Amazon doesn't really require you to sign up beyond just having an account with them already, which most people tend to for books and such. As far as the service itself, you click a link, it asks are you sure, and you download an MP3 file, eliminating any dependence on any device.
Also, to download albums, and insure that you don't lose the file if your internet connection craps out, they provide a download program that opens a '.amz' file you download. Note that the client is available for Windows, OSX, and yes, many flavors of linux. The Ubuntu 7.10 deb they provide worked fine for me.
The one proviso for them is that its a one time purchase, if you lose the file somehow you can't redownload it. If you can deal with that I definitely recommend it, its easy and so far problem free. Also the lossy quality isn't enough that I notice, and while I'm no audiophile I still hate anything below about 192kbs mp3.
The difference between trying to stabilize an aircraft like the F-16 vs. stabilizing a spacecraft in an unstable position is primarily a question of consumables.
An aircraft's controls are primarily aerodynamic, so you don't have to worry much about the cost of those controls, since its just a bit of electricity. However, for maintaining a spacecrafts center of mass (where reaction wheels and shifting masses won't help), the only modern way to maintain control is with rockets/jets of some sort, with the use of irretrievable fuel that entails. Of course this wouldn't be as a big a deal because presumably the fuel would be replinishable.
The other thing is that from what I gather this is a long-term instability, where you can leave it for days and it will be fine, but not months. We face similar problems with objects at the L4 and L5 lagrange points; while you do have to use some fuel to maintain position, its not an unreasonable amount.
The noble gases make great propellants. However, because they are inert they are not good at storing energy. In a chemical rocket the propellant is the power source; in an ion thruster, the propellant is only a working fluid, similar to hydraulic fluid. You still need an electric power source to ionize the gas and charge the grids that transfer momentum to the ionized gas.
I'd guess that its within feasibility, but it would be overly expensive. First you've got to figure out where it is, which is known to a few kilometers I believe, and then you propogate that forward based on known forces.
Without adding some kind of thruster, we only know the position during the 2029 close approach to within, a few thousand kilometers (at which point it can't hit the Earth within its 3-sigma probability, but may hit a keyhole), and the perturbation caused by the Earth at that point makes it so that on the next go-round in 2036 the 3-sigma ellipse is tens of thousands of kilometers wide (with the Earth being only ~6400 km wide). Clearly its not a trivial celestial mechanics problem to do something as complex as nudging it into Earth orbit; any process to do so would have to be begun years earlier and be done with long-burning, low-thrust devices (e.g. ion thrusters).
Also, looking at the amount of force required to move an object that size even in a relatively long-term way is non-trivial. I think some numbers that got ran, trying to nudge it 600 meters (out of a gravitiational keyhole) within a 7 year period required a 4 newtons of thrust constantly for those 7 years, which while not impossible, is far beyond anything current ion thrusters have done. It would probably require a brand new design, with the associated testing for durability, and some kind of in-situ resource utilization so that you don't have to carry 7 years worth of fuel. Of course, if you start earlier your requirements may drop significantly, but still non-trivial.
Having said that, and acknowledging that it could cost hundreds of billions, I'd say lets do it, I've always been an advocate of asteroid mining and colonies, much more than the moon and Mars. I think you could make a business case given all the resources available there.
(I'm an Aerospace Eng. helping out with a class trying to design a very similar Apophis tracking mission, so I have some experience with the details of what dealing with it entails.)
This is the second part of the COTS contract. The first already went to SpaceX, while originally Rocketplane/Kistler won the second part, but failed to meet agreed upon fundraising milestones and lost the contract. Now they are reawarding that second part to Orbital Sciences, while maintaining SpaceX as the first COTS partner.
I think you're thinking of the NASA/Northrop-Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge. Looks like they will have some actual competition next year other than bad luck.
I'd say its two-fold. To show the possibility of privately funded interplanetary exploration, and to support the development of low cost, space-capable robotics.
