Another issue that I heard pointed out by a Shuttle engineer that I hadn't thought of - any incident that damages the payload bay door latching mechanism or the electronic control of said mechanism will doom the Shuttle. If the doors can't be latched, it's impossible to re-enter the atmosphere.
Have you been to Radio Shack lately? Man, I'd love to see the look on the employee's face when someone comes in looking for SIPP memory modules for a 286!
I have noticed that Liberals will always make double-standard excuses for the most egregious behaviors of their favored cultural demographics, i.e. anyone who is not male and European, and come down with the most sanctimonious outrage on similar behaviors by those who are unfavored. Europeans arrive in the New World and displace indigenous populations? Miserable, terrible, horrible Europeans, how could you have done such a thing? Indigenous Aztec populations subject tens of thousand of war prisoners to grisly death to appease the Sun God? It's a unique and attractive form of cultural and religious expression that is equally valuable to any of the creations of the Old World - but you just wouldn't understand.
I certainly have to have sympathy for the position those in favor of a Libertarian government in the vein that you describe are in. If you are high on the socioeconomic ladder, Libertarianism is the ideal philosophy. Those in this standing are left to keep what is theirs, and government stays out of their way. However, for the great majority of people who are not high on the socioeconomic ladder, the first question that arises when it comes time to cast a vote is "What can a government lead by candidate X do for me?" If the answer is "Nothing except stay out of your way so you may exercise your full potential", this is obviously going to be an unsuitable answer for citizens in that position. And since citizens in that position are always going to outnumber citizens in the former, I can see how a persecution complex can develop where Libertarians feel the great weight of humanity below them dragging at their feet - this of course has been written about, by Rand et. al. ad nauseam.
So the question is, how does one convince the mass of people who need to know what a government can do for them, not how much a government can stay out of their way, to vote for a Libertarian system? If the standard of living for the great majority of people were raised to the point where they started to feel that large government disadvantages started to outweigh the advantages, perhaps there would be a shift in popular thinking. This seems unlikely to happen given the continued growth of human population and dwindling natural resources. This is my personal objection to Libertarian philosophy - I feel it is a philosophy designed for an expanding, resource-rich world, while the world as it is actually becoming is a contracting, constrained, resource-poor world. The more it contracts, the less people will be interested in a form of government which only has something to offer the haves and nothing to offer the have-nots; and the number of have-nots will steadily increase regardless of any attempts they may make to actualize their potential as there will be only so much to go around. So how does one convince that mass of humanity that the Libertarian system is truly good for them?
Would you not agree that the dividing line between extreme libertarianism and anarchism is a fine one? If the goal of libertarianism is the minimization of the authority of the state, then the existence of no state authority at all is taking the philosophy to its logical conclusion.
I think it's likely that when the history books are written 100 years from now, World War 2 will be viewed as a great war between the two conflicting ideologies of fascism and communism, with the majority of the text being devoted to the Eastern front confrontation between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Quantitatively speaking, the amount of men and material devoted to that aspect of the conflict makes the war on the Western front look like little more than a sideshow, with the other players falling in line behind one of the aforementioned two. The battle of Kursk, for example, had more divisions engaged in battle than were engaged on the Western front during the entirety of the Allied campaign.
It's a chestnut about as old as the war itself, but it has been said that the Allies defeated German Fascism to make the world safe for Soviet Communism, but it bears repeating. For example, much is said about the Nazi atrocities in the concentration camps during the war, but it is little noted that by the German defeat in May of 1945 the Soviets were operating the largest concentration camp in Europe, and the "liberation" of the camps in Poland that came under Soviet control after the war was less a liberation and more of a corporate restructuring. A "Under New Management" sign was metaphorically put on the gates, and similar atrocities were committed; only the admission requirements had changed.
But that's what a government exists for. As citizens of a nations with governments we are signatories to the social contract that legitimizes the governments use of force - to take away some of our liberties in exchange for shielding us from a war of "all against all." It is, of course, up to the people to keep the power of the government in check, but I believe those who consistently decry ANY government intervention by way of legislation to protect citizens from each other have really gotten too far removed from what a "war of all against all" feels like.
