That brings up an interesting point - since man quite possibly contributed to the extinction of the Mammoth, would it not be something of a 'duty' to undo the unnatural selection?
Look, we smarted up before the Buffalo went extinct, and now they make great burgers Buffalo Meat Sales. Can you imagine a Mammoth prime rib? Am I the only one thinking Flinstones here?
Maybe we can splice the Mammoth DNA into cats and make cat-sized Mammoths. I'll call them Cammoths. If they can be litter-trained they'd make the perfect house pet.
Wind turbines generate peak power at a certain RPM, so this device uses a transmission to change the effective RPM of shaft to the generator. Why not use a continuously variable hydraulic transmission - those have been available for quite awhile in vehicular applications. Are the losses in efficiency too much, or are they too expensive? It seems like it might be a more proven and resilient technology.
A perhaps telling quote from Cawley: "Early on, I was concerned about the look of the Enterprise, but after meeting and getting to know J.J. and his perspective on this film, I'm no longer concerned with little details like that. J.J. knows what he likes about Star Trek and that is Gene's original vision-preserving that message is his primary concern."
Maybe all the grinches here should come down off the chimney and give the thing a chance - you've barely seen a few teaser action scenes.
While the film does look action-flicky in it's trailer, it might be possible that it's not all action and no substance. Normally trailers are supposed to excite and entice - how should this movie be presented? What was different about trailers for all the other Trek films? If they all sucked, why are you watching?
When you look back at the best episodes of all time, both TOS and TNG, which are always rated highest? Yes, those with lots of action. Borg, Planet Crusher, Balance of Power, etc etc. All the less energizing character-building is done in the series, and the more 'epic' story lines are in the feature films.
If you want a more talkie and less guns and fire trucks thing you need a series to give the story breadth and depth. To 'reboot'/'re-imagine' the series and try to kindle anticipation in an audience other than the 'old guard' (like me, who will go see any Star Trek movie that comes out) they are obviously going to try to showboat the special effects in the trailer.
Would you rather see a trailer scene of Klingons drowning in purring pink powder-puffs?
The Maginot Line worked as designed - the Germans never broke it. They went around it. Why? Because the Maginot Line wasn't finished all the way to the North Sea. Why? Because the treaty with Belgium in which the two nations were to have a joint defense and Belgium was responsible for that section of the German frontier (they were effectively a buffer zone) precluded France walling off Belgium from French territory. The strategic alliance depended on French troops mobilizing and moving into Belgium to co-defend the territory. When Belgium got skittish (trying not to provoke Germany in the foolish idea that the Germans would hurl themselves against the Maginot Line instead of roll through Belgium..) in the late 30's and pulled out of this joint-defense agreement the French started at a panic-pace to continue their defenses all the way to the North Sea. By the time of German invasion this was only just begun and the most basic pillboxes and fences had been erected before the attack. Had Maginot been completed, the Germans would have had a very miserable prospect of attacking France. Had Belgium not flaked and allowed French/British troops into the pre-prepared positions along the Belgian-German border things might also have fallen a different way.
RAID6 is a general term used to describe any system with TWO INDEPENDENT types of redundancy such that any two disks in a RAID group can be lost without data loss.
This is not RAID5.1. RAID6 has two separate calculations.
Within RAID6 there are different ways to create that second level of disk redundancy. Some schemes use a separate calculation of interleaved parity similar to RAID5. Others (eg NetAapp) use what they call RAID-DP, which is a form of RAID6-protection using a RAID4 with two parity disks. This is *not* interleaved parity, so it's significantly faster than interleaved RAID6 and faster than RAID5.
ZFS duplicates a lot of functionality that belongs outside of a filesystem.
That may be your opinion. The most advanced storage technology companies tend to disagree with you.
