Also I think doing things this way will make consumers more aware of how insane the cell network prices are. "What, I'm paying 0.25c/text? But a text is a couple hundred bytes and I pay a millionth of a cent for that at home." Wherever an ISP also runs a cell network they won't like this prospect.
Actually I disagree. I think it's crazy that I pay per KWh of electical power I use, I pay per minute of phone time I spent, I pay per BTU (or is it volume?) of natural gas I use, I pay per liter of petrol I use, etc, etc...
But with bandwidth I pay for a certain number of GB/month, and I get throttled if I go above that. What if I want to use a little more, or a little less? There's this bizarre situation with bandwidth where, to make the most out of what I pay for, I have to always keep tabs on how long before my quota resets, and how much I've downloaded.
I have to try and guess in advance what I'll use, and so inevitably either end up paying for more than I need or get less than I want.
Imagine if you had a certain distance you could travel in your car per month, or you had a certain amount of power/water/gas/phone time you could use, and you lost out if you didn't use exactly your allocated amount; it'd be madness.
I think the reason providers aren't rushing to implement this is because they know they'd make less money; because people would stop buying more than they need. Either that or because they think (perhaps rightly so) that the average consumer wouldn't understand the concept of paying per unit of data (why iPod storage is advertised in terms of the dubious "song" or "movie"), but I think that'll change as time goes on.
Personally I hope metered pricing comes as soon as possible.
That is a bit hypocritical, well spotted. (I suppose he could argue it's an artistically creative work vs a piece of software, but I don't buy that argument personally even though it convinces some.)
As I understand it the "Direct" thing has gone through several revisions now as problems were pointed out by NASA engineers.
Also many people say "no not Direct, go for Jupiter or any number of competing designs. Among the unfaithful there are so many bazaars all selling such different things that any individual competitor's impact is diminished.
When the people who built the Shuttle tell me they think the Ares V is the way to go that carries a lot of credibility.
If Carmack says he has a great rocket, no matter how open its designs are, he'll have to work a lot harder to win me over.
And I imagine I'd be much more willing to take a risk than a congressman.
The "space race" ended with the fall of the soviet union. Now scientific equipment built in Europe is sent up in a Japanese rocket, plucked out of space by a Russian robotic arm and docked onto a US docking hold. Far more nations have space programs, all doing different things (even India is making contributions to lunar science these days), all collaborating, and the US too is preparing a new generation of space-ships.
So yes the space race is long dead, but space exploration is booming like never before. There are less big things like landing on the moon, but make no mistake space exploration is so much more important than getting a human onto another lump of rock and getting him quickly back.
Of over 100 missions 2 disasters isn't too bad, it much better than Apollo and no-one brings up the failures of Apollo whenever it's mentioned like they do with the Shuttle.. It's a shame people will remember the Shuttle for the disasters and not for the triumphs, I don't think the astronauts who died would have wanted it this way (imho).
Or maybe they'll update the browsers, and no-one being able to access their systems will encourage them to update their systems? I can't help but think that'd be a good thing.. I'm not keeping a gopher client around just in case.
You basically got your argument handed right back to you with a bunch of reasonable reasons MS would be doing this and all you can do is latch onto an irrelevant mistake in the last sentence. Smooth.
Simple: first there is your inner ear balance and second there is the pooling of blood in your head when you are upside down. Both of these are affected differently by freefall and neutral buoyancy on the Earth because the two are very different physical environments.
Yup someone else pointed this out above, you're right it's an "unhelpful" analogy. I tried to clarify what I meant above so I'll drop it here.
What's important is that it's not a problem with it as a zero-G equivalent on the cellular level, it's just a bad analogy.
Not at all - it would know because of the pressure difference across the cell would always be changing direction.
The other guy who responded added this point, but I think he was right that it'd have a negligible effect for embryos, which are tiny.
I haven't looked up info on the device they use but the center of rotation would be quite a way from the center of the tiny embryo, and it wouldn't be spinning very quickly, so the difference in centripetal force between the closer and further of the two sides would be tiny. (I'm imagining the embryos placed on the outer ring of some steadily rotating gyroscope-like thing, but not sure.)
(e.g. When you see people passing out in those high-G machines they're spinning quite a distance from the center (seated, facing inwards), so they feel almost exactly the same force over their whole body (but the tip of their nose would feel very slightly less heavy).
Now imagine the person was spinning much slower, and instead of feeling the difference between the tip of their nose and the back of their head they had to feel the G-force difference between the tip of their nose and their upper-lip. Not a huge difference, but scale that down to the cellular level and I think it can safely be ignored.)
Also it'd be easy to isolate any effect caused by such a tiny force by spinning the otherwise stationary "normal-G" embryos slightly to duplicate the force.
If they turn out the same as the perfectly stationary "normal-G" embryos it'd be safe to conclude that the slight rotational effect is having no effect on the "zero-G" embryos either.
So I'd say they can probably be pretty confident in applying these results to zero-G. Besides however much we discuss this now you can be sure it's well-trodden ground to the people running the experiment, and I'm mystified how the GP could think otherwise.
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Also I think doing things this way will make consumers more aware of how insane the cell network prices are. "What, I'm paying 0.25c/text? But a text is a couple hundred bytes and I pay a millionth of a cent for that at home." Wherever an ISP also runs a cell network they won't like this prospect.
Actually I disagree. I think it's crazy that I pay per KWh of electical power I use, I pay per minute of phone time I spent, I pay per BTU (or is it volume?) of natural gas I use, I pay per liter of petrol I use, etc, etc...
