That is the hard, part, honestly. Most of the evangelists for asteroid exploitation gloss this over. The obvious (and technically difficult) answer is that you just deliver it to the top of a space elevator, or de-orbit it in small chunks using retro-rockets built and fueled in space. Personally, I think the best thing would be to keep it in space and start up a space economy, but that's a harder sell to a hypothetical financier who wants returns here on Earth.
As a another poster mentioned, though the asteroids are a plentiful source of materials that are in high-demand for new tech, but very rare on Earth -- at some point the supply/demand curves would almost have to make asteroids a viable option, regardless of shipping difficulties.
IMO an asteroid mission is far and away the best choice for manned exploration. They have practically nonexistent gravity wells, making exploration relatively cheap, and depending on the target selected, could support making life support volatiles and rocket fuel in-situ. A good-sized nickel-iron NEO, on the other hand, could be an excellent prospecting opportunity -- depending on how big it is, it could supply enough iron to sate Earth's steel demand for a century or more -- or it could be used as a resource cache to bootstrap space-borne manufacturing. Mining space rocks isn't as glamorous as the moon or Mars, but the cost/benefit analysis strongly favors the asteroid.
"With the current online gaming scene dominated by Modern Warfare, Gears of War and Halo 3, it's pretty clear that tastes have moved away from the "bouncy deathmatch" model of the Quake series."
Oh, I dunno -- Unreal Tournament was doing great until Epic dropped the ball in UT3. 2k3 and 2k4 were pretty popular until just a few years ago, and a lot of people were excited about Tribes: Vengeance util it became clear that the gameplay was getting dumbed down. I think there's a market for "bouncy deathmatch" shooters, but the developers need to unlearn all the habits that the serious-business shooter have taught them and remember how to have good, bloody, explody, ridiculous fun.
I was suprised this is news as well. Dusting keypad locks to see which keys are used most often isn't unheard of, and this just seems like a variation on that.
Not that it justifies addiction to any game, but the difference in sentiment comes down primarily to a difference in presentation. While the underlying mechanisms are similar, WoW couches them in swaths of narrative and challenge. Sure, at the root of it the point of WoW is to make Blizzard enough money to Buy The Whole Damn World, but along the way the player gets to feel as though they're a part of a sweeping epic, or to test their button-pushing skills against other players. In that respect, it's not any more insidious than a coin-op Pac-Man cabinet, or a novel. Facebook games, on the other hand, are the mechanism laid bare: there's no story, no challenge, just a hook, followed by an opportunity to hand over your money to the creators of the "game." They don't really even pass as entertainment; as the creator of Cow Clicker says, they're little more than brain hacks.
More hyperbole than hubris, but it's honestly not that far off the mark. Solar flare while in transit? From dealing with radiation while in transit to the various forms of architecture a hostile environment like Mars would require (and a metal-rich environment like Phobos, too...), what an interplanetary war might look like and what might spark it, what kind of social issues and division might arise on an off-world colony, what low gravity might do to the human phenotype, etc., etc., etc... KSR might not have been right on all counts, but it's apparent that he at least gave most of them some thought.
Go read it! The worst that could happen is that you'll become terrified of space elevators. (Dun dun DUNN!)
I brought this up once in a class on science fiction, and after some discussion we came to the conclusion that Kim Stanley Robinson thought of *everything* you'd need to think of with interplanetary missions in the Mars trilogy.
You know, I spent a semester of my life working for a department at my university that kept all of its operating information in FileMaker Pro databases. Of course, there were two of them, most of the data in one was replicated in the other, and if you actually wanted to *do* anything with the data in either, like have it show up on the departmental calendar or mailing list, you had to manually copy and paste it into still other databases. For most of that semester, my job was basically to function as a $10.00/hr database interface. Had I stayed on there any longer, my superiors would have probably showed up to work one day and discovered that all of their Filemaker DBs had mysteriously migrated into Postgres during the night...
Not so strange. It shouldn't be much of a surprise that the early Catholic missionaries would choose to co-opt pagan holidays (and rites, for that matter -- what do you think pine trees have to do with the baby Jesus, anyway?) rather than try to eliminate them. Claiming to reveal a hidden or alternate meaning to an established religion gives you a foot in the door where you might not otherwise have one. Hell, the apostle Paul pulls one of these in Acts when he tells followers of a Greek mystery religion that Christ was their "unknown god" revealed.
My dinky little 90hp Honda has no trouble at all in getting up to highway speeds on a typical highway on-ramp. In fact, I'm usually held back by the people in front of me (WHO DON'T KNOW HOW TO MERGE PROPERLY RAARGH), rather than by the performance of my own vehicle.
You'd be surprised how fast a economy car can be if you're willing to really wring it out.
So you've never met the folks who build their own MechWarrior sim-pits, have you? If you think a nice-looking RPG table is embarrassing, you can't imagine what having a giant robot cockpit in your living room will do to your reputation...
