Longer lifetime...200-300 years. There is just too much to do and time flies way too fast. One minute you are a 20 year old college student, the next minute you are 40 years old, running out the clock.
If your rovers were small enough, you might be able to make a gun-launched or gun-assisted scheme work. If you could engineer your probe/launch vehicle to withstand 20 Gs, for example, a linear acceleration at that level would get you to Mach 1.2ish in 400 meters or so. You come out of the barrel cleanly in ramjet territory and, what's better past the point where your shock wave angles are highly dependent on Mach number. You could start out in subcritical mode for the engine and progress through critical and supercritical, buying hardware simplicity with some loss of efficiency. You might even be able to shed some of the diffuser cowling in stages at the lip for a Q&D variable geometry engine. By the tme you hit M = 5-7, you'd probably be out of the atmosphere and would have to switch to rocket mode anyhow. Your mass fraction for the booster stage would be pretty amazing because you'd shaved 2000-2500 m/s off your delta-V with the gun/air-breathing phase. (That matters a lot to the rocket equation. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to work out the actual benefit.)
The limiting factors here are obtaining a guidance and control system that is small enough to fit down your (admittedly large bore) low-pressure launch gun. Also, your gun would have to be pretty dang straight or your vehicle would have to be wrapped in a vibration-absorbing sabot.
The benefits are: 1) Once you have the gun, you can launch as many as you like; 2) Mass fraction as mentioned above; 3)The possibility of production-lining launch vehicle construction.
Not that I've given this any thought.
BTW, Bruckner et. al. at the University of Washington have been working on a ram accelerator, a type of launch gun, for years. The only thing slowing them is funding. They omit an airbreathing stage in favor of obtaining all the Delta-V in one shot, subjecting the payload to 700-1e3 Gs.
This issue also concerns studies with non-results in all scientific fields. The pressure to produce "results" causes two types of problems:
1. Massive fudging of data to achieve (statistical) significance.
2. Inefficiencies due to researchers repeating failing experiments because they can't learn from the unpublished non-results of others.
It's fundamentally a problem of human psychology (reputation/face saving), and of organizational design, which sets up the rewards context (universities, tenure process, journals, etc.) The system is pretty outdated and broken for the modern pace of information production, imho.
In my opinion, if you don't have money to pay them yet, they're a co-founder, even if you've already been working on things for a year. General rules for finding co-founders apply.
Yea, building a massive electromagnetic riffle along the slope of a mountain in a third world country to repeatedly launch vehicles into space has been on my todo list since i first read "the moon is a harsh mistress."
It is worth noting that "Always drink responsibly" is the alcohol industry's PSA slogan. It was almost certainly chosen because it contains "Always drink" as opposed to being effective. This is why you see it in industry supported ads instead of the MADD ads.
It's not better, it's _awesomer_. I'm so tired of all this scalable, readable, fully tested code (which of course is good), that I find these small, wicked snippets so entertaining for the hacker part of my brain; and after all, this is the true reason I code: for fun.
Yeah, exactly. The help command should also have a dozen useless esoteric options but no obvious way to actually get any help. Here are some suggestions :)
-B Don't not use non-buffered IO for not displaying output
-e Pipe help output through rot13 transformation
-G Display output in psychedelic ANSI format
-w Produce ASCII histogram of help task heap allocations.
-Z Format output so that the number of columns is a prime number
-Q Run help in daemon mode
-X1 Translate help to Klingon
-X2 Translate help to Esperanto
-X12 Translate help to Esperanto, then to Klingon
-X21 Translate help to Klingon, then to Esperanto
2. Music making is very accessible (offhand, I can't think of any condition which would prevent one from playing music at all)
3. If you have the dedication to get good at making programs, you also have the drive to get at least half-decent at making music
Result: good programmers tend to be musicians. Alan Kay was once a professional jazz guitarist; I don't find this coincidental.
The problem I have with music-anything analogies is that "music" covers such gigantic scope that you can make all kinds of generalizations about it, and they'll be true for some kind of music. Individualistic? Collaborative? High-tech? Low-tech? Intricate and exact? Improvised and free-form? Notated? Oral tradition? Hey, we've got that, too! My field is just like music!
This story is exactly why TechCrunch is such a joke. You can't make giant, sweeping statements like: "The Day Live Web Video Streaming Failed Us" and then, in the second sentence of your story, deliver a bunch of incredibly impressive stats about how successful the various streams were.
I like how the last paragraph reveals the true point of this post though. It's just a veiled advertisement for another lame P2P video service.
How does anyone take these people seriously? It's kind of fun to watch them flop around making mountains out of mole hills but anyone who considers these jokers to be a legitimate news source should re-think how they get their information.
