FTFA: the White House is more intrigued by missions to asteroids and Phobos and Deimos as a precursor to a human landing on the Red Planet in the distant future.
This is great news. A mission to Phobos would make a lot of sense. It has a lower delta V than a moon or Mars landing. It is estimated to require half the propellant and hardware weight compared to a mission to the surface, half the mission cost, and significantly lower risk due to the fact that no surface manned lander is required. More importantly, it has less than half the engineering and development cost (and time). The other big plus is that there is no rotation so the mission would be protected from radiation by Phobos on one side and Mars on the other. The only question is whether the Russians will beat the US and get a manned mission there first. They have been looking at going to Phobos for a while now. They have an unmanned mission going there and returning with samples scheduled for 2011.
Some have commented that Space Ship Two is only a thrill ride. That may be so for now but the company is already on record as saying that if SS2 is successful, then there will be a SS3 that will be orbital. There is some speculation that SS3 will be only hypersonic point to point but if there is money in it, I am sure Branson will go for an orbital verson some day.
In Canada Swine Flu/H1N1 has become the dominant flu strain circulating representing 99.2% of all flu cases diagnosed. This is good news as 5,000 Canadians died last year from the seasonal flu while this year only 250 have died from flu since April. If 4,500 less people will die from flu this year, it makes you wonder what all the panic was over?
I have abandoned my landline and don't miss it one bit. As for teaching a 3 year old to dial a blackberry, that is not a problem as their are bluetooth handsets that are exactly the same as as POTS handsets except that they connect to a cell instead of a landline.
If the power goes out I will just charge it in my car from time to time. Moreover when the power is out I will not only still have voice but also email and internet where the everyone else's computers are the paperweights. In this day and age, internet access is essential and my blackberry keeps me connected everywhere all the time wether I am at home or on my boat.
I think eventually smartphones will eventually replace not only POTS but also home computers. As soon as they figure out a way to connect my blackberry to my monitor, external hard drive and keyboard I will not need a home PC anymore.
I finally realized that we did not need a home phone since everyone in my house had their own cell phone. My Blackberry uses my wifi network when I am at home and for $15/month I have have unlimited local and long distance through the Rogers talkspot plan. Now I don't miss any calls since there is only one number to reach me no matter where I am. I even have a bluetooth handset phone that automatically connects when I am in the house. Its great not having to answer the phone and find out the call was for my kids.
I know that most of my Internet access on the Blackberry goes through a central server (BES for companies or BIS for individuals) and that data gets compressed en route. The primary reason, of course, is so pages can load more quickly, but it also has a side effect of requiring less data be transferred, therefore less load on the network.
I had heard Blackberry has compression on their systems but I think it is more than that alone. The Blackberry is also very efficient with its polling and handshaking. I am not sure how Apple does it but my Blackberry data ususage every month is low. I never use more than 100 megs of my 500 meg data limit. I hear that Rogers iPhone plan comes with 1 gig per month and people still struggle to keep within it with only moderate ususage.
The problem with a manned mission to land on Mars or even orbiting it is how to protect against radiation. There is no ozone layer or magnetic field on Mars so one big solar flare and the crew are fatally exposed. Landing on Phobos on the other hand has some huge advantages. One side of Phobos constantly faces Mars so landing they would have Mars on one side and the bulk of Phobos on the other to shield against radiation. In addition there is negligible gravity so the Delta v is less than landing on the Earth's moon or Mars. That savings to the energy budget could be used for a faster transit time which again reduces the risk of radiation. There is also a possibility that there is water on Phobos which could be used for fuel production, possible missions to the Mars surface and perhaps even enough to support a colony. Landing on Phobos is not as sensational as landing on Mars but what is the use of sending a crew on a suicide mission that would hurt spaceflight more than help? Phobos provides the best solution for a survivable mission.
If you wiped out all life on the earth with an asteroid, no matter what, it would be more habitable than the moon.
Yes and then it could be resettled by the survivors from the moon and/or Mars. A few weeks ago Jupiter was hit by something that left a scar the size of the pacific ocean yet no one seen it coming. Then there are the 50,000 nukes waiting for someone to panic and fire off. Or swine flu that is one mutation away from wiping out everyone. It is scary that that could happen to the earth at any time without warning to build shelters in mines. Werner Von Braun knew the dangers 50 years ago and mapped out a plan to colonize the solar system. It would have cost a lot less than the trillions of dollars squandered on the cold war, Iraq I & II etc. What value can you place on the survival of the human race?