When I was just learning, there was a guy who pulled up very close behind me on a very steep hill, and I freaked out so much that I accidentally stalled the car and almost rolled into him. He then proceeded to do the same thing again, even after he nearly got hit the first time. It's not really a problem anymore, but I still resent it when people do that.
Different strokes for different folks. My pockets aren't nearly deep enough to afford the kinds of cars that come with decent semi-autos, and I find that for me, a stick shift is far more help than harm. After a few months of driving one, operation becomes pretty much automatic, and the only time I ever find myself being distracted by the transmission is the rare occasion when I miss a shift ("Whoops, that's not third gear!").
The big thing for me, though, is driver involvement. I like to be engaged and in control when I'm driving; if I wanted a nice and easy cruise I'd take the bus. Three pedals and a stick is just that much more fun.
If you want to use that kind of analogy, I'd suggest comparing an IBM Model M to a cell phone on-screen keyboard. The Model M is tactile, precise, and communicative. The touchscreen is none of those things, and you just have to hope the software does a good job of guessing what you meant to press.
I'd much rather switch gears myself. The car can't see the hill coming up, or spot the hole in traffic I need to merge into. I can, and having the ability to select gears for power or economy as I please makes handling those scenarios that much easier. The only place I'd prefer an automatic is when there's a string of stop signs on a hill, and there are morons behind me pulling right up to my bumper. I do sometimes roll back a hair, you know...
Parent and GP have got it right; it's been known for a long time that people will drive as fast as they think is safe. If an environment looks conducive to 75MPH cruising, people will cruise at 75 even if the local robber-barons have set the speed limit to 55. Conversely, if an environment is obviously pedestrian (like the one TFA describes, with narrow streets and other urban features), the average driver will slow down considerably. Generally speaking, that average speed is the safest for everybody involved. On the other hand, if you're designing ramrod-straight roads with a lane and half in each direction and clear turf for 75 feet on either side for a suburban residential district, you're going to terrify a lot of parents when drivers are going 50 in a 30.
"Look at Autocross events... people love'em, and they're a lot of fun. But rarely do you go over 40 MPH."
That just means you're (a) not trying hard enough or (b) need stickier tires.
Slashdot Mirror
Why the speaker? If you're going to implant electrode grids on the cortex, why not go whole-hog and put one on the hearing center?
But what is it in base-13? That's the *real* question.
That is the hard, part, honestly. Most of the evangelists for asteroid exploitation gloss this over. The obvious (and technically difficult) answer is that you just deliver it to the top of a space elevator, or de-orbit it in small chunks using retro-rockets built and fueled in space. Personally, I think the best thing would be to keep it in space and start up a space economy, but that's a harder sell to a hypothetical financier who wants returns here on Earth.
As a another poster mentioned, though the asteroids are a plentiful source of materials that are in high-demand for new tech, but very rare on Earth -- at some point the supply/demand curves would almost have to make asteroids a viable option, regardless of shipping difficulties.
IMO an asteroid mission is far and away the best choice for manned exploration. They have practically nonexistent gravity wells, making exploration relatively cheap, and depending on the target selected, could support making life support volatiles and rocket fuel in-situ. A good-sized nickel-iron NEO, on the other hand, could be an excellent prospecting opportunity -- depending on how big it is, it could supply enough iron to sate Earth's steel demand for a century or more -- or it could be used as a resource cache to bootstrap space-borne manufacturing. Mining space rocks isn't as glamorous as the moon or Mars, but the cost/benefit analysis strongly favors the asteroid.
Looking at the concept image in TFA, I can say quite confidently that I drew that on the back of a notebook in third grade.
I'm totally suing.
"With the current online gaming scene dominated by Modern Warfare, Gears of War and Halo 3, it's pretty clear that tastes have moved away from the "bouncy deathmatch" model of the Quake series."
Oh, I dunno -- Unreal Tournament was doing great until Epic dropped the ball in UT3. 2k3 and 2k4 were pretty popular until just a few years ago, and a lot of people were excited about Tribes: Vengeance util it became clear that the gameplay was getting dumbed down. I think there's a market for "bouncy deathmatch" shooters, but the developers need to unlearn all the habits that the serious-business shooter have taught them and remember how to have good, bloody, explody, ridiculous fun.
I was suprised this is news as well. Dusting keypad locks to see which keys are used most often isn't unheard of, and this just seems like a variation on that.
Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie:
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will!
This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
Here's to hoping that Musk gets around to retiring sooner than Delos Harriman.
Not that it justifies addiction to any game, but the difference in sentiment comes down primarily to a difference in presentation. While the underlying mechanisms are similar, WoW couches them in swaths of narrative and challenge. Sure, at the root of it the point of WoW is to make Blizzard enough money to Buy The Whole Damn World, but along the way the player gets to feel as though they're a part of a sweeping epic, or to test their button-pushing skills against other players. In that respect, it's not any more insidious than a coin-op Pac-Man cabinet, or a novel. Facebook games, on the other hand, are the mechanism laid bare: there's no story, no challenge, just a hook, followed by an opportunity to hand over your money to the creators of the "game." They don't really even pass as entertainment; as the creator of Cow Clicker says, they're little more than brain hacks.
