As it turned out, the refit of the shuttle after each flight is about as costly as a Saturn V launch. Now, the Saturn V could lift 100 tons into orbit, the shuttle 30. You can do the math on cost per pound.
No, not really. A shuttle launch is about half the cost of a Saturn V, even by the highest-cost estimates for shuttle. Saturn V was not a cheap booster by per-launch calculations. It was cheap by per-ton calculations, but in the 70s there weren't any payloads high-lift vehicles.
Shuttle was intended to be cheap to fly when it was flown at high rate, because the fixed costs would go down. It never ended up flying at a rate high enough to make the assumption correct. The marginal costs of the shuttle are actually not terribly bad-- it's the fixed cost that is high. (Which is why it isn't good enough to simply reduce the flight rate-- you don't save much by decreasing the rate when most of the cost is in the fixed cost.)
How come they're retiring the fleet 4 years before the next craft is ready?
The reason given is that the development of the new launch system costs money. There is no added budget to develop it, so the money to design and build the new system has to come from some other part of the budget. The budget they're using is the budget to fly the shuttle. So, in short, they can't develop new system until they free up money to do so by stopping flying the old one.
Is is actually more economical to pay the Russians or us Eurotrash to send them to space rather than the cost of maintaining and flying the shuttle?
Yes... up until the point when the Russians raise prices because they have a monopoly.
I'm not sure what the big deal about safety is. Indy car drivers walk away from 200 mph crashes, and their cars are 1500 pounds, about half the weight of a standard American car. Safety doesn't come from weight alone, it comes from engineering for safety. The car will be safe, or unsafe, depending on how it's engineered.
In any case, looks much less dangerous than a motorcycle, and tens of millions of people drive those. Looks like it will easy to park in the city, too.
My understanding is that relativity has been directly observed several times, whereas quantum theory is still just based on the interpretation of a series of controlled laboratory experiments, which mostly amounts to sifting through the wreckage of a high-energy collision and trying to derive the original state from the leftover pieces.
Nope.
Quantum mechanics is vastly, overwhelmingly, massively tested. Compared to general relativity, quantum mechanics is easy to test in the lab, and there are many many many experimental validations of it
And general relativity, also, is getting to be well tested.
Both theories have passed all the tests that they have been put to.
The problem is: quantum mechanics becomes important for things that are very small. General relativity becomes important for objects with strong gravity. The only range where you can test both of them together is if you can find objects that are both extremely small, and have extremely high gravity. Unfortunately, that realm is outside the experimental range of any experiments, now or anytime in the forseeable future.
First, gallium and indium are not rare earth elements. I don't know what the heck these guys are talking about.
Second, there is plenty of gallium around-- it's found anywhere you can refine aluminum from. It's not usually recovered because it isn't economical to, but if it were in fact running out, it could be easily produced as a byproduct of aluminum production.
In fact, the memo is very clear and well written; it explains what he is doing at each point, and exactly what is failing. If this is a real memo from Gates, I am favorably impressed with him-- he is stating exactly what the user interface people need to know.
I have to say, when I'm frustrated with how a download works, I rarely have such a detailed memory of exactly what I did and how and why it failed-- it's more "I went to your dumb site, and it didn't work! You're all idiots!" (Of course, Gates would have been probably taking notes from the start).
I'm also impressed that he doesn't have a flunky do all the uploads and patches on his machine for him, but does it himself. This is the right way for the management to do it, but I'm impressed that he actually does.
That's a nice HUGE FREAKIN' BLOCK OF TEXT you've got there, buddy. Maybe you'd like some PARAGRAPH STRUCTURE to wash it down. Don't blame me, the story as I submitted it had paragraph breaks.
The laws of physics apply to air conditioning too; basically they say that you have to reject heat somewhere, and the amount of heat you reject has to be more than the amount of heat that you move (that is, you can't use the rejected heat to run an engine to power the airconditioner).
You can use less energy to accomplish a job, but you can't use no energy. That's what these cars (apparently) seem to claim-- they are running on NO energy-- they (use energy to) split the water into hydrogen and oxyen, then burn the hydrogen and oxygen to get the energy to split the water, and have extra energy left over. This is not "refrigeration technology"-- this is magic.
With that said, let me say that I wrote "apparently" in the previous paragraph, because I haven't actually seen the Japanese text, only the news articles, and I know that news articles often miss a key point, or two-- for all I know this may actually be a perfectly functional car, and the reporter screwed up the article. It could be a fuel-cell car, for example, powered off the grid (which could be said to "run on water", although not in a perpetual-motion closed cycle.)
