Being large with organized development effort, it feels largely like they're going to burn a lot of developer hours and fail. For example: if they can't get Wayland to where they need it to be, why would a whole new display server be easier? Is Wayland somehow being encumbered by a problem they won't have (i.e. closed-source hardware driver support).
I've always been curious as to how secure the rover communications are. It does have a direct transmitter from the surface back to Earth - I wonder what you get if you could receive/transmit to that.
Imagine 3-orthogonally mounted rocket engines. The sum force of the asteroid has to ultimately be a vector combination of force in those 3 directions. You apply thrust off angle such that you counter the asteroid's attraction without thrusting at it.
The asteroidmay not be solid rock. It could be a rubble-pile type, and there might not be anything solid-enough to apply force to in a consistent way. It might be two closely orbiting bodies of rock, in which case you can't push on one in any type of consistent direction.
The benefit of the gravity-tug approach is that if you have a body of some concentrated mass moving at you, then if you have a spaceship sit away from it and maintain a constant position relative to a point other then the asteroid, then you can act on it's entire mass consistently.
Find it early enough, and you can do this with high-efficiency ion thrusters, rather then needing inefficient chemical rockets.
Re: reactive force from retrorockets - you fire them off-angle to the asteroid so exhaust doesn't hit them. You can easily mount orthogonal engines which would carefully cancel the attraction of the asteroid without directing any exhaust at it.
That is marginally accurate of an Ubuntu user, but the other distros are still popular and have only been gaining users since Shuttleworth started sodomizing his userbase.
Also it misses the point entirely. Distro maintainers should decide how and why UEFI is used. It shouldn't be baked into the Linux kernel, and if you want to build your own kernel, then it's something you should decide yourself.
Kerbal Space Program isn't a highly accurate simulator (though it's very good for getting a feel for the actual mechanics). It only does two-body simulations as far as I know (hence the domain change between Kerbin and Mun for example). This of course makes sense since 3-body is unsolvable analytically, but it does mean that it's orbital projections won't account for the influence of multiple bodies on the trajectory until you get close enough for it to change which body it simulates against.
I do actually wonder if there's a built in assumption there that if you do something sufficiently grandiose you'll get a lot of extra help for free. You have to imagine that if it looked like people were actually going to be launched that we'd see a few other projects aimed at increasing their survival (i.e. launching supplies ahead of time etc.) and/or contingency planning.
The moon was a 3 day voyage though, not a 500 day one. Spending 500 days and however much money just to circle mars and come back is a dangerous waste, especially if you're going to send people - who, while on a spaceship - can't do anything more then a probe could.
Except that doesn't happen in modern wars. Modern wars are defined by having a high rate of hardware attrition, and then a big question of whether you want to fight with WW2 era technology if you don't win a decisive victory in the first few days/weeks.
No one's going to be running high power high output jammers after that.
Aldous Huxley had it more right then George Orwell: distract the people with luxuries and short term goals, at the expense of long-term freedoms. That said, his dystopia was arguably not one: it wasn't like those who brooked changed were murdered or imprisoned or tortured - they were just discredited and lavished with benefits, but ultimately kept irrelevant.
This seems unlikely. Seeing as how a jammer is a very powerful transmission source, in a combat situation setting all drones to attack jamming signals would quickly lead to said single pilot being blown apart (since 5 drones vs 1 fighter is going to be a losing match).
It's always been the weakness of jamming - you become the most powerful signal source in the area, and a very obvious target for anyone with suitable RDF gear.
Except the ease with which a drone could be hacked is being vastly overstated. It's already unreasonable to think anyone is going to crack an AES encrypted link unless they compromise physical security at an actual military base. Since it's a drone you need to implement the attack in real time as well.