I'm not sure what you feel about your home nation, but I know an America without government would not be a Libertarian paradise of free markets and personal responsibility for socially detrimental actions. It would be Somalia.
Until one day, while watching reruns of "Legend Of The Seeker" on your in-dash entertainment system and slobbering over the kind of tits you wish existed at the latest LARP convention, you manage to kill someone who doesn't share your zest for solipsism or Unix analogies. I swear Slashdot posts stories like this just to troll the libertarians that are as thick as flies on shit around here. "Life is like Unix and you are the superuser." And this gets an Insightful moderation. Shit a god damn. I suppose I'm going to have to start driving with venetian blinds on my car windows to enhance my cinematic vehicular experience, and if I drive over a libertarian I'll tell his family and friends that the free market will take care of it.
Having never played the game, how does the Honor system end up actually rewarding "everything bad and wrong"? The idea sounds good, in theory of course...
I have a 2 year old AMD machine with an AM2 motherboard, which supports AM2+ processors in the latest BIOS. I was considering replacing the aging box with an Intel machine, or building a new AMD machine, I wasn't quite sure what to do.
Then I found I could buy an AM2+ Phenom 2 triple-core and a Radeon HD4850 for just shy of $200. That pretty much ended the internal debate.
As amazing the X program accomplishments were, they were a long way from getting into orbit. It's relatively trivial to just get into space, but getting the tangential velocity to achieve orbit is a whole other matter. Single-stage to orbit is a really hard problem from an aerospace design point because, at least with chemical rocket technology where you have to carry your fuel with you, you're running up against the limits of the famous Tsiolkovsky "ideal rocket" differential equation. The problem is that as you carry more fuel in your single stage to propel you faster, you need more structure to carry that fuel, which requires more fuel to propel the mass of the structure, which requires even more fuel to propel the mass of the fuel you haven't burned yet, etc. You can mitigate this to some extent by dropping stages, which nearly all rocket systems do.
It is theoretically possible to build a single stage to orbit rocket, but with propellants limited to the maximum specific impulse of chemical energy the spacecraft would have a very limited payload capability, and the structure would have to be so light that there isn't really a material yet known that would be up to the job. In addition, you can't even get the maximum theoretical specific impulse of chemical rockets (hydrogen/oxygen combustion) in the real world because hydrogen/oxygen engines have to run fuel-rich; if they ran at the normal stoichometric ratio no engine bell material could withstand the temperature.
Of course, with some kind of revolution in propulsion that could much greater specific impulses with lower weight all bets would be off. They wanted to do single stage to orbit in the 70s with the shuttle, but the current stage-and-a-half was the closest that was possible as the technology wasn't there for SSTO. Unfortunately, it still isn't - the SSMEs are still considered cutting edge for chemical rocket propulsion.
Much to economists chagrin, economies don't run on information or money, they run on manpower and energy, the cheaper the better. Economies with a surplus of either will do well, and those with neither like the United States will do poorly in the coming decades. How anyone can imagine that the U.S. can reinvent itself into an "information based" economy is beyond me - information technology is a consequence of industrialized society, not a foundation of one. What makes us believe that our ideas are so fantastic that we should be paid GDP-sized sums of money for them? The recent economic decline is not a growing pain, it's another death throe of the decline of the current way of living, a decline that essentially started when U.S. oil production peaked and offshoring of industry began in earnest in the 1970s.
Ah, I see now - to make the return trip intersect the lower half cone one has to be outside the upper half cone at some point in the departing journey, implying that for some part of time you traveled faster than light. I somehow managed a faster than light "sidestep" at the end of the departing journey to make it work out; don't know why I did that. You really should have tackled this analogy instead of me.:)
Programming a basic 2D game was a task that a professor of mine in college used to jazz up one of the less glamorous programming courses: Data Structures and Algorithms. Besides the applications you mentioned, one can also apply the concepts of data structures (dynamic map generation, inventory and item management) and algorithms (decision trees, finite state machines to keep track of mob behavior, shortest path algorithms, etc.)