I doubt that anyone will be trying to develop their own launch vehicle to do this, although a custom trans-lunar injection stage might be in the cards. One of the upcoming Falcon 1-extended versions may have the juice to get a small but capable rover to the lunar surface, bringing this reasonably within cost restrictions.
I'm sure they have. I think a more apt title would be 'Possibility of life in Victoria Crater is looking more remote.' I don't think anyone working on it would be dumb enough to think that ruled it out over the whole area.
When the original Mariner probes that were sent to Mars sent back their data, they managed to capture the most desolate parts of the surface, leading to the impression that it was, and had always been as dead as the moon. There was no data on the impressive amounts of volcanism that was clearly present in Mars past. I'm sure when it came back the preliminary reports did say that it was potentially geographically dead, and always had been, but no one assumed it was necessarily true.
If there is evidence of past life, which I like to think there is, it will probably be discovered by these people are those like them. They're not so stupid as to follow an assumption that every one of us sees through in about two seconds.
Umm, SpaceX seems do be doing just fine (yes, I know they haven't had a completely successful launch yet). They have designed and built a $6 million rocket capable of getting to LEO with a reasonable load, as well as have the tooling and parts for a much larger version. Granted they have an advantage over Rocketplane Kistler because Musk has a rather large piggy bank, but its still very minimal compared to what NASA, Boeing, Lockheed and Rocketdyne are doing.
There are a number of reasons for why they can do this while the big names fail, but among them are a small dedicated workforce in a Silicon Valley-like atmosphere, lack of reliance on public opinion, and a focus on the most cost-effective design rather than the most efficient. The whole point is to develop it in a way that NASA would never do under a traditional contract.
While its fair to withold judgment until the next launch (May I believe), I see no reason why the next Falcon 1 won't complete its mission, and neither does DARPA, besides plain old dumb luck which tends to affect all launch vehicles, even the Soyuz. Given a success, and more to follow, I don't think the concept is flawed; of course I don't know much about Rocketplane Kistler besides their suborbital design, and there approach may very well have been flawed.
For a little more detail, the first failure was a loose bolt that caused an explosion ~25 seconds into the flight, and they corrected this by implementing better checks during the launch including a 'hold-down' sequence at which if anything is slightly off-nominal the entire procedure is aborted. This happened at the second launch, although they were able to refuel and launch again in just over an hour, which is quite impressive anyway.
For the second failure when the engine and telemetry cut off as it was making the orbital insertion burn, an oscillation (slosh) developed in the upper stage fuel tank that became too large for the control system to handle. This was corrected by two methods, either of which would probably have been enough to solve the problem. First they modified to control laws so that it would be better able to handle the oscillation. Second they added baffles to the tanks (unfortunately increasing cost) in order to insure that a slosh couldn't develop in the first place.
So yes, while they've had two failures, the causes of those failures were identified and corrected, and DARPA is perfectly satisfied with this effort. Of course, the real test will be sometime in the next few months (two launches of F1 in Q1 2008 according to the website), but it seems there's good reason to be optimistic.
I'd assume they do the same thing they do now. Either they go without, which prevents them from getting on an aircraft anyway as far as I know, or they get a non-driver ID, which at least in Oklahoma are exactly like the DL only with a 'Not a Valid Driver's License' or something similar printed on it.
Not a whole lot different from the current state of things as far as I know.
Theres a lot of significant work in star trackers to do attitude orientation within the solar system, and I'd imagine that as we explore further outward, we'll make decent enough stellar maps that you could determine your orientation from those maps, and also that you could determine the position based on the variations from 'known' configurations. Its just a question of good models and fast computers.
A more practical implementation, something that a friend of mine is working on in fact, is the ability to use star tracker data to determine the positions of the planets. Based on ephemeris data (the very refined data made available from JPL regarding the position of celestial bodies) its just a matter of calculation to determine both the position and the attitude of the spacecraft. Of course from what I know those calculations aren't the easiest things, clearly.
