SpaceX is blowing the competition away. Even the Chinese have said they can't match SpaceX's prices. ULA will continue building Deltas and Atlases for a while yet, but once their current launch manifests are cleared, they'll have a tough time selling any more. Their only hope of survival is if SpaceX can't ramp up production fast enough to devour the entire market. In the meantime, other "NewSpace" vendors are getting into the game, making life even tougher for the "legacy" crowd. I just wonder how long it will take before SLS gets canceled.
I don't know how you got onto/. without knowing what a Lagrange Point is, but yeah it's more-or-less gravity neutral there. (More so at L4 and L5 than the others, but in any case you need only minimal fuel for station keeping.) And that makes it a good place for a fuel depot. In fact, it's better than refueling in LEO if you're using fuel mined from asteroids, because you need less fuel (on average) to get that fuel to L5 than to LEO. And the reverse is true as well... In order to refuel along the way you need to get either the fuel to LEO or the spacecraft to L5, and it's probably a lot more economical to do the latter than the former. (Depends on the mission of course, but for Mars, definitely.)
Personally, I'm just happy to see NASA looking at long-term plans that aren't focused on a BTDT "flags & footprints" mission with no follow up. Turning an asteroid into a space station is a good idea, and a major step toward robust space infrastructure. Ultimately I reckon the bulk of this work will be done by private industry, but it's good to have NASA get out in front of this trend. Even just announcing this plan will get private-sector resources working on it. (What they should do is offer an open 5-year contract for fuel delivery at L5 at, say, 1-10/th their cost of launching it from Earth.)
Even just setting up an outpost there at L5 would create a "demand pull" toward supplying its needs. The nascent "NewSpace" industry is champing at the bit, waiting for this sort of opportunity. A reliable commitment from government would go a long way in this sector.
I mailed in my absentee ballot for Black Hawk County this afternoon. However, I had to use a FWAB because I never received the ballot I requested a month ago. I waited until the last day for that ballot, and finally went to the local (de-facto) embassy for Plan B.
Every time I always check the box to continue receiving ballots at my current address, but somehow that never seems to "stick", I always have to proactively request a ballot.
Frankly, this is a national embarrassment for the USA. Our election process is so fucked up with machines and such. Here in Taiwan (where I live) they have no machines and use only paper ballots. After the polls close, they hand-count the ballots in public view and results are usually complete within 2~3 hours.
This reminds me of another method using light instead of gas, which was described at a recent space conference. The idea was to pulse laser light toward the west (since most space debris is traveling predominantly eastward), and over time the photons alone could provide enough delta-v to nudge things out of orbit more quickly. For the big stuff they have other plans in mind, such as electrostatic tethers and micro-rockets. But for little stuff, the light pulse would be a cost-effective "shotgun" approach to deal with the cloud of crap that's too small to track.
Sorry I can't find a link at the moment. I saw it a few months ago on YouTube from either NewSpace or SpaceUp, or ISDC or one of the other conferences in the last year or two.
Windows is a piece of crap, but still much better for a desktop workstation than any Linux (or UNIX) I have come across.
Wait, what? Windows is a piece of crap, but still better than Linux? I think at least one of these words does not mean what you think it means.;-)
I started with Slackware in '95, and tried various other distros over the years, though I couldn't name them all or tell you the order. RedHat, Debian, Gentoo, CentOS, FreeBSD, SuSE... it's all a hazy blur now... I kept a dual-boot Windows partition around for a while, but used it less and less, and finally stopped using it in the early 2000's. (I still have WinXP in a VirtualBox, just for SlingBox, but hardly ever use it these days.)
At this point, it's hard for me to imagine ever going back to "non-free" software. I've been using FOSS almost exclusively for over 10 years already. In recent years I've settled on the various *buntu distros, depending on which desktop is less "sucky" at any given time.
