That would be nice, but US export restrictions prevented the export of the electrodynamic tether (METS) that was bound for Mir. The tether could have increased Mir's orbit to a point where it wouldn't decay, but with the use of a tether, the fuel requirements are prohibitive.
I have this book, and it is good, but it requires a larger investment in time then many people who need to whip out a project have.
There's another book I have that's better suited for helping someone who needs to produce a CGI app over the weekend, and that's CGI101 by Jacqueline D. Hamilton.
Check out their website, it has the first few chapters online, and it's really well written.
www.cgi101.com
(I don't work for these people, but I benefited from this book when I needed to get something written from scratch and didn't know Perl or anything abuot CGI)
SELECT sex.image, text.description
FROM web_images AS sex, web_text AS text
WHERE sex.primary_key = text.primary_key
AND text.description LIKE UPPER('%NATALIE%')
AND text.description LIKE UPPER('%PORTMAN%')
AND text.description NOT LIKE UPPER('%GRITS%')
Woo-hoo! Our sweet mother of Akamai accelerated download, don't fail me now!
1. The first privately funded manned space mission took place earlier this year when MirCorp paid for a pair of Cosmonauts to go up and begin refurbishing Mir for commercial use. It had nothing to do with Destination Mir.
2. Why do you hope they de-orbit Mir first? Is it out of spite? That space station still has much use left in it, and you propose to throw it away? This sounds an awful lot like cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Commercial space is the only way we'll get off this planet. If the price of the survival of the species is a Pizza Hut logo on the side of a spaceship, I'm willing to pay.
I see a perfect marketing opportunity. If these people are willing to brand their product in conjunction with a well known leader in modular livingspaces, they could profit immensely.
I speak, of course of:
VR by Habitrail!
Think about it: The ultimate geek houses with modular hallways, ladders, and function specific rooms. Oh, and excercise wheels....
I wish to patent R2R sales (Residence to Residence) sales. R2R transactions are performed by the use of a salesperson (hereafter referred to as 'Agent') visiting the residence of a potential customer (to be known as the 'Client') and engaging in the attempt to sell goods/services (known as the 'transaction').
In a typical R2R transaction, an agent will first engage the client in a series of 'hand-shake' interactions. Using a question-response protocol, the agent will ascertain the current status of the client, the physiological status of the client, and the clients willingness to, for example, have a carpet that shines as it did when it was new.
Following the 'hand-shake', the agent will transfer a block of information about the goods/services that he/she is offering. This transfer of information (known colloquilly as 'the pitch') will use a simple XOR error-correction protocol (in the form of questions/response sessions mid pitch) to determine that the client is still responding (example: 'You don't want a dirty carpet, do you?').
Following the transfer, the agent will begin another series of transactions with the client to ascertain readiness to take delivery of the R2R goods/services. Following a succesful negotiation during this communication, the transaction will complete with one final 'handshake' protocol interaction.
I affirm that I believe the above interaction (to be known as R2R Transactions or 'Door to door sales') to be unique and without precedent.
OpenGL Killed the TTY star. Sure, there are cool 3d games out now, but it seems like there aren't really story tellers attached to them. Douglas Adams, for instance, worked with hoards of sweaty programmers to diagram a fabulously addictivt text game, hhgttg. His last attempt, however (Starship Titanic), was basically a modern attempt at the same thing, but not as good because they had to paste graphics onto it to get the attention of the 30 second attention span crowds to be commercially successful
I say, throw down your 3d games of oppression! Throw down your Quakes, your Half Lifes, and get yourself some Leather Goddess of Phobos! Get some Zork, get some Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy! Hell, get Adventure!
Hello, Sailor!
The babel fish sails across the room and into an open waste hatch!
Anyone can make not tea, access denied!
HIT THORBAST WITH SWORD!
See? It's all there, all in those little characters, many of you can probably remember where those lines are from.
If anything, a true geek should marvel at the efficiency of a text based game. After all, wouldn't you say that compressing a vivid picture of Joe's Bar or a Vogon Airlock into 100 bytes (in the form of the character description) is incredible?
