The ESA Hipparcos satellite took very precise measurements of star parallax for over 2 million stars and after years of data reduction has determined around 120,000 of them to be within 3000 light years or less. The other 1,880,000 are apparently farther away than 3000 LY since their parallax was below the insturment measurement threshhold. Of the 120,000 "local" stars, only around 40,000 are considered to be of "constant" luminosity like the sun; the rest are variable luminosity stars probably hostile to life. Thus despite huge estimates of 100 billion stars in the galaxy, the number of "local" "constant" stars within 3000 LY is only 40,000 - a much smaller sample of possible stars that are a very daunting distance away for ET detection. So, Where Are They? I think they are Probably Further Away Than We Can Detect...but my SETI screensaver churns on anyway.
Say Cloning Is Sucessful - Where Is The Habitat?
on
TigerCloning
·
· Score: 1
I think all of these cloning efforts for endangered / extinct species is great, but where are we going to put all of these newly resurrected species? A small team in a basement lab and a one-day media blitz makes for a feel-good story today, but who's going to pay for the thousands of acres these efforts will need for habitat to REALLY bring the species back? Slashdot runs stories for us geeks on cloning and Planet of the Apes movies, but I haven't seen any stories here about how orangs are about to go extinct due to the Indonesians destroying their habitat. That's the REAL problem/issue, and I sure don't know what the solution is - except maybe acceptance/ resignation that extintion isn't just forever, its inevitable.
The Fall of Iridium (coming soon to a sky near you) is vindication of the view that people don't want WIRELESS, they want WIRED, as in max bandwidth. Undersea and underground fiber optic cables, not satellites, are the backbone of the worldwide internet - cheaper to install with much higher capacity. For years communications satellites have been the (sole) monemaker for space activities and provided the spur for further space development. Now that isn't true anymore - and I fear ALL space development will suffer as a result.
Anybody want to start a betting pool ***(pun)*** on just how long before covert US Navy SEAL divers are roaming up and down the flooded passageways of this sub? It has never-before-seen surface-to-surface missiles designed to take out US aircraft carriers, maybe warp-speed torpedos, certainly top-of-the-line Russian crypto gear, in only 350 feet of international water. Project Jennifer raised a sub from miles down back in the early 70s, and a Russian boomer that sank due to internal fire off the coast of Bermuda in 1986 in thousands of feet of water mysteriously had the missile hatches peeled open and several missiles gone when a follow-on Russian oceanographic expedition photographed it a few months later. Hmm, wonder who did that? The Kursk is a piece of (very tempting) cake in comparison...
Get enough motherboards to make a small networked cluster running the SETI@Home software and use these to start a group processing "work units" (WUs) from the SETIatHome project at http://www.setiathome.com . SETI stands for Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Basically a group from the University of California is recording radio telescope data nonstop, breaking it up into 30 second chunks, then farming it out to volunteers on the internet for processing that searches for signals from alien civilizations. So far 2.2 million volunteers have signed up and around 150 million work units have been processed. The project is slated to run for 2 more years and result in a major sky survey. The SETI angle provides a legitimate and even important use of otherwise obsolete equipment, will allow competitions among local schools to generate the most processed work units, and provide a "hook" that can lead in to lots of other topics - astronomy, math, technology, networking, whatever. I recommend mounting the motherboards on PVC pipe and using that as an open framework instead of just getting a bunch of boxes. Ebay and www.pcsurplusonline.com are great sources for cheap motherboards and peripherals. I believe that using do-it-yourself motherboards will lead to "hands-on" learning experiences by the school "geeks", who would otherwise never be allowed to tinker with the nice, neat, 20-minutes-per-kid rows of State-bought computers in the library. If gifted students decide to tinker with the memory, tweak the hard disk, modify the program settings, add more motherboards, set up a multi-user networked Quake tournament, then great! They'll have to learn something practical to achieve these goals, and they'll have a platform on which to do it. There is a lot of competitive spirit and teamwork generated by this SETI effort. The central website "keeps score" of who has processed the most WUs and a dedicated high school team could zoom to the top of the rankings. A 486DX2/66 motherboard takes about 5 days to process a single WU, old 100 MHz Pentium motherboards about a day per WU (that compares to about 4 hours non-stop by a $5000 top-of-the-line 1 GHz Athlon system). Fifty Pentium-100 motherboards (think 50 teammembers spending $20 on EBay each for "their" motherboard in the cluster) could process around 20,000 WUs in a year. Currently, a group that processed 20,000 WUs would be in 8th place out of 2.2 million participants, above teams from Silicon Graphics and just below teams from Sun Microsystems and Intel. It would sure be cool to see a group of high school kids in such august company!