Some of the features, such as the pointer-based manipulation of the filesystem for snapshot purposes, are not possible to be performed outside the filesystem. Let's consider a snapshot. First (side note), a beef I have: Sun calls ZFS snapshots "Copy on Write" - which never made sense to me; there's no copy on write happening during a ZFS snapshot, the new data is written to a new location (not copied) and a new pointer laid down for it; the old data sits in it's initial location with the 'old' pointer. What is traditionally called a "copy on write" snapshot is how most of the world does snapshots: 1) read old data block, 2) copy to 'snapshot' area, 3) write new data block. This is three disk I/Os for each block written while a snapshot is active on the system (add another write copy if you have a second snapshot active, and keep going as you add snapshots until the system crawls to a stop). "Traditional" filesystems can't move their pointers around to manipulate themselves; that's what makes ZFS snapshots so powerful (and also why NetApp is suing them - because this type of filesystem was patented in NetApp's WAFL many years ago). Maybe they chose to co-opt the C.O.W. name to somehow try to dodge a NetApp lawsuit (oops). Anyway.
With a pointer-based snapshot your I/O looks like this: 1) write new data block (along with pointer) to active filesystem. Done. One I/O. The old pointer is captured in the 'snapshot' filesystem and you don't need to do anything to it to manipulate it. So, almost no performance penalty to carry a live snapshot (or two, or three, etc).
That's why it's routine for people running NetApp filers to be live with multiple, or even tens of snapshots 'online' for instant backup recovery... and why competing storage vendors like EMC rarely run with a snapshot for more time than it takes to make a backup or replicate that point-in-time data. It costs too much in I/O overhead. ZFS has a similar scheme (hence the lawsuit) and provides similar advantages (NetApp WAFL is also a quota filesystem, which simplifies volume sizing/management very nicely; ZFS, from what I've used of it, seems quite similar). This makes life in the storage management world better. A lot better.
Historical vendor FUD about 'fragmentation' and 'Read I/O' has been directed at NetApp/WAFL for years; yet they continue to be a leader in benchmark performance. Maybe if you own the filesystem (WAFL) you have a much better idea about where to look for the next blocks, rather than using complex and arbitrary SAN read-ahead cache schemes as implemented by other vendors.
So, I'd say that there are some compelling reasons to have this intelligence in the filesystem and not at some arbitrary level below it.
I think there is one other significant problem to overcome: radiaton, whether cosmic ray radiation or sunspot/solar storm radiation. In a spacecraft or space station this is a significant problem. On earth we are protected by our magnetic field. Venus doesn't have an instrinsic magnetic field to speak of, but does have an induced magnetic field. This might be an advantage to colonists of a floating Venusian city versus those of a space station.
http://www-ssc.igpp.ucla.edu/personnel/russell/papers/venus_mag/
...was the way to go for me. Those little proprietary vendor NAS boxes, not generally being "open" open-sourced, make it difficult to deal with if there are problems. I'd say go for a little machine running either Linux or, in my case, Solaris. The hardware does not have to be super-fast if you are just serving files in a home network environment & I recommend RAID5 for the best usable gig/$. Even in a home system I want RAID - if my laptop or desktop hard disk fails I want a *solid* backup since I don't do tape B/U any longer. For something super-reliable I went with an older Sun Blade 100 desktop machine - you can find them used on Ebay for $100 and they just keep running and running. They have a PATA internal interface, so toss in a couple of IDE drives (RAID as you like, use Sun ZFS and get enterprise-class features in a free NAS) and off you go. I wanted something a bit bigger, so I installed an U160 SCSI controller & found a used external SCSI disk chassis for $20 (Ebay is your friend), stuffed it with 5x 500G SATA disks w/SCSI-SATA bridge boards (the only annoying part for me, since Solaris on SPARC does not support SATA) and it's been running rock-solid 24/7 since early this year. I serve NFS and CIFS (via Samba) as well as run my web server on it. The next step would be clustering, when Sun offers a free option for that (not holding breath)
Or Mexico, with a marginal tax rate of 24.6%, yet widespread crippling poverty (thus giving the lie to the theory that the path to prosperity lies solely with lower tax rates) and wholesale corruption that makes our "finest government that money can buy" just that. You might pay less in taxes, but you would end up having to finance your own private militia (and health care system, etc, etc) to have the security that one has here, and unless you get off shopping via the web (and losing much of your merchandise along the delivery chain), I think you'll wind up missing the shopping malls. There's a reason all those Mexicans come streaming across our borders, and it's not to live under the rule of our whacked-out politicians. And I don't see a flood of millionaires streaming south, renouncing their U.S. citizenship in order to live like billionaires in Mexico. Obviously you have not actually BEEN to Mexico. While there is the poverty you speak of, there is no shortage of shopping malls filled to the brim with modern luxury goods. You do not need a 'militia' to protect yourself as you might in some latin american countries. It's not a paradise, but if you have money or the means to make it there, it's not a bad place to go. You will not find many opportunities for business (unless you are 'connected') but if you bring your own you could succeed. A friend of mine is a telecommuter/programmer living in Mexico City and living incredibly inexpensively while pulling down a nice US wage.