Re:Old tech new again?
on
3D Printers
·
· Score: 2
Perhaps you should consider reading the article before reflexively hitting the Submit button to get a low post number. The process is stereolithography, and it's mentioned in the article.
The difference between the old fashioned stereolithography and what the article is about is this: The article is based around pushing 3d printing for use in the home, not just engineering firms.
They talk about printing plastics, metals and ceramics, but they left out the most important two of all:
Latex and silicon!
(mumbling)She's my creation, is it real? Weird science, da da.....
If the US is serious about living in space, we need to build larger structures. The easiest way to do that economically is to use the external fuel tanks from the space shuttle.
Each launch takes an external tank 95% of the way into orbit then throws it away. The shuttle would not need to store extra fuel to hold onto it through the OMS-2 burn (orbit circularization), it would be able to do it with the onboard supplies.
Once in orbit, a tank could be converted (in 1 launch) to a living space 4 times that of the completed International Space Station (39 launches). On the second launch, attach the next tank by a cable to the first one. Spin them and you have a space station with artificial gravity.
The best part of artificial gravity is that you get to stop re-inventing the wheel. No $5,000,000 toilets to work in zero g, no $300,000 anti-torque wrenches, nothing. You just use normal stuff from earth at a significant savings, plus you don't have to worry about muscle degradation.
Need microgravity? Set up a farm of External Tanks to fly free next to the manned station. This is better anyhow because you don't distrurb experiments when using the treadmill or running into walls.
Serious effort has been put into determining the feasibility of using ETs in orbit, and all the numbers point to it being the cheapest way to set up a serious presence in space. Slashdot your senator and demand that NASA implement one of the hundreds of viable low cost concepts and start storing ETs in orbit!
Oh, and for the propellent freaks that complain the ET has such a high cross section that it would de-orbit quickly because of atmospheric friction, that's what space tethers (METS) are for, and if NASA would get off its collective ass and build a tether system for the ISS, those could be adapted for use on the ET farm as well.
For more info, check out www.orbit6.com. Chris Fitch has a great website about using ETs in space.
Currently, the Russians have the only spacecraft capable of refuelling fuel tanks in orbit, and that's the Progress freighter. The Russians also have the only automated docking technology (KURS, used on Mir and the ISS), the cheapest and most reliable person transport (Soyuz, in service for over 30 years), and so on.
Despite this, the western press still paints this image of Russian space hardware as being obsolete and unsafe! It's amazing, fewer Russians have died in space than US astronauts, and the Russians/Soviets have spent YEARS more in space then we have. Mir is a functional spacestation now with a proven reliabillity and track record while the ISS can't even properly scrub CO2 when there's more then 3 people onboard, they have to run vents from the shuttle!
Now, we're paying Boeing millions additional to build these fuel tanks that can only be refuelling through a $500 million space shuttle launch? Look, if you ask nice, you can probably get a Progress-type fueller system installed! It'll cost 10% of what we're spending to make this half-ass system work, and it'll use existing technologies that have been proven since the Salyut stations in the 70s.
Before anyone starts making cracks about dangerous Russian space and obsolete hardware, remember that the US doesn't have ANYTHING for space station ops other then the Shuttle, and the state of the US space station art hasn't changed since Skylab.
If we're serious about building our own technologies so that we don't rely on Russian economics, we need to get federal startup money for companies like Roton (www.rotaryrocket.com), Kistler (www.kistleraerospace.com) and most importantly, get 100% behind the European ATV, a cargo freighter that performs what Progress does but carries something like 5 times the cargo and fuel to the ISS. Think of it like the old Soviet Star modules for Salyut, except launched on the Ariane 5.
Of course, the best space freighter would be a cleverly tricked out Corellian freighter, but that'll just have to wait a bit...
Some of the people here may not understand how patents are rewarded in todays companies. I work for a software company myself, and if you do something that gets the company a patent, you are rewarded significantly. At my company, it's to the tune of thousands of dollars in realized profit.
