What us guys mean by "small government" is a small restricted federal government... not gone, I'm pretty sure most of us guys aren't anarchists, just limited. The federal government is primarily meant to act as a single unit with the outside world, including military forces, diplomacy and trade, and to facilitate trade and cooperation between the states. This means that a military, the interstate highway system, monetary policy, and other acts of the federal government are well within their purview and worthwhile. However, on education, police and most other internal matters, many of us guys would prefer the federal government to stay out.
This does not mean, however, that we don't want those things as a public service, just not one provided at a federal level. On police and fire protection, education, drug and alcohol policy, city roads, etc., many of us feel that the local governments serve us better, since they are closer to the people, have a smaller system to administer (less bureaucracy), and if it ever gets too bad where you are, its much easier to move between cities and states than to leave the US entirely. Plus, look at No Child Left Behind, the War on Drugs, and the 21-year drinking age to see exactly how well the federal government has done at getting involved in what should be local affairs.
Of course, there are some problems with the system, it tends to create a patchwork of laws that vary in arbitrary ways (look at our voting laws), which I see as a necessary inconvenience. The biggest concern I have is that with an education system based almost entirely locally, you have a situation where poor areas have poor schools, and you strengthen the feedback where poverty breeds poverty. Even then though, federal involvement has usually had the effect of bringing all schools down to the same level rather than improving the bad ones, while in Tulsa, Oklahoma (not exactly a bastion of liberal thinking) we've had some pretty good results where the school districts include both rich and poor areas, and the poorer districts create magnet schools. Could it be improved, yes, but I'm not sure federal mandates are the way to do it.
So thats what us guys, in a very large country with strong streak of individualism mean when we say small government... and Palin makes me think of an evil mix between Bush, Rove, and Martha Stewart.... I agree with you there.
In addition to the previous posters, who seem pretty on top of it, identifying that repairs are still cheaper than a new one, I'd also point out that space-based visible telescopes aren't as important now as they were in the nineties. The main reason to get it off of the surface is to eliminate the 'seeing' effects of the atmosphere, the way turbulence distorts signals and reduces the maximum resolution to ~1 arcsec (I think). This is the same reason that the big ones are built in high, arid places.
One of the biggest developments since then is the implementation of adaptive optics systems, which use active controls to warp the mirrors and eliminate the errors caused by atmospheric perturbations. This theoretically allows a ground-based telescope to achieve diffraction-limited resolution; I say theoretically because as far as I know most implementations suffer from a situation where you'll get top performance only a fraction of the time. However, it does mean you can get a much larger scope for much cheaper, reducing the utility of a space telescope.
A Hubble-style design is limited by weight and volume to about the size it is now, meaning that you can't do much to improve it, except with electronics to improve throughput. It's limited because it requires holding the entire structure stiff, to within ~10 nanometers, through all of launch and deployment, and without drastically larger launch vehicles, thats what we're left with. Of course, going to a flexible adaptive structure, like that of JWST, could allow much larger, lighter scopes to be deployed in space. But considering that JWST was quoted above as being ~$4bln, in order to improve it to optical precision would probably raise it to $6bln. So maybe one day, but the cost/benefit ratio just doesn't seem to get you there at this point... particularly when HST can be kept running for another 5 years for only $.5bln.
Why JWST is still going though, is because much of the IR range is blocked by the atmosphere, so theres no way to use any kind of advanced control technology to remove the problems caused by the atmosphere.
Actually from what I've heard its marginally broken. They were having trouble getting it into safe mode but managed to communicate with it and shut it down yesterday. However, its not responding today, so it seems it doesnt have enough reserve power to keep itself properly warmed. However, my friend (who was telling me about the issues today) mentioned some kind of "Lazarus Mode" that may let it wake up again come spring.
And apparently they're still able to get a lot of good climatological data off of it, among other things, so its definitely worth keeping alive; I say this because my default assumption was that because it can't move its inherently limited lifetime, that after a certain period of time it couldn't get much new data.