I don't know about this now-you-see-me-now-you-don't stuff, but....
Accoring to TFA, these lenses cancel incoming electromagnetic waves, allowing instruments to function in harsh EM environments. TFA mentiones using them in an MRI chamber or for stealh from radar.... but what might be even more interesting to the military would be if this can block EM from...a nuclear explosion?
Suddenly it's possible to harden military electronic equipment from the EMP caused by a nuclear blast - any vehicles, ship, aircraft, spy satellite could benefit from such types of shielding. Even if this doesn't pan out as some Wonder Woman Invisible Jet(tm) thingy, it might still be quite useful to the military.
Why is it so hard to just admit that we can't explain everything in the universe yet? Why must we, throughout history, fabricate gods for sun, moon, rain, fire.. and over the years through enlightenment and science, distill this down to the ONE GOD who handles all the stuff we haven't got are arms around yet?
Why can't people simply live with the fact that we don't know everything yet, and each day we exist as a society without destroying ourselves and our world, we'll chip away at the problem.
It's not the destination that's important, but it's the RIDE. Getting there, exploring and learning ignites our minds and pushes us forward. "I DON'T KNOW" what created the universe, exactly. To not strongly encourage this would be to stagnate our society. Is our society really so great that we want to leave it where it is today?
I've seen no evidence of anything supernatural, and if such a 'being' did exist, as far as anyone can see he/it created the universe with inviolable rules in which we have yet to been able to prove an impossible disconnect or contradiction.
Why do societies always have to have that checkbox marked "I know the answer, God did it" so we can sleep at night?
I'm curious why Mojave, California wasn't selected for this. Mojave seems to already be a de-facto spaceport with Rutan and company out there doing their own launches, along with a few other X-prize types. It's got the same low population/cheap land factors but is a bit closer to major population centers and aerospace infrastructure. It's also got a huge runway and aircraft servicing facilities and a is a transport hub with rail access.
What's with this bumble-frack Egypt location?? (no offense to Egyptians intended)
All I can say is that this is the generalized state of outsourcing across all industries (there are exceptions, but..)
Generally, outsourcing (these days) is done to save money. You have to ask yourself why that savings is possible. Having seen many 'outsourcing' projects come and go and come again, it's always the same story: the outsourcing company finds minimal compliance methods to satisfy the SLA, and the result are expectations well below what was formerly done in-house.
Cost at the expense of quality - that's what outsourcing means these days. Why do you think "Made in China" generally means lower quality disposable junk? Why don't we outsource to Germany, known for fine engineering and manufacturing? Why don't we outsource our call centers to Sweeden? Well, because it's more expensive.
There might have been a day when you outsourced a project because the singular talent to handle it was working in another company, but those days are mostly past. Now it's done for the balance sheets and bonuses of upper management (who generally have taken their golden parachute long before the reality of the outsourcing nightmare hits the fan).
