Well, you have to be a little careful regarding Faget and the shuttle, given that his short winged 'DC-3' design was on the losing side of the compromise with the Air Force regarding the shuttle's cross range capability. Additionally, the DC-3 looked like it would have suffered from severe heating and aerodynamic instability problems on re-entry. Unlike the Mercury/Apollo era, where Faget's word was the only word, industry pushed back with their own spacecraft designs for the shuttle program and largely won -- the idea for a planform orbiter and a drop tank came from outside his team.
However, to be fair, after the DC-3 battle, Faget's team did have the crucial insight that the external tank could serve a structural function as the backbone of the shuttle stack, instead of just hanging off it, and their MSC-040 orbiter design was the baseline for the production orbiters.
Well, setting aside your homophobia, I don't think they look like star trek vehicles at all (no nacelles/no craggy bits, which are the two primary looks in the Star Trek universe). They do have a science-fictiony look because they're all streamlined to some extent, and streamlining was the great motif of early science fiction hardware imagery.
However, the need for streamlining stems more from the fact that these vehicles will spend most of their operational lives in the atmosphere, either going up or coming down, unlike, say the Lunar Module or the ISS.
Should we ever get the point where X-Prize type people are developing pure space vehicles, expect to see the sleek science fiction look vanish.
I know a lot of people have suggested Pournelle's King David's Spaceship, but was the one you were thinking of have a whole thing with an alien race living on the other side of a near impassable mountaing range?
'Cos that's what I'm thinking of and it's driving me nuts I can't remember the title. I'd love to compare the publications date with King David's Spaceship.
Most current thinking by physicists about viable time machines (viable in that they don't violate e.g. the framework of thermodynamics or general relativity, not that we have any way to build them), such as wormholes, very long supermassive rotating cylinders, or the intersection of quantum threads (not the same as the strings of string theory), indicates that they all have in common one thing:
You cannot use such a device to go back to a time before the machine itself was created. This neatly solves the "why haven't we been visited yet by time travellers?" question -- they can't till we do our bit and build the machine!
You may be interested in this article in IEEE Spectrum by James Oberg, where he explains how and why the Shenzhou is significantly different from the Soyuz.
Basically, the Shenzhou is a bigger and has an orbital module capable of independant flight, something very new. Part of the reason why is that although the Chinese tried to buy a Soyuz from the Russians, the only one they were able to obtain was pretty much just a shell, having had most of its flght systems removed prior to delivery.
Ah, but isn't the fundamental basis (fundamental as in Alan Turing's 1937 "On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem") of computer science the very fact that code and data are not inherently different.
We usually choose to maintain a distinction for reasons of practicality, but it is wise to remember that the difference is constructed, and the line is easily crossed -- as anyone who has seen a CGI script buffer overflow exploit can tell you.
While this doesn't have any bearing on the immediate question of directly executing XML documents in some way, I suspect that it does mean that an awful lot of readers of Dr. Dobbs (including myself) are delibrately refraining from "understanding" the difference between code and data.
'Metamaterials" are not "metaphysical", in the same way that metainformation is not inherently metaphysical. Meta is--say it with me people--just a prefix meaning (from the jargon file) "one level up" or if you prefer (from websters) "between, with, after, behind, over, about, reversely".
Metamaterials are carefully constructed arrangements of regular materials, whose properties combine to produce behaviours that no "pure" material can duplicate, including negative indexes of refraction.
This should not be a surprising concept to anyone who is aware that, for example, atoms can combine form metatoms (so-called "molecules") that have all kinds of properties not found when dealing with pure elements -- and yet the laws of nature survive!
There is no transcending the laws of nature going on here.
The stock shot on the LCD is of the Ha'penny Bridge, a 19th century pedestrian bridge in my old home town of Dublin. I wonder they chose a pedestrian bridge from a pre-automobile era to help sell sell high tech car parts!
