Moderators, read some sample messages by the parent user. All signs point to BS, this guy talks about being some Navy R&D guy in other messages, as well as takes credit for a wide variety of things. Perhaps he has fooled some of y'all into moderating him up?
Flight will eventually happen
on
The Coming Air Age
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I've read a bunch of threads from people who talk about how dangerous it will be to have so many people flying around, and I am reminded of how when cars first appeared, they would be escorted in town by sentries waving red flags because it was thought that the cars would be so inherently dangerous.
Wales vs. Whales
on
Wireless Wales
·
· Score: 1, Redundant
Personally, I think wireless whales would be more exciting....
Hybrid cars are much friendlier to the environment.
Many advocates of electric cars see the energy cycle as something like this:
1. (energy comes from somewhere) 2. Environmentally clean driving!
The real problem is that because the anti-nuke lobby has made it uneconomical to run nuclear power plants, we currently get almost all our power from coal and gas burning plants. These guys are not very efficient at making electricity, a least not compared to the super efficient engines in the hybrids. They produce much more pollution per watt. The end result, an electric car just moves the pollution it creates from the car to the power plant, and the power plant is very very dirty.
Until coal & gas are not used anymore, pure EV is bad for the environment.
I'd like to suggest the following: BUILD an Orion ship in the middle of the desert over a period of years. Whenever a big piece of military hardware is decommissioned, install it somewhere on this Orion ship. Sidewinders, old A-10 guns that fire depleted uranium, hell, even ICBMs.
Why? Just in case.
Let's say an asteroid or comet threatens civilization: You'd have a solution that, as messy as it would be, would at least be superior to millions of people getting killed.
What if aliens threaten us? We'd have SOME sort of defense.
What if some unforseeable natural disaster takes place in space and only a big old spaceship will solve it? I'd rather we be prepared then not.
Store is unfueled, keep the nukes where they are now. This way, it's no real threat to anyone. Keep the warheads off the ICBMs it has onboard, all this stuff could be installed in a day or so, if we were properly motivated.
Have schools and colleges build simple re-entry capsules that don't have to be super lightweight.
Put one or two submarine reactors onboard along with a big resevoir of water. Like Niven-Pournelle's Archangel, you could use water for attitude control. For 'precision' maneuvering, you could fire off an ICBM (properly aligned, of course).
This would be neat, and it could be done a LOT cheaper then when you use purpose built components.
Digital music downloads is what's known as a 'Disruptive technology'. Every industry has disruptive technologies that, when they appear, are not as good as what is currently in place, but end up improving to a point where they replace the original sustaining technology.
An example of disruptive technology is the 8" hard drive. The 14" hard drives were fast and stored a lot of data, but few of the disk companies bothered to make 8" drives when they came out because they were slower and didn't store as much data. Not only that, but they cost more per megabyte. But the market for Minicomputers demanded lower cost (even if it was higher cost per meg) overall drives, so they started improving. Only one or two hard drive companies from the 14" market survived the switch to 8" drives because they didn't see the benefit, and their customers didn't either, until it was too late.
The same thing happened again when the 5.25" HDs came out. Only a couple manufacturers of 8" drives stayed in business, and only because they spent money on the 5.25" drives well before they were good enough to sell, or profitable.
Finally, look at the excavating market: Up until the 1940s, steam shovels were all cable activated. They used cables to lift the arms and control the scoop, not hydraulics. When the first hydraulic dirt movers came out, they couldn't move anywhere near as much dirt and they cost more to operate, but eventually they became more powerful, safer, and cheaper to own and operate then cable operated stuff. NONE of the steam shovel companies that were in business in the 1940s survived past the 1950s because they didn't see the benefit of selling what they saw as inferior technology, which hydraulics definately were in the beginning.
This created opportunities for the startups to dominate the small hydraulics market unopposed until they were able to grow into and take over the domain of the cable operated steam shovel.
What HMV (and these other companies) are doing is learning from the mistakes of those companies. Digital music download is a disruptive technology to the sustaining technology of physical music purchase. It's not as high quality as CDs now, and it has lots of deficiencies, but they know that eventually, the market for digital downloads of music may grow to compete with and even replace physical media sales. That's not what customers want right now, but the market and technologies change, so 5-10 years from now, customers will demand this, and whoever is in the business first will have lots of advantages.