Maybe if the people who knew the operations were involved in writing the SLA the service/product wouldn't be sub-par, but then, who wants to train the guy who's taking your job? Plus, if the SLA actually met expectations and/or current in-house standards of quality, I doubt there would be much cost savings (where does it come from? How can you save money by inserting another management level and employing people with differing/conflicting company loyalties?)
Great idea. Now, if MythTV only *SUPPORTED* mouse interaction (and, therefore, touchscreens) I'd be well on my way to "MythCAR".
MythTV 18.1 adds a few mouse functions, but the primary interface navigation is still keyboard only. The GTK widgets aren't written to accept mouse events and need a total rewrite, from what I've read.
Non-existant magnetic field, weak gravity... all things which contribute to a long-term erosion of the atmosphere. We can affect the planet on a much shorter term via the methods you mention. Of course, we would not import the gasses as 'gas', but use resources in situ, or import them as solids (asteriods, etc).
Carbon dioxide reactors have also been proposed, but water vapor is a stronger greenhouse gas than CO2. If the aforementioned trapped water can be released, voila.
Right, it can never be like Earth, the gravity will be much less (imagine the incredibly tall trees and... people) but as far as atmosphere composition and density, that's possible.
OK, but your time scale is way off. The atmosphere leaks away over millions of years; we can greenhouse-up the atmosphere on the order of hundreds of years.
In JPL's warm-spot modelling for Enceladus there is an undersurface ocean heated by one of the two now-familiar forces of tidal heating or radiological decay heating (though the former seems more likely).
So the statement goes: "where there is liquid water, there could be life". Do we have another Europa on our hands here?
Slashdot Mirror
They're called BattleBots
That brings up an interesting point - since man quite possibly contributed to the extinction of the Mammoth, would it not be something of a 'duty' to undo the unnatural selection?
Look, we smarted up before the Buffalo went extinct, and now they make great burgers Buffalo Meat Sales.
Can you imagine a Mammoth prime rib? Am I the only one thinking Flinstones here?
Like this guy couldn't get a job selling insurance?
It's almost so easy even a caveman could do it!
Maybe we can splice the Mammoth DNA into cats and make cat-sized Mammoths. I'll call them Cammoths. If they can be litter-trained they'd make the perfect house pet.
Wind turbines generate peak power at a certain RPM, so this device uses a transmission to change the effective RPM of shaft to the generator. Why not use a continuously variable hydraulic transmission - those have been available for quite awhile in vehicular applications. Are the losses in efficiency too much, or are they too expensive? It seems like it might be a more proven and resilient technology.
Interesting to note that James Cawley will appear in this new Trek film as an undisclosed Enterprise crew member. See the story at Cawley Set to Appear in J.J. Abrams' Star Trek.
A perhaps telling quote from Cawley: "Early on, I was concerned about the look of the Enterprise, but after meeting and getting to know J.J. and his perspective on this film, I'm no longer concerned with little details like that. J.J. knows what he likes about Star Trek and that is Gene's original vision-preserving that message is his primary concern."
Maybe all the grinches here should come down off the chimney and give the thing a chance - you've barely seen a few teaser action scenes.
While the film does look action-flicky in it's trailer, it might be possible that it's not all action and no substance. Normally trailers are supposed to excite and entice - how should this movie be presented? What was different about trailers for all the other Trek films? If they all sucked, why are you watching?
When you look back at the best episodes of all time, both TOS and TNG, which are always rated highest? Yes, those with lots of action. Borg, Planet Crusher, Balance of Power, etc etc. All the less energizing character-building is done in the series, and the more 'epic' story lines are in the feature films.
If you want a more talkie and less guns and fire trucks thing you need a series to give the story breadth and depth. To 'reboot'/'re-imagine' the series and try to kindle anticipation in an audience other than the 'old guard' (like me, who will go see any Star Trek movie that comes out) they are obviously going to try to showboat the special effects in the trailer.
Would you rather see a trailer scene of Klingons drowning in purring pink powder-puffs?
I would rub it in and mention not having to update because I'm running Linux....but I guess I just did :P
The Maginot Line worked as designed - the Germans never broke it. They went around it.