I'm still not sure exactly what ESA is being discussed. Something to do with gaming, it seems, but nobody in the article actually mentions it, and the article itself is so completely boring and uninformative that I'm not interested enough to find out.
Good point. Apple's market share for computers is currently about 6.5% of the computer market, putting it at about one third that of the largest computer vendor, Dell, at 17%. Apple's strategy seems to have worked a lot better than most of the other companies that were manufacturing computers in 1984-- IBM dominated the market back then, and they tanked.
I'm not at all sure I agree with this, but I do see a lot of advantages in Apple's "control freak" theory. Basically, in the iPhone model, the phone and the carrier are a single integrated structure. The exclusive agreement gives them the ability to dictate exactly what the service provides and how. So the customers are buying a system, not a set of parts that they assemble into their own system.
Having been part of a lot of situations in which each vendor says that the problem isn't in their part of the system, it's in the other guy's part, I can see a lot of advantage to them in keeping tight control (so the pieces do play well together), and even some advantage to the customer (in that when things fail, they don't get run around in circles trying to figure out which vendor to go to,)
Now you're telling me that the FBI proposes that they should have the right to not only prosecute people, but put them in jail for damn near life for drawing cartoons. And you don't notice that this is a teeny tiny little bit of an infringement on freedom?
Nobody has experimentally observed either dark matter nor dark energy. If these were observed, they would no longer be labeled "dark".
If by "observed," you meant "seen by the reflection or emission of visible light," then you'd be correct. By "dark" we mean "stuff that we can't see by reflection or emission of light".
However, dark matter well observed by its gravity.
The point is, it's a completely different category of thing from inflation. Dark matter is an observation looking for a theory-- nobody said "theory predicts that the universe ought to be full of stuff that we won't be able to see, let's look at galactic rotation curves and expansion maps and lensing and test if the theory's right." Instead it was the opposite: "galactic rotation curves and expansion maps and lensing all tell us there's something out there we can't see, let's find a theory that can explain it."
There are alternative possibilities-- MOND is one, for example, although it's beginning to look like lensing observations are ruling that out. But the key point is that dark matter is observation driven (despite being dark), not theory driven.
"Last I heard it was a fringe pseudoscience based mostly on conjecture and magical thinking." Yep. Correct. Read the page; it's seriously wack.
Contrasting nicely with "dark matter" and "cosmic inflation" which are mainstream science based mainly on conjecture and magical thinking. These are not only two completely different things, they are two completely different kinds of things.
Dark mater is an experimental observation. It's not a theory, it's an observation. There are various theories of what dark matter is, or for that matter of what other possibilities might explain the observations, but dark matter itself is an observation that needs to be explained by a theory; it's not a theory.
Cosmic inflation is a theoretical concept which looks like it could explain some observations. It's not accepted as any kind of a confirmed theory yet, but it is well accepted as a candidate for a theory that might, with some additional experimental confirmation, become a reasonable model.
The link for this statement:
[FBI Director Robert Mueller] admitted, however, that he was not aware of any wiretap requests being denied because of Congress' inaction." is here: www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9886461-7.html
This is the relevant passage:
...FBI Director Robert Mueller continued that push on Wednesday, but he wouldn't go so far as to say those "private partners" would stop installing requested wiretaps unless certain legal protection is granted.
To some extent, Mueller is stating the obvious: Federal law requires telephone and Internet companies to comply with lawful wiretap court orders or lawful certifications from the attorney general, with stiff penalties for noncompliance. But Mueller said in various ways that he was concerned that lack of retroactive liability protection would harm the government's "relationships" with telephone companies -- which seems to leave in doubt whether all of the administration's requests were legal.
The seemingly reluctant admission came during pointed questioning by Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Penn.) at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. Specter, the committee's ranking member, has proposed an amendment--which has so far been unsuccessful--to a controversial spy law update that would allow lawsuits alleging illegal spying by telephone companies to continue, except with government lawyers substituted in the companies' place.
FBI Director Robert Mueller said he disagreed with that approach, arguing it would provide a "disincentive" for communications companies to team up with federal terrorism investigations.
Then the following exchange ensued:
Specter: A disincentive, OK, but do you think they would stop?
Mueller: I think it is a disincentive...
