No, we didn't. Putting any form of nuclear energy into space has profound political implications. And do you really want a nuclear powered rocket to break up like Columbia did? And why? We don't need the capacity for probes.
Nuclear fission rockets are probably dead in the water for operation in Earth's atmosphere. However, I'm not particularly concerned about a bit of uranium being dumped in the sea. Thousands of tons of it have been dissolved in the ocean since long before we were here.
As for the need, electricity generation would enable heaps of stuff we can't do now - decent data transmission rates from outer solar system probes, active radar, nuclear rockets allowing bigger probes carrying more equipment launched with the same boosters we have now...the list goes on.
Yeah, like why we should waste enormous amounts of money getting humans to Mars. A fleet of unmanned probes would give us a lot more information in the short term.
Have you any idea how limited remote-controlled robots are? Send me to Mars with a digital camera, a chemistry set, a microscope, a shovel, and a hammer, and I can learn more about Mars in five minutes than Pathfinder could in months.
The requirements for a moon mission and a Mars mission are so different you're not likely to prove very much by landing on it.
The moon is a day or two away by chemical rocket. Mars is somewhere between a few weeks (if we build something really futuristic like an Orion drive) and eight months (if we do a minimum-energy Hohmann orbit) away. Mars has an atmosphere, so you can do aerobraking and make propellant out of it, neither of which you can do on the Moon. Mars has a nice diurnal cycle, the Moon doesn't. The temperatures are totally different. The science you want to do on each place is totally different.
If you want a less challenging target for your initial mission, try a near-Earth asteroid. Much more science return - and learning more about NEOs might give us the chance to figure out how best to deflect them.
And yes, heterosexuality (or for that matter lesbianism) doesn't spread AIDS anywhere near as fast as male homosexual practice, but the only real blocker is the kind of social arrangement practiced by Christianity or Judiasm. Horrors! We'd much rather die slowly and painfully, taking others with us, than learn from the bigots!
Nope, Exclusive lesbianism is statistically much safer again. By your logic, all women should therefore become lesbians and use artificial insemination from HIV-negative men to become pregnant.
Alternatively, we could all become celibate. That'd solve the problem!
Grow up. The ancients didn't practice what they preach. Neither do contemporary Christians or Jews, as a group. There's a lot of fornication goin' on, and there always will be, and any public health campaigns that aren't designed around this simple fact will fail.
This is yet another version of opt-out (which has been discussed ad infinitum as a bad idea), and is is restricted to one state (and is thus completely useless to deal with what is an international spam problem. Try suing Romanians in a Colorado state court).
When a space elevator goes wrong, the people currently ascending it might well die. The rest either flies off into deep space, or burns up on reentry. That would be a shame, but it's not going to kill anyone.
It would be very risky for NASA to try and keep this stuff secret - at least from the post-crash investigation. If Congress got word of it, they'd be crucified.
If you want revenge, there's a) the cricket world cup, and b) beating us on home soil at the rugby world cup, and c) beating us to qualify for the soccer world cup in 2005 or so...
And, hey, you've got a better basketball team than the USA does, at least according to the last world championship;)
I don't know that much about fighter planes or warships, but I think I know a little about computers, and Tom Clancy gets the computer stuff wrong a fair proportion of the time. Hence, it's reasonable to assume that he gets the rest of the engineering in his books wrong.
Trust me, it would take more than skiing on crap to make the Australian downhill team competitive... we had one good female slalom skiier, but that's only because she spent her teenage years in the Alps somewhere. In snow terms, you might say we already ski on crap... it's usually complete slush about 30cm deep for most of the season.
The only sensible season to spend *any* time in the Australian high country is summer, when the weather is damn pleasant, the flowers are out, and the views are fscking spectacular. Particularly at the moment, when half of it is on fire...:/
We are, however, much better skiiers than the Austrians are surfers:)
Seeing it's several hundred kilometres from Buller to the Snowy Mountains Hydro project, and the Buller area is in completely different catchments, I'm not sure how you can blame the Snowy scheme.
While there seems to be some very good features of this design (simple, light, cheap to build, and if the blurb is true efficient) I'd like to know how well it works at part throttle. IIRC this is a major problem with current jet designs - they're fine (not as efficient as a prop, but comparable) at high speeds, but chew juice like crazy at lower speeds.
You also couldn't reverse the thing the same way you reverse a normal vessel, but, hey, just run a small set of pipes to the front and a miniature one of these jet gadgets and you've got instant bow thrusters:)
Do you really think that Redhat, (or for that matter Apple or Microsoft) don't have vicious internal flamewars occasionally? They do, and the only time you hear about them is when a developer resigns in a huff. You should *expect* developers to argue. If they don't, they're not doing their work properly.
He knocked up a program to convert PG etexts into LaTeX. It's not difficult to do and get something that looks quite good. I'm sure I could write something similar in a day or two, if there isn't something on freshmeat already.