This is roughly the same danger as an adversary getting control of a radio on a military net. Anyone familiar with military protocol will know this - radios with encryption codes keyed in are regarded as having security clearances equivalent to that code. Because a radio with the right encryption codes, under enemy control is practically every bit as dangerous as some hypothetical rogue drone. An enemy with a military radio can call in artillery and air strikes on friendly positions, feed bad intel and misdirect forces etc. They are every bit as dangerous - arguably more dangerous - then a rogue drone. But unlike a drone, radios can be captured because they're carried by people. A drone in the air isn't going to be hacked with any practical attack.
Then the real problem is the usual one of tyrants: "we must teach them a lesson!" leading to ever more harsh punishments which fail to understand the nature of the dissent. Not exactly unknown now either.
" A jet could pull 15 g's, out-turning any conventional aircraft"
Whys is that an advantage?
Aren't high-G turns already obsolete (along with 'dogfighting')?
No? Dogfighting is obsolete because modern missiles can pull turns and speeds which planes can't. A plane unconstrained by the need to keep a pilot alive is essentially a rather highly featureful missile. Which means it's conceivable a very advanced drone would very much be able to out-maneuver or outrun missiles.
It'd still be enormously handy. And of course once you start going down that path the question is really how long you'd want to keep the data for? A week? Month? Year?
It's all be personal so pruning it with the detail most people would want to wouldn't really be practical. It'd be kind of neat if the concept became popular though because it might lead to some renewed interest in archival storage - it very much feels like we should be able to do better then todays tape-drives.
I prefer the idea of simply being able to rewind the last day or so and see the thing I can't quite remember. I mean, being able to literally backtrack your steps to when you lost an object would be pretty incredible.
Generally, storing waste for 10.000 years in a safe manner is not considered to be possible. (And think about the costs which occur in those timelines).
I would suggest it's your education which is lacking. The dangerous radiation is stuff with a short half-life, that's what makes it so dangerous. Long half-life material is often toxic, but in terms of radioactivity it's not dangerous at all. There are a variety of ways for us to re-process waste material into safer to store forms, but frankly speaking there are compounds and materials which are just as dangerous to the general public which are not related to nuclear waste and are tossed on the ground every day.
And just FYI, there is no such thing as a 'renewable' energy source, all the 'renewable' energy sources are just on such a long depletion timescale that nobody really cares.
This. It's hardly safer to live on ground contaminated with cadmium then it is to live on ground contaminated with low-level radionucleotides (and frequently more dangerous). Check out what happened when the reservoir for an aluminium mine broke near a town in Europe - the contents of that have probably poisoned a lot of the local ground for years to come.
Indeed the problems in Japan would certainly be almost impossible with current designs.
We should really deal with the problems at hand rather than espouse the virtues of things that do not yet exist. In fact, a non-negligible percentage of currently operating nuke plants in the US absolutely could suffer a catastrophic disaster like Fukushima –not from tsunami, but from earthquake or perhaps terrorism, and in a similar fashion (if the plant loses power and it isn't restored before the batteries die, they'll experience the same form of meltdown).
Please come up with a safe solution for current problems, and cease the handwaving dismissal of these problems because more modern on the drawing board designs won't have the same flaws. Building a plant that can't melt down like Fukishima does NOTHING to fix the damage done by Fukushima or the very real possibility of a Fukushima-scale accident occurring at currently operating plants.
Yes it does. Namely because most of the current reactors should be closed down, and replaced with modern designs.
But since no one wants to allow us to build new nuclear power plants, but also no one really wants to open a whole bunch of new coal-fired powerplants, mysteriously, we wind up running older designs longer then they should be, despite known issues.
The solution is as it always have be: build new plants, and then shutdown and dismantle old plants - and probably get some reprocessing capability so we can reduce the total mass of radioactive materials that need to be stored.
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Also the Chinese hate Japan. For pretty understandable reasons.
Being large with organized development effort, it feels largely like they're going to burn a lot of developer hours and fail. For example: if they can't get Wayland to where they need it to be, why would a whole new display server be easier? Is Wayland somehow being encumbered by a problem they won't have (i.e. closed-source hardware driver support).
In an ideal world, we would be able to eliminate CO2 from our atmosphere completely
Plants need CO2 to produce food. If you eliminated CO2 we'd die as a species, along with every other species.