I agree on most points, but I suspect you're not up-to-date on the latest battery tech. Liquid-metal batteries offer grid-level storage at affordable prices. (Google-up Donald Sadoway's TED-Talk on this topic for more info.)
Now you're just being obtuse. The point here is grass vs. grain. Cows are not evolved to eat grain, whether it's corn seeds or wheat seeds or whatever sort of "grass" seeds you choose. Cows are essentially mobile fermenting vats with legs; their purpose in life is to eat lots of cellulose (not grain) and convert it into meat, methane, and poop. Feeding them grain not only fattens them faster, it also screws up their digestion and nutrition.
Liquid-metal batteries are reliable and inexpensive (or so their inventor claims). It will be a while yet before they're widely available, but Khosla Ventures has invested in a startup to bring them to market. It may not be the silver bullet, but it will help.
It's time for people to start learning about permaculture. The "green revolution" is nearing its end, as the petroleum on which it depends reaches peak production. The way forward is to grow as much of your own food as possible, buy your food as locally and seasonally as possible, and promote the adoption of sustainable farming practices, either via the political process or by directly supporting local farmers who use them.
Permaculture can be practiced through various methods in almost any type of climate, and it's scalable from a backyard plot to a thousand-acre spread. It uses no chemical inputs, requires far less water, and actually builds up more topsoil instead of eroding it out to the ocean.
A few examples to check out:
1. Managed grazing. Joel Salatin's Polyface Farm is a prime example of this method which produces insane amounts of beef, pork, and poultry on just 100 acres of grassland. (The average farm in their county gets 80 cow-days per acre; Polyface gets 400!)
2. Aquaponics. Will Allen's "Growing Power" co-op in Milwaukee is a great example of aquaponics, which is a cross between aquaculture (fish farming) and hydroponics. Basically, fish produce waste which feeds the plants, and plants clean the water to keep the fish healthy.
3. Pasture-cropping (aka "no-kill" farming). Australian Colin Seis is credited with inventing (or rediscovering) this technique of planting row crops on pasture land without plowing-under the grass. Instead, the grass is grazed or mowed prior to planting, which gives the crop plants a head start before the grass comes back.
There's a ton of info about all this stuff on the web, especially on YouTube. Check it out.
There's a farmer in Virginia who claims his permaculture techniques could sequester all the CO2 emitted by humans since the industrial revolution in less than 10 years. His name is Joel Salatin and the technique he invented is called mob-stocking herbivorous solar conversion lignified carbon sequestration fertilization. In the 50 years the Salatins have been farming this way, they've added 8 inches of topsoil to their land (this is how the carbon is sequestered). Salatin is featured in Michael Pollan's book, "The Omnivore's Dilemma." Pollan gives a brief introduction to the farm in this video among others.
DE designers should be retired, just like the guys who gave us the basic clutch+brake+accelerator layout of pedals in cars. The basic combo of windows, widgets, & menus has served us well enough for decades already. There is nothing "more intuitive" waiting to be discovered... at least not as long as we're still using keyboards and mice.
FFS, quit mucking about with "innovation" on the desktop!!! (Remember KISS? "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"...?? Any of this ringing any bells?) If anything, you DE designers should be more concerned with convergence than differentiation. Every time you hear the screams of millions of users crying out against the latest "New-Paradigm"[tm] from MS or Apple, that should be your cue to GIVE PEOPLE WHAT THEY WANT -- ie: what they are USED TO -- not an "Even-Newer-Paradigm".
If you've got time on your hands, and are looking for something to do, please spend it on improving your favorite apps. The UI does not need anything "new", nor do the users want anything new or unfamiliar. It's more than enough hassle to keep up with "innovations" in the app space... please don't make us learn new tricks in the WM too!