It it possible that a new generation of ships might have measures that a) reduce the risk of fire, and b) make it easier to fight the fire?
For instance, if the ship's smaller (fewer bunks, fewer supplies required, more fuel efficient so smaller fuel tanks, more space-efficient and lighter electronics, etc. etc.), wouldn't that inherently make it easier to fight fires? More armor around the magazine and the fuel tanks?
On another topic, why do you say that you "didn't want to miss this war?" Whilst, if the need really arose, I would do my duty to defend my country, and I do understand that fighting wars is something you've trained for years to do, I can't understand why you'd be anxious to fight a war (which is the only interpretation I can place on your comment). Lots of people are likely to die, indirectly through your actions, if a war happens. Some of them will be Iraqi civilians. Most of them will be Iraqi conscripts who probably don't want to die defending Saddam's leadership. Some will be fellow Americans, the odd Pom and maybe a few Aussies. It's possible some could be your friends and acquaintances. There's a small but real chance one could be you. WTF would you *want* to be in a war?
I'm a member of Amnesty, and have participated in letter-writing campaigns. They don't provide you with boilerplate text. Instead, they give you the relevant details and ask you to write your own letter based on them.
I must admit, sometimes I felt like there wasn't enough background provided and I wanted (and sometimes obtained) more information about the subject I wrote about, but this is a world away from just creating form letters with zero thought.
I'm trying and I really can't think of any solid benefits from trying this. Couldn't they have tried to design something a little more practical, or was this just dumbing down the project for lower-level students, like all schools do?
And you're assuming that there's other more important science waiting to be done that this experiment is preventing? I get the distinct impression that there simply aren't that many scientists particularly interested in zero-G experiments any more.
No connection, except that they're both trying to build personal VTOL craft.
As for whether anyone has succeeded, well, the closest thing you'll find is probably this Japanese mini-helicopter that was featured on/. a while ago. It flies, but from all reports it's not exactly the safest gadget ever made...
From reading their discussion paper, they claim TCPA can be used to (amongst other things):
Generate a public/private key pair, the private part never leaves the TCPA chip.. That's kinda nifty, because even if the bad guys get a root compromise on your system they still can't get your private key. They could however use the TCPA system to decrypt messages USING your private key though, until the root compromise was discovered and removed. So, kinda nice, but not a panacea.
Put critical data (eg the encryption key for an encrypted FS) in a secure register that can't be accessed if "the operating system environment" is changed. I would need to spend some time reading the TCPA specification to understand exactly how they intend for this to work, but I'm dubious about this example. Once this data gets out of the secure environment, it's vulnerable to compromise, so in this case I don't see what this adds over keeping the key in the user's head, for instance.
Additionally, I'd be interested to see how the system copes with software upgrades. It seems like an impossible task to build a system that allows easy software installation but isn't itself vulnerable to accepting a trojan - and because the system's hardware the protocol can't be easily modified to deal with flaws.
Presumably IBM has smart people who've considered this and think their solution is workable. In my copious free time maybe I'll download the spec and have a look...:)
The 50MT Soviet bomb was the biggest public relations stunt in history.
I would have though that the Apollo program was the biggest PR stunt in history. Not that it didn't do extremely cool things along the way, and I'm certainly glad it happened, but...
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Nuclear fission rockets are probably dead in the water for operation in Earth's atmosphere. However, I'm not particularly concerned about a bit of uranium being dumped in the sea. Thousands of tons of it have been dissolved in the ocean since long before we were here.
As for the need, electricity generation would enable heaps of stuff we can't do now - decent data transmission rates from outer solar system probes, active radar, nuclear rockets allowing bigger probes carrying more equipment launched with the same boosters we have now...the list goes on.
Have you any idea how limited remote-controlled robots are? Send me to Mars with a digital camera, a chemistry set, a microscope, a shovel, and a hammer, and I can learn more about Mars in five minutes than Pathfinder could in months.
The moon is a day or two away by chemical rocket. Mars is somewhere between a few weeks (if we build something really futuristic like an Orion drive) and eight months (if we do a minimum-energy Hohmann orbit) away. Mars has an atmosphere, so you can do aerobraking and make propellant out of it, neither of which you can do on the Moon. Mars has a nice diurnal cycle, the Moon doesn't. The temperatures are totally different. The science you want to do on each place is totally different.
If you want a less challenging target for your initial mission, try a near-Earth asteroid. Much more science return - and learning more about NEOs might give us the chance to figure out how best to deflect them.
Nope, Exclusive lesbianism is statistically much safer again. By your logic, all women should therefore become lesbians and use artificial insemination from HIV-negative men to become pregnant.
Alternatively, we could all become celibate. That'd solve the problem!