From the tone of your writing, it sounds like you're still bound by a NDA. God help you if you let out the secret of their completely unworkable method!:D
One of my friends in college with congenital anosmia was a lifesaver when, as often happened, someone would leave leftover takeout in the lounge refrigerator over a school vacation. He was well rewarded for performing cleanup tasks that anyone with a functioning olfactory system would have found unbearable!
Imagine a Cartesian coordinate system, with time on the Y axis and distance on the X axis to the left and to the right. So you have 1 light year, 2 light years, etc on the X axis, and 1 year, 2 years, etc. on the Y axis. Now, if you take off for your destination at very close to the speed of light, you will be traveling about 1 light year per year, so the slope of the line will be 1 and it will form a 45 degree angle. Draw two of these lines positive going from the origin along the positive Y axis, one to the left and one to the right. This is your "light cone." Now imagine you travel along one of these lines, at very close to the speed of light, until you reach your destination at 10 light years in 10 years. Then let's say you decide to travel back at some speed faster than light, like 0.5C or 0.1C. Draw another cone with the mouth pointing downward from your destination along the original line and you'll find that the slope of the new line will be less than 1, so the angle of the new line will be less than 45 degrees. If that's the case, the new light cone for the return journey can intersect the light cone of the original journey at some point in spacetime, meaning you can intercept yourself during your original trip! If you return at the same velocity close to C that you left, the going and return trip slope will both be 45 degrees and the light cones will not intersect, thereby avoiding the paradox.
The faster the initial velocity, the greater the friction and therefore the greater the temperature in the upper atmosphere and therefore the greater the burn-off.
I'm not an astrophysicist, but I think at hypersonic velocities in the atmosphere the asteroid would be heated more by ram pressure than by friction. Another variable to take into account would be how closely the body is to an ideal black body - the closer it is the more of the radiant energy incident on its surface that will be re-radiated away. This is why the leading edges of the Space Shuttle are black: there's no way those surfaces could withstand the temperatures produced by re-entry without a majority of incident thermal energy being re-radiated away.
m*dv/dt = -mg - kv^p. If the velocity is high as it would be in the case of a meteorite p would be greater than 1 and the equation is nonlinear; p also depends on the atmospheric pressure which is approximately an decreasing exponential function of altitude. One might also want to take into account the fact that at high velocities heated air ionizes and doesn't behave like an ideal gas - I guess this is why spacecraft engineers use computational fluid dynamics to analyze things like this! Still, he's correct though in that unless you want to get into Hamiltonian or Lagrangian mechanics F=MA is all there is, it just depends on how deep you want to massage the equation.
Re:The Mysterious Reoccurrence of Mr. Freckles
on
Most Blogs Now Abandoned
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Social networking allows people to find each other to have sex, but is more customizable and doesn't have the overt nature of a dating site or a personal ad, which encourages women to use it. The first question on the mind of anyone thinking of creating or investing in a new social networking venture should be "How easy will this make it for people to find partners, without making it LOOK like they're really looking for sex?" The last point is critical in that if it is too overt, women won't use it, and then men won't use it, and it will die. If these websites help people find sex more easily than people could normally the sites, like ethanol, are fads which will not be going away anytime soon.
Many freight railroads that operate diesel locomotives in mountainous areas have had electric braking systems for decades called "dynamic brakes", but the electric power created by turning the traction motors into generators was just turned into heat through large resistor banks and blown out the top of the locomotive. You can spot a locomotive with dynamic braking by the characteristic bulge in the roofline where the resistor bank is located. I guess it didn't make economic sense until now to actually put the electricity generated back into powering the locomotive.
Slashdot Mirror
Another issue that I heard pointed out by a Shuttle engineer that I hadn't thought of - any incident that damages the payload bay door latching mechanism or the electronic control of said mechanism will doom the Shuttle. If the doors can't be latched, it's impossible to re-enter the atmosphere.