The person who wrote this question should consider taking the following stance:
1. Allow the company get the patent so he/she can reap the profits of being paid immediately by his/her company.
2. Let the company fight it out in court and with the public over the validity of the patent.
This can be summed up as 'It's no my problem'. It sounds like apathy, but in this day and age, we need more data points in the patent-wars to bring about change. If his patent is indeed ridiculous, it'll help our movement of changing how patents are awarded. If his patent isn't ridiculous, his company can gain whatever success is inherent in the field they compete in.
Either way, the programmer/patent author will end up realizing actual cash profit from his work. Anyone who advises him to fight this to the death is basically saying 'You shouldn't make money'.
Again, if the patent is ridiculous, the people who have to pay for the legal fees and patent costs are the people who made the boneheaded decision in the first place, not the author.
First of all, mechanical life doesn't automatically assume that there remains biological intelligence, not if the mechanical life destroyed/replaced/evolved from biological critters.
Something we should be aware of is the danger of something along the lines of Fred Saberhagen's Berserkers. These are fictional robots that scour the universe for life and remove it whenever they can. If such devices (or belligerant aliens) _do_ exist, we should be spending effort to do the following:
A: Build a military presence in space, or at least develop the technology so it can be activated at short notice.
B: Start colonizing the hell out of the solar system and any other stars nearby. Can't send a starship brimming with humans to Barnards Star? Fine, use whatever technology is current to build as many extrasolar probes with frozen embryos, decanters, and robots programmed to keep looking for habitable planets, and send those out as fast as we can.
C: Ramp up radio detection. All current radio telescopy is done on or in full view of Earth and her millions of transmitters. We need to set up a farside radio observatory on the moon and start scanning very carefully for transmissions of intelligent origin and signs of incoming spacecraft. Anything traveling in our direction at any significant speed would be easy to see in such an environment because of the monatomic hydrogen fusing and expending itself against it while it charged in.
Right now, we're like a blind person with a bag of money standing in the middle of the street. We don't know if the neighborhood is good or bad, but we should be taking steps to find out.
Despite what some posters have postulated, there is nothing really hazardous about dealing with frozen CO^2. It's just Dry Ice, and when a block of dry-ice sublimates, it just converts into CO^2, a natural byproduct of breathing.
The advantage to using Alcohol in this system is that Alcohol has a much lower freezing point then water. Eg, you can have liquid alcohol that's 25 degrees fahrenheit, a point where water would be solid.
Cars use alcohol as part of the antifreeze. Glycol-Alchohol is the stuff you usually pour down your cars gullet.
According to another story I read, the missions will be webcast as much as possible.
I wonder if this means I'll have to skip watching Survivor IV to watch these rovers skitter across the surface?!
Both probes will be searching for evidence of water, but neither of them will be landed near the place where the evidence of liquid water was found recently. In the article, a scientist said that area was too rocky and hilly, and they were worried about a rover flipping over.
On the plus side, these two rovers will use airbags to bounce to a landing (like Pathfinder).
The one thing I don't get it why they launch them seperately. Why not use a single Titan IV (or equivalent capacity booster) to inject both into a trans-mars orbit? If the concern is dealing with two landings at once, just perform an orbital correction on one of them to aerobrake twice, once at a shallow angle to bleed off speed, the second one as the money shot for entry into Mars' atmosphere. The other lander could perform a standard single aerobrake and land days before the second one came in for its second encounter with the atmosphere.
The only reasons I see to using two Delta 2s are this:
1. NASA doesn't want both eggs in one launching basket.
2. NASA can more easilly get Delta 2 boosters than a bigger booster like the Titan,
or
3. NASA doesn't want to do something new like a 2 stage aerobrake.
I fly R/C planes, and there are almost always at least one or two jets flying at the field in los Angeles I fly at.
I'm finishing up a radio controlled rocketplane right now myself, based on the X-20 spaceplane. A friend of mine has an R/C turbojet, and he was thinking of helping me with my drop tests by taking my rocket plane up on his jet and dropping it from there for the glide tests so it would be going fast enough.