Why? Because the Maginot Line wasn't finished all the way to the North Sea. Why? Because the treaty with Belgium in which the two nations were to have a joint defense and Belgium was responsible for that section of the German frontier (they were effectively a buffer zone) precluded France walling off Belgium from French territory. The strategic alliance depended on French troops mobilizing and moving into Belgium to co-defend the territory.
When Belgium got skittish (trying not to provoke Germany in the foolish idea that the Germans would hurl themselves against the Maginot Line instead of roll through Belgium..) in the late 30's and pulled out of this joint-defense agreement the French started at a panic-pace to continue their defenses all the way to the North Sea. By the time of German invasion this was only just begun and the most basic pillboxes and fences had been erected before the attack.
Had Maginot been completed, the Germans would have had a very miserable prospect of attacking France. Had Belgium not flaked and allowed French/British troops into the pre-prepared positions along the Belgian-German border things might also have fallen a different way.
All RAID6 is not created equal.
RAID6 is a general term used to describe any system with TWO INDEPENDENT types of redundancy such that any two disks in a RAID group can be lost without data loss.
This is not RAID5.1. RAID6 has two separate calculations.
Within RAID6 there are different ways to create that second level of disk redundancy. Some schemes use a separate calculation of interleaved parity similar to RAID5. Others (eg NetAapp) use what they call RAID-DP, which is a form of RAID6-protection using a RAID4 with two parity disks. This is *not* interleaved parity, so it's significantly faster than interleaved RAID6 and faster than RAID5.
That may be your opinion. The most advanced storage technology companies tend to disagree with you.
Some of the features, such as the pointer-based manipulation of the filesystem for snapshot purposes, are not possible to be performed outside the filesystem. Let's consider a snapshot. First (side note), a beef I have: Sun calls ZFS snapshots "Copy on Write" - which never made sense to me; there's no copy on write happening during a ZFS snapshot, the new data is written to a new location (not copied) and a new pointer laid down for it; the old data sits in it's initial location with the 'old' pointer. What is traditionally called a "copy on write" snapshot is how most of the world does snapshots: 1) read old data block, 2) copy to 'snapshot' area, 3) write new data block. This is three disk I/Os for each block written while a snapshot is active on the system (add another write copy if you have a second snapshot active, and keep going as you add snapshots until the system crawls to a stop). "Traditional" filesystems can't move their pointers around to manipulate themselves; that's what makes ZFS snapshots so powerful (and also why NetApp is suing them - because this type of filesystem was patented in NetApp's WAFL many years ago). Maybe they chose to co-opt the C.O.W. name to somehow try to dodge a NetApp lawsuit (oops). Anyway.
With a pointer-based snapshot your I/O looks like this: 1) write new data block (along with pointer) to active filesystem. Done. One I/O. The old pointer is captured in the 'snapshot' filesystem and you don't need to do anything to it to manipulate it. So, almost no performance penalty to carry a live snapshot (or two, or three, etc).
That's why it's routine for people running NetApp filers to be live with multiple, or even tens of snapshots 'online' for instant backup recovery... and why competing storage vendors like EMC rarely run with a snapshot for more time than it takes to make a backup or replicate that point-in-time data. It costs too much in I/O overhead. ZFS has a similar scheme (hence the lawsuit) and provides similar advantages (NetApp WAFL is also a quota filesystem, which simplifies volume sizing/management very nicely; ZFS, from what I've used of it, seems quite similar). This makes life in the storage management world better. A lot better.
Historical vendor FUD about 'fragmentation' and 'Read I/O' has been directed at NetApp/WAFL for years; yet they continue to be a leader in benchmark performance. Maybe if you own the filesystem (WAFL) you have a much better idea about where to look for the next blocks, rather than using complex and arbitrary SAN read-ahead cache schemes as implemented by other vendors.
So, I'd say that there are some compelling reasons to have this intelligence in the filesystem and not at some arbitrary level below it.