And when the sun expands to a red giant, what then?
I am hoping for anti-grav or/fusion/warp drives to be invented by then so we can escape to the stars. For now I am worried about comets that we do not see coming like the one that just hit Saturn a few weeks ago.
Off earth colonies are the only way to insure that all of mankind will not be wiped out by a extinction event like a comet/asteroid strike. One major strike and that is it for mankind. A lunar colony is a cheap alternative for the continuance of the human race. Eventually other colonies could be set up. There are other locations that have even a lower delta v than the moon. In any event for now our only insurance is Colbert's DNA riding on the space station but as noted above, the space station will be deorbited in a few years. $100 billion burnt up with very little science to show for it. Add the shuttle development costs of $176 billion and you could have paid for a lunar colony. Had the money used for the shuttle been spent on nuclear space propulsion we would have a ship with a 1,000 ton payload instead of a shuttle with 60,000 lb payload. We need a colony that is eventually self sustaining for the continuance of mankind. As they say, the meek shall inherit the earth. The rest of us will escape to the stars.
OMFG I still have a scar from my swine flu vacination that I was forced to have when I was in the Army in 1976. My arm swelled up with pus as if I had a boil. I was sick for days but at least I was not hospitalized like some of my friends. Wired has an article about those days. 1 person died from the actual flu while 30+ people died from the vacination. The nation wide vacination program cost $135 mil($500 mil in todays dollars). I hope they improved the vacine from those days because mine hurt like a bitch.
CNN reports that President Obama said Monday that the swine flu outbreak is a 'cause for concern and requires a heightened state of alert,' but is not a 'cause for alarm.' I for one agree with him. No one has died in the US from swine flu yet the media is portraying it as a major disaster. How is this any worse than the regular influenza that causes approximately 36,000 deaths and more than 200,000 hospitalizations every year in America?
As a commercial software developer who works very hard and doesn't want to see my work made available for free, why would I approve of what TPB are doing?
Well actually, if you are developing business software, you could benefit from a large number of people trying your software and liking it. They then get their bosses to buy it for their office. There is no money sueing individual file sharers but if they catch a business using pirated software they can be sued for millions. Developers make money from share ware. Bands make money from concerts. DVD and movie ticket sales are booming. Music is free but iTunes is thriving. I would think that there are lots of developers that would think that TPB is doing them a service just like youtube and google provide a service. I am not saying it is right but that is the way it is and the only ones complaining are the big monopolies.
Kim Jong Il: Now you see, the changing of the worrd is inevitabre! Lisa: I'm sorry, it's what? Kim Jong Il: Inevit, inevitabre. Lisa: One more time. Kim Jong Il: [shouts] Inevitabre! Things are inevitabrey going to change! Goddamnit, open your f**king ears!
No it won't. One of the rules of naming such semi-permanent structures is that they're not often named after living people.
So who is to say that the name Colbert refers to a living person? There is a Colbert County in Alabama and of course the famous Jean-Baptiste Colbert who served as the French minister of finance from 1665 to 1683 under the rule of King Louis XIV. There are also:
Charles Colbert, marquis de Croissy (1625-1696), French diplomatist, brother of Jean-Baptiste Colbert;
Claudette Colbert (1903-1996), American actress;
Conn Colbert (1896-1916), Irish rebel;
Edouard Colbert (1774-1853), Napoleonic French Baron and leader of the Red Lancers;
Edwin Harris Colbert (1905-2001), American vertebrate paleontologist;
Holmes Colbert, developer of the Chickasaw Nation's constitution in the 1850s and
Jacques-Nicolas Colbert (1655-1707), French churchman, son of Jean-Baptiste Colbert. No way did I voted 30 - 40 times for Stephen Colbert.
Minus 40C is not uncommon even in central Canada. We are so far away from any large body of water that it gets colder here than in parts of the Artic. I recall -54C back in 1974 and then the sap in the trees did freeze expanding the truck to the point where the tree cracked. Not really an explosion but when you are camping out in the woods it sounds loud enough to seem like an explosion. The lakes freeze but not to the bottom and the wildlife seem to make out ok. The deer seem to have more trouble with the deep snow than the cold.
Minus 12C. Meh. We play hockey with just a sweater at -12C.