Specter: But do you think they would stop?
Mueller: I think it would hamper our relationships, yes.... I do think it would hinder our relationships.
Specter: Disincentive, hamper, hinder, but I don't hear you say it would stop....
Mueller: I'm not going to say it's going to stop, but I do believe delay is detrimental to the safety of the country. Delay and lack of clarity, lack of simplicity guiding our relationships inhibits our ability to get the information we need on a daily basis.
...
Actually, the moon doesn't pass through Earth's magnetotail every month-- the moon's orbit is inclined to the ecliptic, so some months the magnetotail passes north or south of the moon-- it depends on season and precession.
Yep, turns out i it's not true. The original article is wrong, and all the/. posters mentioning how the premise is absurd are right. Basically, some tabloid reporter saw the kid's science fair project and decided to run with it, and the rest of the newsmedia picked it up and nobody every checked the facts.
The "correction' in his science fair project was to suggest that the maybe asteroid might hit a satellite in geosynchronous orbit as it goes by, and get deflected to the surface of the Earth. That correcton article points out that this is nonsense because when the asteriod crosses the orbital plane of geosynchronous orbit, it's not at geosynchronous distance, but I'll point out that if an asteroid hits a geosynchronous satellite, this will "deflect" it's path to about the same extent that your car will be deflected if it hits a gnat.
"Vandalism" isn't necessary vandalism -- they've never actually defined that word. It's like "terrorism" is to a newspaper - a license to do what you like in the name of "truthiness". Would Galileo be a vandal, would Rosa Parks? Is Stephen Colbert
I have to say that if you look at the edit summary of a random article for the text "revert vandalism", it's pretty clear what vandalism is-- typically things like people deleting the entire text of a section and substituting "E4T MY HAIRY WHONG" or "Ki11 ALL ". I don't think that Galileo would do something like that.
And why do you say "they've never actually defined that word [vandalism]"? Did you look up the definition of vandalism in Wikipedia?
I checked Obama's site and found no mention of any plan to make this particular cut.
I think the author of the original story is making things up.
The first time he mentioned space in his campaign literature was on page 15 of a 15 page document about his plans for education (which in itself provides some insight into how important space is to him), where he says he's going to fund his additions to the 66 billion dollar education budget by cuts from NASA. The first citation is here
As a high school student, I have been told time and time again about how "budget" issues result in no new textbooks, computers, or building renovations this year.
The federal budget doesn't fund high school textbooks, so may be true, but it's not a point in favor of increasing the Department of Education budget (which, remember, is already four times NASA's), it's a point in favor of increasing your state budget.
The federal education budget-- sixty-six billion dollars-- buys things like implementing the "No Child Left Behind" act.
The point is that the Budget of the Department of Eduction, as of 2007, is sixty six billion dollars. NASA's budget is 16 billion dollars.
Do you really think that Department of Education is giving us four times the value that NASA is? (It's main initiative right now is something called "No Child Left Behind." )
Slashdot Mirror
As it turned out, the refit of the shuttle after each flight is about as costly as a Saturn V launch. Now, the Saturn V could lift 100 tons into orbit, the shuttle 30. You can do the math on cost per pound.
No, not really. A shuttle launch is about half the cost of a Saturn V, even by the highest-cost estimates for shuttle. Saturn V was not a cheap booster by per-launch calculations. It was cheap by per-ton calculations, but in the 70s there weren't any payloads high-lift vehicles.
Shuttle was intended to be cheap to fly when it was flown at high rate, because the fixed costs would go down. It never ended up flying at a rate high enough to make the assumption correct. The marginal costs of the shuttle are actually not terribly bad-- it's the fixed cost that is high. (Which is why it isn't good enough to simply reduce the flight rate-- you don't save much by decreasing the rate when most of the cost is in the fixed cost.)
How come they're retiring the fleet 4 years before the next craft is ready?
The reason given is that the development of the new launch system costs money. There is no added budget to develop it, so the money to design and build the new system has to come from some other part of the budget. The budget they're using is the budget to fly the shuttle. So, in short, they can't develop new system until they free up money to do so by stopping flying the old one.
Is is actually more economical to pay the Russians or us Eurotrash to send them to space rather than the cost of maintaining and flying the shuttle?
Yes... up until the point when the Russians raise prices because they have a monopoly.
