The city will pay, as much as the court awards. And with regard to chances of winning, how do you think unlikely it is to win if a cop opens a gate to your private property (without being invited), walks up to you and takes some of your things without permission or any legal basis?
someone opened fire on a squad car with two officers in it before escaping
Obviously, an illegally taken photo of the two officers told the attacker that the car's occupants were the police. And not the subtle hint that it was a police car:-)
Yes. An apple, for example, is a part of a tree. Quite a few trees have edible parts - mostly fruits, sometimes branches (if bamboo can be called a tree); bark in two instances that I know...
If the other guy does not believe you and want a proof then probably you don't care what he believes. Besides, how a random 320x240 picture taken from 100 feet away can be a proof of anything?
With regard to the phone tap, a text message with an agreed upon code word would work even better - it gets there faster.
So either the first 2 portions of the "Product ID" are useless, or they can't claim if the key is pirated.
Or, more likely, the key is in the last 3 portions and the first two are a checksum for it. That's how you prevent people from entering any random key.
It's not a conspiracy, it's simply a consistent policy. The people who define the direction of the country are very well known, they write books about that. My point is simply that they are not presidents, and so they are not constrained to 8 years in the office. They remain around, in one advisory capacity or another.
The answer probably would have been: "I didn't know for sure, but given the situation, I decided that the risk of staying is higher than the risk of going."
That one party already has 100% seats in Congress, and after November it will retain their 100%.
Need proof? Check their voting records. Republicans and Democrats are both sock puppets on hands of one puppeteer. Haven't John Kerry declared that he is planning to "win" in Iraq, in an attempt to be more Catholic than the Pope? Hasn't Hillary Clinton said (and not said) enough already?
Who is the puppeteer? That's who gave Cheney his marching orders on those secret energy meetings. Important people with money and influence. Names do not matter, actually.
Not necessarily. However the West provided so many true stories, there was little need to lie. Notably, the USA was not portrayed as an oppressive police state, because at that time it wasn't so. Quite opposite, the USA was painted as a country of opportunities - such as an opportunity to win a million in Las Vegas, or an opportunity to die under a bridge because another hobo wanted your coat. Americans were depicted as hard working, competent people under the rule of millionaire presidents. American elections were shown as honest (they probably were, back then.)
Seriously i don;t understand why you guys cry out loud so much. You guys voted for HIM a second time. Right? First time its a coincidence, second time its delibrate.
That is indeed a problem, caused by the following, simplified:
Most americans are traditionally unaware of world politics, so they defer all that stuff to their elected representatives (the Congress and the President.) The political system is so rigged that it doesn't matter if you vote for Twiddledee or Twiddledum; the elector's choice is thus nullified, and 3rd parties have no chance in hell.
Many consecutive US governments worked hard to undermine the quality of education in US schools. As result, you can successfully graduate and still be a complete idiot about essential political issues. This is convenient to the government because it's easier to rule over idiots.
Intellect and skills are villified as obsolete, undesirable traits. Mediocrity is hailed, as in "the meek will inherit the Earth" - conveniently omitting that the rest will go to the stars. Hardly anyone reads books, and 90% of those books are cheap detective stories. Maybe 0.5% of americans heard about Plato. Only philosophy students read him. Anti-intellectualism is strong, and the current President is loved because he is so much against knowledge, just like his voters.
US prosperity after WWII was quickly redirected into consumerism, which continues to this time. This is an addictive obsession with all things material, especially compared to what thy neighbor just bought. This keeps people focused on earning more money to buy more sh1t they don't need in the first place, and away from politics.
The media had been gradually bought lock, stock & barrel, and it does not educate people any more. Instead it entertains them with a carefully designed sweet cocktail of selected news and maximum gossip. Propagandists have neen installed at key places, and paid by the government, to tell people what to think. Inconvenient reporters had been ran out of town.
Religious propaganda is rampant, and feeble-minded people are likely to fall prey to one or another preacher. Once caught, they won't escape. The preacher thinks for them.
All that had been perpetrated for decades, under a master plan, by dedicated people. Presidents came and went, but the planners stayed around.
As result, about 50% of US population does not think at all, and votes for whoever they are told to vote, and believes in whatever they are told to believe. Those are the people who elected the current President, and those are the people who will vote for his successor, whoever they will be told to vote for.