I think there is one other significant problem to overcome: radiaton, whether cosmic ray radiation or sunspot/solar storm radiation. In a spacecraft or space station this is a significant problem. On earth we are protected by our magnetic field. Venus doesn't have an instrinsic magnetic field to speak of, but does have an induced magnetic field. This might be an advantage to colonists of a floating Venusian city versus those of a space station. http://www-ssc.igpp.ucla.edu/personnel/russell/papers/venus_mag/
...was the way to go for me. Those little proprietary vendor NAS boxes, not generally being "open" open-sourced, make it difficult to deal with if there are problems. I'd say go for a little machine running either Linux or, in my case, Solaris. The hardware does not have to be super-fast if you are just serving files in a home network environment & I recommend RAID5 for the best usable gig/$. Even in a home system I want RAID - if my laptop or desktop hard disk fails I want a *solid* backup since I don't do tape B/U any longer.
For something super-reliable I went with an older Sun Blade 100 desktop machine - you can find them used on Ebay for $100 and they just keep running and running. They have a PATA internal interface, so toss in a couple of IDE drives (RAID as you like, use Sun ZFS and get enterprise-class features in a free NAS) and off you go.
I wanted something a bit bigger, so I installed an U160 SCSI controller & found a used external SCSI disk chassis for $20 (Ebay is your friend), stuffed it with 5x 500G SATA disks w/SCSI-SATA bridge boards (the only annoying part for me, since Solaris on SPARC does not support SATA) and it's been running rock-solid 24/7 since early this year. I serve NFS and CIFS (via Samba) as well as run my web server on it.
The next step would be clustering, when Sun offers a free option for that (not holding breath)
Or Mexico, with a marginal tax rate of 24.6%, yet widespread crippling poverty (thus giving the lie to the theory that the path to prosperity lies solely with lower tax rates) and wholesale corruption that makes our "finest government that money can buy" just that. You might pay less in taxes, but you would end up having to finance your own private militia (and health care system, etc, etc) to have the security that one has here, and unless you get off shopping via the web (and losing much of your merchandise along the delivery chain), I think you'll wind up missing the shopping malls. There's a reason all those Mexicans come streaming across our borders, and it's not to live under the rule of our whacked-out politicians. And I don't see a flood of millionaires streaming south, renouncing their U.S. citizenship in order to live like billionaires in Mexico.
Obviously you have not actually BEEN to Mexico. While there is the poverty you speak of, there is no shortage of shopping malls filled to the brim with modern luxury goods. You do not need a 'militia' to protect yourself as you might in some latin american countries. It's not a paradise, but if you have money or the means to make it there, it's not a bad place to go. You will not find many opportunities for business (unless you are 'connected') but if you bring your own you could succeed.
A friend of mine is a telecommuter/programmer living in Mexico City and living incredibly inexpensively while pulling down a nice US wage.
I don't know about this now-you-see-me-now-you-don't stuff, but....
Accoring to TFA, these lenses cancel incoming electromagnetic waves, allowing instruments to function in harsh EM environments. TFA mentiones using them in an MRI chamber or for stealh from radar.... but what might be even more interesting to the military would be if this can block EM from...a nuclear explosion?
Suddenly it's possible to harden military electronic equipment from the EMP caused by a nuclear blast - any vehicles, ship, aircraft, spy satellite could benefit from such types of shielding. Even if this doesn't pan out as some Wonder Woman Invisible Jet(tm) thingy, it might still be quite useful to the military.
Why is it so hard to just admit that we can't explain everything in the universe yet? Why must we, throughout history, fabricate gods for sun, moon, rain, fire.. and over the years through enlightenment and science, distill this down to the ONE GOD who handles all the stuff we haven't got are arms around yet?
Why can't people simply live with the fact that we don't know everything yet, and each day we exist as a society without destroying ourselves and our world, we'll chip away at the problem.