I agree - combat in Elite 2 sucked, but I feel the heart of the problem wasn't the physics model itself but rather the same problem that occured in the transition from Doom to Quake -- combat went from fighting off packs, with always the threat and tension of more baddies arriving as your energy and ammo/missiles were depleted, to fighting one or two hostiles at a time. The frenetic pace that was the heart of combat in both Doom and Elite was lost. More realistic combat physics *can* be fun, as illustrated by the Independance Day series.
Nobody can collect your personal data unless they have either your consent or a law that specifically says that they may.
I would say that publishing that personal data on the Internet (either by putting text on a web page or sending Google your IP address and search terms so they can send you back results) gives both de facto and de jure consent.
Also, I do not believe that Google's internal storing of searches falls under the definition of "personal data" in the EU directive. Here personal data is defined as:
"'personal data'" shall mean any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person ("data subject"); an identifiable person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identification number or to one or more factors specific to his physical, physiological, mental, economic, cultural or social identity"
A search query-result pair does not in itself identify a person, and so is not personal data. Even an IP number identifies a computer not a person, and with the exception of people like me (who live alone and have static IPs for their home boxes), it can very difficult to associate an IP number with a specific person (Did 15 year old Tommy or his Dad search for "Free Porn" from that dialup account?)
Exactly my point -- random crappy journal that doesn't add any value: to the Net with you!. But it has been suggested that it's wrong for any journal to be a commercial entity, whereas I think the better journals, like Science, Nature, and The JAMA and so on are entitled to charge money and avail of copyright protection for their products.
In an analogy to the open source commercial model, the better publications are providing a service in all the seen and unseen work that gets done on an article. The actual data in these articles is still free for for anyone to use after all, which seems to be forgotten (generally speaking abstracts are usually freely available too).
I'm just pointing out that not all journals are quite so parasitic as some would have you believe and don't deserve to be tarred with the same brush as the Journal of Obscure Interactions. That this is often the case is understandable: a lot of publishing Ph.Ds tend to be reluctant to admit that some editor with a fraction of their lab experience might actually be better than themselves at writing in general and conveying their ideas in particular.
hahahahaha! You're kidding right? Look at a page from Nature or Science: you think that was done in TeX? Nope, it was put together by professional layout artists and illustrators using tools like Adobe photoshop and Quark. And before anyone poo-poo's the value of good graphic design, take a look at the average conference proceeding - many articles in their own unique font, different type sizes, some articles with their own page numbers, some articles that look like they're ninth generation photocopies...
More fundamentally, the amount of work that goes into improving the text in one of these articles can be immense, especially when the author doesn't have english as a first language. Some articles have to be almost completely rewritten. Don't believe me? Find a sample of articles (including authors from non english speaking countries) which have unrevised pre-prints available on-line and which were subsequently published in either of these two magazines and compare their readability and conciseness.
I know some journals adopt a straight through approach to the text of papers and here I'm all for the on-line archive approach, because frankly I don't think these journals are doing what they are supposed to. If I want to read a dozen different versions of how to structure an article, style a reference, name a gene, or give a temperature, I'll take the pre-print feed.
Just because "Slashdot editor" is an oxymoron, doesn't mean it's true all over!
Who will invest in space when the government maintains a monopoly on launching?
Even in the United States, there is no "monoply on lanching." That law was repealed a number of years ago, but still people seem convinced it exists... There are a number of private launch services for satellites, both inside and outside the U.S.
If one is still worried about the U.S regulatory environment, one can happily launch outside the U.S. legal regime, from Baikonur, through Juiquan, to the SeaLaunch platform.
Yet despite there being no regulatory or monopoly barrier to putting any given pound of payload into orbit, there is no rush of investement into creating low cost launchers for humans or on-orbit industry.
Why? Because the major barrior is economic not political. There is no good return on investment for space applications for anything other than commercial satellites, which are already serviced by current launchers to the satisfaction of the satellite owners.
There is a large hump to get over before that situation changes, and that hump will be paid for by governments, not markets.
Your reasoning is reminiscent of Thatcherism and Reaganomics. The belief that all a nation has to do to solve its problems is wave the magic legislative wand of deregulation is not borne out by history.