I thought that corn ethanol was the agenda of anyone who wanted to win the Iowa caucus. Anyway, 8-10 years ago it was a Republican congress, but Clinton was still president, so its just as easy to flip the blame game around. Personally it seems to me there are a number of factors larger than it was one party or the other:
1. Republican revolution push for decreased regulation in the 90s. I think its been well proven that a truly free market has issues, and that the government has to limit it to some extent. 2. Clinton and congressional democrats agreeing to it and pushing for minority lending assistance. This encouraged the banks to make decisions based on something other than financial risk. 3. Bush's ownership society and the general "American Dream" ideal that encouraged people to take out loans they couldn't afford in order to get what they were "supposed" to have. 4. Bank employees who encouraged people to take out loans they couldn't afford. 5. People who couldn't do the math to see that they really couldn't afford that loan (maybe bad education)? 6. Economic models and deregulation ideas (Greenspan) based on the fact that a persons self-interest doesn't always line up with the companies self-interest... while it does most of the time, on the extreme it doesnt and these situations have to be corrected for. 7. Plain old American materialism. 8. The market moves in cycles, this ones just looking a little worse than average.
Just my thoughts... I'm getting tired of the blame game stuff.
I don't think its so much the taxing of the rich in and of itself thats being defined as socialist, but the fact that he wants to cut taxes for 95%... which would be fine except that I believe a fairly large portion of that 95% don't pay any income tax (~30%?). So if you're taking money from the rich to give to the poor that does sound a bit socialistic, not that I'm particularly happy with the way McCain and Co. are throwing it around... particularly with the support of the bailout, which while it may have been necessary, certainly strikes of socialism itself.
What does worry me is that raising taxes on companies who's income is likely leveling or even dropping means that their total income is lowered, even if they'd normally be weathering the crisis, and will thus have to cut jobs and further the slide. Of course, Obama did say something about giving tax incentives to companies that create jobs, so we'll see how that does reversing that trend.
Yeah, they're tricky like that. Remember that flight 3 was supposed to be Q1 2008, but didn't launch till May, even though they left the website as it was.
Just to be clear (for both you and another poster) from what I've been told the Q4 2008 date on the website indicates that the vehicle will be delivered to the cape by then, not necessarily a launch.
However, they should be running the full mission duty cycle engine test on the F9 in McGregor soon... should be exciting, hopefully its on a weekend so I can head up there.
Not necessarily. I think most people look at email and IM as one-to-one communication, and at web pages and blogs as for widespread distribution but not necessarily immediate. Easy to use systems designed for immediate widespread distribution, while not difficult to understand, also aren't necessarily obvious; the fact that it would be particularly valuable for coordinating a decently sized group in a tactical situation makes it important for commanders and policy makers to be aware of.
So think of it as a report about services for immediate mobile information distribution, which happens to be exemplified by the current service Twitter. And in my mind, these kind of services are one of those things that is obvious once you know about it, but wouldn't occur to you otherwise. Keeping those things in mind its not necessarily a wasted report, and in fact does exactly what military intelligence is supposed to do, inform commanders of potential enemy tactics.
I think you're missing the point. No where in the article does it mention trying to ban Twitter (which would be completely ridiculous). What the intelligence report does is exactly what the Army Intelligence group is supposed to do, identify potential tactics that adversaries may use, and inform the decision-makers of those things. While an officer may understand and use email, the use of twitter, which focuses not on individual communication but mass distribution, is a different enough model that older colonels and generals may not have imagined it on their own. Informed decisions are always better ones.
I think this is really the most frustrating thing about the way the past 7 or 8 years have gone is that the obvious abuses make people have a knee-jerk reaction that even reasonable actions are wrong.
perhaps, but as someone pointed out above, one of the biggest reasons the amazon music store exists DRM-free is because of the popularity, and thus the power of Apple and the iPod. I hope, although I can't say I expect, that if the kindle becomes more popular, and publishers want to get around Amazon, they'll have to go DRM free.
However since books are so small, piracy is easier, and the popularity will never be as high as something like the iPod, there's a good chance the circumstances won't repeat so well.
Because if the endorsement encourages more people to buy one, it enlarges the market for e-books in general. If you don't like the amazon one in particular, it still shows that the market is large if done in a simple way; this means that more people may get in the market and if it gets popular enough we'll end up with a well-ordered digital download book market (hopefully without DRM) in the same way that the ever increasing popularity of the iPod has encouraged growth of the market as a whole so that other companies can do decently. Now we have the Amazon music store, eMusic, iTMS+, etc. that sell good-quality DRM-free music largely because the iPod showed there was a market. I hope that increasing kindle popularity will have the same effect on the nascent e-book market.