The Earth also needs CO2 to stay warm. We'd be in a permanent ice age if there was literally zero in the atmosphere.
Moderation. People have surprising difficulty with the concept.
I've always been curious as to how secure the rover communications are. It does have a direct transmitter from the surface back to Earth - I wonder what you get if you could receive/transmit to that.
Imagine 3-orthogonally mounted rocket engines. The sum force of the asteroid has to ultimately be a vector combination of force in those 3 directions. You apply thrust off angle such that you counter the asteroid's attraction without thrusting at it.
The asteroidmay not be solid rock. It could be a rubble-pile type, and there might not be anything solid-enough to apply force to in a consistent way. It might be two closely orbiting bodies of rock, in which case you can't push on one in any type of consistent direction.
The benefit of the gravity-tug approach is that if you have a body of some concentrated mass moving at you, then if you have a spaceship sit away from it and maintain a constant position relative to a point other then the asteroid, then you can act on it's entire mass consistently.
Find it early enough, and you can do this with high-efficiency ion thrusters, rather then needing inefficient chemical rockets.
Re: reactive force from retrorockets - you fire them off-angle to the asteroid so exhaust doesn't hit them. You can easily mount orthogonal engines which would carefully cancel the attraction of the asteroid without directing any exhaust at it.
That is marginally accurate of an Ubuntu user, but the other distros are still popular and have only been gaining users since Shuttleworth started sodomizing his userbase.
Also it misses the point entirely. Distro maintainers should decide how and why UEFI is used. It shouldn't be baked into the Linux kernel, and if you want to build your own kernel, then it's something you should decide yourself.
Wouldn't it just be velocity?
It's not like the Earth has a super-strong magnetic field.
On the plus side: maybe a future where it has enough atmosphere that we can land things with normal parachutes.
Kerbal Space Program isn't a highly accurate simulator (though it's very good for getting a feel for the actual mechanics). It only does two-body simulations as far as I know (hence the domain change between Kerbin and Mun for example). This of course makes sense since 3-body is unsolvable analytically, but it does mean that it's orbital projections won't account for the influence of multiple bodies on the trajectory until you get close enough for it to change which body it simulates against.
What about the composition of the comet itself? I can't find any information about it, but if it had a significant amount of water ice...
Supplies in Mars orbit (or on it's surface) could presumably be reached.
We haven't really had that much trouble with the rovers though, and they get covered in dust. They've all well outlived their operational lifespan.
I do actually wonder if there's a built in assumption there that if you do something sufficiently grandiose you'll get a lot of extra help for free. You have to imagine that if it looked like people were actually going to be launched that we'd see a few other projects aimed at increasing their survival (i.e. launching supplies ahead of time etc.) and/or contingency planning.
The moon was a 3 day voyage though, not a 500 day one. Spending 500 days and however much money just to circle mars and come back is a dangerous waste, especially if you're going to send people - who, while on a spaceship - can't do anything more then a probe could.
Except that doesn't happen in modern wars. Modern wars are defined by having a high rate of hardware attrition, and then a big question of whether you want to fight with WW2 era technology if you don't win a decisive victory in the first few days/weeks.
No one's going to be running high power high output jammers after that.
Aldous Huxley had it more right then George Orwell: distract the people with luxuries and short term goals, at the expense of long-term freedoms. That said, his dystopia was arguably not one: it wasn't like those who brooked changed were murdered or imprisoned or tortured - they were just discredited and lavished with benefits, but ultimately kept irrelevant.
This seems unlikely. Seeing as how a jammer is a very powerful transmission source, in a combat situation setting all drones to attack jamming signals would quickly lead to said single pilot being blown apart (since 5 drones vs 1 fighter is going to be a losing match).
It's always been the weakness of jamming - you become the most powerful signal source in the area, and a very obvious target for anyone with suitable RDF gear.