I'm not sure what the big deal about safety is. Indy car drivers walk away from 200 mph crashes, and their cars are 1500 pounds, about half the weight of a standard American car. Safety doesn't come from weight alone, it comes from engineering for safety. The car will be safe, or unsafe, depending on how it's engineered.
In any case, looks much less dangerous than a motorcycle, and tens of millions of people drive those. Looks like it will easy to park in the city, too.
My understanding is that relativity has been directly observed several times, whereas quantum theory is still just based on the interpretation of a series of controlled laboratory experiments, which mostly amounts to sifting through the wreckage of a high-energy collision and trying to derive the original state from the leftover pieces.
Nope. Quantum mechanics is vastly, overwhelmingly, massively tested. Compared to general relativity, quantum mechanics is easy to test in the lab, and there are many many many experimental validations of it
And general relativity, also, is getting to be well tested.
Both theories have passed all the tests that they have been put to.
The problem is: quantum mechanics becomes important for things that are very small. General relativity becomes important for objects with strong gravity. The only range where you can test both of them together is if you can find objects that are both extremely small, and have extremely high gravity. Unfortunately, that realm is outside the experimental range of any experiments, now or anytime in the forseeable future.
they only produce power when the curtains are closed.
First, gallium and indium are not rare earth elements. I don't know what the heck these guys are talking about. Second, there is plenty of gallium around-- it's found anywhere you can refine aluminum from. It's not usually recovered because it isn't economical to, but if it were in fact running out, it could be easily produced as a byproduct of aluminum production.
I have to say, when I'm frustrated with how a download works, I rarely have such a detailed memory of exactly what I did and how and why it failed-- it's more "I went to your dumb site, and it didn't work! You're all idiots!" (Of course, Gates would have been probably taking notes from the start).
I'm also impressed that he doesn't have a flunky do all the uploads and patches on his machine for him, but does it himself. This is the right way for the management to do it, but I'm impressed that he actually does.
Well, of course, DARPA doesn't do research. DARPA manages contracts with other organizations that do research.
The Einsteins most likely want to be in the organizations that actually do the research.
You can use less energy to accomplish a job, but you can't use no energy. That's what these cars (apparently) seem to claim-- they are running on NO energy-- they (use energy to) split the water into hydrogen and oxyen, then burn the hydrogen and oxygen to get the energy to split the water, and have extra energy left over. This is not "refrigeration technology"-- this is magic.
With that said, let me say that I wrote "apparently" in the previous paragraph, because I haven't actually seen the Japanese text, only the news articles, and I know that news articles often miss a key point, or two-- for all I know this may actually be a perfectly functional car, and the reporter screwed up the article. It could be a fuel-cell car, for example, powered off the grid (which could be said to "run on water", although not in a perpetual-motion closed cycle.)
I'm still not sure exactly what ESA is being discussed. Something to do with gaming, it seems, but nobody in the article actually mentions it, and the article itself is so completely boring and uninformative that I'm not interested enough to find out.
The smallest known exoplanet is the fourth planet of the pulsar B1257+12, with a mass considerably smaller than Earth. Many of the pulsar planets are Earth sized and smaller.
Good point. Apple's market share for computers is currently about 6.5% of the computer market, putting it at about one third that of the largest computer vendor, Dell, at 17%. Apple's strategy seems to have worked a lot better than most of the other companies that were manufacturing computers in 1984-- IBM dominated the market back then, and they tanked.
...I can think of two reasons:...2) Steve Jobs is a control freak
I'm not at all sure I agree with this, but I do see a lot of advantages in Apple's "control freak" theory. Basically, in the iPhone model, the phone and the carrier are a single integrated structure. The exclusive agreement gives them the ability to dictate exactly what the service provides and how. So the customers are buying a system, not a set of parts that they assemble into their own system.
Having been part of a lot of situations in which each vendor says that the problem isn't in their part of the system, it's in the other guy's part, I can see a lot of advantage to them in keeping tight control (so the pieces do play well together), and even some advantage to the customer (in that when things fail, they don't get run around in circles trying to figure out which vendor to go to,)
Now you're telling me that the FBI proposes that they should have the right to not only prosecute people, but put them in jail for damn near life for drawing cartoons. And you don't notice that this is a teeny tiny little bit of an infringement on freedom?
If by "observed," you meant "seen by the reflection or emission of visible light," then you'd be correct. By "dark" we mean "stuff that we can't see by reflection or emission of light".
However, dark matter well observed by its gravity.