Speaking of farmland, there's a farmer in Virginia who claims his permaculture techniques could sequester all the CO2 emitted by humans since the industrial revolution in less than 10 years. His name is Joel Salatin and the technique he invented is called mob-stocking herbivorous solar conversion lignified carbon sequestration fertilization. In the 50 years the Salatins have been farming this way, they've added 8 inches of topsoil to their land (this is how the carbon is sequestered). Salatin is featured in Michael Pollan's book, "The Omnivore's Dilemma." Pollan gives a brief introduction to the farm in this video among others.
Similar to Prof. Albert Bartlett's lecture on exponential growth (above), Chris Martenson's Crash Course is an expansion on the same theme which ties it all together with the debt-money system, peak oil, etc.. Well worth the time.
While that would indeed be better than the current fleet of water-cooled reactors, I'm skeptical of sodium-cooled IFRs, given their less-than-stellar track record over the years. IMHO, molten salt is the best way forward. LFTRs have gotten some attention lately, and I'm all in favor. But there's another MSR variant being developed now that is specifically designed to use our existing waste stockpile as its fuel, called WAMSR (waste annihilating molten-salt reactor).
Um, didn't NASA have a "'dragon' style vehicle concept" about 45 years ago? I mean SpaceX is hardly shy about their gratitude for "standing on the shoulders" of NASA's previous achievements. And the basic "teardrop" form-factor is hardly original or unique among re-entry vehicles. But now that I think about it... what are you talking about? What "dragon-style" vehicle have they got? Are you talking about Cygnus? That's not like Dragon, it's just for cargo.
I look forward to Orbital's successful launch to ISS this fall, but to claim they're ahead of SpaceX in manned spaceflight is just wrong.
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SpaceX is blowing the competition away. Even the Chinese have said they can't match SpaceX's prices. ULA will continue building Deltas and Atlases for a while yet, but once their current launch manifests are cleared, they'll have a tough time selling any more. Their only hope of survival is if SpaceX can't ramp up production fast enough to devour the entire market. In the meantime, other "NewSpace" vendors are getting into the game, making life even tougher for the "legacy" crowd. I just wonder how long it will take before SLS gets canceled.
I don't know how you got onto /. without knowing what a Lagrange Point is, but yeah it's more-or-less gravity neutral there. (More so at L4 and L5 than the others, but in any case you need only minimal fuel for station keeping.) And that makes it a good place for a fuel depot. In fact, it's better than refueling in LEO if you're using fuel mined from asteroids, because you need less fuel (on average) to get that fuel to L5 than to LEO. And the reverse is true as well... In order to refuel along the way you need to get either the fuel to LEO or the spacecraft to L5, and it's probably a lot more economical to do the latter than the former. (Depends on the mission of course, but for Mars, definitely.)
Personally, I'm just happy to see NASA looking at long-term plans that aren't focused on a BTDT "flags & footprints" mission with no follow up. Turning an asteroid into a space station is a good idea, and a major step toward robust space infrastructure. Ultimately I reckon the bulk of this work will be done by private industry, but it's good to have NASA get out in front of this trend. Even just announcing this plan will get private-sector resources working on it. (What they should do is offer an open 5-year contract for fuel delivery at L5 at, say, 1-10/th their cost of launching it from Earth.)
Even just setting up an outpost there at L5 would create a "demand pull" toward supplying its needs. The nascent "NewSpace" industry is champing at the bit, waiting for this sort of opportunity. A reliable commitment from government would go a long way in this sector.
Read it again. They're not "unnamed" they're "unamed".
They wrote a "uname" daemon that's hosted on aerial drones. But of course there's a flame war over whether to use Kdrone or Gdrone... .
Unless you're using "tools" as a verb, there should be an "s" at the end of "hint." /grammar-nag
Citation please. I've never heard of voting problems in Black Hawk County, but I'm willing to look at your evidence.
I mailed in my absentee ballot for Black Hawk County this afternoon. However, I had to use a FWAB because I never received the ballot I requested a month ago. I waited until the last day for that ballot, and finally went to the local (de-facto) embassy for Plan B.
Every time I always check the box to continue receiving ballots at my current address, but somehow that never seems to "stick", I always have to proactively request a ballot.