Have you been to Radio Shack lately? Man, I'd love to see the look on the employee's face when someone comes in looking for SIPP memory modules for a 286!
I have noticed that Liberals will always make double-standard excuses for the most egregious behaviors of their favored cultural demographics, i.e. anyone who is not male and European, and come down with the most sanctimonious outrage on similar behaviors by those who are unfavored. Europeans arrive in the New World and displace indigenous populations? Miserable, terrible, horrible Europeans, how could you have done such a thing? Indigenous Aztec populations subject tens of thousand of war prisoners to grisly death to appease the Sun God? It's a unique and attractive form of cultural and religious expression that is equally valuable to any of the creations of the Old World - but you just wouldn't understand.
Was the sick child with cancer ok? Why wouldn't the robots the entomologist built help him WHY
I certainly have to have sympathy for the position those in favor of a Libertarian government in the vein that you describe are in. If you are high on the socioeconomic ladder, Libertarianism is the ideal philosophy. Those in this standing are left to keep what is theirs, and government stays out of their way. However, for the great majority of people who are not high on the socioeconomic ladder, the first question that arises when it comes time to cast a vote is "What can a government lead by candidate X do for me?" If the answer is "Nothing except stay out of your way so you may exercise your full potential", this is obviously going to be an unsuitable answer for citizens in that position. And since citizens in that position are always going to outnumber citizens in the former, I can see how a persecution complex can develop where Libertarians feel the great weight of humanity below them dragging at their feet - this of course has been written about, by Rand et. al. ad nauseam.
So the question is, how does one convince the mass of people who need to know what a government can do for them, not how much a government can stay out of their way, to vote for a Libertarian system? If the standard of living for the great majority of people were raised to the point where they started to feel that large government disadvantages started to outweigh the advantages, perhaps there would be a shift in popular thinking. This seems unlikely to happen given the continued growth of human population and dwindling natural resources. This is my personal objection to Libertarian philosophy - I feel it is a philosophy designed for an expanding, resource-rich world, while the world as it is actually becoming is a contracting, constrained, resource-poor world. The more it contracts, the less people will be interested in a form of government which only has something to offer the haves and nothing to offer the have-nots; and the number of have-nots will steadily increase regardless of any attempts they may make to actualize their potential as there will be only so much to go around. So how does one convince that mass of humanity that the Libertarian system is truly good for them?
Would you not agree that the dividing line between extreme libertarianism and anarchism is a fine one? If the goal of libertarianism is the minimization of the authority of the state, then the existence of no state authority at all is taking the philosophy to its logical conclusion.
I think it's likely that when the history books are written 100 years from now, World War 2 will be viewed as a great war between the two conflicting ideologies of fascism and communism, with the majority of the text being devoted to the Eastern front confrontation between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Quantitatively speaking, the amount of men and material devoted to that aspect of the conflict makes the war on the Western front look like little more than a sideshow, with the other players falling in line behind one of the aforementioned two. The battle of Kursk, for example, had more divisions engaged in battle than were engaged on the Western front during the entirety of the Allied campaign.
It's a chestnut about as old as the war itself, but it has been said that the Allies defeated German Fascism to make the world safe for Soviet Communism, but it bears repeating. For example, much is said about the Nazi atrocities in the concentration camps during the war, but it is little noted that by the German defeat in May of 1945 the Soviets were operating the largest concentration camp in Europe, and the "liberation" of the camps in Poland that came under Soviet control after the war was less a liberation and more of a corporate restructuring. A "Under New Management" sign was metaphorically put on the gates, and similar atrocities were committed; only the admission requirements had changed.
But that's what a government exists for. As citizens of a nations with governments we are signatories to the social contract that legitimizes the governments use of force - to take away some of our liberties in exchange for shielding us from a war of "all against all." It is, of course, up to the people to keep the power of the government in check, but I believe those who consistently decry ANY government intervention by way of legislation to protect citizens from each other have really gotten too far removed from what a "war of all against all" feels like.