Remember, what the customer wants is not always best, and if you spend your life following the customers requests only, you'll eventually go out of business when a disruptive technology appears. It happened to the 14" drive manufacturers who listened to their customers (who weren't interested in slower, lower capacity drives), and it'll happen to the music industry that doesn't embrace and extend downloads.
For more data on this, read 'The Innovators Dilemma' by Christensen.
Orbiter is pretty, but the aerodynamics on it are very super rudimentary compared to X-Plane. The X-plane shuttle landing is extremely accurate, with working glass cockpit displays and reallistic handling.
Like what, mental transmission? pcAnywhere support so you can play it on their machines? Free airline tickets so you can come and copy it to your laptop off their machine?
I predict the feedback will be filled with the following:
1. Whining to the effect of 'they JUST found these? All the bearings went bad at once?'
2. Whining to the effect of 'They're still using 40+ year old crawlers? How dumb!'
3. Whining to the effect of 'NASA is so stupid, they can't even drive 5 miles, much less fly a million in a shuttle'
4. A few token 'We should be at moon/mars/jupiter by now, NASA has just fallen by the wayside and is a relic of lost dreams' whines
5. A few people will get a kick out of saying 'Maybe we should pay the Russians to help us with our space technology?' and 'Can't they fix this by having Natalie P. put grits on the bearings?'
6. Finally, one or two levelheaded people will say 'This stuff happens, and I'm glad they're catching it now instead of when a shuttle falls off a crawler'.
Of course, #6 will be basically ignored, and instead a message saying 'If these bearings failed, it would be bad.' will be marked +5 Insightful, +5 Interesting, and +5 Informative, the three I's of insipid posts that bring to mind the sound of a million people saying 'Well, duh....'
On The Wings L5: First City In Space Hail Columbia! and The Dream Is Alive, a movie about the shuttle program released just before the Challenger disaster.
These are great, but the only thing you can find is the (albeit neat) Space Station 3d and some 'Xtreme' stunts movie.
What movie would I like to see on IMAX? Classical IMAX movies, for one! This may sound dumb, but the truth of the matter is that some of the best IMAX films are out of circulation and simply cannot be seen today.
When reading about the latest Mars in Antarctica mission at the Flashline Station, Robert Zubrin wrote that at one point a cargo plane scheduled to come and pick up the staff was told to reschedule by one of the scientists at the campsite. He asks why, and they point at their computer monitor and say that according to the webcams outside, it's very overcast.
He pokes his head out of the shelter and sees that the skies are clear, but the scientists INSIST that the webcam shows that they are very overcast.
The funniest part was that no matter what he did, he could not convince them to just look out a window or come outside because they were so certain about what the webcam was showing them that they saw no need.
Todays technology seems most effective when it supplements or enhances something, not when it absolutely replaces it.
Based on the replies to my message, I seem to have struck a 'self-righteousness' nerve! : )
You gotta admit, being PROUD of not watching a show is at least as asinine as anything you might read into my original response.
Re:must...avoid...reality tv...
on
The Sims Survivor
·
· Score: 0, Troll
You're... PROUD of only watching half an episode of Survivor?
The standards for pride have, it appears, fallen somewhat since I was originally taught the word.
You should have pride if you participated in an AIDS walk and raised money & awareness.
You should be proud if you strictly recycling cans and paper to cut the need for pulling virgin materials into circulation.
You should be proud of yourself if you, through some selfless action, helped someone in need through a difficult period and improved their life markedly.
But this... being PROUD of somehow resisting the urge to watch part of a TV show?
One of the companies providing components for him has been indicted for fraud. Turns out they were giving the Air Force some parts that were supposed to be clean room O2 grade components, eg, no waste that could react w/ pure Oxygen.
It seems they gave the parts an alcohol bath before delivery, then tried to fib their way out of it.
Whoops....
Hope his glider doesn't explode. That'd be ironic.
Not the ISS. The high inclination orbit the ISS is in to accomadate heavy Russian cargo launches (for modules like Zvezda, zarya, etc) from Kazakhstan puts the station in an orbit that is not ideal for either Russian or US heavy launchers, just somewhere in-between. The result is that it would be enormously expensive to stage the construction of any Mars vehicle at the ISS because of all the extra expenses in launching to that orbit.
Also, the orbit isn't really that efficient for transfering out of because of the inclination, so you have two costs, the launch from ground cost and the fuel cost for boosting out of orbit.