By the way, quoting the X-33 as example is a very bad choice, and is in fact illustrative of how hard it is to build radically new launchers. The X-33 died as much from basic technical problems as budgetary ones: the aerospike engines were troublesome and the inability to create composite tanks which could hold up under operating conditions derailed the project. Single Stage to Orbit is just not the way to go with chemical rockets, as Oberth, Goddard, Tsiolkovsky, Sanger, Braun, Korolov and Faget couuld have told you.
Err... most of the editing, overall, is done without pay by other researchers and graduate students in the field. Where you work may be an exception, but at least in CS, this is how it works. Peer review, you know.
Peer review is not editing. In fact it usually annoys publishers when peer reviewers try to do copyediting, line editing etc: they usually have no idea of the house style, word count allocation, etc. Peer reviewers exist to check for factual accuracy. Period. If you're unpaid and doing more than that you're either on the editorial board or doing work most journals would in fact prefer you didn't do. (The situation may be different for very small or new journals, and conference reports in general but this article is about opening up the commercial publications.)
Skilled and expensive editors are still required to a) do an initial weeding out process so the peer review system isn't overloaded, b) whip manuscripts into shape which are usually written by people who got much better marks in science than composition in school, and c) prepare illustrations -- I've seen the fun when a publisher has to create something printable out of some power point file whipped up by an overeager grad student.
There's a reason why a magazines like Nature and Science get read by large numbers of people and self-edited conference reports aren't even read by all the conference attendees
...capitalism is the only answer. Compare the exponential advancement of computer technology to the thirty year old space shuttle technology
This would be the same computer technology that got started because of massive military and government subsidies and funding from ENIAC to the Internet?
Your comment is even more ironic in the light that the PC revolution which allowed mass market economics to operate on computers is a direct consequence of the development of the Apollo Guidance Computer. (Don't believe me? Look it up, try reading "Journey to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Guidance Computer" by Eldon C. Hall). Without NASA money supporting integrated circuit production lines and demonstrating a digital computer can be trusted for mission critical applications in the 1960's, round about now we'd all be getting excited by IBM's new 640K IBM-PC XT...
I agree that private industry is the future of space, but there's still a long way to go before the "barriers to the marketplace" (physical and economic) can be lowered sufficiently to permit reasonable returns in short enough time frames for most investors. Reasonably funding NASA (which costs peanuts compared to the amount of money spent on social services or military spending), ESA, RSA, etc now is the quickest way to open up those markets, rather than the current plan of letting these agencies limp along on budgets cut beyond the bone, which will ultimately cost taxpayers more in the long run.
More likely, they'll design a servo loop that breaks into oscillation and jams the X-band transponder because they had no understanding of how to work with real components of the non-mathematical variety.
I wouldn't try to feel too superior -- that sounds a little bit like the problem Apollo 11 had with its landing radar, which caused the guidance computer to produce all those exciting 1201 overflow alarms...in 1969 (when, presumably, Real Engineers Roamed the Earth)
(ObTrivia: If the SimSup hadn't thrown a similar overflow problem at Misson Control in one of the last simulation excercises before the landing, there's a good chance an unneeded abort would have been called and the first man to walk on the Moon might have been Pete Conrad)
One second is defined as "the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom."
The meter is then defined in terms of this. There really are very few basic, basic units, and the kilogram is currently the only one which still relies on an actual physical prototype, and NIST are currently working on a 'electric' kilogram.
I think the BBC have it wrong - the earlier discovered Cruithne asteroid is *not* a moon of Earth. It doesn't orbit the Earth, rather it orbits the Sun in a rather unusual fashion that keeps it relatively close to the Earth's orbital position.
The new object is a moon though, because it orbits a planet. Moons orbit planets, planets orbit stars (hence asteroids are sometimes known as 'minor planets' or 'planetesimals').
IEEE Spectrum had two related features on this last month about the struggles in the Entertainment and consumer electronics industries to control the Digital hub.