The rest of the country can, and does think, but what "who cares what you think", citing the President. To prevent any rebellion their telephones may or may not be tapped, and they may or may not be subject to attention of the US Secret Police (an amalgam of DHS, FBI, and SS.) If an opposition materializes, it will be dealt with, mercilessly.
That Move bombing was an act of government-perpetrated domestic terrorism
That the US police is armed, dangerous and may shoot first
That black americans were an oppressed underclass until the middle of 20th century, and that racism is still alive and well among people in some states.
That the West props up the apartheid regime in South Africa
That the West props up Israel and pays for its wars
That Israel is unfair to Palestinians
That the West destabilized Afghanistan to to make it a thorn in USSR's side
That the Vietnam war was a horrendous crime, despite what US Presidents said at the time
That the West wants military supremacy over everyone else, and may use nuclear weapons for aggressive purposes
That the US economy is a colossus on clay legs, supported only by mountains of green paper and by fear of global economic collapse (countries started replacing dollars with gold and euros only after 2000)
... and many other pure propaganda stories like that.
I can only offer a small response about one of your proposals:
I'm actually more of a proponent of what is called "local" power; IOW each home or industrial plant supplies as much power as it needs for itself, and returns surpluses to the grid. Such a thing was hardly practical twenty years ago, and still is very expensive, but it *can* be done with existing technology now.
It is already the case in California. If you have a power generating capability - as large as a wind turbine, or as small as a solar panel, you can feed the power back into the grid when you are not consuming it yourself. And you will be paid for the power that you give to others: link. I know someone who used to own a wind turbine and he was paid for the energy.
It might have been that I read more in your message than you wrote:-) My opinion is just this: scientists rarely come up with innovations just because hordes of laborers work on something simple.
If we do not explore the bottom of the ocean then we will never learn how to do that
I fully agree here. We have precious little knowledge about ocean floors, and we have no mechanisms to operate there, even though most of Earth surface is covered with water, and ocean floor is known to contain plenty of useful resources. Not even mentioning tasty fishes:-)
if we do not explore local space, then we will never learn how to explore outer space
I do not quite agree here. Local space == outer space. There is no difference between traveling at LEO vs. traveling to the Moon. There is very, very little of what we don't know already, since it was a busy path for many robotic probes, and they measured everything measurable on their way already, and far better than any human would do.
If you don't actually do it, you don't actually learn
ISS is there for learning - it's the only purpose of it, really. As I said, you don't have to go around the Moon to learn how to eat zero gravity foods. It costs far less to do all the research you can come up with right in the LEO, at the ISS. The trouble is that not much of that research is left to do - we already know enough about human bodies, and we can predict how badly will they fare over this and that period of time.
The real issue here is not whether a human team will survive a 1 year flight to Mars. It can be done, and we know how. There are several viable projects to that extent. We just don't have any need to go. Take the Mars rovers, for example. They are crawling all over the surface, peering in every crack, drilling every rock they come across - and they do it for a year! Now, what kind of human team can do that, living off of solar energy, staying immune to ionizing radiation and dust storms, and not needing shelter, food, water, rest, not even wanting to go home, and not having any fear about their own survival?
Robots is something that we need badly. Without robots we can not possibly construct anything in orbit, especially large scale. Even proponents of Moon exploration concur that we need to have an army of scavenger robots that will be mining this and that. Humans will be way to scarce for laboring in Moon mines. But we don't need to fly anywhere to develop robots! The money should be spent on research here, on terra firma, and once we have something to try we can screw it to the tip of a rocket and fire it away, to any planet you like. The robot won't mind the travel time, and once there it will work on anything we want, without asking for a flight home.
Repeated human flights to the Moon will not be useful to reach this goal, or, as I already mentioned,/any/ goal at all, except photo-ops on the Moon. Now, why would we need that? You see, I am talking from a deeply practical point of view, trying to come up with a reasonable path to where we want to be. And I accept as a goal that humans want to live on other planets. But we are not ready for that yet. Leonardo Da Vinci had a design of a helicopter, so what? He did not have the materials, and he had no engine at the time. We are in a similar position, like Jules Verne protagonists who just barely managed to cross a continent in a hot air balloon. Yes, it can be done; and no, it is risky and expensive, and only a fool will want to do it again. We would be utter fools to try to set up a commercial airline across the Atlantic that uses such balloons.