- A lowly graduate student in Aerospace Engineering
Probably doing some rough calculations with spheres of influence, and then putting those rough trajectories into an optimization scheme, probably with a non-linear programming problems. Do this same method with a number of different schemes (direct Hohman transfer, Venus flyby, out to Mars and back) and see what gets you to Mercury orbit with as little fuel required and with minimal risk of accidentally smashing your spacecraft.
While its impossible to calculate these trajectories exactly by hand, its easy enough for a computer to do so, and if you can give a rough starting place, optimization techniques will find solution. Trade studies are done to find the best method overall, as in any other engineering practice.
Hope that helps some... it sounds like a fun problem to work out.
I'd actually argue that the high profile competition with the Soviets caused the current state of the US space program. We rushed to the moon in a completely unsustainable way, and needed something to do afterwards that would be high profile but much cheaper, and most importantly involve men (eliminating the possibility of probes counting as high profile). This led to the technological budget monster that is the STS, which is fundamentally flawed (combining heavy lifter with person carrier), and is overly complex for what little it really does. That said I have a little hope for the new architecture (Orion+Ares) because it fixes the architectural flaws, leaving only the managerial ones.... but I digress.
If there had been no Soviet competition it may have taken us 10 or 20 years longer to get to the moon, or we may have decided to skip it all together, and gone to Mars or asteroids instead. However, whatever we did, it seems likely that it wouldn't have been simple flags and footprints, but instead would have been more along the lines of what Von Braun and the others had really been going for, with longer stays eventually leading to permanent habitation. Because there would never have been as large of an investment, there would never have been the budget fatigue, and the space program, whatever form it took, would have been better at using limited resources to fulfill its goals.
Of course, predicting what might have happened is hard, but I still think that that very strong competition was ultimately harmful. Of course, this kind of lower-key competition doesn't carry the same dangers.
I think the White Stripes, Hot Hot Heat, the Kaiser Chiefs, Spoon, the Wallflowers and Weezer are all pretty good, and pretty mainstream (I hear them on the alternative station rather than the indie station on XM.) And of course the less mainstream still seem to pretty available, more indie stuff like the Shins, Ben Lee, Metric, Sloan, and the Decembrists.
Hell, even some of the really true 'pop' has some high points, I personally enjoy Train and the Fray much more than my more indie friends would ever approve of.
Keep in mind that when Zepplin and the Doors were going strong you also had such wonders as the BeeGees and the Captain and Taneel(?) and other people that I'm sure you've forgotten and that I'm too young to ever remember.
*All of those that I've mentioned are CDs that I've bought recently.
It changes depending on your location. Down around my house, in a suburban area, the circle is about half a mile, but it tends to be accurate within a quarter mile. However, when I was downtown a few nights ago, I noticed that the circle was within about.2 miles i think, and the location within.1 mile.
I'd imagine towers are denser in most dense walking areas, allowing more accurate positions (with more intersecting hyperbolae), and that's where I see the feature being most useful. T
That is, the feature isn't a replacement for something like a Garmin or TomTom, but I can see it being very useful for when you're lost in a pedestrian area and have time to look at a street sign and get your precise position once it gets you very close.
If I want a whole album I'll still buy it on CD, but when its something where you only want a song or two, its a pretty good deal, and MP3 is at least standard enough that you probably won't have to reencode it to something else (which is what worries me, as a 256k MP3 sounds fine, but I can usually hear the difference in the reencoded version.) Also I usually find in the end I listen more to things that I like the whole album anyway...
I've actually been pretty impressed with WHS so far, and I hate using desktop Windows (I set it up for my parents while home this week). I haven't done a whole lot of large data transfers, so I haven't been able to check your issues, but the ease of set up has amazed me.
The built in web interface just works, as does the connector, although of course there are a few annoying Microsoft-isms like only being able to use it on XP or up, and the remote desktop internet interface requires IE and ActiveX.