Grow up. The ancients didn't practice what they preach. Neither do contemporary Christians or Jews, as a group. There's a lot of fornication goin' on, and there always will be, and any public health campaigns that aren't designed around this simple fact will fail.
Next!
Nasty, nasty, stuff, if I remember my chemistry class.
When a space elevator goes wrong, the people currently ascending it might well die. The rest either flies off into deep space, or burns up on reentry. That would be a shame, but it's not going to kill anyone.
It would be very risky for NASA to try and keep this stuff secret - at least from the post-crash investigation. If Congress got word of it, they'd be crucified.
If you want revenge, there's a) the cricket world cup, and b) beating us on home soil at the rugby world cup, and c) beating us to qualify for the soccer world cup in 2005 or so...
And, hey, you've got a better basketball team than the USA does, at least according to the last world championship ;)
Ain't compound interest cool?
If the greenback drops in value, the net cost of your labor will drop and the net cost of those proverbial Indian programmers will increase.
US exports become more competitive, imports get dearer, everybody is happy.
I don't know that much about fighter planes or warships, but I think I know a little about computers, and Tom Clancy gets the computer stuff wrong a fair proportion of the time. Hence, it's reasonable to assume that he gets the rest of the engineering in his books wrong.
The only sensible season to spend *any* time in the Australian high country is summer, when the weather is damn pleasant, the flowers are out, and the views are fscking spectacular. Particularly at the moment, when half of it is on fire ... :/
We are, however, much better skiiers than the Austrians are surfers :)
Try again later!
You also couldn't reverse the thing the same way you reverse a normal vessel, but, hey, just run a small set of pipes to the front and a miniature one of these jet gadgets and you've got instant bow thrusters :)
Do you really think that Redhat, (or for that matter Apple or Microsoft) don't have vicious internal flamewars occasionally? They do, and the only time you hear about them is when a developer resigns in a huff. You should *expect* developers to argue. If they don't, they're not doing their work properly.
He knocked up a program to convert PG etexts into LaTeX. It's not difficult to do and get something that looks quite good. I'm sure I could write something similar in a day or two, if there isn't something on freshmeat already.
For instance, if the ship's smaller (fewer bunks, fewer supplies required, more fuel efficient so smaller fuel tanks, more space-efficient and lighter electronics, etc. etc.), wouldn't that inherently make it easier to fight fires? More armor around the magazine and the fuel tanks?
On another topic, why do you say that you "didn't want to miss this war?" Whilst, if the need really arose, I would do my duty to defend my country, and I do understand that fighting wars is something you've trained for years to do, I can't understand why you'd be anxious to fight a war (which is the only interpretation I can place on your comment). Lots of people are likely to die, indirectly through your actions, if a war happens. Some of them will be Iraqi civilians. Most of them will be Iraqi conscripts who probably don't want to die defending Saddam's leadership. Some will be fellow Americans, the odd Pom and maybe a few Aussies. It's possible some could be your friends and acquaintances. There's a small but real chance one could be you. WTF would you *want* to be in a war?
I must admit, sometimes I felt like there wasn't enough background provided and I wanted (and sometimes obtained) more information about the subject I wrote about, but this is a world away from just creating form letters with zero thought.
had somebody devised a hack to make these phones remotely or something ? :-)
And you're assuming that there's other more important science waiting to be done that this experiment is preventing? I get the distinct impression that there simply aren't that many scientists particularly interested in zero-G experiments any more.
fortune (6) is the font of all wisdom :)
As for whether anyone has succeeded, well, the closest thing you'll find is probably this Japanese mini-helicopter that was featured on /. a while ago. It flies, but from all reports it's not exactly the safest gadget ever made...
- Generate a public/private key pair, the private part never leaves the TCPA chip.. That's kinda nifty, because even if the bad guys get a root compromise on your system they still can't get your private key. They could however use the TCPA system to decrypt messages USING your private key though, until the root compromise was discovered and removed. So, kinda nice, but not a panacea.
- Put critical data (eg the encryption key for an encrypted FS) in a secure register that can't be accessed if "the operating system environment" is changed. I would need to spend some time reading the TCPA specification to understand exactly how they intend for this to work, but I'm dubious about this example. Once this data gets out of the secure environment, it's vulnerable to compromise, so in this case I don't see what this adds over keeping the key in the user's head, for instance.
Additionally, I'd be interested to see how the system copes with software upgrades. It seems like an impossible task to build a system that allows easy software installation but isn't itself vulnerable to accepting a trojan - and because the system's hardware the protocol can't be easily modified to deal with flaws.Presumably IBM has smart people who've considered this and think their solution is workable. In my copious free time maybe I'll download the spec and have a look... :)
Why not just have private armies, as well? Let's go properly fuedal instead of the half-assed version current nutty libertarians want...
I would have though that the Apollo program was the biggest PR stunt in history. Not that it didn't do extremely cool things along the way, and I'm certainly glad it happened, but...