Timeline-Development of Artificial Consciousness?
on
Ask Robert X. Cringely
·
· Score: 2
Your weekly deadline keeps you focused on now, but the full impact of the digital revolution you have covered from the beginning will not manifest itself fully for decades or centuries. What is the Cringley Long View of Things? How long til the microprocessors design their own next generation and we humans no longer understand how they work? How long til they become self aware like HAL 9000 ? What will they do for/to humans? Will "they" be silicon, photonic, quantum, DNA based? Who / what is on the critical path today that will lead to this tomorrow?
Here we go again...crashing spacecraft, but on purpose for a change. In this case, Europa is surely a concern, but NASA and others have crashed plenty of spacecraft just to clear the slate and start on another project. Its about money, just check out this quote from the linked report: "The Io plus Amalthea option is not consistent with Galileo's current budget plan." There are many other examples. NASA allowed a functioning solar observing satellite to be destroyed in a Star Wars test even tho the satellite was observing a whole new category of sun-grazing comets it had discovered. The Magellan Venus orbiter was sent in an "aerobrake test" that burned it up - but what if it had detected changes on the surface of Venus on a second mapping run, which would have meant the HUGE discovery of active volcanism there. The recent Lunar Polar Orbiter was crashed on the day its money ran out, and while sending up a plume of steam after hitting an icepack (it didn't) would have been a spectacular home run, a better plan would have been to fund it long enough to drop the orbit and skim the supposed ice crater at close range as many times as possible. Motorola is ready to let the Iridium system become a $3 billion fireworks display. Back in the 80s NASA seriously considered shutting down Voyager 2 before it got to Uranus and Neptune as a cost cutting measure - the primary mission was only Jupiter and Saturn. Somehow an effort needs to be organized where functioning spacecraft get turned over to interested third parties when the Big Boys get tired of playing with them...
Wow, thats' a neat pictorial about ultracold overclocking. I'm not into overclocking, but as an experiment I'd be interested to see somebody just get a motherboard and dump the whole thing in liquid nitrogen and try it. The main danger will be getting some parts of the board colder than others during cooldown and causing thermal stresses that will crack things - parts, traces, etc. I've done some work with liquid nitrogen and slow cooldown of what you put in it is very important. If you get a nice thick layer of liquid nitrogen in something like a styrofoam cooler and put the lid on, you will quickly get nice stratified layers of undisturbed air that get progressively colder the closer to the surface of the liquid ntrogen you get. If one were to mount the mobo on four fiberglass rods and stick these up thru the styrofoam lid, one could slowly lower the mobo closer and closer to the surface of the liquid nitrogen and get it progressively colder. After it had equalized in temp just above the surface, just plunge the mobo in. If you try this with a cheap mobo first as proof of concept, what have you got to lose? If somebody tries this, email me at rickyjames@email.com and let me know how it went. Better yet, tell Slashdot.
As a former engineer who worked on Space Station and has been to Russia on space-related business (I've built experiments with my own hands that have flown on MIR), let me vent my spleen.
This thing was started in 1983 in Reagan's State of the Union Address. NASA quickly decided it was supposed to last for 30 years, create every kind of perfect crystal/drug/ball bearing/McGuffin possible, service satellites, be the gateway to Mars, have a crew of 8, 100 kilowatts of power and an equivalent amount of heat rejection (important and often overlooked by non-space geeks - space is the ultimate vacuum thermos that keeps heat in), a 300 foot truss that was going to have every kind of telescope pointed up and every kind of camera pointed down. It was supposed to be made from a couple of 42 foot modules (Lab and Hab (habitation)) linked in a racetrack via four corner nodes that were basically six sided docking ports. Supplies were going to be brought up (and trash down) in a 27 foot logistics module via the Shuttle. The thing was supposed to be in a 28 degree inclined orbit, where the shuttle can take a maximum amount of payload, and reboost was supposed to use excess water as propellant offloaded from the Shuttle's fuel cell system. The whole thing was to be inaugurated in 1992, Columbus' 500th anniversary for $8 billion dollars.