Hopefully there will be bugfixes soon to fix these issues (the file transfers and data corruptions), but I've been impressed in general. It's still a young product, and they do tend to get better with time anyway.
For all the responses that say 'well duh! A simple NAS box', I just set up a WHS box for my parents, and I must say it's slick.
I use linux on all my machines, and back up everything to a server/mythtv box, and generally get very frustrated when using Windows on my own machines. However, I've been almost entirely pleased with my experience with WHS, which has functionality way beyond a simple NAS box. It does automatic backups by default, saves space by recognizing when two files on different computers are in fact the same, and has a pretty gui interface for managing users and storage space. Also, it has a web-accessible interface, with secure passwords and logins already built in, a decent online file manager, and RDC access (unfortunately you need IE for that). Connecting it to a domain name is incredibly simple and costs nothing in addition to the cost for the software in the first place. Finally, it does the media center extender thing, which if I had an XB360, I'm sure I'd appreciate, and is something a NAS won't do.
In the end, of course you can do more with a linux box, and a NAS would be cheaper and simpler, but WHS is incredibly simple to set up (I was expecting to spend days getting everything configured, but ended up spending a few of hours), yet provides a lot of valuable features, and is in theory expandable to be even more powerful. So while its certainly not for everyone, in the right circumstances its a great product, and I've been very pleased, and worth the money I payed for it (around $150).
For the record, when I say almost entirely, it's frustrating that the RDC is IE only, the connector software is only WinXP or above, and its really set up for actually having different users on the home PC if more than one person uses it, rather than the typical everyone sharing one user that tends to happen on windows machines.
Not necessarily, because while overall FLAC usage is negligible, its usage among people who want lossless is probably higher than MP3 among all lossy formats. Unless they completely replace all AAC tracks with ALAC tracks, it seems likely that any foray into embracing lossless formats would involve at least allowing the import and conversion of FLACs (like WMA), or full support (like MP3).
True, but you're probably not going to hear all the details on your iPod anyway. The real advantage of this, at least in my mind, is the ability to transcode to a format you want without fear. I don't claim to be able to hear the difference between lossless and 192 or 256 MP3, but the idea of taking a 128 AAC and converting it to a 192 MP3 to play on something that doesn't support AAC is problematic, and that is something that can be fairly easy to hear.
So with hard drive sizes getting large enough that a moderate sized collection of lossless albums (say 100 Gb or 200 to 300 albums) isn't that ridiculous, so it makes sense to archive music in a lossless format. Of course I'm not sure if the bandwidth capabilities are really there yet to do this properly, but I'm no expert.
We did have a bomb threat called in one day in Jenks (where I went to high school, its a suburb of Tulsa), but more to the point I think the idea is that targeting a 'typical' location can be just as powerful as targeting a large symbol. If a school got hit in suburban Tulsa or St. Louis or Denver, I'd be much more wary of going about my daily life than with a big target like the Pentagon or the WTC, because then its saying anywhere is a target.
Not that I'm trying to justify fear and safety trumping civil liberties, since I can think of a thousand reasons thats a horrible idea (some of which I learned at Jenks), just saying that theres a strong argument for somewhere like Jenks or Kellyville (or any other small town or suburb anywhere else in the country) being a potential target, because thats more likely to scare the crap out of people and affect your every day lives outside of airports.
If you're talking about air launch, it only gives you a minor improvement, and if you're talking about a heavy launch vehicle like Ares V, you're not going to find an aircraft capable of launching it. The Orbital Sciences Pegasus rocket launches off of an L-1011 aircraft, and has a fairly small payload.
Remember that most of your energy is spent with energy in the direction of the orbit rather than going straight up, and thus why orbital flight is an order of magnitude more difficult that the suborbital flight that SpaceShipOne did.