If you want pics of the plane I'm modeling mine after, check out this link:
http://www.friends-partners.org/~mwade/craft/dyn asoar.htm
No matter what the ruling is, what could it do? Even if the websites are found against, all the court could do is assign some improbable damage figure that nobody would collect. The websites would appeal, and the legal system would have another go at it a year from now in appeals court.
If Kaplan rules in favor of the defendants, does that mean that the aggressors will be forced to pay the legal fees of the defense? If not, this whole thing is a lose-lose situation.
Even if the studios end up on the losing side, they just go play a couple rounds of golf and laugh about it over drinks. The defendants, on the other hand, will be stuck with hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees.
This case is far from over. It hasn't gotten bloody yet.
I shall spend $5,000 for a multimedia computer, outfit it with top of the line speakers and subwoofers! Now, I will purchase a bass-boosting seat for added realism! Then, I will purchase additional monitors to place around me to give me 180 degree+ field of vision!
Then I'll load up PacMan.
This reminds me an awful lot about the linked Onion article:
http://www.theonion.com/onion3308/realtimetv.htm l
Titled: New $5,000 Multimedia Computer System Downloads Real-Time TV Programs, Displays Them On Monitor
A real cool project would be to teach them about computer security. Eg, explain how TCP/IP works (down to the point of SYN and ACKs), then show them common ways systems are compromised and how to secure them. Knowing about computer security is becoming more and more important, and at the same time, the subject will have just enough of a 'forbidden' aspect to it to really involve the students. Just be sure to carefully work the hacker ethic into it so they don't go out and abuse their new knowledge. Who knows, you might even be able to keep a few of them turning into 3l33t h4x0r dud3z!
I have to admit a certain level of concern whenever people start talking about 'Modernizing the Constitution'.
An example of an oft proposed 'update' is to remove the right of citizens to bear arms. No matter how attractive the idea of changing one of the first 10 amendments is, consider the dangers posed as well.
Hey, I just realized what this means. If it's reflective on such a wide range of frequencies, that means that the amount of multiplexing data compression you can do is huge.
One of these fibers might be able to carry a hundred times more data then any current fiber, for instance, just by having sub-bands that use different light frequencies. Each band would think they had exclusive use of the superfiber, so they could all be running at max datarate.
This is exactly what I've been waiting for. Now, I can get that 100 watt CO^2 laser and RTG power source implanted in my midriff and run one of these cables through my arm and to my fingers so I can fire laser beams from my hands!
No need to invest in handguns, spare keys, or window defrosters, I'll just take a finger laser, thank you!
The reason I haven't done this before, of course, is the heat problem with fiberoptics cooking all the musclemeat between the laser and the aperature.
Oh, that and I don't have the millions it'd take to buy the hardware and surgeons needed. But that's hardly the important issue here, is it?
Nice idea, but it's freaking $11,000! For that money, I'd buy myself a pair of Apple Cinema displays and a pair of good ol' shutter glasses for 3d.
Why two cinema displays?
Easy, one for my office, and one to sleep with, silly.
FYI, you can get the same effect as this 3d LCD display for a lot less. Simply purchase some crack-cocaine and take that while playing Quake. It'll also make the carnage much... meatier, I imagine.
The biggest threat to profits in online porn industry right now isn't fraud from people who steal numbers, it's what's known as the 'Gak factor'.
Typically, this works like this: 1. Guy visits goatporn website. 2. Guy pays for goatporn.com on his credit card. 3. Guy gets off and loves the website. (camera pans, one month later) 4. Wife opens credit card bill and sees charge to goatporn.com. 5. Wife confronts husband while weeping, convinced she's not satisfying him and that the marriage is about to end. 6. Guy decides that (after a quick 'GAK!') rather then explain that he loves his wife and just needs some goatporn once in a while, instead claims 'Gosh, I never made those charges!' 7.Under her watchful eye, he calls the bank and disputes the charges.
I doubt there's a real industry wide problem with fraudulent charges. In actuality, I suspect it's almost 100% legit charges that get reported as fraud because the significant other is flipping out.