The reason it would be a one way trip is that there is minimal atmosphere to protect from solar radiation. That plus the radiation during the trip means that any crew would die from cancer within a few years even if they returned to earth so why bother bringing them back? Volunteers would have a shortened lifespan but make it to the history books.
50 years from now we will find out that Stephen Colbert negotiated an end to the strike but did not want to take any credit for it just like his dad did.
The X-15 rocketplane, an air-launched manned research vehicle with a maximum speed of more than Mach 6 and a maximum altitude of more than fifty miles, was designed in the 50's and flew 199 flights well into the 60's.
The Aurora is the rumoured mach 6+ successor of the the SR-71. Some speculate that it was using pulse detonation propulsion but nothing has ever been confirmed. Some say that the program was cancelled as it cost a billion dollars per flight!
Technology is good at some things but does have its drawbacks. The more complex a system is, the more likely it will break down at the wrong moment. On a tank the problem is not that bad. Technology helps but there are multiple backup systems so even if all the computers fail, you can still fire the guns. A M829A3 120mm APFSDS round travels at 1,575 m/sec so at ranges up to 2,500m, whatever you point at will die.
As for hacking into a tank's computer, it is impossible. The Tactical Coms system employs very heavy duty encryption plus frequency hopping on voice and data transmissions.
Last night Colbert announced that he would be filing his papers for the Democratic primary but not for the Republican. He also mentioned that he has to keep his total campaign spending under $5,000 or else he will risk breaking election laws. So there is his plan. He can raise and spend $5,000 on his campaign and still keep his TV show. We will find out tonight on his show if the Dems accept him for the primary ballot.
So wait a minute, doesn't every disease have the chance to mutate into something much worse not just avian flu? Are there not super bugs who are already resistant to antibiotics? What if one of them combined into a flesh eating zombie disease? Everyday millions of bad things could happen and we are not panicking over all of them.
The solution for avian flu is simple. Stop office workers from handling live poultry and you'll prevent the only known vector for contracting the disease.
Slashdot Mirror
FTFA: the White House is more intrigued by missions to asteroids and Phobos and Deimos as a precursor to a human landing on the Red Planet in the distant future.
This is great news. A mission to Phobos would make a lot of sense. It has a lower delta V than a moon or Mars landing. It is estimated to require half the propellant and hardware weight compared to a mission to the surface, half the mission cost, and significantly lower risk due to the fact that no surface manned lander is required. More importantly, it has less than half the engineering and development cost (and time). The other big plus is that there is no rotation so the mission would be protected from radiation by Phobos on one side and Mars on the other. The only question is whether the Russians will beat the US and get a manned mission there first. They have been looking at going to Phobos for a while now. They have an unmanned mission going there and returning with samples scheduled for 2011.
Some have commented that Space Ship Two is only a thrill ride. That may be so for now but the company is already on record as saying that if SS2 is successful, then there will be a SS3 that will be orbital. There is some speculation that SS3 will be only hypersonic point to point but if there is money in it, I am sure Branson will go for an orbital verson some day.
In Canada Swine Flu/H1N1 has become the dominant flu strain circulating representing 99.2% of all flu cases diagnosed. This is good news as 5,000 Canadians died last year from the seasonal flu while this year only 250 have died from flu since April. If 4,500 less people will die from flu this year, it makes you wonder what all the panic was over?
I have abandoned my landline and don't miss it one bit. As for teaching a 3 year old to dial a blackberry, that is not a problem as their are bluetooth handsets that are exactly the same as as POTS handsets except that they connect to a cell instead of a landline.
If the power goes out I will just charge it in my car from time to time. Moreover when the power is out I will not only still have voice but also email and internet where the everyone else's computers are the paperweights. In this day and age, internet access is essential and my blackberry keeps me connected everywhere all the time wether I am at home or on my boat.
I think eventually smartphones will eventually replace not only POTS but also home computers. As soon as they figure out a way to connect my blackberry to my monitor, external hard drive and keyboard I will not need a home PC anymore.
I finally realized that we did not need a home phone since everyone in my house had their own cell phone. My Blackberry uses my wifi network when I am at home and for $15/month I have have unlimited local and long distance through the Rogers talkspot plan. Now I don't miss any calls since there is only one number to reach me no matter where I am. I even have a bluetooth handset phone that automatically connects when I am in the house. Its great not having to answer the phone and find out the call was for my kids.