What a crock. And to think I got excited and wasted years of my life on this thing.
The "dream" has undergone reverse "mission creep" to where it isn't even worth doing anymore, but nobody has the guts to say that. Forget 4 nodes and two 47 foot modules and crew of 8 - they turned the 27 foot logistics module into a "lab" and are using one node (the one up there now) to hook it to Russian junk that couldn't pass a NASA safety review if its life depended on it. (Wait a minute - astronaut's lives DO depend on it!) With the 27 foot logistics module "reassigned" and the 47 foot modules "reconsidered", all supplies are to be delivered via Soyuz/Progress to the new 57 degree inclined orbit - max payload ability for Russian launches, but the Shuttle has to leave stuff at home and burn a hideous amount of extra fuel to get there. On the news they say "the shuttle delivered a ton of supplies" as if that were a big deal - the shuttle was supposed to deliver over TEN TONS of supplies per flight in the original orbit!!! Since resupply logistics are now the stranglehold on the project after the STUPID decision to move the station's orbit to allow Russian participation, there is going to be effectively NO science over the 10 (not 30) projected life.
And as far as reboost to overcome atmospheric drag goes, well gee, at the 57 degree orbit we can't afford to lift 100 KW of solar cells, so we can't support water electrolysis to obtain reboost propellant, so we can't use the Shuttle's fuel cell byproducts, so let's just take that water that cost $10,000 a pound to lift to this God-forsaken orbit, bring it all back to Earth, and open a spigot after landing to let it drain out on to a concrete runway at Kennedy Space Center. Instead, let's change the reboost fuel to hydrazine and fly it up as part of the resupply weight budget (already reduced by a factor of ten, remember)! Who cares if the highly toxic exhaust freezes all over the exterior of the space station and sticks to an astronaut's space suit during a space walk and kills the crew when it vaporizes back in the crew modules after the spacewalk? The crew is only 3 now, not 8.
NASA has been working on Space Station for almost 20 years now as an officially sanctioned project and it is a criminal embarassment as to how little engineering has been accomplished in the past and how little science will be accomplished in the future. The cost overrun is beyond comprehesion over the past 20 years and is deliberately obscured by NASA by always referring to the overrun from the last rebudget exercise, not the beginning of the project.
Worst of all, it bodes terribly for our future in space. This millstone around our neck will soak up all of our energies for the next decade until we deorbit the thing into the Pacific with a sigh of relief. Only then will we start thinking seriously about a moonbase / Mars mission that will stay put and grow with each pound we launch to it instead of continually slip down into a firey re-entry and destruction unless we send up an equal mass of reboost propellant every year to fart away.
When I was a kid, I watched Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon and thought I could set foot on Mars - or at least some American my age would. But if NASA manages a moonbase or Mars mission the same way they've done Space Station, I'll be in my grave before another human sets foot on another world again. And she probably won't even be American. D'oh!
Poe IS cool but the REAL 19th century code mystery is called the Beale cypher. This guy sent the letter below and three code sheets to a friend. Beale's codes were based on documents available in the early 1800s - one was the Declaration of Independence. One code sheet talked about a vault of gold in Bedford County (Virginia, I think) when decoded, and the second listed who got what share of it (not reproduced here). The final code sheet with the gold's location, reproduced below, HAS NEVER BEEN BROKEN....
My Esteemed Friend: - Ever since leaving my comfortable quarters at your house I have been journeying to this place, and only succeeded in reaching it yesterday. I have had altogether a pleasant time, the weather being fine and the atmosphere bracing. I shall remain here a week or ten days longer, then "ho" for the plains, to hunt the buffalo and encounter the savage grizzlies. How long I may be absent I cannot now determine, certainly no less than two years, perhaps longer.
With regard to the box left in your charge, I have a few words to say, and, if you will permit me, give you some instructions concerning it. It contains papers vitally affecting the fortunes of myself and many others engaged in business with me, and in the event of my death, its loss might be irreparable. You will, therefore, see the necessity of guarding it with vigilance and care to prevent so great a catastrophe. It also contains some letters addressed to yourself, and which will be necessary to enlighten you concerning the business in which we are engaged. Should none of us ever return you will please preserve carefully the box for the period of ten years from the date of this letter, and if I, or no one with authority from me during that time demands its restoration, you will open it, which can be done by removing the lock. You will find, in addition to the papers addressed to you, other papers which will be unintelligible without the aid of a key to assist you. Such a key I have left in the hands of a friend in this place, sealed, addressed to yourself, and endorsed not to be delivered until June, 1832. By means of this you will understand fully all you will be required to do.