Slashdot Mirror
That would be nice, but US export restrictions prevented the export of the electrodynamic tether (METS) that was bound for Mir. The tether could have increased Mir's orbit to a point where it wouldn't decay, but with the use of a tether, the fuel requirements are prohibitive.
Actually, one of Mir's predecessors was first, Salyut 1.
I have this book, and it is good, but it requires a larger investment in time then many people who need to whip out a project have.
There's another book I have that's better suited for helping someone who needs to produce a CGI app over the weekend, and that's CGI101 by Jacqueline D. Hamilton.
Check out their website, it has the first few chapters online, and it's really well written.
www.cgi101.com
(I don't work for these people, but I benefited from this book when I needed to get something written from scratch and didn't know Perl or anything abuot CGI)
SELECT sex.image, text.description
FROM web_images AS sex, web_text AS text
WHERE sex.primary_key = text.primary_key
AND text.description LIKE UPPER('%NATALIE%')
AND text.description LIKE UPPER('%PORTMAN%')
AND text.description NOT LIKE UPPER('%GRITS%')
Woo-hoo! Our sweet mother of Akamai accelerated download, don't fail me now!
The first item is correct, the first crew returning from Salyut 6 died because a valve opened and drained their air before they re-entered.
The second one did not happen.
1. The first privately funded manned space mission took place earlier this year when MirCorp paid for a pair of Cosmonauts to go up and begin refurbishing Mir for commercial use. It had nothing to do with Destination Mir.
2. Why do you hope they de-orbit Mir first? Is it out of spite? That space station still has much use left in it, and you propose to throw it away? This sounds an awful lot like cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Commercial space is the only way we'll get off this planet. If the price of the survival of the species is a Pizza Hut logo on the side of a spaceship, I'm willing to pay.
I see a perfect marketing opportunity. If these people are willing to brand their product in conjunction with a well known leader in modular livingspaces, they could profit immensely.
I speak, of course of:
VR by Habitrail!
Think about it: The ultimate geek houses with modular hallways, ladders, and function specific rooms. Oh, and excercise wheels....
I wish to patent R2R sales (Residence to Residence) sales. R2R transactions are performed by the use of a salesperson (hereafter referred to as 'Agent') visiting the residence of a potential customer (to be known as the 'Client') and engaging in the attempt to sell goods/services (known as the 'transaction').
In a typical R2R transaction, an agent will first engage the client in a series of 'hand-shake' interactions. Using a question-response protocol, the agent will ascertain the current status of the client, the physiological status of the client, and the clients willingness to, for example, have a carpet that shines as it did when it was new.
Following the 'hand-shake', the agent will transfer a block of information about the goods/services that he/she is offering. This transfer of information (known colloquilly as 'the pitch') will use a simple XOR error-correction protocol (in the form of questions/response sessions mid pitch) to determine that the client is still responding (example: 'You don't want a dirty carpet, do you?').
Following the transfer, the agent will begin another series of transactions with the client to ascertain readiness to take delivery of the R2R goods/services. Following a succesful negotiation during this communication, the transaction will complete with one final 'handshake' protocol interaction.
I affirm that I believe the above interaction (to be known as R2R Transactions or 'Door to door sales') to be unique and without precedent.
OpenGL Killed the TTY star. Sure, there are cool 3d games out now, but it seems like there aren't really story tellers attached to them. Douglas Adams, for instance, worked with hoards of sweaty programmers to diagram a fabulously addictivt text game, hhgttg. His last attempt, however (Starship Titanic), was basically a modern attempt at the same thing, but not as good because they had to paste graphics onto it to get the attention of the 30 second attention span crowds to be commercially successful
I say, throw down your 3d games of oppression! Throw down your Quakes, your Half Lifes, and get yourself some Leather Goddess of Phobos! Get some Zork, get some Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy! Hell, get Adventure!
Hello, Sailor!
The babel fish sails across the room and into an open waste hatch!
Anyone can make not tea, access denied!
HIT THORBAST WITH SWORD!
See? It's all there, all in those little characters, many of you can probably remember where those lines are from.