No, the Kindle is fairly single purpose device so its doubtful that it will. When it converts a PDF it reflows it and stores it as text, rather than simply displaying it as a bitmap; this isn't so much a failure in the software as some would make it out to be, but simply that the screen isn't big enough to make it useful. If that's what you're interested in, I think the iRex iLiad (or however its capitalized) is the best bet, even though it is more expensive.
I think the idea is that as you get more massive that doesn't work as well anymore. The weight of the airbags becomes untenable... I haven't looked at the math in few years, so unfortunately I can't be more specific.
Mars is one of the hardest places to land because its atmosphere is so wispy; on Earth some simple parachutes and a well-shaped capsule do the trick. On Venus the atmosphere is so thick anything you drop in will happily land softly as long as it doesn't melt. The moon and other such places you really only have the landing rocket option, which can be heavy but not particularly complicated.
On Mars though, the atmosphere is too thin to allow the capsule to slow it down to subsonic speeds on its own, meaning supersonic chutes are necessary if you want to use the atmosphere to slow you down. If you want to land with a rocket, you run into issues of trying to light an engine with supersonic flow going into the nozzle; trying to light it and flip around I imagine introduces some pretty wretched dynamic and structural problems. That tends to mean a series of parachutes including custom Mach 2 or Mach 3 chutes that would never be needed on Earth, or in this case using an aeroshell as well. Even then, you're still going too fast, so you need to slow down more. As suggested before, the airbags have worked in the past but don't scale well with higher mass vehicles. Thus you really need some kind of rocket (that ignite at subsonic speed); I'm not sure why a sky crane works better than some other system with rockets, I'd imagine its the easiest method of separation and also allows you to use less fuel since the crane itself doesn't have to slow down to a safe speed (i.e. release it down and reel it back up to reduce landing speed.)
Also, they had this option out there three years ago when I worked on a Mars mission for a class, so it's been out there a while and is probably as well developed as a non-tested system can be.
I'm not so sure about Civ IV. It's barely usable on my Macbook Air, which has the same integrated graphics. Of course, it could be that the slower CPU really does it in; I also haven't retried it with CoolBook, so it may be hitting a core shutdown issue.
Not sure about that. I started losing my hair noticeably when I was 16 or 17... but of course I could just be on the edge of the bell curve. Of course, there's also not a man in my family over 20 with hair on either side, and none of them I'd ever describe as playboys, so maybe there is something there.
Of course, I'd argue that you're never sure where science is going to go, so pursuing different avenues is important, even if it seems a little less useful or even vain. In this case, I could foresee a situation where finding a solution to a rather simple problem, baldness, could help develop methods that would eventually be useful for dealing with cancer and Alzheimer's, which I can only imagine would be more complex to deal with. Also, you can't forget that its not like the entire community focuses on one topic at a time. Parallel research in separate but related areas tend to feedback off of each other; having too many people working on the same thing can at times only slow it down, since so much time is wasted either reinventing the wheel multiple times, or trying to keep things organized.
Just to be a bit more explicit, sensitivity probably refers to one of two things.
The first would be an increase in quantum efficiency; that would be an increase in the ratio of photons detected to those impacting. In a photovoltaic cell this would lead to improved efficiency. Current scientific detectors, that I've looked into anyway for a research project I'm involved in, max out at maybe 70%, with most reasonably priced ones being 25%-35%. (The 70% ones tend to be things like photomultiplier tubes which require power input to achieve a high reverse voltage, so they're certainly not useful for PV cells.)
The second aspect would be to decrease the noise or dark count so that its capable of detecting dimmer and dimmer light sources, and in order to get the > 100% improvements this is definitely a large aspect of what the new method has done. Unfortunately I know more about the applications and figures of merit than the semiconductor stuff, so I can't say much about this other than I hope this opens up some new application possibilities.
Why would Google's dominance have anything to do with the 50cm limit? That's a government restriction on what's available for civilian use. The wired article says that it actually is capable of ~40cm but NGA degrades the resolution before releasing it to Google or anyone else. I know of another spacecraft that had to be placed in a higher orbit in order to keep the resolution below the limits.