I know you will cheerfully comply with my request, thus adding to the many obligations under which you have already placed me. In the meantime, should death or sickness happen to you, to which all are liable, please select from among your friends some one worthy, and to him hand this letter, and to him delegate your authority. I have been thus particular in my instructions, in consequence of the somewhat perilous enterprise in which we are engaged, but trust we shall meet long ere the time expires, and so save you this trouble. Be the result what it may, however, the game is worth the candle, and we will play it to the end. With kindest wishes for your most excellent wife, compliments to the ladies, a good word to enquiring friends, if there be any, and assurances of my highest esteem for yourself, I remain as ever,
Your sincere friend, T.J.B.
Beale Code Page II - (This is the decrypt; the original is on the web page above)
I have deposited in the county of Bedford, about four miles from Buford's, in an excavation or vault, six feet below the surface of the ground, the following articles, belonging jointly to the parties whose names are given in number "3," herewith:
The first deposit consisted of one thousand and fourteen pounds of gold, and three thousand eight hundred and twelve pounds of silver, deposited November, 1819. The second was made December, 1821, and consisted of nineteen hundred and seven pounds of gold, and twelve hundred and eighty-eight pounds of silver; also jewels, obtained in St. Louis in exchange for silver to save transportation, and valued at $13,000.
The above is securely packed in iron pots, with iron covers. The vault is roughly lined with stone, and the vessels rest on solid stone, and are covered with others. Paper number "1" describes the exact locality of the vault so that no difficulty will be had in finding it.
THE LOCALITY OF THE VAULT - (This has never been decoded)
I had DirecPC for a while and bailed out of it. In addition to the disadvantages I see others listing here, they had what they called a "Fair Use" policy that choked down your personal data flow per day once you hit a certain limit - around 1 or 2 MP3 files worth, roughly. Sure, you get 400 Kbs, but only for the fraction of a second required to download a static web page. Sustained high speed downloads? Forget it.
At 8:19 AM EST Anonymous Coward posted DeCSS on this forum, making the ***Slashdot site itself*** part of this mess. Will Commander Taco be dragged away in chains for running a pirate info site? Will Slashdot be shut down by the Feds if Hemos refuses to delete the posting on First Amendement grounds? Will the 8:19 posting itself quietly disappear? Just where does this end?
The Real Problem With The High Frontier....
on
The High Frontier
·
· Score: 1
... is that few care about it anymore. There are three times the number of people talking about putting wireless Macs in space (see nearby other Slashdot story) than there are people talking here about putting colonies in space.
Slashdot Mirror
The ESA Hipparcos satellite took very precise measurements of star parallax for over 2 million stars and after years of data reduction has determined around 120,000 of them to be within 3000 light years or less. The other 1,880,000 are apparently farther away than 3000 LY since their parallax was below the insturment measurement threshhold. Of the 120,000 "local" stars, only around 40,000 are considered to be of "constant" luminosity like the sun; the rest are variable luminosity stars probably hostile to life. Thus despite huge estimates of 100 billion stars in the galaxy, the number of "local" "constant" stars within 3000 LY is only 40,000 - a much smaller sample of possible stars that are a very daunting distance away for ET detection. So, Where Are They? I think they are Probably Further Away Than We Can Detect...but my SETI screensaver churns on anyway.
I think all of these cloning efforts for endangered / extinct species is great, but where are we going to put all of these newly resurrected species? A small team in a basement lab and a one-day media blitz makes for a feel-good story today, but who's going to pay for the thousands of acres these efforts will need for habitat to REALLY bring the species back? Slashdot runs stories for us geeks on cloning and Planet of the Apes movies, but I haven't seen any stories here about how orangs are about to go extinct due to the Indonesians destroying their habitat. That's the REAL problem /issue, and I sure don't know what the solution is - except maybe acceptance/ resignation that extintion isn't just forever, its inevitable.