I know that most of my Internet access on the Blackberry goes through a central server (BES for companies or BIS for individuals) and that data gets compressed en route. The primary reason, of course, is so pages can load more quickly, but it also has a side effect of requiring less data be transferred, therefore less load on the network.
I had heard Blackberry has compression on their systems but I think it is more than that alone. The Blackberry is also very efficient with its polling and handshaking. I am not sure how Apple does it but my Blackberry data ususage every month is low. I never use more than 100 megs of my 500 meg data limit. I hear that Rogers iPhone plan comes with 1 gig per month and people still struggle to keep within it with only moderate ususage.
The problem with a manned mission to land on Mars or even orbiting it is how to protect against radiation. There is no ozone layer or magnetic field on Mars so one big solar flare and the crew are fatally exposed. Landing on Phobos on the other hand has some huge advantages. One side of Phobos constantly faces Mars so landing they would have Mars on one side and the bulk of Phobos on the other to shield against radiation. In addition there is negligible gravity so the Delta v is less than landing on the Earth's moon or Mars. That savings to the energy budget could be used for a faster transit time which again reduces the risk of radiation. There is also a possibility that there is water on Phobos which could be used for fuel production, possible missions to the Mars surface and perhaps even enough to support a colony. Landing on Phobos is not as sensational as landing on Mars but what is the use of sending a crew on a suicide mission that would hurt spaceflight more than help? Phobos provides the best solution for a survivable mission.
If you wiped out all life on the earth with an asteroid, no matter what, it would be more habitable than the moon.
Yes and then it could be resettled by the survivors from the moon and/or Mars. A few weeks ago Jupiter was hit by something that left a scar the size of the pacific ocean yet no one seen it coming. Then there are the 50,000 nukes waiting for someone to panic and fire off. Or swine flu that is one mutation away from wiping out everyone. It is scary that that could happen to the earth at any time without warning to build shelters in mines. Werner Von Braun knew the dangers 50 years ago and mapped out a plan to colonize the solar system. It would have cost a lot less than the trillions of dollars squandered on the cold war, Iraq I & II etc. What value can you place on the survival of the human race?
I am hoping for anti-grav or/fusion/warp drives to be invented by then so we can escape to the stars. For now I am worried about comets that we do not see coming like the one that just hit Saturn a few weeks ago.
Off earth colonies are the only way to insure that all of mankind will not be wiped out by a extinction event like a comet/asteroid strike. One major strike and that is it for mankind. A lunar colony is a cheap alternative for the continuance of the human race. Eventually other colonies could be set up. There are other locations that have even a lower delta v than the moon. In any event for now our only insurance is Colbert's DNA riding on the space station but as noted above, the space station will be deorbited in a few years. $100 billion burnt up with very little science to show for it. Add the shuttle development costs of $176 billion and you could have paid for a lunar colony. Had the money used for the shuttle been spent on nuclear space propulsion we would have a ship with a 1,000 ton payload instead of a shuttle with 60,000 lb payload. We need a colony that is eventually self sustaining for the continuance of mankind. As they say, the meek shall inherit the earth. The rest of us will escape to the stars.
OMFG I still have a scar from my swine flu vacination that I was forced to have when I was in the Army in 1976. My arm swelled up with pus as if I had a boil. I was sick for days but at least I was not hospitalized like some of my friends. Wired has an article about those days. 1 person died from the actual flu while 30+ people died from the vacination. The nation wide vacination program cost $135 mil($500 mil in todays dollars). I hope they improved the vacine from those days because mine hurt like a bitch.
CNN reports that President Obama said Monday that the swine flu outbreak is a 'cause for concern and requires a heightened state of alert,' but is not a 'cause for alarm.' I for one agree with him. No one has died in the US from swine flu yet the media is portraying it as a major disaster. How is this any worse than the regular influenza that causes approximately 36,000 deaths and more than 200,000 hospitalizations every year in America?
I find it ironic that on the same day TPB staff is found guilty, that Google annouces that it will provide full length hollywood movies and TV shows for free.
As a commercial software developer who works very hard and doesn't want to see my work made available for free, why would I approve of what TPB are doing?
Well actually, if you are developing business software, you could benefit from a large number of people trying your software and liking it. They then get their bosses to buy it for their office. There is no money sueing individual file sharers but if they catch a business using pirated software they can be sued for millions. Developers make money from share ware. Bands make money from concerts. DVD and movie ticket sales are booming. Music is free but iTunes is thriving. I would think that there are lots of developers that would think that TPB is doing them a service just like youtube and google provide a service. I am not saying it is right but that is the way it is and the only ones complaining are the big monopolies.