Frankly, this is a national embarrassment for the USA. Our election process is so fucked up with machines and such. Here in Taiwan (where I live) they have no machines and use only paper ballots. After the polls close, they hand-count the ballots in public view and results are usually complete within 2~3 hours.
We can do better, folks. We must demand better.
So just volunteer for a charity group instead. Still looks good on the resume, and a lot of local groups are in need of all the help they can get.
I was thinking the same thing.
This reminds me of another method using light instead of gas, which was described at a recent space conference. The idea was to pulse laser light toward the west (since most space debris is traveling predominantly eastward), and over time the photons alone could provide enough delta-v to nudge things out of orbit more quickly. For the big stuff they have other plans in mind, such as electrostatic tethers and micro-rockets. But for little stuff, the light pulse would be a cost-effective "shotgun" approach to deal with the cloud of crap that's too small to track.
Sorry I can't find a link at the moment. I saw it a few months ago on YouTube from either NewSpace or SpaceUp, or ISDC or one of the other conferences in the last year or two.
Windows is a piece of crap, but still much better for a desktop workstation than any Linux (or UNIX) I have come across.
Wait, what? Windows is a piece of crap, but still better than Linux? I think at least one of these words does not mean what you think it means. ;-)
I started with Slackware in '95, and tried various other distros over the years, though I couldn't name them all or tell you the order. RedHat, Debian, Gentoo, CentOS, FreeBSD, SuSE... it's all a hazy blur now... I kept a dual-boot Windows partition around for a while, but used it less and less, and finally stopped using it in the early 2000's. (I still have WinXP in a VirtualBox, just for SlingBox, but hardly ever use it these days.)
At this point, it's hard for me to imagine ever going back to "non-free" software. I've been using FOSS almost exclusively for over 10 years already. In recent years I've settled on the various *buntu distros, depending on which desktop is less "sucky" at any given time.
I agree on most points, but I suspect you're not up-to-date on the latest battery tech. Liquid-metal batteries offer grid-level storage at affordable prices. (Google-up Donald Sadoway's TED-Talk on this topic for more info.)
Now you're just being obtuse. The point here is grass vs. grain. Cows are not evolved to eat grain, whether it's corn seeds or wheat seeds or whatever sort of "grass" seeds you choose. Cows are essentially mobile fermenting vats with legs; their purpose in life is to eat lots of cellulose (not grain) and convert it into meat, methane, and poop. Feeding them grain not only fattens them faster, it also screws up their digestion and nutrition.
Liquid-metal batteries are reliable and inexpensive (or so their inventor claims). It will be a while yet before they're widely available, but Khosla Ventures has invested in a startup to bring them to market. It may not be the silver bullet, but it will help.
It's time for people to start learning about permaculture. The "green revolution" is nearing its end, as the petroleum on which it depends reaches peak production. The way forward is to grow as much of your own food as possible, buy your food as locally and seasonally as possible, and promote the adoption of sustainable farming practices, either via the political process or by directly supporting local farmers who use them.
Permaculture can be practiced through various methods in almost any type of climate, and it's scalable from a backyard plot to a thousand-acre spread. It uses no chemical inputs, requires far less water, and actually builds up more topsoil instead of eroding it out to the ocean.
A few examples to check out:
1. Managed grazing. Joel Salatin's Polyface Farm is a prime example of this method which produces insane amounts of beef, pork, and poultry on just 100 acres of grassland. (The average farm in their county gets 80 cow-days per acre; Polyface gets 400!)
2. Aquaponics. Will Allen's "Growing Power" co-op in Milwaukee is a great example of aquaponics, which is a cross between aquaculture (fish farming) and hydroponics. Basically, fish produce waste which feeds the plants, and plants clean the water to keep the fish healthy.