It's not the destination that's important, but it's the RIDE. Getting there, exploring and learning ignites our minds and pushes us forward. "I DON'T KNOW" what created the universe, exactly. To not strongly encourage this would be to stagnate our society. Is our society really so great that we want to leave it where it is today?
I've seen no evidence of anything supernatural, and if such a 'being' did exist, as far as anyone can see he/it created the universe with inviolable rules in which we have yet to been able to prove an impossible disconnect or contradiction.
Why do societies always have to have that checkbox marked "I know the answer, God did it" so we can sleep at night?
Per capita, I would really question whether there are more armed Iraqis than US citizens. The AK47 is a friggin' wedding favor, for crying out loud.
We also don't have RPG-7's in the closet. At least, most of us don't. Nor do we have 155mm artillery shells like our Iraqi brethren do.
I'm curious why Mojave, California wasn't selected for this. Mojave seems to already be a de-facto spaceport with Rutan and company out there doing their own launches, along with a few other X-prize types. It's got the same low population/cheap land factors but is a bit closer to major population centers and aerospace infrastructure. It's also got a huge runway and aircraft servicing facilities and a is a transport hub with rail access.
What's with this bumble-frack Egypt location?? (no offense to Egyptians intended)
All I can say is that this is the generalized state of outsourcing across all industries (there are exceptions, but..)
Generally, outsourcing (these days) is done to save money. You have to ask yourself why that savings is possible. Having seen many 'outsourcing' projects come and go and come again, it's always the same story: the outsourcing company finds minimal compliance methods to satisfy the SLA, and the result are expectations well below what was formerly done in-house.
Cost at the expense of quality - that's what outsourcing means these days. Why do you think "Made in China" generally means lower quality disposable junk? Why don't we outsource to Germany, known for fine engineering and manufacturing? Why don't we outsource our call centers to Sweeden? Well, because it's more expensive.
There might have been a day when you outsourced a project because the singular talent to handle it was working in another company, but those days are mostly past. Now it's done for the balance sheets and bonuses of upper management (who generally have taken their golden parachute long before the reality of the outsourcing nightmare hits the fan).
Maybe if the people who knew the operations were involved in writing the SLA the service/product wouldn't be sub-par, but then, who wants to train the guy who's taking your job? Plus, if the SLA actually met expectations and/or current in-house standards of quality, I doubt there would be much cost savings (where does it come from? How can you save money by inserting another management level and employing people with differing/conflicting company loyalties?)
YMMV.
Great idea. Now, if MythTV only *SUPPORTED* mouse interaction (and, therefore, touchscreens) I'd be well on my way to "MythCAR".
MythTV 18.1 adds a few mouse functions, but the primary interface navigation is still keyboard only. The GTK widgets aren't written to accept mouse events and need a total rewrite, from what I've read.
Non-existant magnetic field, weak gravity... all things which contribute to a long-term erosion of the atmosphere. We can affect the planet on a much shorter term via the methods you mention. Of course, we would not import the gasses as 'gas', but use resources in situ, or import them as solids (asteriods, etc).
Carbon dioxide reactors have also been proposed, but water vapor is a stronger greenhouse gas than CO2. If the aforementioned trapped water can be released, voila.
Right, it can never be like Earth, the gravity will be much less (imagine the incredibly tall trees and... people) but as far as atmosphere composition and density, that's possible.
OK, but your time scale is way off. The atmosphere leaks away over millions of years; we can greenhouse-up the atmosphere on the order of hundreds of years.
I don't see a problem maintaining this long-term.
Maybe you could combine BioD with Hydrogen Fuel Injection http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/1 5/2314241&tid=126&tid=14/ and eliminate the increased NOx and particulate emissions?
What was interesting to me was this diagram:
e -details.cfm?imageID=1681/
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/imag
In JPL's warm-spot modelling for Enceladus there is an undersurface ocean heated by one of the two now-familiar forces of tidal heating or radiological decay heating (though the former seems more likely).
So the statement goes: "where there is liquid water, there could be life". Do we have another Europa on our hands here?