And we have an equivalent of a hot air ballon now for all our spaceflight needs; it's costly, dangerous, and barely gets us there when it's not broken. I say, we proved the point, now we need to think well and develop a better technology. There are interesting ideas already, mostly nuclear fusion - and they will wo
I appreciate the link; however it is proposing a system that is 1,000 times less powerful (10 MW) than what we discussed above (10 GW), and it is placed into a low (1000 km) orbit, and it moves in the sky, and it requires multiple rectennas, and so on and so on. I won't be taking it apart, just to save your and my time. And besides, such a small project technically can be done.
Yes, sure, if you want to build something you can do it. However hardly anyone can be awestruck with a 10 MW power plant that works less than 4 minutes per 1.7 hours orbit:-) That amounts to mere 392 kW of continuous power, ignoring the energy storage losses (batteries won't do, you probably need to store it as heat or as potential energy in a mass of water... this paper doesn't explore here.)
Here is a nice picture of a 1.58 GW coal power plant. This is a reasonably sized plant; anything smaller - like the proposed 10 MW ocean-warmer:-) - would be just a toy project of little practical value. Hoover dam, for example, is a 2 GW installation.
In any case, I do not object to any reasonable proposal, and I would gladly work on any serious project of the kind. Unfortunately, space-based power plants are often seen in extreme light - as a universal solution to all Earth's problems or as a universal menace. The Wikipedia article was so unwise (to put it mildly) and so obviously incorrect that I just had to point that out. Way too many articles of that kind are written by people with tunnel vision, who, for example, never mention that 2.4 GHz band is widely used for radio communication, and a power station in the sky would be not very cell phone friendly. Skeptics are just as necessary as starry-eyed inventors.
Ignorant babbling. I work with microwave designs every day, so I probably know something about it by now. And I have a degree in EE.
Credentials aside, the Wikipedia article that you refer to just scratches the surface, so to say. There are many issues with practicalities. For example, there is no way to manufacture an antenna that has no side lobes. Those are unwanted leaks from the main beam, and they point at unprotected humans on the ground, far away from the rectenna. Given geostationary placement, the extra distance won't lessen the harm; side lobes are often very narrow, and can result in small "bright spots" of danger.
Another issue is that to if you want to illuminate a small (10x10 km) spot on the ground from 35,786 km with 95% of your energy, your main beam must be not wider than arctan(10/36000) = 0.016 degrees. Normally an antenna with a beam of a couple of degrees is called super-high gain. Don't you see a disconnect here, of two-three orders of magnitude?
An antenna of such gain can be made, given the size. The Wikipedia article mentions an antenna with a 1 km dia. dish. There will be enormous problems with keeping the sections of the dish all pointing in the right direction. There are radio telescopes that operate sections to point the dish; but in the case of orbital placement the dish will have to stand on its own against solar radiation. And all the while we must remember that the main beam has to be 0.01 degree wide. To make matters simple, if you stand with such a flashlight 1 km from the screen, the spot of light on the screen will be only 1 foot wide. Even a laser beam can not be collimated that well - here are somelinks for your reading pleasure. Microwave beams have longer wavelength and they require proportionally larger scale equipment.
Now, to illustrate the foolishness of Wikipedia article's assertions about safety. Let's assume that 10 GW of power falls, evenly distributed, into a 10 km diameter circle. This circle has area of 78,500,000 square meters. Therefore, each square meter receives 127 W of microwave energy (10e10 / 78.5e6). If you stand you probably will collect 100W of RF energy; if you lie down you will get 200W or more. What genius wrote the Wikipedia article without using simple formulas to check what he is writing about? His numbers don't make any sense. Your CDMA cell phone has 0.1W transmitter; your GSM phone has up to 1W transmitter. And here we are talking about 100-200W of microwave applied *directly* to your head! Some say that even 100 mW is hazardous, but even using the loose numbers we can see that you should stand away from anything more powerful than a few Watts. Oh, by the way one of common effects of microwave radiation is blindness, since vision-related layer of cells is quite exposed.