The Fall of Iridium (coming soon to a sky near you) is vindication of the view that people don't want WIRELESS, they want WIRED, as in max bandwidth. Undersea and underground fiber optic cables, not satellites, are the backbone of the worldwide internet - cheaper to install with much higher capacity. For years communications satellites have been the (sole) monemaker for space activities and provided the spur for further space development. Now that isn't true anymore - and I fear ALL space development will suffer as a result.
Anybody want to start a betting pool ***(pun)*** on just how long before covert US Navy SEAL divers are roaming up and down the flooded passageways of this sub? It has never-before-seen surface-to-surface missiles designed to take out US aircraft carriers, maybe warp-speed torpedos, certainly top-of-the-line Russian crypto gear, in only 350 feet of international water. Project Jennifer raised a sub from miles down back in the early 70s, and a Russian boomer that sank due to internal fire off the coast of Bermuda in 1986 in thousands of feet of water mysteriously had the missile hatches peeled open and several missiles gone when a follow-on Russian oceanographic expedition photographed it a few months later. Hmm, wonder who did that? The Kursk is a piece of (very tempting) cake in comparison...
Get enough motherboards to make a small networked cluster running the SETI@Home software and use these to start a group processing "work units" (WUs) from the SETIatHome project at http://www.setiathome.com . SETI stands for Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Basically a group from the University of California is recording radio telescope data nonstop, breaking it up into 30 second chunks, then farming it out to volunteers on the internet for processing that searches for signals from alien civilizations. So far 2.2 million volunteers have signed up and around 150 million work units have been processed. The project is slated to run for 2 more years and result in a major sky survey. The SETI angle provides a legitimate and even important use of otherwise obsolete equipment, will allow competitions among local schools to generate the most processed work units, and provide a "hook" that can lead in to lots of other topics - astronomy, math, technology, networking, whatever. I recommend mounting the motherboards on PVC pipe and using that as an open framework instead of just getting a bunch of boxes. Ebay and www.pcsurplusonline.com are great sources for cheap motherboards and peripherals. I believe that using do-it-yourself motherboards will lead to "hands-on" learning experiences by the school "geeks", who would otherwise never be allowed to tinker with the nice, neat, 20-minutes-per-kid rows of State-bought computers in the library. If gifted students decide to tinker with the memory, tweak the hard disk, modify the program settings, add more motherboards, set up a multi-user networked Quake tournament, then great! They'll have to learn something practical to achieve these goals, and they'll have a platform on which to do it. There is a lot of competitive spirit and teamwork generated by this SETI effort. The central website "keeps score" of who has processed the most WUs and a dedicated high school team could zoom to the top of the rankings. A 486DX2/66 motherboard takes about 5 days to process a single WU, old 100 MHz Pentium motherboards about a day per WU (that compares to about 4 hours non-stop by a $5000 top-of-the-line 1 GHz Athlon system). Fifty Pentium-100 motherboards (think 50 teammembers spending $20 on EBay each for "their" motherboard in the cluster) could process around 20,000 WUs in a year. Currently, a group that processed 20,000 WUs would be in 8th place out of 2.2 million participants, above teams from Silicon Graphics and just below teams from Sun Microsystems and Intel. It would sure be cool to see a group of high school kids in such august company!
Your weekly deadline keeps you focused on now, but the full impact of the digital revolution you have covered from the beginning will not manifest itself fully for decades or centuries. What is the Cringley Long View of Things? How long til the microprocessors design their own next generation and we humans no longer understand how they work? How long til they become self aware like HAL 9000 ? What will they do for/to humans? Will "they" be silicon, photonic, quantum, DNA based? Who / what is on the critical path today that will lead to this tomorrow?
Here we go again...crashing spacecraft, but on purpose for a change. In this case, Europa is surely a concern, but NASA and others have crashed plenty of spacecraft just to clear the slate and start on another project. Its about money, just check out this quote from the linked report: "The Io plus Amalthea option is not consistent with Galileo's current budget plan." There are many other examples. NASA allowed a functioning solar observing satellite to be destroyed in a Star Wars test even tho the satellite was observing a whole new category of sun-grazing comets it had discovered. The Magellan Venus orbiter was sent in an "aerobrake test" that burned it up - but what if it had detected changes on the surface of Venus on a second mapping run, which would have meant the HUGE discovery of active volcanism there. The recent Lunar Polar Orbiter was crashed on the day its money ran out, and while sending up a plume of steam after hitting an icepack (it didn't) would have been a spectacular home run, a better plan would have been to fund it long enough to drop the orbit and skim the supposed ice crater at close range as many times as possible. Motorola is ready to let the Iridium system become a $3 billion fireworks display. Back in the 80s NASA seriously considered shutting down Voyager 2 before it got to Uranus and Neptune as a cost cutting measure - the primary mission was only Jupiter and Saturn. Somehow an effort needs to be organized where functioning spacecraft get turned over to interested third parties when the Big Boys get tired of playing with them...