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Amazon doesn't really require you to sign up beyond just having an account with them already, which most people tend to for books and such. As far as the service itself, you click a link, it asks are you sure, and you download an MP3 file, eliminating any dependence on any device.
Also, to download albums, and insure that you don't lose the file if your internet connection craps out, they provide a download program that opens a '.amz' file you download. Note that the client is available for Windows, OSX, and yes, many flavors of linux. The Ubuntu 7.10 deb they provide worked fine for me.
The one proviso for them is that its a one time purchase, if you lose the file somehow you can't redownload it. If you can deal with that I definitely recommend it, its easy and so far problem free. Also the lossy quality isn't enough that I notice, and while I'm no audiophile I still hate anything below about 192kbs mp3.
Fair enough, tether propulsion is certainly an easier thing to get fully developed than the materials for the elevator cable.
The difference between trying to stabilize an aircraft like the F-16 vs. stabilizing a spacecraft in an unstable position is primarily a question of consumables.
An aircraft's controls are primarily aerodynamic, so you don't have to worry much about the cost of those controls, since its just a bit of electricity. However, for maintaining a spacecrafts center of mass (where reaction wheels and shifting masses won't help), the only modern way to maintain control is with rockets/jets of some sort, with the use of irretrievable fuel that entails. Of course this wouldn't be as a big a deal because presumably the fuel would be replinishable.
The other thing is that from what I gather this is a long-term instability, where you can leave it for days and it will be fine, but not months. We face similar problems with objects at the L4 and L5 lagrange points; while you do have to use some fuel to maintain position, its not an unreasonable amount.
The noble gases make great propellants. However, because they are inert they are not good at storing energy. In a chemical rocket the propellant is the power source; in an ion thruster, the propellant is only a working fluid, similar to hydraulic fluid. You still need an electric power source to ionize the gas and charge the grids that transfer momentum to the ionized gas.
I'd guess that its within feasibility, but it would be overly expensive. First you've got to figure out where it is, which is known to a few kilometers I believe, and then you propogate that forward based on known forces.
Without adding some kind of thruster, we only know the position during the 2029 close approach to within, a few thousand kilometers (at which point it can't hit the Earth within its 3-sigma probability, but may hit a keyhole), and the perturbation caused by the Earth at that point makes it so that on the next go-round in 2036 the 3-sigma ellipse is tens of thousands of kilometers wide (with the Earth being only ~6400 km wide). Clearly its not a trivial celestial mechanics problem to do something as complex as nudging it into Earth orbit; any process to do so would have to be begun years earlier and be done with long-burning, low-thrust devices (e.g. ion thrusters).
Also, looking at the amount of force required to move an object that size even in a relatively long-term way is non-trivial. I think some numbers that got ran, trying to nudge it 600 meters (out of a gravitiational keyhole) within a 7 year period required a 4 newtons of thrust constantly for those 7 years, which while not impossible, is far beyond anything current ion thrusters have done. It would probably require a brand new design, with the associated testing for durability, and some kind of in-situ resource utilization so that you don't have to carry 7 years worth of fuel. Of course, if you start earlier your requirements may drop significantly, but still non-trivial.
Having said that, and acknowledging that it could cost hundreds of billions, I'd say lets do it, I've always been an advocate of asteroid mining and colonies, much more than the moon and Mars. I think you could make a business case given all the resources available there.
(I'm an Aerospace Eng. helping out with a class trying to design a very similar Apophis tracking mission, so I have some experience with the details of what dealing with it entails.)
This is the second part of the COTS contract. The first already went to SpaceX, while originally Rocketplane/Kistler won the second part, but failed to meet agreed upon fundraising milestones and lost the contract. Now they are reawarding that second part to Orbital Sciences, while maintaining SpaceX as the first COTS partner.
I think you're thinking of the NASA/Northrop-Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge. Looks like they will have some actual competition next year other than bad luck.
I'd say its two-fold. To show the possibility of privately funded interplanetary exploration, and to support the development of low cost, space-capable robotics.