James Oberg, the expert on the Russian space program also wrote two articles recently on the Chinese space program for IEEE Spectrum, the house journal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers.
I'm some shameless self promotion,/. reader's may be interested to read this article by Mark Ingebretson in August's issue IEEE Spectrum on the topic - he talks about how water, not metal, is the most likely first choice for a mining economy.
I wish they would go back to a sixties mentality. Compare how tight and innovative NASA was in the sixties - from a sub-orbital pop with Alan Shepard to Mare Tranquilitatus in less than ten years. Compare the return on investement in the sixties to anything since, including the space shuttle. A lot of those sixties guys were from NASA's predecessor, NACA, when NACA was a sort of super consultant to private industry. I know that Chris Kraft (the original Flight director) for example is totally for a return to that NACA style and supports private space enterprise. It's the beauracry that devloped in the 70's and 80's that have damaged NASA, after it was pretty much left rudderless after Apollo 11.
As for American corporations leading the way to cheap space flight...look at what Zubrin has to say about the big players. Boeing, etc have no incentive to make, say, the Titan launcher cheaper since that would hurt their profit margin. Look at how NASA got screwed by Lockheed Martin on the X-33 for example.
To be fair, the words "viral" and "GPL" were being put together long before Microsoft. The first time I saw them connected was many moons ago in no less a source than the ESR maintained New Hacker's Dictionary, where a definition reads:
General Public Virus n.
Pejorative name for some versions of the GNU project copyleft or General Public License (GPL), which requires that any tools or apps incorporating copylefted code must be source-distributed on the same anti-proprietary terms as GNU stuff. Thus it is alleged that the copyleft `infects' software generated with GNU tools, which may in turn infect other software that reuses any of its code. The Free Software Foundation's official position as of January 1991 is that copyright law limits the scope of the GPL to "programs textually incorporating significant amounts of GNU code", and that the `infection' is not passed on to third parties unless actual GNU source is transmitted. Nevertheless, widespread suspicion that the copyleft language is `boobytrapped' has caused many developers to avoid using GNU tools and the GPL. Changes in the language of the version 2.0 GPL did not eliminate this problem.
Ummm, no, nature creates straight lines and circles too. An example of a straight line: San Andreas fault, the surface features form a nice straight line. Many fault features can form huge straight lines. Circle examples: meteorite craters, volcanic caldreas.
On a smaller scale for geometric regularities, think about the hexagonal features of the Giant's causeway in Antrim, Northern Ireland.
Not to mention the ability of non-sentient life to form these straight line and circular structures too.
As for your final point, you might enjoy reading "The Olympus Gambit" by William Rollo. It's hard to get, but a fun read about just that possibilty.
James Oberg - who is probably the West's leading expert on the Russian/Soviet program first investigated these rumours over twenty years ago and found no substance to them either then or since - a long extract from a book by him can be found here on the Federation of American Scientists web site. But in summary, there is no substance to the rumors, although cosmonauts did die in training on Earth, washed out of the program, etc, and for political reasons were removed from the official soviet accounts of their space program.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, you have to be a little careful regarding Faget and the shuttle, given that his short winged 'DC-3' design was on the losing side of the compromise with the Air Force regarding the shuttle's cross range capability. Additionally, the DC-3 looked like it would have suffered from severe heating and aerodynamic instability problems on re-entry. Unlike the Mercury/Apollo era, where Faget's word was the only word, industry pushed back with their own spacecraft designs for the shuttle program and largely won -- the idea for a planform orbiter and a drop tank came from outside his team.
However, to be fair, after the DC-3 battle, Faget's team did have the crucial insight that the external tank could serve a structural function as the backbone of the shuttle stack, instead of just hanging off it, and their MSC-040 orbiter design was the baseline for the production orbiters.
Well, setting aside your homophobia, I don't think they look like star trek vehicles at all (no nacelles/no craggy bits, which are the two primary looks in the Star Trek universe). They do have a science-fictiony look because they're all streamlined to some extent, and streamlining was the great motif of early science fiction hardware imagery.