Since the US commercial space industry is effectively isolated by ITAR restrictions, but is still dominant overall for now, a US restriction basically leads to a world-wide restriction for everyone but other governments. A loosening of US regulation is the only real way to improve commercial space imagery in the short term, although if ITAR isn't loosened soon, the world's going to catch up and surpass the US anyway. But of course, saying you want to stop fighting international arms trade is about as easy as saying you want to make life easier for pedophiles or terrorists, and I can't see it passing anytime soon.
That is true, I especially appreciate it because I had been reading some Baen books before I purchased mine, so I was able to get them that way. Of course now I've been into more historical fiction, Michener and such, so that doesn't work out quite as well. The Amazon store is just so convenient, as soon as someone comes out with a DRM free store with comparable selection (like Amazon did with music) I'll jump ship immediately. Unfortunately the voting with your dollars by not buying doesn't work as well here, because it just comes off as there not being a market for e-books at all.
I don't think so, necessarily. E-ink is great for this application, but pretty terrible for most others right now. I can't imagine reading something long on an iPhone, while the Kindle, and I'd assume the Sony are very easy to read off of.
Of course, the target market for e-book readers I tend to think is significantly smaller than mp3/pda/cell phone convergence devices, but that doesn't mean that they're obsolete. But if you enjoy reading (I try to make at least half an hour a day to read novels), then it really is a wonderful device; when you travel you dont have 3 books taking up room in your bag, when you need something new you don't have to drive to the store, and I still move every 3-6 months, so I don't have to worry about what old books I might want to take with me to reread for that period.
Now the DRM issue. You can in fact get open formats onto the Kindle, its just that there's not as much legal and open stuff out there, and you cant exactly 'rip' a book as easily as a CD. It just sucks.
I got something to transfer as an image of the page to the Kindle once, and it was very difficult to read. Its not capable of scrolling around, so unless it's reflowable it really doesn't work well on that screen.
The basic problem is that a 6.4 meter aperture can't fit in a launch vehicle, Ares V is only to be 5.5 meters.
Hubble was built at the diameter it was (2.4 meter) because thats about the maximum you could build of a stiff mirror that held its shape well enough through launch to remain optically sound on orbit. When you require 10-nm level precision, it takes a hefty structure to keep things that stiff.
In order to go bigger, the methods they're using for James Webb manage to double the aperture while halving the weight. The way they do this is using active controls and sensors to correct errors rather than rely on avoiding all errors. But looking at James Webb, you'll notice it focuses on IR which is very hard to observe from Earth, while no optical band concept is out there. This is because the new, big Earth-bound scopes use adaptive optics to eliminate seeing errors (the variations in the atmosphere that Hubble avoids), and get potentially better images than Hubble since larger mirrors can be used.
Of course, if the money shows up, there are other advantages to having a space-based observatory, particularly access time and not having to worry about the effectiveness of the adaptive elements, so I'm sure we'll see a proper Hubble replacement eventually, but it's certainly not as critical for scientific progress as some might think.
But generally, in all the work I've done (my graduate thesis is focusing on optical imaging with a lensless system) most of those kind of things, where you detect the magnitude of the wave-pattern, which in the far field is the Fourier transform, and then reconstruct the phase, it relies on having a relatively well-defined maximum region. I haven't looked at this yet, but I can't see this using techniques like those of X-Ray crystallography or SAR.
But Apple's solution keeps the less desirable ones out. It's especially good for avoiding the viruses that can get out there when you open up the market.
I'd imagine, though its not something I have experience with (I'm in Aerospace), that while that argument would be very valid for a case where you only have a couple of servers, where triple redundancy would double or triple your power requirements, pollution, etc, if you scale it up to a lot of servers, as long as you can replace a broken component within the mean-time-to-failure divided by the number of servers, you could maintain triple redundancy with only two extra machines. At this point, its conceivable that the use of cheaper hardware might reduce the pollution per box, and with only 2 extra machines, you could come in lower.
Of course, I'm sure the actual situation is much more complex, but this is the first thing that occurred to me, and I'd guess its a fairly accurate example of smaller version of the problem. It also illustrates why cheap hardware might be good for google, but wouldn't be good for a smaller setup.