I doubt that anyone will be trying to develop their own launch vehicle to do this, although a custom trans-lunar injection stage might be in the cards. One of the upcoming Falcon 1-extended versions may have the juice to get a small but capable rover to the lunar surface, bringing this reasonably within cost restrictions.
I'm sure they have. I think a more apt title would be 'Possibility of life in Victoria Crater is looking more remote.' I don't think anyone working on it would be dumb enough to think that ruled it out over the whole area.
When the original Mariner probes that were sent to Mars sent back their data, they managed to capture the most desolate parts of the surface, leading to the impression that it was, and had always been as dead as the moon. There was no data on the impressive amounts of volcanism that was clearly present in Mars past. I'm sure when it came back the preliminary reports did say that it was potentially geographically dead, and always had been, but no one assumed it was necessarily true.
If there is evidence of past life, which I like to think there is, it will probably be discovered by these people are those like them. They're not so stupid as to follow an assumption that every one of us sees through in about two seconds.
To be fair, I think Kevin James being a cannibal would be interesting news, no matter what I normally think of celebrity news.
Umm, SpaceX seems do be doing just fine (yes, I know they haven't had a completely successful launch yet). They have designed and built a $6 million rocket capable of getting to LEO with a reasonable load, as well as have the tooling and parts for a much larger version. Granted they have an advantage over Rocketplane Kistler because Musk has a rather large piggy bank, but its still very minimal compared to what NASA, Boeing, Lockheed and Rocketdyne are doing.
There are a number of reasons for why they can do this while the big names fail, but among them are a small dedicated workforce in a Silicon Valley-like atmosphere, lack of reliance on public opinion, and a focus on the most cost-effective design rather than the most efficient. The whole point is to develop it in a way that NASA would never do under a traditional contract.
While its fair to withold judgment until the next launch (May I believe), I see no reason why the next Falcon 1 won't complete its mission, and neither does DARPA, besides plain old dumb luck which tends to affect all launch vehicles, even the Soyuz. Given a success, and more to follow, I don't think the concept is flawed; of course I don't know much about Rocketplane Kistler besides their suborbital design, and there approach may very well have been flawed.
For a little more detail, the first failure was a loose bolt that caused an explosion ~25 seconds into the flight, and they corrected this by implementing better checks during the launch including a 'hold-down' sequence at which if anything is slightly off-nominal the entire procedure is aborted. This happened at the second launch, although they were able to refuel and launch again in just over an hour, which is quite impressive anyway.
For the second failure when the engine and telemetry cut off as it was making the orbital insertion burn, an oscillation (slosh) developed in the upper stage fuel tank that became too large for the control system to handle. This was corrected by two methods, either of which would probably have been enough to solve the problem. First they modified to control laws so that it would be better able to handle the oscillation. Second they added baffles to the tanks (unfortunately increasing cost) in order to insure that a slosh couldn't develop in the first place.
So yes, while they've had two failures, the causes of those failures were identified and corrected, and DARPA is perfectly satisfied with this effort. Of course, the real test will be sometime in the next few months (two launches of F1 in Q1 2008 according to the website), but it seems there's good reason to be optimistic.
I'd assume they do the same thing they do now. Either they go without, which prevents them from getting on an aircraft anyway as far as I know, or they get a non-driver ID, which at least in Oklahoma are exactly like the DL only with a 'Not a Valid Driver's License' or something similar printed on it.
Not a whole lot different from the current state of things as far as I know.