3. Pasture-cropping (aka "no-kill" farming). Australian Colin Seis is credited with inventing (or rediscovering) this technique of planting row crops on pasture land without plowing-under the grass. Instead, the grass is grazed or mowed prior to planting, which gives the crop plants a head start before the grass comes back.
There's a ton of info about all this stuff on the web, especially on YouTube. Check it out.
I hope they find a use for it someday. Because the SLS (Senate Launch System) will never fly.
There's a farmer in Virginia who claims his permaculture techniques could sequester all the CO2 emitted by humans since the industrial revolution in less than 10 years. His name is Joel Salatin and the technique he invented is called mob-stocking herbivorous solar conversion lignified carbon sequestration fertilization. In the 50 years the Salatins have been farming this way, they've added 8 inches of topsoil to their land (this is how the carbon is sequestered). Salatin is featured in Michael Pollan's book, "The Omnivore's Dilemma." Pollan gives a brief introduction to the farm in this video among others.
DE designers should be retired, just like the guys who gave us the basic clutch+brake+accelerator layout of pedals in cars. The basic combo of windows, widgets, & menus has served us well enough for decades already. There is nothing "more intuitive" waiting to be discovered... at least not as long as we're still using keyboards and mice.
FFS, quit mucking about with "innovation" on the desktop!!! (Remember KISS? "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"...?? Any of this ringing any bells?) If anything, you DE designers should be more concerned with convergence than differentiation. Every time you hear the screams of millions of users crying out against the latest "New-Paradigm"[tm] from MS or Apple, that should be your cue to GIVE PEOPLE WHAT THEY WANT -- ie: what they are USED TO -- not an "Even-Newer-Paradigm".
If you've got time on your hands, and are looking for something to do, please spend it on improving your favorite apps. The UI does not need anything "new", nor do the users want anything new or unfamiliar. It's more than enough hassle to keep up with "innovations" in the app space... please don't make us learn new tricks in the WM too!
There's a Google Tech-Talk that got posted a few days ago, which is not specifically about this patent, but may shed some light on what they have in mind: The Distributed Camera: Modeling the World from Online Photos
With a period of just 7 days, you have to wonder how fast the little bugger is moving. Could be a significant fraction of C...?
Speaking of farmland, there's a farmer in Virginia who claims his permaculture techniques could sequester all the CO2 emitted by humans since the industrial revolution in less than 10 years. His name is Joel Salatin and the technique he invented is called mob-stocking herbivorous solar conversion lignified carbon sequestration fertilization. In the 50 years the Salatins have been farming this way, they've added 8 inches of topsoil to their land (this is how the carbon is sequestered). Salatin is featured in Michael Pollan's book, "The Omnivore's Dilemma." Pollan gives a brief introduction to the farm in this video among others.
Similar to Prof. Albert Bartlett's lecture on exponential growth (above), Chris Martenson's Crash Course is an expansion on the same theme which ties it all together with the debt-money system, peak oil, etc.. Well worth the time.
It is a solved problem. Masten Space Systems is just one of several companies that seem to be doing better than the Morpheus project.
While that would indeed be better than the current fleet of water-cooled reactors, I'm skeptical of sodium-cooled IFRs, given their less-than-stellar track record over the years. IMHO, molten salt is the best way forward. LFTRs have gotten some attention lately, and I'm all in favor. But there's another MSR variant being developed now that is specifically designed to use our existing waste stockpile as its fuel, called WAMSR (waste annihilating molten-salt reactor).
Um, didn't NASA have a "'dragon' style vehicle concept" about 45 years ago? I mean SpaceX is hardly shy about their gratitude for "standing on the shoulders" of NASA's previous achievements. And the basic "teardrop" form-factor is hardly original or unique among re-entry vehicles. But now that I think about it... what are you talking about? What "dragon-style" vehicle have they got? Are you talking about Cygnus? That's not like Dragon, it's just for cargo.
I look forward to Orbital's successful launch to ISS this fall, but to claim they're ahead of SpaceX in manned spaceflight is just wrong.