Well said! I wish I had mod points to your post up.
Kim Jong Il: Now you see, the changing of the worrd is inevitabre!
Lisa: I'm sorry, it's what?
Kim Jong Il: Inevit, inevitabre.
Lisa: One more time.
Kim Jong Il: [shouts] Inevitabre! Things are inevitabrey going to change! Goddamnit, open your f**king ears!
So who is to say that the name Colbert refers to a living person? There is a Colbert County in Alabama and of course the famous Jean-Baptiste Colbert who served as the French minister of finance from 1665 to 1683 under the rule of King Louis XIV. There are also: Charles Colbert, marquis de Croissy (1625-1696), French diplomatist, brother of Jean-Baptiste Colbert; Claudette Colbert (1903-1996), American actress; Conn Colbert (1896-1916), Irish rebel; Edouard Colbert (1774-1853), Napoleonic French Baron and leader of the Red Lancers; Edwin Harris Colbert (1905-2001), American vertebrate paleontologist; Holmes Colbert, developer of the Chickasaw Nation's constitution in the 1850s and Jacques-Nicolas Colbert (1655-1707), French churchman, son of Jean-Baptiste Colbert. No way did I voted 30 - 40 times for Stephen Colbert.
Minus 40C is not uncommon even in central Canada. We are so far away from any large body of water that it gets colder here than in parts of the Artic. I recall -54C back in 1974 and then the sap in the trees did freeze expanding the truck to the point where the tree cracked. Not really an explosion but when you are camping out in the woods it sounds loud enough to seem like an explosion. The lakes freeze but not to the bottom and the wildlife seem to make out ok. The deer seem to have more trouble with the deep snow than the cold.
Minus 12C. Meh. We play hockey with just a sweater at -12C.
The reason it would be a one way trip is that there is minimal atmosphere to protect from solar radiation. That plus the radiation during the trip means that any crew would die from cancer within a few years even if they returned to earth so why bother bringing them back? Volunteers would have a shortened lifespan but make it to the history books.
50 years from now we will find out that Stephen Colbert negotiated an end to the strike but did not want to take any credit for it just like his dad did.
The X-15 rocketplane, an air-launched manned research vehicle with a maximum speed of more than Mach 6 and a maximum altitude of more than fifty miles, was designed in the 50's and flew 199 flights well into the 60's.
The Aurora is the rumoured mach 6+ successor of the the SR-71. Some speculate that it was using pulse detonation propulsion but nothing has ever been confirmed. Some say that the program was cancelled as it cost a billion dollars per flight!
Technology is good at some things but does have its drawbacks. The more complex a system is, the more likely it will break down at the wrong moment. On a tank the problem is not that bad. Technology helps but there are multiple backup systems so even if all the computers fail, you can still fire the guns. A M829A3 120mm APFSDS round travels at 1,575 m/sec so at ranges up to 2,500m, whatever you point at will die.
As for hacking into a tank's computer, it is impossible. The Tactical Coms system employs very heavy duty encryption plus frequency hopping on voice and data transmissions.
Last night Colbert announced that he would be filing his papers for the Democratic primary but not for the Republican. He also mentioned that he has to keep his total campaign spending under $5,000 or else he will risk breaking election laws. So there is his plan. He can raise and spend $5,000 on his campaign and still keep his TV show. We will find out tonight on his show if the Dems accept him for the primary ballot.
I will seek and find you.
I shall take you to bed and have my way with you.
I will make you ache, shake & sweat until you moan & groan.
I will make you beg for mercy, beg for me to stop.
I will exhaust you to the point that you will be relieved when I'm finished with you.
And, when I am finished, you will be weak for days.
All my love,
The Flu
Each year between 50 - 100 people per million of population die from the various forms of influenza that are commonly refered to as flu. Since 1997, only 50 people who had close contact with birds have died from Avian flu.
So wait a minute, doesn't every disease have the chance to mutate into something much worse not just avian flu? Are there not super bugs who are already resistant to antibiotics? What if one of them combined into a flesh eating zombie disease? Everyday millions of bad things could happen and we are not panicking over all of them.
The solution for avian flu is simple. Stop office workers from handling live poultry and you'll prevent the only known vector for contracting the disease.