If anything, a true geek should marvel at the efficiency of a text based game. After all, wouldn't you say that compressing a vivid picture of Joe's Bar or a Vogon Airlock into 100 bytes (in the form of the character description) is incredible?
The difference between the old fashioned stereolithography and what the article is about is this: The article is based around pushing 3d printing for use in the home, not just engineering firms.
They talk about printing plastics, metals and ceramics, but they left out the most important two of all:
Latex and silicon!
(mumbling)She's my creation, is it real? Weird science, da da.....
If the US is serious about living in space, we need to build larger structures. The easiest way to do that economically is to use the external fuel tanks from the space shuttle.
Each launch takes an external tank 95% of the way into orbit then throws it away. The shuttle would not need to store extra fuel to hold onto it through the OMS-2 burn (orbit circularization), it would be able to do it with the onboard supplies.
Once in orbit, a tank could be converted (in 1 launch) to a living space 4 times that of the completed International Space Station (39 launches). On the second launch, attach the next tank by a cable to the first one. Spin them and you have a space station with artificial gravity.
The best part of artificial gravity is that you get to stop re-inventing the wheel. No $5,000,000 toilets to work in zero g, no $300,000 anti-torque wrenches, nothing. You just use normal stuff from earth at a significant savings, plus you don't have to worry about muscle degradation.
Need microgravity? Set up a farm of External Tanks to fly free next to the manned station. This is better anyhow because you don't distrurb experiments when using the treadmill or running into walls.
Serious effort has been put into determining the feasibility of using ETs in orbit, and all the numbers point to it being the cheapest way to set up a serious presence in space. Slashdot your senator and demand that NASA implement one of the hundreds of viable low cost concepts and start storing ETs in orbit!
Oh, and for the propellent freaks that complain the ET has such a high cross section that it would de-orbit quickly because of atmospheric friction, that's what space tethers (METS) are for, and if NASA would get off its collective ass and build a tether system for the ISS, those could be adapted for use on the ET farm as well.
For more info, check out www.orbit6.com. Chris Fitch has a great website about using ETs in space.
Currently, the Russians have the only spacecraft capable of refuelling fuel tanks in orbit, and that's the Progress freighter. The Russians also have the only automated docking technology (KURS, used on Mir and the ISS), the cheapest and most reliable person transport (Soyuz, in service for over 30 years), and so on.
Despite this, the western press still paints this image of Russian space hardware as being obsolete and unsafe! It's amazing, fewer Russians have died in space than US astronauts, and the Russians/Soviets have spent YEARS more in space then we have. Mir is a functional spacestation now with a proven reliabillity and track record while the ISS can't even properly scrub CO2 when there's more then 3 people onboard, they have to run vents from the shuttle!
Now, we're paying Boeing millions additional to build these fuel tanks that can only be refuelling through a $500 million space shuttle launch? Look, if you ask nice, you can probably get a Progress-type fueller system installed! It'll cost 10% of what we're spending to make this half-ass system work, and it'll use existing technologies that have been proven since the Salyut stations in the 70s.
Before anyone starts making cracks about dangerous Russian space and obsolete hardware, remember that the US doesn't have ANYTHING for space station ops other then the Shuttle, and the state of the US space station art hasn't changed since Skylab.
If we're serious about building our own technologies so that we don't rely on Russian economics, we need to get federal startup money for companies like Roton (www.rotaryrocket.com), Kistler (www.kistleraerospace.com) and most importantly, get 100% behind the European ATV, a cargo freighter that performs what Progress does but carries something like 5 times the cargo and fuel to the ISS. Think of it like the old Soviet Star modules for Salyut, except launched on the Ariane 5.
Of course, the best space freighter would be a cleverly tricked out Corellian freighter, but that'll just have to wait a bit...
Some of the people here may not understand how patents are rewarded in todays companies. I work for a software company myself, and if you do something that gets the company a patent, you are rewarded significantly. At my company, it's to the tune of thousands of dollars in realized profit.