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What us guys mean by "small government" is a small restricted federal government... not gone, I'm pretty sure most of us guys aren't anarchists, just limited. The federal government is primarily meant to act as a single unit with the outside world, including military forces, diplomacy and trade, and to facilitate trade and cooperation between the states. This means that a military, the interstate highway system, monetary policy, and other acts of the federal government are well within their purview and worthwhile. However, on education, police and most other internal matters, many of us guys would prefer the federal government to stay out.
This does not mean, however, that we don't want those things as a public service, just not one provided at a federal level. On police and fire protection, education, drug and alcohol policy, city roads, etc., many of us feel that the local governments serve us better, since they are closer to the people, have a smaller system to administer (less bureaucracy), and if it ever gets too bad where you are, its much easier to move between cities and states than to leave the US entirely. Plus, look at No Child Left Behind, the War on Drugs, and the 21-year drinking age to see exactly how well the federal government has done at getting involved in what should be local affairs.
Of course, there are some problems with the system, it tends to create a patchwork of laws that vary in arbitrary ways (look at our voting laws), which I see as a necessary inconvenience. The biggest concern I have is that with an education system based almost entirely locally, you have a situation where poor areas have poor schools, and you strengthen the feedback where poverty breeds poverty. Even then though, federal involvement has usually had the effect of bringing all schools down to the same level rather than improving the bad ones, while in Tulsa, Oklahoma (not exactly a bastion of liberal thinking) we've had some pretty good results where the school districts include both rich and poor areas, and the poorer districts create magnet schools. Could it be improved, yes, but I'm not sure federal mandates are the way to do it.
So thats what us guys, in a very large country with strong streak of individualism mean when we say small government... and Palin makes me think of an evil mix between Bush, Rove, and Martha Stewart.... I agree with you there.
In addition to the previous posters, who seem pretty on top of it, identifying that repairs are still cheaper than a new one, I'd also point out that space-based visible telescopes aren't as important now as they were in the nineties. The main reason to get it off of the surface is to eliminate the 'seeing' effects of the atmosphere, the way turbulence distorts signals and reduces the maximum resolution to ~1 arcsec (I think). This is the same reason that the big ones are built in high, arid places.
One of the biggest developments since then is the implementation of adaptive optics systems, which use active controls to warp the mirrors and eliminate the errors caused by atmospheric perturbations. This theoretically allows a ground-based telescope to achieve diffraction-limited resolution; I say theoretically because as far as I know most implementations suffer from a situation where you'll get top performance only a fraction of the time. However, it does mean you can get a much larger scope for much cheaper, reducing the utility of a space telescope.
A Hubble-style design is limited by weight and volume to about the size it is now, meaning that you can't do much to improve it, except with electronics to improve throughput. It's limited because it requires holding the entire structure stiff, to within ~10 nanometers, through all of launch and deployment, and without drastically larger launch vehicles, thats what we're left with. Of course, going to a flexible adaptive structure, like that of JWST, could allow much larger, lighter scopes to be deployed in space. But considering that JWST was quoted above as being ~$4bln, in order to improve it to optical precision would probably raise it to $6bln. So maybe one day, but the cost/benefit ratio just doesn't seem to get you there at this point... particularly when HST can be kept running for another 5 years for only $.5bln.
Why JWST is still going though, is because much of the IR range is blocked by the atmosphere, so theres no way to use any kind of advanced control technology to remove the problems caused by the atmosphere.
Actually from what I've heard its marginally broken. They were having trouble getting it into safe mode but managed to communicate with it and shut it down yesterday. However, its not responding today, so it seems it doesnt have enough reserve power to keep itself properly warmed. However, my friend (who was telling me about the issues today) mentioned some kind of "Lazarus Mode" that may let it wake up again come spring.
And apparently they're still able to get a lot of good climatological data off of it, among other things, so its definitely worth keeping alive; I say this because my default assumption was that because it can't move its inherently limited lifetime, that after a certain period of time it couldn't get much new data.
I thought that corn ethanol was the agenda of anyone who wanted to win the Iowa caucus. Anyway, 8-10 years ago it was a Republican congress, but Clinton was still president, so its just as easy to flip the blame game around. Personally it seems to me there are a number of factors larger than it was one party or the other:
1. Republican revolution push for decreased regulation in the 90s. I think its been well proven that a truly free market has issues, and that the government has to limit it to some extent.