I'm not sure what you feel about your home nation, but I know an America without government would not be a Libertarian paradise of free markets and personal responsibility for socially detrimental actions. It would be Somalia.
Until one day, while watching reruns of "Legend Of The Seeker" on your in-dash entertainment system and slobbering over the kind of tits you wish existed at the latest LARP convention, you manage to kill someone who doesn't share your zest for solipsism or Unix analogies. I swear Slashdot posts stories like this just to troll the libertarians that are as thick as flies on shit around here. "Life is like Unix and you are the superuser." And this gets an Insightful moderation. Shit a god damn. I suppose I'm going to have to start driving with venetian blinds on my car windows to enhance my cinematic vehicular experience, and if I drive over a libertarian I'll tell his family and friends that the free market will take care of it.
Having never played the game, how does the Honor system end up actually rewarding "everything bad and wrong"? The idea sounds good, in theory of course...
Sorry, I just looked at my receipt and it was more like $250. Don't want to get anyone's hopes up too much.
I have a 2 year old AMD machine with an AM2 motherboard, which supports AM2+ processors in the latest BIOS. I was considering replacing the aging box with an Intel machine, or building a new AMD machine, I wasn't quite sure what to do.
Then I found I could buy an AM2+ Phenom 2 triple-core and a Radeon HD4850 for just shy of $200. That pretty much ended the internal debate.
As amazing the X program accomplishments were, they were a long way from getting into orbit. It's relatively trivial to just get into space, but getting the tangential velocity to achieve orbit is a whole other matter. Single-stage to orbit is a really hard problem from an aerospace design point because, at least with chemical rocket technology where you have to carry your fuel with you, you're running up against the limits of the famous Tsiolkovsky "ideal rocket" differential equation. The problem is that as you carry more fuel in your single stage to propel you faster, you need more structure to carry that fuel, which requires more fuel to propel the mass of the structure, which requires even more fuel to propel the mass of the fuel you haven't burned yet, etc. You can mitigate this to some extent by dropping stages, which nearly all rocket systems do. It is theoretically possible to build a single stage to orbit rocket, but with propellants limited to the maximum specific impulse of chemical energy the spacecraft would have a very limited payload capability, and the structure would have to be so light that there isn't really a material yet known that would be up to the job. In addition, you can't even get the maximum theoretical specific impulse of chemical rockets (hydrogen/oxygen combustion) in the real world because hydrogen/oxygen engines have to run fuel-rich; if they ran at the normal stoichometric ratio no engine bell material could withstand the temperature. Of course, with some kind of revolution in propulsion that could much greater specific impulses with lower weight all bets would be off. They wanted to do single stage to orbit in the 70s with the shuttle, but the current stage-and-a-half was the closest that was possible as the technology wasn't there for SSTO. Unfortunately, it still isn't - the SSMEs are still considered cutting edge for chemical rocket propulsion.
Name it "Verizon Spaceport We've Got A Goddamned Spaceport, Bitches, What've You Got Fuck Yeah Go America!
Much to economists chagrin, economies don't run on information or money, they run on manpower and energy, the cheaper the better. Economies with a surplus of either will do well, and those with neither like the United States will do poorly in the coming decades. How anyone can imagine that the U.S. can reinvent itself into an "information based" economy is beyond me - information technology is a consequence of industrialized society, not a foundation of one. What makes us believe that our ideas are so fantastic that we should be paid GDP-sized sums of money for them? The recent economic decline is not a growing pain, it's another death throe of the decline of the current way of living, a decline that essentially started when U.S. oil production peaked and offshoring of industry began in earnest in the 1970s.