Wow, thats' a neat pictorial about ultracold overclocking. I'm not into overclocking, but as an experiment I'd be interested to see somebody just get a motherboard and dump the whole thing in liquid nitrogen and try it. The main danger will be getting some parts of the board colder than others during cooldown and causing thermal stresses that will crack things - parts, traces, etc. I've done some work with liquid nitrogen and slow cooldown of what you put in it is very important. If you get a nice thick layer of liquid nitrogen in something like a styrofoam cooler and put the lid on, you will quickly get nice stratified layers of undisturbed air that get progressively colder the closer to the surface of the liquid ntrogen you get. If one were to mount the mobo on four fiberglass rods and stick these up thru the styrofoam lid, one could slowly lower the mobo closer and closer to the surface of the liquid nitrogen and get it progressively colder. After it had equalized in temp just above the surface, just plunge the mobo in. If you try this with a cheap mobo first as proof of concept, what have you got to lose? If somebody tries this, email me at rickyjames@email.com and let me know how it went. Better yet, tell Slashdot.
This thing was started in 1983 in Reagan's State of the Union Address. NASA quickly decided it was supposed to last for 30 years, create every kind of perfect crystal/drug/ball bearing/McGuffin possible, service satellites, be the gateway to Mars, have a crew of 8, 100 kilowatts of power and an equivalent amount of heat rejection (important and often overlooked by non-space geeks - space is the ultimate vacuum thermos that keeps heat in), a 300 foot truss that was going to have every kind of telescope pointed up and every kind of camera pointed down. It was supposed to be made from a couple of 42 foot modules (Lab and Hab (habitation)) linked in a racetrack via four corner nodes that were basically six sided docking ports. Supplies were going to be brought up (and trash down) in a 27 foot logistics module via the Shuttle. The thing was supposed to be in a 28 degree inclined orbit, where the shuttle can take a maximum amount of payload, and reboost was supposed to use excess water as propellant offloaded from the Shuttle's fuel cell system. The whole thing was to be inaugurated in 1992, Columbus' 500th anniversary for $8 billion dollars.
What a crock. And to think I got excited and wasted years of my life on this thing.
The "dream" has undergone reverse "mission creep" to where it isn't even worth doing anymore, but nobody has the guts to say that. Forget 4 nodes and two 47 foot modules and crew of 8 - they turned the 27 foot logistics module into a "lab" and are using one node (the one up there now) to hook it to Russian junk that couldn't pass a NASA safety review if its life depended on it. (Wait a minute - astronaut's lives DO depend on it!) With the 27 foot logistics module "reassigned" and the 47 foot modules "reconsidered", all supplies are to be delivered via Soyuz/Progress to the new 57 degree inclined orbit - max payload ability for Russian launches, but the Shuttle has to leave stuff at home and burn a hideous amount of extra fuel to get there. On the news they say "the shuttle delivered a ton of supplies" as if that were a big deal - the shuttle was supposed to deliver over TEN TONS of supplies per flight in the original orbit!!! Since resupply logistics are now the stranglehold on the project after the STUPID decision to move the station's orbit to allow Russian participation, there is going to be effectively NO science over the 10 (not 30) projected life.
And as far as reboost to overcome atmospheric drag goes, well gee, at the 57 degree orbit we can't afford to lift 100 KW of solar cells, so we can't support water electrolysis to obtain reboost propellant, so we can't use the Shuttle's fuel cell byproducts, so let's just take that water that cost $10,000 a pound to lift to this God-forsaken orbit, bring it all back to Earth, and open a spigot after landing to let it drain out on to a concrete runway at Kennedy Space Center. Instead, let's change the reboost fuel to hydrazine and fly it up as part of the resupply weight budget (already reduced by a factor of ten, remember)! Who cares if the highly toxic exhaust freezes all over the exterior of the space station and sticks to an astronaut's space suit during a space walk and kills the crew when it vaporizes back in the crew modules after the spacewalk? The crew is only 3 now, not 8.