Except the ease with which a drone could be hacked is being vastly overstated. It's already unreasonable to think anyone is going to crack an AES encrypted link unless they compromise physical security at an actual military base. Since it's a drone you need to implement the attack in real time as well.
This is roughly the same danger as an adversary getting control of a radio on a military net. Anyone familiar with military protocol will know this - radios with encryption codes keyed in are regarded as having security clearances equivalent to that code. Because a radio with the right encryption codes, under enemy control is practically every bit as dangerous as some hypothetical rogue drone. An enemy with a military radio can call in artillery and air strikes on friendly positions, feed bad intel and misdirect forces etc. They are every bit as dangerous - arguably more dangerous - then a rogue drone. But unlike a drone, radios can be captured because they're carried by people. A drone in the air isn't going to be hacked with any practical attack.
Then the real problem is the usual one of tyrants: "we must teach them a lesson!" leading to ever more harsh punishments which fail to understand the nature of the dissent. Not exactly unknown now either.
" A jet could pull 15 g's, out-turning any conventional aircraft"
Whys is that an advantage?
Aren't high-G turns already obsolete (along with 'dogfighting')?
No? Dogfighting is obsolete because modern missiles can pull turns and speeds which planes can't. A plane unconstrained by the need to keep a pilot alive is essentially a rather highly featureful missile. Which means it's conceivable a very advanced drone would very much be able to out-maneuver or outrun missiles.
It'd still be enormously handy. And of course once you start going down that path the question is really how long you'd want to keep the data for? A week? Month? Year?
It's all be personal so pruning it with the detail most people would want to wouldn't really be practical. It'd be kind of neat if the concept became popular though because it might lead to some renewed interest in archival storage - it very much feels like we should be able to do better then todays tape-drives.
I prefer the idea of simply being able to rewind the last day or so and see the thing I can't quite remember. I mean, being able to literally backtrack your steps to when you lost an object would be pretty incredible.
Generally, storing waste for 10.000 years in a safe manner is not considered to be possible. (And think about the costs which occur in those timelines).
I would suggest it's your education which is lacking. The dangerous radiation is stuff with a short half-life, that's what makes it so dangerous. Long half-life material is often toxic, but in terms of radioactivity it's not dangerous at all.
There are a variety of ways for us to re-process waste material into safer to store forms, but frankly speaking there are compounds and materials which are just as dangerous to the general public which are not related to nuclear waste and are tossed on the ground every day.
And just FYI, there is no such thing as a 'renewable' energy source, all the 'renewable' energy sources are just on such a long depletion timescale that nobody really cares.
This. It's hardly safer to live on ground contaminated with cadmium then it is to live on ground contaminated with low-level radionucleotides (and frequently more dangerous). Check out what happened when the reservoir for an aluminium mine broke near a town in Europe - the contents of that have probably poisoned a lot of the local ground for years to come.
Indeed the problems in Japan would certainly be almost impossible with current designs.
We should really deal with the problems at hand rather than espouse the virtues of things that do not yet exist. In fact, a non-negligible percentage of currently operating nuke plants in the US absolutely could suffer a catastrophic disaster like Fukushima –not from tsunami, but from earthquake or perhaps terrorism, and in a similar fashion (if the plant loses power and it isn't restored before the batteries die, they'll experience the same form of meltdown).
Please come up with a safe solution for current problems, and cease the handwaving dismissal of these problems because more modern on the drawing board designs won't have the same flaws. Building a plant that can't melt down like Fukishima does NOTHING to fix the damage done by Fukushima or the very real possibility of a Fukushima-scale accident occurring at currently operating plants.
Yes it does. Namely because most of the current reactors should be closed down, and replaced with modern designs.
But since no one wants to allow us to build new nuclear power plants, but also no one really wants to open a whole bunch of new coal-fired powerplants, mysteriously, we wind up running older designs longer then they should be, despite known issues.
The solution is as it always have be: build new plants, and then shutdown and dismantle old plants - and probably get some reprocessing capability so we can reduce the total mass of radioactive materials that need to be stored.