2. Clinton and congressional democrats agreeing to it and pushing for minority lending assistance. This encouraged the banks to make decisions based on something other than financial risk.
3. Bush's ownership society and the general "American Dream" ideal that encouraged people to take out loans they couldn't afford in order to get what they were "supposed" to have.
4. Bank employees who encouraged people to take out loans they couldn't afford.
5. People who couldn't do the math to see that they really couldn't afford that loan (maybe bad education)?
6. Economic models and deregulation ideas (Greenspan) based on the fact that a persons self-interest doesn't always line up with the companies self-interest... while it does most of the time, on the extreme it doesnt and these situations have to be corrected for.
7. Plain old American materialism.
8. The market moves in cycles, this ones just looking a little worse than average.
Just my thoughts... I'm getting tired of the blame game stuff.
I don't think its so much the taxing of the rich in and of itself thats being defined as socialist, but the fact that he wants to cut taxes for 95%... which would be fine except that I believe a fairly large portion of that 95% don't pay any income tax (~30%?). So if you're taking money from the rich to give to the poor that does sound a bit socialistic, not that I'm particularly happy with the way McCain and Co. are throwing it around... particularly with the support of the bailout, which while it may have been necessary, certainly strikes of socialism itself.
What does worry me is that raising taxes on companies who's income is likely leveling or even dropping means that their total income is lowered, even if they'd normally be weathering the crisis, and will thus have to cut jobs and further the slide. Of course, Obama did say something about giving tax incentives to companies that create jobs, so we'll see how that does reversing that trend.
Yeah, they're tricky like that. Remember that flight 3 was supposed to be Q1 2008, but didn't launch till May, even though they left the website as it was.
Just to be clear (for both you and another poster) from what I've been told the Q4 2008 date on the website indicates that the vehicle will be delivered to the cape by then, not necessarily a launch.
However, they should be running the full mission duty cycle engine test on the F9 in McGregor soon... should be exciting, hopefully its on a weekend so I can head up there.
Not necessarily. I think most people look at email and IM as one-to-one communication, and at web pages and blogs as for widespread distribution but not necessarily immediate. Easy to use systems designed for immediate widespread distribution, while not difficult to understand, also aren't necessarily obvious; the fact that it would be particularly valuable for coordinating a decently sized group in a tactical situation makes it important for commanders and policy makers to be aware of.
So think of it as a report about services for immediate mobile information distribution, which happens to be exemplified by the current service Twitter. And in my mind, these kind of services are one of those things that is obvious once you know about it, but wouldn't occur to you otherwise. Keeping those things in mind its not necessarily a wasted report, and in fact does exactly what military intelligence is supposed to do, inform commanders of potential enemy tactics.
I think you're missing the point. No where in the article does it mention trying to ban Twitter (which would be completely ridiculous). What the intelligence report does is exactly what the Army Intelligence group is supposed to do, identify potential tactics that adversaries may use, and inform the decision-makers of those things. While an officer may understand and use email, the use of twitter, which focuses not on individual communication but mass distribution, is a different enough model that older colonels and generals may not have imagined it on their own. Informed decisions are always better ones.
I think this is really the most frustrating thing about the way the past 7 or 8 years have gone is that the obvious abuses make people have a knee-jerk reaction that even reasonable actions are wrong.
perhaps, but as someone pointed out above, one of the biggest reasons the amazon music store exists DRM-free is because of the popularity, and thus the power of Apple and the iPod. I hope, although I can't say I expect, that if the kindle becomes more popular, and publishers want to get around Amazon, they'll have to go DRM free.
However since books are so small, piracy is easier, and the popularity will never be as high as something like the iPod, there's a good chance the circumstances won't repeat so well.
Because if the endorsement encourages more people to buy one, it enlarges the market for e-books in general. If you don't like the amazon one in particular, it still shows that the market is large if done in a simple way; this means that more people may get in the market and if it gets popular enough we'll end up with a well-ordered digital download book market (hopefully without DRM) in the same way that the ever increasing popularity of the iPod has encouraged growth of the market as a whole so that other companies can do decently. Now we have the Amazon music store, eMusic, iTMS+, etc. that sell good-quality DRM-free music largely because the iPod showed there was a market. I hope that increasing kindle popularity will have the same effect on the nascent e-book market.