The point is, it's a completely different category of thing from inflation. Dark matter is an observation looking for a theory-- nobody said "theory predicts that the universe ought to be full of stuff that we won't be able to see, let's look at galactic rotation curves and expansion maps and lensing and test if the theory's right." Instead it was the opposite: "galactic rotation curves and expansion maps and lensing all tell us there's something out there we can't see, let's find a theory that can explain it."
There are alternative possibilities-- MOND is one, for example, although it's beginning to look like lensing observations are ruling that out. But the key point is that dark matter is observation driven (despite being dark), not theory driven.
Dark mater is an experimental observation. It's not a theory, it's an observation. There are various theories of what dark matter is, or for that matter of what other possibilities might explain the observations, but dark matter itself is an observation that needs to be explained by a theory; it's not a theory.
Cosmic inflation is a theoretical concept which looks like it could explain some observations. It's not accepted as any kind of a confirmed theory yet, but it is well accepted as a candidate for a theory that might, with some additional experimental confirmation, become a reasonable model.
This is the relevant passage:
...FBI Director Robert Mueller continued that push on Wednesday, but he wouldn't go so far as to say those "private partners" would stop installing requested wiretaps unless certain legal protection is granted.
To some extent, Mueller is stating the obvious: Federal law requires telephone and Internet companies to comply with lawful wiretap court orders or lawful certifications from the attorney general, with stiff penalties for noncompliance. But Mueller said in various ways that he was concerned that lack of retroactive liability protection would harm the government's "relationships" with telephone companies -- which seems to leave in doubt whether all of the administration's requests were legal.
The seemingly reluctant admission came during pointed questioning by Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Penn.) at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. Specter, the committee's ranking member, has proposed an amendment--which has so far been unsuccessful--to a controversial spy law update that would allow lawsuits alleging illegal spying by telephone companies to continue, except with government lawyers substituted in the companies' place.
FBI Director Robert Mueller said he disagreed with that approach, arguing it would provide a "disincentive" for communications companies to team up with federal terrorism investigations.
Then the following exchange ensued:
Specter: A disincentive, OK, but do you think they would stop?
Mueller: I think it is a disincentive...
Specter: But do you think they would stop?
Mueller: I think it would hamper our relationships, yes.... I do think it would hinder our relationships.
Specter: Disincentive, hamper, hinder, but I don't hear you say it would stop....
Mueller: I'm not going to say it's going to stop, but I do believe delay is detrimental to the safety of the country. Delay and lack of clarity, lack of simplicity guiding our relationships inhibits our ability to get the information we need on a daily basis.
...
Actually, the moon doesn't pass through Earth's magnetotail every month-- the moon's orbit is inclined to the ecliptic, so some months the magnetotail passes north or south of the moon-- it depends on season and precession.
Here's another link
The "correction' in his science fair project was to suggest that the maybe asteroid might hit a satellite in geosynchronous orbit as it goes by, and get deflected to the surface of the Earth. That correcton article points out that this is nonsense because when the asteriod crosses the orbital plane of geosynchronous orbit, it's not at geosynchronous distance, but I'll point out that if an asteroid hits a geosynchronous satellite, this will "deflect" it's path to about the same extent that your car will be deflected if it hits a gnat.
I think I agree; I'm not sure what the downside is to Linux on the "big iron" servers with the heavy workloads-- sounds like a good application to me.
I have to say that if you look at the edit summary of a random article for the text "revert vandalism", it's pretty clear what vandalism is-- typically things like people deleting the entire text of a section and substituting "E4T MY HAIRY WHONG" or "Ki11 ALL ". I don't think that Galileo would do something like that.
And why do you say "they've never actually defined that word [vandalism]"? Did you look up the definition of vandalism in Wikipedia?
The first time he mentioned space in his campaign literature was on page 15 of a 15 page document about his plans for education (which in itself provides some insight into how important space is to him), where he says he's going to fund his additions to the 66 billion dollar education budget by cuts from NASA. The first citation is here
The federal budget doesn't fund high school textbooks, so may be true, but it's not a point in favor of increasing the Department of Education budget (which, remember, is already four times NASA's), it's a point in favor of increasing your state budget.
The federal education budget-- sixty-six billion dollars-- buys things like implementing the "No Child Left Behind" act.
Do you really think that Department of Education is giving us four times the value that NASA is? (It's main initiative right now is something called "No Child Left Behind." )