More hyperbole than hubris, but it's honestly not that far off the mark. Solar flare while in transit? From dealing with radiation while in transit to the various forms of architecture a hostile environment like Mars would require (and a metal-rich environment like Phobos, too...), what an interplanetary war might look like and what might spark it, what kind of social issues and division might arise on an off-world colony, what low gravity might do to the human phenotype, etc., etc., etc... KSR might not have been right on all counts, but it's apparent that he at least gave most of them some thought.
Go read it! The worst that could happen is that you'll become terrified of space elevators. (Dun dun DUNN!)
I brought this up once in a class on science fiction, and after some discussion we came to the conclusion that Kim Stanley Robinson thought of *everything* you'd need to think of with interplanetary missions in the Mars trilogy.
You know, I spent a semester of my life working for a department at my university that kept all of its operating information in FileMaker Pro databases. Of course, there were two of them, most of the data in one was replicated in the other, and if you actually wanted to *do* anything with the data in either, like have it show up on the departmental calendar or mailing list, you had to manually copy and paste it into still other databases. For most of that semester, my job was basically to function as a $10.00/hr database interface. Had I stayed on there any longer, my superiors would have probably showed up to work one day and discovered that all of their Filemaker DBs had mysteriously migrated into Postgres during the night...
Not so strange. It shouldn't be much of a surprise that the early Catholic missionaries would choose to co-opt pagan holidays (and rites, for that matter -- what do you think pine trees have to do with the baby Jesus, anyway?) rather than try to eliminate them. Claiming to reveal a hidden or alternate meaning to an established religion gives you a foot in the door where you might not otherwise have one. Hell, the apostle Paul pulls one of these in Acts when he tells followers of a Greek mystery religion that Christ was their "unknown god" revealed.
My dinky little 90hp Honda has no trouble at all in getting up to highway speeds on a typical highway on-ramp. In fact, I'm usually held back by the people in front of me (WHO DON'T KNOW HOW TO MERGE PROPERLY RAARGH), rather than by the performance of my own vehicle.
You'd be surprised how fast a economy car can be if you're willing to really wring it out.
So you've never met the folks who build their own MechWarrior sim-pits, have you? If you think a nice-looking RPG table is embarrassing, you can't imagine what having a giant robot cockpit in your living room will do to your reputation...
I, for one, welcome our new Segway-riding military android overlords!
Depending on the Honda, there's a whole other stereotype for you.
/drives a '91 Honda CRX...
"Hi, My name is Stephen Amaris, and I'm the Pirate Party candidate in your district!"
When I was just learning, there was a guy who pulled up very close behind me on a very steep hill, and I freaked out so much that I accidentally stalled the car and almost rolled into him. He then proceeded to do the same thing again, even after he nearly got hit the first time. It's not really a problem anymore, but I still resent it when people do that.
Different strokes for different folks. My pockets aren't nearly deep enough to afford the kinds of cars that come with decent semi-autos, and I find that for me, a stick shift is far more help than harm. After a few months of driving one, operation becomes pretty much automatic, and the only time I ever find myself being distracted by the transmission is the rare occasion when I miss a shift ("Whoops, that's not third gear!").
The big thing for me, though, is driver involvement. I like to be engaged and in control when I'm driving; if I wanted a nice and easy cruise I'd take the bus. Three pedals and a stick is just that much more fun.
If you want to use that kind of analogy, I'd suggest comparing an IBM Model M to a cell phone on-screen keyboard. The Model M is tactile, precise, and communicative. The touchscreen is none of those things, and you just have to hope the software does a good job of guessing what you meant to press.
I'd much rather switch gears myself. The car can't see the hill coming up, or spot the hole in traffic I need to merge into. I can, and having the ability to select gears for power or economy as I please makes handling those scenarios that much easier. The only place I'd prefer an automatic is when there's a string of stop signs on a hill, and there are morons behind me pulling right up to my bumper. I do sometimes roll back a hair, you know...
Parent and GP have got it right; it's been known for a long time that people will drive as fast as they think is safe. If an environment looks conducive to 75MPH cruising, people will cruise at 75 even if the local robber-barons have set the speed limit to 55. Conversely, if an environment is obviously pedestrian (like the one TFA describes, with narrow streets and other urban features), the average driver will slow down considerably. Generally speaking, that average speed is the safest for everybody involved. On the other hand, if you're designing ramrod-straight roads with a lane and half in each direction and clear turf for 75 feet on either side for a suburban residential district, you're going to terrify a lot of parents when drivers are going 50 in a 30.
"Look at Autocross events... people love'em, and they're a lot of fun. But rarely do you go over 40 MPH."
That just means you're (a) not trying hard enough or (b) need stickier tires.
Craigslist seems like a likely spot. Just search for cars older than 1985.
Somewhere in Switzerland, Yves Rossy is wondering what took NASA so long.