The person who wrote this question should consider taking the following stance:
1. Allow the company get the patent so he/she can reap the profits of being paid immediately by his/her company.
2. Let the company fight it out in court and with the public over the validity of the patent.
This can be summed up as 'It's no my problem'. It sounds like apathy, but in this day and age, we need more data points in the patent-wars to bring about change. If his patent is indeed ridiculous, it'll help our movement of changing how patents are awarded. If his patent isn't ridiculous, his company can gain whatever success is inherent in the field they compete in.
Either way, the programmer/patent author will end up realizing actual cash profit from his work. Anyone who advises him to fight this to the death is basically saying 'You shouldn't make money'.
Again, if the patent is ridiculous, the people who have to pay for the legal fees and patent costs are the people who made the boneheaded decision in the first place, not the author.
First of all, mechanical life doesn't automatically assume that there remains biological intelligence, not if the mechanical life destroyed/replaced/evolved from biological critters.
Something we should be aware of is the danger of something along the lines of Fred Saberhagen's Berserkers. These are fictional robots that scour the universe for life and remove it whenever they can. If such devices (or belligerant aliens) _do_ exist, we should be spending effort to do the following:
A: Build a military presence in space, or at least develop the technology so it can be activated at short notice.
B: Start colonizing the hell out of the solar system and any other stars nearby. Can't send a starship brimming with humans to Barnards Star? Fine, use whatever technology is current to build as many extrasolar probes with frozen embryos, decanters, and robots programmed to keep looking for habitable planets, and send those out as fast as we can.
C: Ramp up radio detection. All current radio telescopy is done on or in full view of Earth and her millions of transmitters. We need to set up a farside radio observatory on the moon and start scanning very carefully for transmissions of intelligent origin and signs of incoming spacecraft. Anything traveling in our direction at any significant speed would be easy to see in such an environment because of the monatomic hydrogen fusing and expending itself against it while it charged in.
Right now, we're like a blind person with a bag of money standing in the middle of the street. We don't know if the neighborhood is good or bad, but we should be taking steps to find out.
Despite what some posters have postulated, there is nothing really hazardous about dealing with frozen CO^2. It's just Dry Ice, and when a block of dry-ice sublimates, it just converts into CO^2, a natural byproduct of breathing.
The advantage to using Alcohol in this system is that Alcohol has a much lower freezing point then water. Eg, you can have liquid alcohol that's 25 degrees fahrenheit, a point where water would be solid.
Cars use alcohol as part of the antifreeze. Glycol-Alchohol is the stuff you usually pour down your cars gullet.
According to another story I read, the missions will be webcast as much as possible.
I wonder if this means I'll have to skip watching Survivor IV to watch these rovers skitter across the surface?!
Both probes will be searching for evidence of water, but neither of them will be landed near the place where the evidence of liquid water was found recently. In the article, a scientist said that area was too rocky and hilly, and they were worried about a rover flipping over.
On the plus side, these two rovers will use airbags to bounce to a landing (like Pathfinder).
The one thing I don't get it why they launch them seperately. Why not use a single Titan IV (or equivalent capacity booster) to inject both into a trans-mars orbit? If the concern is dealing with two landings at once, just perform an orbital correction on one of them to aerobrake twice, once at a shallow angle to bleed off speed, the second one as the money shot for entry into Mars' atmosphere. The other lander could perform a standard single aerobrake and land days before the second one came in for its second encounter with the atmosphere.
The only reasons I see to using two Delta 2s are this:
1. NASA doesn't want both eggs in one launching basket.
2. NASA can more easilly get Delta 2 boosters than a bigger booster like the Titan,
or
3. NASA doesn't want to do something new like a 2 stage aerobrake.
I fly R/C planes, and there are almost always at least one or two jets flying at the field in los Angeles I fly at.
n asoar.htm
I'm finishing up a radio controlled rocketplane right now myself, based on the X-20 spaceplane. A friend of mine has an R/C turbojet, and he was thinking of helping me with my drop tests by taking my rocket plane up on his jet and dropping it from there for the glide tests so it would be going fast enough.