NASA has been working on Space Station for almost 20 years now as an officially sanctioned project and it is a criminal embarassment as to how little engineering has been accomplished in the past and how little science will be accomplished in the future. The cost overrun is beyond comprehesion over the past 20 years and is deliberately obscured by NASA by always referring to the overrun from the last rebudget exercise, not the beginning of the project.
Worst of all, it bodes terribly for our future in space. This millstone around our neck will soak up all of our energies for the next decade until we deorbit the thing into the Pacific with a sigh of relief. Only then will we start thinking seriously about a moonbase / Mars mission that will stay put and grow with each pound we launch to it instead of continually slip down into a firey re-entry and destruction unless we send up an equal mass of reboost propellant every year to fart away.
When I was a kid, I watched Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon and thought I could set foot on Mars - or at least some American my age would. But if NASA manages a moonbase or Mars mission the same way they've done Space Station, I'll be in my grave before another human sets foot on another world again. And she probably won't even be American. D'oh!
Poe IS cool but the REAL 19th century code mystery is called the Beale cypher. This guy sent the letter below and three code sheets to a friend. Beale's codes were based on documents available in the early 1800s - one was the Declaration of Independence. One code sheet talked about a vault of gold in Bedford County (Virginia, I think) when decoded, and the second listed who got what share of it (not reproduced here). The final code sheet with the gold's location, reproduced below, HAS NEVER BEEN BROKEN....
r ehunt/bllet.htm
, 111,95,84,341. 6 ,2018,40,74. , 124,211,486,225. , 1,94,73,416. 0 ,460,25,485,18. 2 24,961,44,16,401. , 7,219,184,360,780. , 69,128,367,460,17. 5 40,208,121,890. 8 0,99,35,18,21,136. , 37,122,113,6,140. , 116,530,82,568,9. 4 ,326,148,234,18. 1 101,365,92,88,181. , 48,122,85,216,284. 2 16,321,603,14,612. 1 8,61,136,247,819. 6 2,302,294,875,78. 0 00,162,286,19,21. 0 4,86,52,88,16,80. 6 7,890,236,154,211. 1 ,39,210,36,3,19. 3 8,46,172,85,194. 6 ,12,101,418,16,140. 1 1,426,89,72,84. , 16,79,23,16,81,122. 3 14,264,1065,323. 1 2,176,213,71,87,96.
Details at:
http://treasurehunt.miningco.com/hobbies/treasu
The Original Uncoded Letter From Beale
St. Louis, Mo., May 9th, 1822.
Robt. Morris, Esq.:
My Esteemed Friend: - Ever since leaving my comfortable quarters at your house I have been journeying to this place, and only succeeded in reaching it yesterday. I have had altogether a pleasant time, the weather being fine and the atmosphere bracing. I shall remain here a week or ten days longer, then "ho" for the plains, to hunt the buffalo and encounter the savage grizzlies. How long I may be absent I cannot now determine, certainly no less than two years, perhaps longer.
With regard to the box left in your charge, I have a few words to say, and, if you will permit me, give you some instructions concerning it. It contains papers vitally affecting the fortunes of myself and many others engaged in business with me, and in the event of my death, its loss might be irreparable. You will, therefore, see the necessity of guarding it with vigilance and care to prevent so great a catastrophe. It also contains some letters addressed to yourself, and which will be necessary to enlighten you concerning the business in which we are engaged. Should none of us ever return you will please preserve carefully the box for the period of ten years from the date of this letter, and if I, or no one with authority from me during that time demands its restoration, you will open it, which can be done by removing the lock. You will find, in addition to the papers addressed to you, other papers which will be unintelligible without the aid of a key to assist you. Such a key I have left in the hands of a friend in this place, sealed, addressed to yourself, and endorsed not to be delivered until June, 1832. By means of this you will understand fully all you will be required to do.