However, the need for streamlining stems more from the fact that these vehicles will spend most of their operational lives in the atmosphere, either going up or coming down, unlike, say the Lunar Module or the ISS.
Should we ever get the point where X-Prize type people are developing pure space vehicles, expect to see the sleek science fiction look vanish.
I know a lot of people have suggested Pournelle's King David's Spaceship, but was the one you were thinking of have a whole thing with an alien race living on the other side of a near impassable mountaing range?
'Cos that's what I'm thinking of and it's driving me nuts I can't remember the title. I'd love to compare the publications date with King David's Spaceship.
Most current thinking by physicists about viable time machines (viable in that they don't violate e.g. the framework of thermodynamics or general relativity, not that we have any way to build them), such as wormholes, very long supermassive rotating cylinders, or the intersection of quantum threads (not the same as the strings of string theory), indicates that they all have in common one thing:
You cannot use such a device to go back to a time before the machine itself was created. This neatly solves the "why haven't we been visited yet by time travellers?" question -- they can't till we do our bit and build the machine!
You may be interested in this article in IEEE Spectrum by James Oberg, where he explains how and why the Shenzhou is significantly different from the Soyuz.
Basically, the Shenzhou is a bigger and has an orbital module capable of independant flight, something very new. Part of the reason why is that although the Chinese tried to buy a Soyuz from the Russians, the only one they were able to obtain was pretty much just a shell, having had most of its flght systems removed prior to delivery.
Ah, but isn't the fundamental basis (fundamental as in Alan Turing's 1937 "On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem") of computer science the very fact that code and data are not inherently different.
We usually choose to maintain a distinction for reasons of practicality, but it is wise to remember that the difference is constructed, and the line is easily crossed -- as anyone who has seen a CGI script buffer overflow exploit can tell you.
While this doesn't have any bearing on the immediate question of directly executing XML documents in some way, I suspect that it does mean that an awful lot of readers of Dr. Dobbs (including myself) are delibrately refraining from "understanding" the difference between code and data.
'Metamaterials" are not "metaphysical", in the same way that metainformation is not inherently metaphysical. Meta is--say it with me people--just a prefix meaning (from the jargon file) "one level up" or if you prefer (from websters) "between, with, after, behind, over, about, reversely".
Metamaterials are carefully constructed arrangements of regular materials, whose properties combine to produce behaviours that no "pure" material can duplicate, including negative indexes of refraction.
This should not be a surprising concept to anyone who is aware that, for example, atoms can combine form metatoms (so-called "molecules") that have all kinds of properties not found when dealing with pure elements -- and yet the laws of nature survive!
There is no transcending the laws of nature going on here.
The stock shot on the LCD is of the Ha'penny Bridge, a 19th century pedestrian bridge in my old home town of Dublin. I wonder they chose a pedestrian bridge from a pre-automobile era to help sell sell high tech car parts!
I agree - combat in Elite 2 sucked, but I feel the heart of the problem wasn't the physics model itself but rather the same problem that occured in the transition from Doom to Quake -- combat went from fighting off packs, with always the threat and tension of more baddies arriving as your energy and ammo/missiles were depleted, to fighting one or two hostiles at a time. The frenetic pace that was the heart of combat in both Doom and Elite was lost. More realistic combat physics *can* be fun, as illustrated by the Independance Day series.
Nobody can collect your personal data unless they have either your consent or a law that specifically says that they may.
I would say that publishing that personal data on the Internet (either by putting text on a web page or sending Google your IP address and search terms so they can send you back results) gives both de facto and de jure consent.
Also, I do not believe that Google's internal storing of searches falls under the definition of "personal data" in the EU directive. Here personal data is defined as:
"'personal data'" shall mean any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person ("data subject"); an identifiable person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identification number or to one or more factors specific to his physical, physiological, mental, economic, cultural or social identity"
A search query-result pair does not in itself identify a person, and so is not personal data. Even an IP number identifies a computer not a person, and with the exception of people like me (who live alone and have static IPs for their home boxes), it can very difficult to associate an IP number with a specific person (Did 15 year old Tommy or his Dad search for "Free Porn" from that dialup account?)