Modern cars have, almost without exception, OBD-II interfaces. I'm surprised that more people have not made low cost adapters and software to use for doing telemetry and data-logging.
If you want an adapter, you need to spend over $100, probably over $300. Software can cost the same.
Where are all the sourceforge projects? Where are all the $20 in parts designs for hooking your laptop to your computer? C'mon!
This is really not that exciting, it's just brute forcing the problem. Human chess grandmasters don't run massive simultaneous mega power number crunching sequences to figure out how to win, they use a combination of strategy and intuition.
This is lame. A much more interesting story would be that someone had written a program that could play world class chess without world class CPU horsepower.
I already use products that are essentially nanotech. For instance, an electronics project of mine uses an Analog Devices ADXL202, a two axis accelerometer that uses MEMS technology to measure acceleration. It's amazing stuff, they took a device that used to be the size of a big box and made it small enough so that 5 can fit on a dime. The nano-tech part of it is that all the moving parts that were in the original accelerometers have been replaced with a tiny series of tuning fork-like assemblies measured in nanometers that somehow impart movement information on an almost molecular scale.
The US is a signatory to treaties which prohibit the use of nuclear devices outside the atmosphere. While originally intended to prevent further nuclear bomb testing in orbit (which would have disastrous effects on todays world), it has also limited legit research into technologies like NERVA.
NERVA rockets (which use a reactor to superheat hydrogen for propulsion, at much higher efficiency levels than chemical rockets) are the key to exploration and exploitation of the Solar System. Our chemical rockets have hit peaks of efficiency limited by the physics of combustion that are not surmountable, and they fall far short of the ISP (a measure of efficiency and power) needed for manned exploration of our neighborhood.
The US should either formally leave these treaties or push for amendements to exclude limits on peaceful use of nuclear propulsion.
Slashdot Mirror
Moderators, read some sample messages by the parent user. All signs point to BS, this guy talks about being some Navy R&D guy in other messages, as well as takes credit for a wide variety of things. Perhaps he has fooled some of y'all into moderating him up?
I've read a bunch of threads from people who talk about how dangerous it will be to have so many people flying around, and I am reminded of how when cars first appeared, they would be escorted in town by sentries waving red flags because it was thought that the cars would be so inherently dangerous.
Personally, I think wireless whales would be more exciting....
When I first read the above message, I thought it was just fluff, but if you think about it... the X-Box does a lot of what Palladium is described as.
At the very least, I would be amazed if Palladium development did not carefully scrutinize successes and failures of the X-Box model.
Really? Where do you live? Even in the US, we have electric cars. Are you in Afghanistan or something?
Sidewinders might be short range in atmosphere, but in space.... c'mon, don't people watch anime any more?
Hybrid cars are much friendlier to the environment.
Many advocates of electric cars see the energy cycle as something like this:
1. (energy comes from somewhere)
2. Environmentally clean driving!
The real problem is that because the anti-nuke lobby has made it uneconomical to run nuclear power plants, we currently get almost all our power from coal and gas burning plants. These guys are not very efficient at making electricity, a least not compared to the super efficient engines in the hybrids. They produce much more pollution per watt. The end result, an electric car just moves the pollution it creates from the car to the power plant, and the power plant is very very dirty.
Until coal & gas are not used anymore, pure EV is bad for the environment.
I'd like to suggest the following: BUILD an Orion ship in the middle of the desert over a period of years. Whenever a big piece of military hardware is decommissioned, install it somewhere on this Orion ship. Sidewinders, old A-10 guns that fire depleted uranium, hell, even ICBMs.
Why? Just in case.
Let's say an asteroid or comet threatens civilization: You'd have a solution that, as messy as it would be, would at least be superior to millions of people getting killed.
What if aliens threaten us? We'd have SOME sort of defense.
What if some unforseeable natural disaster takes place in space and only a big old spaceship will solve it? I'd rather we be prepared then not.
Store is unfueled, keep the nukes where they are now. This way, it's no real threat to anyone. Keep the warheads off the ICBMs it has onboard, all this stuff could be installed in a day or so, if we were properly motivated.
Have schools and colleges build simple re-entry capsules that don't have to be super lightweight.
Put one or two submarine reactors onboard along with a big resevoir of water. Like Niven-Pournelle's Archangel, you could use water for attitude control. For 'precision' maneuvering, you could fire off an ICBM (properly aligned, of course).