Theres a lot of significant work in star trackers to do attitude orientation within the solar system, and I'd imagine that as we explore further outward, we'll make decent enough stellar maps that you could determine your orientation from those maps, and also that you could determine the position based on the variations from 'known' configurations. Its just a question of good models and fast computers. A more practical implementation, something that a friend of mine is working on in fact, is the ability to use star tracker data to determine the positions of the planets. Based on ephemeris data (the very refined data made available from JPL regarding the position of celestial bodies) its just a matter of calculation to determine both the position and the attitude of the spacecraft. Of course from what I know those calculations aren't the easiest things, clearly. - A lowly graduate student in Aerospace Engineering
Probably doing some rough calculations with spheres of influence, and then putting those rough trajectories into an optimization scheme, probably with a non-linear programming problems. Do this same method with a number of different schemes (direct Hohman transfer, Venus flyby, out to Mars and back) and see what gets you to Mercury orbit with as little fuel required and with minimal risk of accidentally smashing your spacecraft.
While its impossible to calculate these trajectories exactly by hand, its easy enough for a computer to do so, and if you can give a rough starting place, optimization techniques will find solution. Trade studies are done to find the best method overall, as in any other engineering practice.
Hope that helps some... it sounds like a fun problem to work out.
I'd actually argue that the high profile competition with the Soviets caused the current state of the US space program. We rushed to the moon in a completely unsustainable way, and needed something to do afterwards that would be high profile but much cheaper, and most importantly involve men (eliminating the possibility of probes counting as high profile). This led to the technological budget monster that is the STS, which is fundamentally flawed (combining heavy lifter with person carrier), and is overly complex for what little it really does. That said I have a little hope for the new architecture (Orion+Ares) because it fixes the architectural flaws, leaving only the managerial ones.... but I digress.
If there had been no Soviet competition it may have taken us 10 or 20 years longer to get to the moon, or we may have decided to skip it all together, and gone to Mars or asteroids instead. However, whatever we did, it seems likely that it wouldn't have been simple flags and footprints, but instead would have been more along the lines of what Von Braun and the others had really been going for, with longer stays eventually leading to permanent habitation. Because there would never have been as large of an investment, there would never have been the budget fatigue, and the space program, whatever form it took, would have been better at using limited resources to fulfill its goals.
Of course, predicting what might have happened is hard, but I still think that that very strong competition was ultimately harmful. Of course, this kind of lower-key competition doesn't carry the same dangers.
I think the White Stripes, Hot Hot Heat, the Kaiser Chiefs, Spoon, the Wallflowers and Weezer are all pretty good, and pretty mainstream (I hear them on the alternative station rather than the indie station on XM.) And of course the less mainstream still seem to pretty available, more indie stuff like the Shins, Ben Lee, Metric, Sloan, and the Decembrists.
Hell, even some of the really true 'pop' has some high points, I personally enjoy Train and the Fray much more than my more indie friends would ever approve of.
Keep in mind that when Zepplin and the Doors were going strong you also had such wonders as the BeeGees and the Captain and Taneel(?) and other people that I'm sure you've forgotten and that I'm too young to ever remember.
*All of those that I've mentioned are CDs that I've bought recently.
It changes depending on your location. Down around my house, in a suburban area, the circle is about half a mile, but it tends to be accurate within a quarter mile. However, when I was downtown a few nights ago, I noticed that the circle was within about .2 miles i think, and the location within .1 mile.
I'd imagine towers are denser in most dense walking areas, allowing more accurate positions (with more intersecting hyperbolae), and that's where I see the feature being most useful. T
That is, the feature isn't a replacement for something like a Garmin or TomTom, but I can see it being very useful for when you're lost in a pedestrian area and have time to look at a street sign and get your precise position once it gets you very close.
If I want a whole album I'll still buy it on CD, but when its something where you only want a song or two, its a pretty good deal, and MP3 is at least standard enough that you probably won't have to reencode it to something else (which is what worries me, as a 256k MP3 sounds fine, but I can usually hear the difference in the reencoded version.) Also I usually find in the end I listen more to things that I like the whole album anyway...