No, the Kindle is fairly single purpose device so its doubtful that it will. When it converts a PDF it reflows it and stores it as text, rather than simply displaying it as a bitmap; this isn't so much a failure in the software as some would make it out to be, but simply that the screen isn't big enough to make it useful. If that's what you're interested in, I think the iRex iLiad (or however its capitalized) is the best bet, even though it is more expensive.
I think the idea is that as you get more massive that doesn't work as well anymore. The weight of the airbags becomes untenable... I haven't looked at the math in few years, so unfortunately I can't be more specific.
Mars is one of the hardest places to land because its atmosphere is so wispy; on Earth some simple parachutes and a well-shaped capsule do the trick. On Venus the atmosphere is so thick anything you drop in will happily land softly as long as it doesn't melt. The moon and other such places you really only have the landing rocket option, which can be heavy but not particularly complicated.
On Mars though, the atmosphere is too thin to allow the capsule to slow it down to subsonic speeds on its own, meaning supersonic chutes are necessary if you want to use the atmosphere to slow you down. If you want to land with a rocket, you run into issues of trying to light an engine with supersonic flow going into the nozzle; trying to light it and flip around I imagine introduces some pretty wretched dynamic and structural problems. That tends to mean a series of parachutes including custom Mach 2 or Mach 3 chutes that would never be needed on Earth, or in this case using an aeroshell as well. Even then, you're still going too fast, so you need to slow down more. As suggested before, the airbags have worked in the past but don't scale well with higher mass vehicles. Thus you really need some kind of rocket (that ignite at subsonic speed); I'm not sure why a sky crane works better than some other system with rockets, I'd imagine its the easiest method of separation and also allows you to use less fuel since the crane itself doesn't have to slow down to a safe speed (i.e. release it down and reel it back up to reduce landing speed.)
Also, they had this option out there three years ago when I worked on a Mars mission for a class, so it's been out there a while and is probably as well developed as a non-tested system can be.
I'm not so sure about Civ IV. It's barely usable on my Macbook Air, which has the same integrated graphics. Of course, it could be that the slower CPU really does it in; I also haven't retried it with CoolBook, so it may be hitting a core shutdown issue.
Not sure about that. I started losing my hair noticeably when I was 16 or 17... but of course I could just be on the edge of the bell curve. Of course, there's also not a man in my family over 20 with hair on either side, and none of them I'd ever describe as playboys, so maybe there is something there.
Of course, I'd argue that you're never sure where science is going to go, so pursuing different avenues is important, even if it seems a little less useful or even vain. In this case, I could foresee a situation where finding a solution to a rather simple problem, baldness, could help develop methods that would eventually be useful for dealing with cancer and Alzheimer's, which I can only imagine would be more complex to deal with. Also, you can't forget that its not like the entire community focuses on one topic at a time. Parallel research in separate but related areas tend to feedback off of each other; having too many people working on the same thing can at times only slow it down, since so much time is wasted either reinventing the wheel multiple times, or trying to keep things organized.
Just to be a bit more explicit, sensitivity probably refers to one of two things.
The first would be an increase in quantum efficiency; that would be an increase in the ratio of photons detected to those impacting. In a photovoltaic cell this would lead to improved efficiency. Current scientific detectors, that I've looked into anyway for a research project I'm involved in, max out at maybe 70%, with most reasonably priced ones being 25%-35%. (The 70% ones tend to be things like photomultiplier tubes which require power input to achieve a high reverse voltage, so they're certainly not useful for PV cells.)
The second aspect would be to decrease the noise or dark count so that its capable of detecting dimmer and dimmer light sources, and in order to get the > 100% improvements this is definitely a large aspect of what the new method has done. Unfortunately I know more about the applications and figures of merit than the semiconductor stuff, so I can't say much about this other than I hope this opens up some new application possibilities.
Why would Google's dominance have anything to do with the 50cm limit? That's a government restriction on what's available for civilian use. The wired article says that it actually is capable of ~40cm but NGA degrades the resolution before releasing it to Google or anyone else. I know of another spacecraft that had to be placed in a higher orbit in order to keep the resolution below the limits.