This would be neat, and it could be done a LOT cheaper then when you use purpose built components.
Digital music downloads is what's known as a 'Disruptive technology'. Every industry has disruptive technologies that, when they appear, are not as good as what is currently in place, but end up improving to a point where they replace the original sustaining technology.
An example of disruptive technology is the 8" hard drive. The 14" hard drives were fast and stored a lot of data, but few of the disk companies bothered to make 8" drives when they came out because they were slower and didn't store as much data. Not only that, but they cost more per megabyte. But the market for Minicomputers demanded lower cost (even if it was higher cost per meg) overall drives, so they started improving. Only one or two hard drive companies from the 14" market survived the switch to 8" drives because they didn't see the benefit, and their customers didn't either, until it was too late.
The same thing happened again when the 5.25" HDs came out. Only a couple manufacturers of 8" drives stayed in business, and only because they spent money on the 5.25" drives well before they were good enough to sell, or profitable.
Finally, look at the excavating market: Up until the 1940s, steam shovels were all cable activated. They used cables to lift the arms and control the scoop, not hydraulics. When the first hydraulic dirt movers came out, they couldn't move anywhere near as much dirt and they cost more to operate, but eventually they became more powerful, safer, and cheaper to own and operate then cable operated stuff. NONE of the steam shovel companies that were in business in the 1940s survived past the 1950s because they didn't see the benefit of selling what they saw as inferior technology, which hydraulics definately were in the beginning.
This created opportunities for the startups to dominate the small hydraulics market unopposed until they were able to grow into and take over the domain of the cable operated steam shovel.
What HMV (and these other companies) are doing is learning from the mistakes of those companies. Digital music download is a disruptive technology to the sustaining technology of physical music purchase. It's not as high quality as CDs now, and it has lots of deficiencies, but they know that eventually, the market for digital downloads of music may grow to compete with and even replace physical media sales. That's not what customers want right now, but the market and technologies change, so 5-10 years from now, customers will demand this, and whoever is in the business first will have lots of advantages.
Remember, what the customer wants is not always best, and if you spend your life following the customers requests only, you'll eventually go out of business when a disruptive technology appears. It happened to the 14" drive manufacturers who listened to their customers (who weren't interested in slower, lower capacity drives), and it'll happen to the music industry that doesn't embrace and extend downloads.
For more data on this, read 'The Innovators Dilemma' by Christensen.
Orbiter is pretty, but the aerodynamics on it are very super rudimentary compared to X-Plane. The X-plane shuttle landing is extremely accurate, with working glass cockpit displays and reallistic handling.
Like what, mental transmission? pcAnywhere support so you can play it on their machines? Free airline tickets so you can come and copy it to your laptop off their machine?
I predict the feedback will be filled with the following:
1. Whining to the effect of 'they JUST found these? All the bearings went bad at once?'
2. Whining to the effect of 'They're still using 40+ year old crawlers? How dumb!'
3. Whining to the effect of 'NASA is so stupid, they can't even drive 5 miles, much less fly a million in a shuttle'
4. A few token 'We should be at moon/mars/jupiter by now, NASA has just fallen by the wayside and is a relic of lost dreams' whines
5. A few people will get a kick out of saying 'Maybe we should pay the Russians to help us with our space technology?' and 'Can't they fix this by having Natalie P. put grits on the bearings?'
6. Finally, one or two levelheaded people will say 'This stuff happens, and I'm glad they're catching it now instead of when a shuttle falls off a crawler'.
Of course, #6 will be basically ignored, and instead a message saying 'If these bearings failed, it would be bad.' will be marked +5 Insightful, +5 Interesting, and +5 Informative, the three I's of insipid posts that bring to mind the sound of a million people saying 'Well, duh....'
whoops, submitted too early:
On The Wings
L5: First City In Space
Hail Columbia!
and
The Dream Is Alive, a movie about the shuttle program released just before the Challenger disaster.
These are great, but the only thing you can find is the (albeit neat) Space Station 3d and some 'Xtreme' stunts movie.
What movie would I like to see on IMAX? Classical IMAX movies, for one! This may sound dumb, but the truth of the matter is that some of the best IMAX films are out of circulation and simply cannot be seen today.
For example:
Tomorrow in Space
To Fly!