But with bandwidth I pay for a certain number of GB/month, and I get throttled if I go above that. What if I want to use a little more, or a little less? There's this bizarre situation with bandwidth where, to make the most out of what I pay for, I have to always keep tabs on how long before my quota resets, and how much I've downloaded.
I have to try and guess in advance what I'll use, and so inevitably either end up paying for more than I need or get less than I want.
Imagine if you had a certain distance you could travel in your car per month, or you had a certain amount of power/water/gas/phone time you could use, and you lost out if you didn't use exactly your allocated amount; it'd be madness.
I think the reason providers aren't rushing to implement this is because they know they'd make less money; because people would stop buying more than they need. Either that or because they think (perhaps rightly so) that the average consumer wouldn't understand the concept of paying per unit of data (why iPod storage is advertised in terms of the dubious "song" or "movie"), but I think that'll change as time goes on.
Personally I hope metered pricing comes as soon as possible.
That is a bit hypocritical, well spotted. (I suppose he could argue it's an artistically creative work vs a piece of software, but I don't buy that argument personally even though it convinces some.)
Yeah.. imagine..
Wait what are you imagining? Fast, secure computers that are getting faster, cheaper and more secure each year? Don't we have those?
Thanks, that actually explains this quite well and I was totally mystified.
As I understand it the "Direct" thing has gone through several revisions now as problems were pointed out by NASA engineers.
Also many people say "no not Direct, go for Jupiter or any number of competing designs. Among the unfaithful there are so many bazaars all selling such different things that any individual competitor's impact is diminished.
When the people who built the Shuttle tell me they think the Ares V is the way to go that carries a lot of credibility.
If Carmack says he has a great rocket, no matter how open its designs are, he'll have to work a lot harder to win me over.
And I imagine I'd be much more willing to take a risk than a congressman.
Then why are they going with Ares V?
If you think we've been "pissing around" you're too ignorant to be worth discussing space exploration with
It's a relatively poor country dumbass, the fact that you think they're inherently more efficient at certain things makes you the racist, not me.
Nope Japanese, I wasn't guessing there
Well I'm not a US citizen so I have no say in that, but I think the Constellation program will pull through
Yeah I just made a guess with that part up to be honest, the one part I wasn't sure about. :x Thanks for the correction
The "space race" ended with the fall of the soviet union. Now scientific equipment built in Europe is sent up in a Japanese rocket, plucked out of space by a Russian robotic arm and docked onto a US docking hold. Far more nations have space programs, all doing different things (even India is making contributions to lunar science these days), all collaborating, and the US too is preparing a new generation of space-ships.
So yes the space race is long dead, but space exploration is booming like never before. There are less big things like landing on the moon, but make no mistake space exploration is so much more important than getting a human onto another lump of rock and getting him quickly back.
Of over 100 missions 2 disasters isn't too bad, it much better than Apollo and no-one brings up the failures of Apollo whenever it's mentioned like they do with the Shuttle.. It's a shame people will remember the Shuttle for the disasters and not for the triumphs, I don't think the astronauts who died would have wanted it this way (imho).
It's called the Ares V, and it too is still under development
Or maybe they'll update the browsers, and no-one being able to access their systems will encourage them to update their systems? I can't help but think that'd be a good thing.. I'm not keeping a gopher client around just in case.
"And I didn't run over that old lady, my car did." You'd have to be pretty silly to think you can play word games with your insurance company
There just might be a clause in the contract that you can't disable the camera....
Do cardiovascular research scientists buy much of their research equipment for Christmas?
You basically got your argument handed right back to you with a bunch of reasonable reasons MS would be doing this and all you can do is latch onto an irrelevant mistake in the last sentence. Smooth.
Enhancements like what?
So either you are correct and it is negligible - in which case the results are wrong
Hmm, you'll have to explain that to me. If it's negligable how are the results wrong?
Does Skype even make money..?
Simple: first there is your inner ear balance and second there is the pooling of blood in your head when you are upside down. Both of these are affected differently by freefall and neutral buoyancy on the Earth because the two are very different physical environments.
Yup someone else pointed this out above, you're right it's an "unhelpful" analogy. I tried to clarify what I meant above so I'll drop it here.
What's important is that it's not a problem with it as a zero-G equivalent on the cellular level, it's just a bad analogy.
Not at all - it would know because of the pressure difference across the cell would always be changing direction.
The other guy who responded added this point, but I think he was right that it'd have a negligible effect for embryos, which are tiny.
I haven't looked up info on the device they use but the center of rotation would be quite a way from the center of the tiny embryo, and it wouldn't be spinning very quickly, so the difference in centripetal force between the closer and further of the two sides would be tiny. (I'm imagining the embryos placed on the outer ring of some steadily rotating gyroscope-like thing, but not sure.)
(e.g. When you see people passing out in those high-G machines they're spinning quite a distance from the center (seated, facing inwards), so they feel almost exactly the same force over their whole body (but the tip of their nose would feel very slightly less heavy).
Now imagine the person was spinning much slower, and instead of feeling the difference between the tip of their nose and the back of their head they had to feel the G-force difference between the tip of their nose and their upper-lip. Not a huge difference, but scale that down to the cellular level and I think it can safely be ignored.)
Also it'd be easy to isolate any effect caused by such a tiny force by spinning the otherwise stationary "normal-G" embryos slightly to duplicate the force.
If they turn out the same as the perfectly stationary "normal-G" embryos it'd be safe to conclude that the slight rotational effect is having no effect on the "zero-G" embryos either.
So I'd say they can probably be pretty confident in applying these results to zero-G. Besides however much we discuss this now you can be sure it's well-trodden ground to the people running the experiment, and I'm mystified how the GP could think otherwise.
I guess the engineers are just too stupid to figure that out? When it is the best solution it will be used..