Ah, I see now - to make the return trip intersect the lower half cone one has to be outside the upper half cone at some point in the departing journey, implying that for some part of time you traveled faster than light. I somehow managed a faster than light "sidestep" at the end of the departing journey to make it work out; don't know why I did that. You really should have tackled this analogy instead of me. :)
Programming a basic 2D game was a task that a professor of mine in college used to jazz up one of the less glamorous programming courses: Data Structures and Algorithms. Besides the applications you mentioned, one can also apply the concepts of data structures (dynamic map generation, inventory and item management) and algorithms (decision trees, finite state machines to keep track of mob behavior, shortest path algorithms, etc.)
From the tone of your writing, it sounds like you're still bound by a NDA. God help you if you let out the secret of their completely unworkable method! :D
One of my friends in college with congenital anosmia was a lifesaver when, as often happened, someone would leave leftover takeout in the lounge refrigerator over a school vacation. He was well rewarded for performing cleanup tasks that anyone with a functioning olfactory system would have found unbearable!
Please just imagine I put a 1 there instead of a zero and everything should work out! :D
Imagine a Cartesian coordinate system, with time on the Y axis and distance on the X axis to the left and to the right. So you have 1 light year, 2 light years, etc on the X axis, and 1 year, 2 years, etc. on the Y axis. Now, if you take off for your destination at very close to the speed of light, you will be traveling about 1 light year per year, so the slope of the line will be 1 and it will form a 45 degree angle. Draw two of these lines positive going from the origin along the positive Y axis, one to the left and one to the right. This is your "light cone." Now imagine you travel along one of these lines, at very close to the speed of light, until you reach your destination at 10 light years in 10 years. Then let's say you decide to travel back at some speed faster than light, like 0.5C or 0.1C. Draw another cone with the mouth pointing downward from your destination along the original line and you'll find that the slope of the new line will be less than 1, so the angle of the new line will be less than 45 degrees. If that's the case, the new light cone for the return journey can intersect the light cone of the original journey at some point in spacetime, meaning you can intercept yourself during your original trip! If you return at the same velocity close to C that you left, the going and return trip slope will both be 45 degrees and the light cones will not intersect, thereby avoiding the paradox.
The faster the initial velocity, the greater the friction and therefore the greater the temperature in the upper atmosphere and therefore the greater the burn-off.
I'm not an astrophysicist, but I think at hypersonic velocities in the atmosphere the asteroid would be heated more by ram pressure than by friction. Another variable to take into account would be how closely the body is to an ideal black body - the closer it is the more of the radiant energy incident on its surface that will be re-radiated away. This is why the leading edges of the Space Shuttle are black: there's no way those surfaces could withstand the temperatures produced by re-entry without a majority of incident thermal energy being re-radiated away.
m*dv/dt = -mg - kv^p. If the velocity is high as it would be in the case of a meteorite p would be greater than 1 and the equation is nonlinear; p also depends on the atmospheric pressure which is approximately an decreasing exponential function of altitude. One might also want to take into account the fact that at high velocities heated air ionizes and doesn't behave like an ideal gas - I guess this is why spacecraft engineers use computational fluid dynamics to analyze things like this! Still, he's correct though in that unless you want to get into Hamiltonian or Lagrangian mechanics F=MA is all there is, it just depends on how deep you want to massage the equation.
Social networking allows people to find each other to have sex, but is more customizable and doesn't have the overt nature of a dating site or a personal ad, which encourages women to use it. The first question on the mind of anyone thinking of creating or investing in a new social networking venture should be "How easy will this make it for people to find partners, without making it LOOK like they're really looking for sex?" The last point is critical in that if it is too overt, women won't use it, and then men won't use it, and it will die. If these websites help people find sex more easily than people could normally the sites, like ethanol, are fads which will not be going away anytime soon.
Many freight railroads that operate diesel locomotives in mountainous areas have had electric braking systems for decades called "dynamic brakes", but the electric power created by turning the traction motors into generators was just turned into heat through large resistor banks and blown out the top of the locomotive. You can spot a locomotive with dynamic braking by the characteristic bulge in the roofline where the resistor bank is located. I guess it didn't make economic sense until now to actually put the electricity generated back into powering the locomotive.