Titanica
When reading about the latest Mars in Antarctica mission at the Flashline Station, Robert Zubrin wrote that at one point a cargo plane scheduled to come and pick up the staff was told to reschedule by one of the scientists at the campsite. He asks why, and they point at their computer monitor and say that according to the webcams outside, it's very overcast.
He pokes his head out of the shelter and sees that the skies are clear, but the scientists INSIST that the webcam shows that they are very overcast.
The funniest part was that no matter what he did, he could not convince them to just look out a window or come outside because they were so certain about what the webcam was showing them that they saw no need.
Todays technology seems most effective when it supplements or enhances something, not when it absolutely replaces it.
Based on the replies to my message, I seem to have struck a 'self-righteousness' nerve! : )
You gotta admit, being PROUD of not watching a show is at least as asinine as anything you might read into my original response.
You're... PROUD of only watching half an episode of Survivor?
The standards for pride have, it appears, fallen somewhat since I was originally taught the word.
You should have pride if you participated in an AIDS walk and raised money & awareness.
You should be proud if you strictly recycling cans and paper to cut the need for pulling virgin materials into circulation.
You should be proud of yourself if you, through some selfless action, helped someone in need through a difficult period and improved their life markedly.
But this... being PROUD of somehow resisting the urge to watch part of a TV show?
Ridiculous.
According to:
http://www.avpress.com/n/frsty2.hts
One of the companies providing components for him has been indicted for fraud. Turns out they were giving the Air Force some parts that were supposed to be clean room O2 grade components, eg, no waste that could react w/ pure Oxygen.
It seems they gave the parts an alcohol bath before delivery, then tried to fib their way out of it.
Whoops....
Hope his glider doesn't explode. That'd be ironic.
Sounds like the Bolo, Mark XX to me.
http://www.iislands.com/hermit/bolo.html
Chapter by chapter highlights? Are you certain you are not looking for the Cliff Notes version of the book instead?
I suppose it's fairly common to confuse the concept of a review vs. Cliff Notes....
Not the ISS. The high inclination orbit the ISS is in to accomadate heavy Russian cargo launches (for modules like Zvezda, zarya, etc) from Kazakhstan puts the station in an orbit that is not ideal for either Russian or US heavy launchers, just somewhere in-between. The result is that it would be enormously expensive to stage the construction of any Mars vehicle at the ISS because of all the extra expenses in launching to that orbit.
Also, the orbit isn't really that efficient for transfering out of because of the inclination, so you have two costs, the launch from ground cost and the fuel cost for boosting out of orbit.
Modern cars have, almost without exception, OBD-II interfaces. I'm surprised that more people have not made low cost adapters and software to use for doing telemetry and data-logging.
If you want an adapter, you need to spend over $100, probably over $300. Software can cost the same.
Where are all the sourceforge projects? Where are all the $20 in parts designs for hooking your laptop to your computer? C'mon!
This is really not that exciting, it's just brute forcing the problem. Human chess grandmasters don't run massive simultaneous mega power number crunching sequences to figure out how to win, they use a combination of strategy and intuition.
This is lame. A much more interesting story would be that someone had written a program that could play world class chess without world class CPU horsepower.
I already use products that are essentially nanotech. For instance, an electronics project of mine uses an Analog Devices ADXL202, a two axis accelerometer that uses MEMS technology to measure acceleration. It's amazing stuff, they took a device that used to be the size of a big box and made it small enough so that 5 can fit on a dime. The nano-tech part of it is that all the moving parts that were in the original accelerometers have been replaced with a tiny series of tuning fork-like assemblies measured in nanometers that somehow impart movement information on an almost molecular scale.
The US is a signatory to treaties which prohibit the use of nuclear devices outside the atmosphere. While originally intended to prevent further nuclear bomb testing in orbit (which would have disastrous effects on todays world), it has also limited legit research into technologies like NERVA.
NERVA rockets (which use a reactor to superheat hydrogen for propulsion, at much higher efficiency levels than chemical rockets) are the key to exploration and exploitation of the Solar System. Our chemical rockets have hit peaks of efficiency limited by the physics of combustion that are not surmountable, and they fall far short of the ISP (a measure of efficiency and power) needed for manned exploration of our neighborhood.
The US should either formally leave these treaties or push for amendements to exclude limits on peaceful use of nuclear propulsion.