Exactly my point -- random crappy journal that doesn't add any value: to the Net with you!. But it has been suggested that it's wrong for any journal to be a commercial entity, whereas I think the better journals, like Science, Nature, and The JAMA and so on are entitled to charge money and avail of copyright protection for their products.
In an analogy to the open source commercial model, the better publications are providing a service in all the seen and unseen work that gets done on an article. The actual data in these articles is still free for for anyone to use after all, which seems to be forgotten (generally speaking abstracts are usually freely available too).
I'm just pointing out that not all journals are quite so parasitic as some would have you believe and don't deserve to be tarred with the same brush as the Journal of Obscure Interactions. That this is often the case is understandable: a lot of publishing Ph.Ds tend to be reluctant to admit that some editor with a fraction of their lab experience might actually be better than themselves at writing in general and conveying their ideas in particular.
hahahahaha! You're kidding right? Look at a page from Nature or Science: you think that was done in TeX? Nope, it was put together by professional layout artists and illustrators using tools like Adobe photoshop and Quark. And before anyone poo-poo's the value of good graphic design, take a look at the average conference proceeding - many articles in their own unique font, different type sizes, some articles with their own page numbers, some articles that look like they're ninth generation photocopies...
More fundamentally, the amount of work that goes into improving the text in one of these articles can be immense, especially when the author doesn't have english as a first language. Some articles have to be almost completely rewritten. Don't believe me? Find a sample of articles (including authors from non english speaking countries) which have unrevised pre-prints available on-line and which were subsequently published in either of these two magazines and compare their readability and conciseness.
I know some journals adopt a straight through approach to the text of papers and here I'm all for the on-line archive approach, because frankly I don't think these journals are doing what they are supposed to. If I want to read a dozen different versions of how to structure an article, style a reference, name a gene, or give a temperature, I'll take the pre-print feed.
Just because "Slashdot editor" is an oxymoron, doesn't mean it's true all over!
Even in the United States, there is no "monoply on lanching." That law was repealed a number of years ago, but still people seem convinced it exists... There are a number of private launch services for satellites, both inside and outside the U.S.
If one is still worried about the U.S regulatory environment, one can happily launch outside the U.S. legal regime, from Baikonur, through Juiquan, to the SeaLaunch platform.
Yet despite there being no regulatory or monopoly barrier to putting any given pound of payload into orbit, there is no rush of investement into creating low cost launchers for humans or on-orbit industry.
Why? Because the major barrior is economic not political. There is no good return on investment for space applications for anything other than commercial satellites, which are already serviced by current launchers to the satisfaction of the satellite owners.
There is a large hump to get over before that situation changes, and that hump will be paid for by governments, not markets.
Your reasoning is reminiscent of Thatcherism and Reaganomics. The belief that all a nation has to do to solve its problems is wave the magic legislative wand of deregulation is not borne out by history.
By the way, quoting the X-33 as example is a very bad choice, and is in fact illustrative of how hard it is to build radically new launchers. The X-33 died as much from basic technical problems as budgetary ones: the aerospike engines were troublesome and the inability to create composite tanks which could hold up under operating conditions derailed the project. Single Stage to Orbit is just not the way to go with chemical rockets, as Oberth, Goddard, Tsiolkovsky, Sanger, Braun, Korolov and Faget couuld have told you.
Peer review is not editing. In fact it usually annoys publishers when peer reviewers try to do copyediting, line editing etc: they usually have no idea of the house style, word count allocation, etc. Peer reviewers exist to check for factual accuracy. Period. If you're unpaid and doing more than that you're either on the editorial board or doing work most journals would in fact prefer you didn't do. (The situation may be different for very small or new journals, and conference reports in general but this article is about opening up the commercial publications.)