If you want pics of the plane I'm modeling mine after, check out this link:
http://www.friends-partners.org/~mwade/craft/dy
No matter what the ruling is, what could it do? Even if the websites are found against, all the court could do is assign some improbable damage figure that nobody would collect. The websites would appeal, and the legal system would have another go at it a year from now in appeals court.
If Kaplan rules in favor of the defendants, does that mean that the aggressors will be forced to pay the legal fees of the defense? If not, this whole thing is a lose-lose situation.
Even if the studios end up on the losing side, they just go play a couple rounds of golf and laugh about it over drinks. The defendants, on the other hand, will be stuck with hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees.
This case is far from over. It hasn't gotten bloody yet.
I shall spend $5,000 for a multimedia computer, outfit it with top of the line speakers and subwoofers! Now, I will purchase a bass-boosting seat for added realism! Then, I will purchase additional monitors to place around me to give me 180 degree+ field of vision!
m l
Then I'll load up PacMan.
This reminds me an awful lot about the linked Onion article:
http://www.theonion.com/onion3308/realtimetv.ht
Titled: New $5,000 Multimedia Computer System Downloads Real-Time TV Programs, Displays Them On Monitor
A real cool project would be to teach them about computer security. Eg, explain how TCP/IP works (down to the point of SYN and ACKs), then show them common ways systems are compromised and how to secure them. Knowing about computer security is becoming more and more important, and at the same time, the subject will have just enough of a 'forbidden' aspect to it to really involve the students. Just be sure to carefully work the hacker ethic into it so they don't go out and abuse their new knowledge. Who knows, you might even be able to keep a few of them turning into 3l33t h4x0r dud3z!
I have to admit a certain level of concern whenever people start talking about 'Modernizing the Constitution'.
An example of an oft proposed 'update' is to remove the right of citizens to bear arms. No matter how attractive the idea of changing one of the first 10 amendments is, consider the dangers posed as well.
Hey, I just realized what this means. If it's reflective on such a wide range of frequencies, that means that the amount of multiplexing data compression you can do is huge.
One of these fibers might be able to carry a hundred times more data then any current fiber, for instance, just by having sub-bands that use different light frequencies. Each band would think they had exclusive use of the superfiber, so they could all be running at max datarate.
This is exactly what I've been waiting for. Now, I can get that 100 watt CO^2 laser and RTG power source implanted in my midriff and run one of these cables through my arm and to my fingers so I can fire laser beams from my hands!
No need to invest in handguns, spare keys, or window defrosters, I'll just take a finger laser, thank you!
The reason I haven't done this before, of course, is the heat problem with fiberoptics cooking all the musclemeat between the laser and the aperature.
Oh, that and I don't have the millions it'd take to buy the hardware and surgeons needed. But that's hardly the important issue here, is it?
Nice idea, but it's freaking $11,000! For that money, I'd buy myself a pair of Apple Cinema displays and a pair of good ol' shutter glasses for 3d.
Why two cinema displays?
Easy, one for my office, and one to sleep with, silly.
FYI, you can get the same effect as this 3d LCD display for a lot less. Simply purchase some crack-cocaine and take that while playing Quake. It'll also make the carnage much... meatier, I imagine.
The biggest threat to profits in online porn industry right now isn't fraud from people who steal numbers, it's what's known as the 'Gak factor'.
Typically, this works like this:
1. Guy visits goatporn website.
2. Guy pays for goatporn.com on his credit card.
3. Guy gets off and loves the website.
(camera pans, one month later)
4. Wife opens credit card bill and sees charge to goatporn.com.
5. Wife confronts husband while weeping, convinced she's not satisfying him and that the marriage is about to end.
6. Guy decides that (after a quick 'GAK!') rather then explain that he loves his wife and just needs some goatporn once in a while, instead claims 'Gosh, I never made those charges!'
7.Under her watchful eye, he calls the bank and disputes the charges.
I doubt there's a real industry wide problem with fraudulent charges. In actuality, I suspect it's almost 100% legit charges that get reported as fraud because the significant other is flipping out.