I know you will cheerfully comply with my request, thus adding to the many obligations under which you have already placed me. In the meantime, should death or sickness happen to you, to which all are liable, please select from among your friends some one worthy, and to him hand this letter, and to him delegate your authority. I have been thus particular in my instructions, in consequence of the somewhat perilous enterprise in which we are engaged, but trust we shall meet long ere the time expires, and so save you this trouble. Be the result what it may, however, the game is worth the candle, and we will play it to the end. With kindest wishes for your most excellent wife, compliments to the ladies, a good word to enquiring friends, if there be any, and assurances of my highest esteem for yourself, I remain as ever,
Your sincere friend, T.J.B.
Beale Code Page II - (This is the decrypt; the original is on the web page above)
I have deposited in the county of Bedford, about four miles from Buford's, in an excavation or vault, six feet below the surface of the ground, the following articles, belonging jointly to the parties whose names are given in number "3," herewith:
The first deposit consisted of one thousand and fourteen pounds of gold, and three thousand eight hundred and twelve pounds of silver, deposited November, 1819. The second was made December, 1821, and consisted of nineteen hundred and seven pounds of gold, and twelve hundred and eighty-eight pounds of silver; also jewels, obtained in St. Louis in exchange for silver to save transportation, and valued at $13,000.
The above is securely packed in iron pots, with iron covers. The vault is roughly lined with stone, and the vessels rest on solid stone, and are covered with others. Paper number "1" describes the exact locality of the vault so that no difficulty will be had in finding it.
THE LOCALITY OF THE VAULT - (This has never been decoded)
71,194,38,1701,89,76,11,83,1629,48,94,63,132,16
975,14,40,64,27,81,139,213,63,90,1120,8,15,3,12
758,485,604,230,436,664,582,150,251,284,308,231
401,370,11,101,305,139,189,17,33,88,208,193,145
918,263,28,500,538,356,117,136,219,27,176,130,1
436,65,84,200,283,118,320,138,36,416,280,15,71,
39,88,61,304,12,21,24,283,134,92,63,246,486,682
18,64,463,474,131,160,79,73,440,95,18,64,581,34
81,12,103,820,62,116,97,103,862,70,60,1317,471,
346,36,150,59,568,614,13,120,63,219,812,2160,17
872,15,28,170,88,4,30,44,112,18,147,436,195,320
8,120,305,42,58,461,44,106,301,13,408,680,93,86
102,38,416,89,71,216,728,965,818,2,38,121,195,1
55,131,234,361,824,5,81,623,48,961,19,26,33,10,
275,346,201,206,86,36,219,324,829,840,64,326,19
919,861,326,985,233,64,68,232,431,960,50,29,81,
81,360,36,51,62,194,78,60,200,314,676,112,4,28,
921,1060,464,895,10,6,66,119,38,41,49,602,423,9
14,23,111,109,62,31,501,823,216,280,34,24,150,1
17,340,19,242,31,86,234,140,607,115,33,191,67,1
121,67,95,122,216,548,96,11,201,77,364,218,65,6
10,98,34,119,56,216,119,71,218,1164,1496,1817,5
540,232,22,141,617,84,290,80,46,207,411,150,29,
39,261,543,897,624,18,212,416,127,931,19,4,63,9
230,460,538,19,27,88,612,1431,90,716,275,74,83,
1300,1706,814,221,132,40,102,34,868,975,1101,84
324,403,912,227,936,447,55,86,34,43,212,107,96,
428,601,203,124,95,216,814,2906,654,820,2,301,1
202,35,10,2,41,17,84,221,736,820,214,11,60,760.
I had DirecPC for a while and bailed out of it. In addition to the disadvantages I see others listing here, they had what they called a "Fair Use" policy that choked down your personal data flow per day once you hit a certain limit - around 1 or 2 MP3 files worth, roughly. Sure, you get 400 Kbs, but only for the fraction of a second required to download a static web page. Sustained high speed downloads? Forget it.
At 8:19 AM EST Anonymous Coward posted DeCSS on this forum, making the ***Slashdot site itself*** part of this mess. Will Commander Taco be dragged away in chains for running a pirate info site? Will Slashdot be shut down by the Feds if Hemos refuses to delete the posting on First Amendement grounds? Will the 8:19 posting itself quietly disappear? Just where does this end?
... is that few care about it anymore. There are three times the number of people talking about putting wireless Macs in space (see nearby other Slashdot story) than there are people talking here about putting colonies in space.