Since the US commercial space industry is effectively isolated by ITAR restrictions, but is still dominant overall for now, a US restriction basically leads to a world-wide restriction for everyone but other governments. A loosening of US regulation is the only real way to improve commercial space imagery in the short term, although if ITAR isn't loosened soon, the world's going to catch up and surpass the US anyway. But of course, saying you want to stop fighting international arms trade is about as easy as saying you want to make life easier for pedophiles or terrorists, and I can't see it passing anytime soon.
That is true, I especially appreciate it because I had been reading some Baen books before I purchased mine, so I was able to get them that way. Of course now I've been into more historical fiction, Michener and such, so that doesn't work out quite as well. The Amazon store is just so convenient, as soon as someone comes out with a DRM free store with comparable selection (like Amazon did with music) I'll jump ship immediately. Unfortunately the voting with your dollars by not buying doesn't work as well here, because it just comes off as there not being a market for e-books at all.
I don't think so, necessarily. E-ink is great for this application, but pretty terrible for most others right now. I can't imagine reading something long on an iPhone, while the Kindle, and I'd assume the Sony are very easy to read off of.
Of course, the target market for e-book readers I tend to think is significantly smaller than mp3/pda/cell phone convergence devices, but that doesn't mean that they're obsolete. But if you enjoy reading (I try to make at least half an hour a day to read novels), then it really is a wonderful device; when you travel you dont have 3 books taking up room in your bag, when you need something new you don't have to drive to the store, and I still move every 3-6 months, so I don't have to worry about what old books I might want to take with me to reread for that period.
Now the DRM issue. You can in fact get open formats onto the Kindle, its just that there's not as much legal and open stuff out there, and you cant exactly 'rip' a book as easily as a CD. It just sucks.
I got something to transfer as an image of the page to the Kindle once, and it was very difficult to read. Its not capable of scrolling around, so unless it's reflowable it really doesn't work well on that screen.
The basic problem is that a 6.4 meter aperture can't fit in a launch vehicle, Ares V is only to be 5.5 meters.
Hubble was built at the diameter it was (2.4 meter) because thats about the maximum you could build of a stiff mirror that held its shape well enough through launch to remain optically sound on orbit. When you require 10-nm level precision, it takes a hefty structure to keep things that stiff.
In order to go bigger, the methods they're using for James Webb manage to double the aperture while halving the weight. The way they do this is using active controls and sensors to correct errors rather than rely on avoiding all errors. But looking at James Webb, you'll notice it focuses on IR which is very hard to observe from Earth, while no optical band concept is out there. This is because the new, big Earth-bound scopes use adaptive optics to eliminate seeing errors (the variations in the atmosphere that Hubble avoids), and get potentially better images than Hubble since larger mirrors can be used.
Of course, if the money shows up, there are other advantages to having a space-based observatory, particularly access time and not having to worry about the effectiveness of the adaptive elements, so I'm sure we'll see a proper Hubble replacement eventually, but it's certainly not as critical for scientific progress as some might think.
But generally, in all the work I've done (my graduate thesis is focusing on optical imaging with a lensless system) most of those kind of things, where you detect the magnitude of the wave-pattern, which in the far field is the Fourier transform, and then reconstruct the phase, it relies on having a relatively well-defined maximum region. I haven't looked at this yet, but I can't see this using techniques like those of X-Ray crystallography or SAR.
But Apple's solution keeps the less desirable ones out. It's especially good for avoiding the viruses that can get out there when you open up the market.
I'd imagine, though its not something I have experience with (I'm in Aerospace), that while that argument would be very valid for a case where you only have a couple of servers, where triple redundancy would double or triple your power requirements, pollution, etc, if you scale it up to a lot of servers, as long as you can replace a broken component within the mean-time-to-failure divided by the number of servers, you could maintain triple redundancy with only two extra machines. At this point, its conceivable that the use of cheaper hardware might reduce the pollution per box, and with only 2 extra machines, you could come in lower.
Of course, I'm sure the actual situation is much more complex, but this is the first thing that occurred to me, and I'd guess its a fairly accurate example of smaller version of the problem. It also illustrates why cheap hardware might be good for google, but wouldn't be good for a smaller setup.