Skilled and expensive editors are still required to a) do an initial weeding out process so the peer review system isn't overloaded, b) whip manuscripts into shape which are usually written by people who got much better marks in science than composition in school, and c) prepare illustrations -- I've seen the fun when a publisher has to create something printable out of some power point file whipped up by an overeager grad student.
There's a reason why a magazines like Nature and Science get read by large numbers of people and self-edited conference reports aren't even read by all the conference attendees
...capitalism is the only answer. Compare the exponential advancement of computer technology to the thirty year old space shuttle technology
This would be the same computer technology that got started because of massive military and government subsidies and funding from ENIAC to the Internet?
Your comment is even more ironic in the light that the PC revolution which allowed mass market economics to operate on computers is a direct consequence of the development of the Apollo Guidance Computer. (Don't believe me? Look it up, try reading "Journey to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Guidance Computer" by Eldon C. Hall). Without NASA money supporting integrated circuit production lines and demonstrating a digital computer can be trusted for mission critical applications in the 1960's, round about now we'd all be getting excited by IBM's new 640K IBM-PC XT...
I agree that private industry is the future of space, but there's still a long way to go before the "barriers to the marketplace" (physical and economic) can be lowered sufficiently to permit reasonable returns in short enough time frames for most investors. Reasonably funding NASA (which costs peanuts compared to the amount of money spent on social services or military spending), ESA, RSA, etc now is the quickest way to open up those markets, rather than the current plan of letting these agencies limp along on budgets cut beyond the bone, which will ultimately cost taxpayers more in the long run.
I wouldn't try to feel too superior -- that sounds a little bit like the problem Apollo 11 had with its landing radar, which caused the guidance computer to produce all those exciting 1201 overflow alarms...in 1969 (when, presumably, Real Engineers Roamed the Earth)
(ObTrivia: If the SimSup hadn't thrown a similar overflow problem at Misson Control in one of the last simulation excercises before the landing, there's a good chance an unneeded abort would have been called and the first man to walk on the Moon might have been Pete Conrad)
The meter is then defined in terms of this. There really are very few basic, basic units, and the kilogram is currently the only one which still relies on an actual physical prototype, and NIST are currently working on a 'electric' kilogram.
The new object is a moon though, because it orbits a planet. Moons orbit planets, planets orbit stars (hence asteroids are sometimes known as 'minor planets' or 'planetesimals').
and
Digital Hubub: Companies vie to create a single device to handle all your home entertainment needs
The Largest Players rule the Media Playground (which shows the spaghetti like relationship between all the big players and the current crop of set top contenders).
One is on the boosters used and the other is on the Shenzhou spaceship and other space projects
As for American corporations leading the way to cheap space flight...look at what Zubrin has to say about the big players. Boeing, etc have no incentive to make, say, the Titan launcher cheaper since that would hurt their profit margin. Look at how NASA got screwed by Lockheed Martin on the X-33 for example.
General Public Virus n.
Pejorative name for some versions of the GNU project copyleft or General Public License (GPL), which requires that any tools or apps incorporating copylefted code must be source-distributed on the same anti-proprietary terms as GNU stuff. Thus it is alleged that the copyleft `infects' software generated with GNU tools, which may in turn infect other software that reuses any of its code. The Free Software Foundation's official position as of January 1991 is that copyright law limits the scope of the GPL to "programs textually incorporating significant amounts of GNU code", and that the `infection' is not passed on to third parties unless actual GNU source is transmitted. Nevertheless, widespread suspicion that the copyleft language is `boobytrapped' has caused many developers to avoid using GNU tools and the GPL. Changes in the language of the version 2.0 GPL did not eliminate this problem.
On a smaller scale for geometric regularities, think about the hexagonal features of the Giant's causeway in Antrim, Northern Ireland.
Not to mention the ability of non-sentient life to form these straight line and circular structures too.
As for your final point, you might enjoy reading "The Olympus Gambit" by William Rollo. It's hard to get, but a fun read about just that possibilty.