I've actually been pretty impressed with WHS so far, and I hate using desktop Windows (I set it up for my parents while home this week). I haven't done a whole lot of large data transfers, so I haven't been able to check your issues, but the ease of set up has amazed me. The built in web interface just works, as does the connector, although of course there are a few annoying Microsoft-isms like only being able to use it on XP or up, and the remote desktop internet interface requires IE and ActiveX. Hopefully there will be bugfixes soon to fix these issues (the file transfers and data corruptions), but I've been impressed in general. It's still a young product, and they do tend to get better with time anyway.
For all the responses that say 'well duh! A simple NAS box', I just set up a WHS box for my parents, and I must say it's slick.
I use linux on all my machines, and back up everything to a server/mythtv box, and generally get very frustrated when using Windows on my own machines. However, I've been almost entirely pleased with my experience with WHS, which has functionality way beyond a simple NAS box. It does automatic backups by default, saves space by recognizing when two files on different computers are in fact the same, and has a pretty gui interface for managing users and storage space. Also, it has a web-accessible interface, with secure passwords and logins already built in, a decent online file manager, and RDC access (unfortunately you need IE for that). Connecting it to a domain name is incredibly simple and costs nothing in addition to the cost for the software in the first place. Finally, it does the media center extender thing, which if I had an XB360, I'm sure I'd appreciate, and is something a NAS won't do.
In the end, of course you can do more with a linux box, and a NAS would be cheaper and simpler, but WHS is incredibly simple to set up (I was expecting to spend days getting everything configured, but ended up spending a few of hours), yet provides a lot of valuable features, and is in theory expandable to be even more powerful. So while its certainly not for everyone, in the right circumstances its a great product, and I've been very pleased, and worth the money I payed for it (around $150).
For the record, when I say almost entirely, it's frustrating that the RDC is IE only, the connector software is only WinXP or above, and its really set up for actually having different users on the home PC if more than one person uses it, rather than the typical everyone sharing one user that tends to happen on windows machines.
Not necessarily, because while overall FLAC usage is negligible, its usage among people who want lossless is probably higher than MP3 among all lossy formats. Unless they completely replace all AAC tracks with ALAC tracks, it seems likely that any foray into embracing lossless formats would involve at least allowing the import and conversion of FLACs (like WMA), or full support (like MP3).
True, but you're probably not going to hear all the details on your iPod anyway. The real advantage of this, at least in my mind, is the ability to transcode to a format you want without fear. I don't claim to be able to hear the difference between lossless and 192 or 256 MP3, but the idea of taking a 128 AAC and converting it to a 192 MP3 to play on something that doesn't support AAC is problematic, and that is something that can be fairly easy to hear.
So with hard drive sizes getting large enough that a moderate sized collection of lossless albums (say 100 Gb or 200 to 300 albums) isn't that ridiculous, so it makes sense to archive music in a lossless format. Of course I'm not sure if the bandwidth capabilities are really there yet to do this properly, but I'm no expert.
We did have a bomb threat called in one day in Jenks (where I went to high school, its a suburb of Tulsa), but more to the point I think the idea is that targeting a 'typical' location can be just as powerful as targeting a large symbol. If a school got hit in suburban Tulsa or St. Louis or Denver, I'd be much more wary of going about my daily life than with a big target like the Pentagon or the WTC, because then its saying anywhere is a target.
Not that I'm trying to justify fear and safety trumping civil liberties, since I can think of a thousand reasons thats a horrible idea (some of which I learned at Jenks), just saying that theres a strong argument for somewhere like Jenks or Kellyville (or any other small town or suburb anywhere else in the country) being a potential target, because thats more likely to scare the crap out of people and affect your every day lives outside of airports.
If you're talking about air launch, it only gives you a minor improvement, and if you're talking about a heavy launch vehicle like Ares V, you're not going to find an aircraft capable of launching it. The Orbital Sciences Pegasus rocket launches off of an L-1011 aircraft, and has a fairly small payload.
Remember that most of your energy is spent with energy in the direction of the orbit rather than going straight up, and thus why orbital flight is an order of magnitude more difficult that the suborbital flight that SpaceShipOne did.