The intensity of microwaves at ground level that would be used in the center of the beam can be designed into the system, but is likely to be comparable to that used by mobile phones. The microwaves must not be too intense in order to avoid injury to wildlife, particularly birds.
Indeed, the author of this piece is not good with numbers, and not good at engineering at all. There is nothing "likely to be comparable" in an engineering project; the numbers are available up front. If you only allow 1 W per square meter (a worst case for the cell phone) then to collect 10 GW you need, obviously, 10e10 square meters, or 10e4 square km - 100 x 100 km area of land, 2 orders of magnitude larger than this author talks about just a few sentences above. It looks to me like the Wikipedia article is just a compilation of "best bits" from multiple s
Sailing ships had their place in progress. However repeated sailing to a certain worthless place would be just a waste of time and money; it would add nothing to the knowledge. Airplanes are not wind driven, by the way, and they have no sails. Airplane design is all about the lifting capability of a wing moving in the atmosphere; this effect was never observed (or researched) on a sailing ship just because a ship is the last place in the world you'd like to do such an experiment on. A wind tunnel would be a better place, or a hilltop if that's all you have. It does not help to have 100,000 sailors on the high seas; it helps to have a couple of smart guys who make a paper airplane and wonder why it flies. If you have money, give it to the sailors and you get more of the same, with no progress. Give the money to the inventors and you get yourself an aircraft.
My point is that at the moment we know enough about rockets and about the mechanics of space travel to the Moon. We have computers which can simulate everything in between at zero cost, compared to actually flying there. Existing simulations, as well as previous actual flights, already tell us all that we need to know - namely that the Moon is there, and we can get there at $10B per year. If anyone suggests that we should spend that money flying the same route again (and again) then I would like to see the itemized list of things of value that we are expected to get from this enterprise. Another ton of lunar soil will not count, we don't know what to do with the samples that are already have. What exactly, and specifically, will we get from another Moon trip?
In other words, flying to the Moon is not going to accelerate progress in fusion research, for example. Funding would accelerate fusion work much more than cheering. Don't fight the last war again. That war is over, and the Moon had been reached. Take your Moon money and give it to physicists, make them build a new class of space vehicle for you. Then you can go to the Moon or elsewhere, depending on what kind of new propulsion you get.
Of course, this will break Active-X, toolbars, downloads, etc. Then again, on business systems, you want those things broken.
I wish it were so. But what do you think is the use of the Web at a company? Primarily to interface with other companies, research their products, download the datasheets and other documentation. There are thousands of companies that offer products in my line of business, and each one has its own subset of requirements. Some want JavaScript for their online ordering; everyone wants cookies; some need Java, other need ActiveX, some insist on IE... and so on. If you break this and give the user only the barebones Web browser then the user won't be able to do the work.
Often, a translation to a well-documented format that doesn't contain execution capability will do the job. Converting incoming.doc files to Open Document XML format, for example.
I don't think it will work at all if you exchange the.doc files with another company, reviewing and adding comments. That's the main reason to send.doc or.xls files; for everything else PDF is the preferred format.
STS maintenance is constantly in trouble because they have no replacement for parts that are worn out or damaged. That's exactly why one Shuttle (Enterprise) is cannibalized for parts; it was a test model anyway, not space-rated.
And you can't compare the complexity and precision and required reliabity of Shuttle components to a rail, or a railroad spike. Amtrak hardware can be upgraded at little cost because there are hundreds of thousands of switch boxes, sensors, semaphores, lights, and other hardware - so the replacement of old components with new ones can be done easily. For example, you have no issues with replacing an old air conditioner with the new one that is made to fit the same hole. And you have no problem to replace an old refrigerator, or to install an aftermarket part into your car - just because they are made to fit, and they are made in large numbers, so that the R&D is justified.
But any large, unique installation / system has to worry about replacement parts; the more unique the system is, the greater is the worry. Normally the parts of such a system are designed to fail at about the same time, so that the whole thing needs to be replaced at once. This is the cheapest approach.
The original Orion team got the environmental impact down to an estimated one additional human death per launch (from cancer due to fallout)
Since cancer does not kill instantly, I wonder how did they calculate that one additional fatality? Was it like shortening of life of 100 people by one year? Or maybe shortening of 1000 lives by one month?
If the town of Springfield, population 1000, is in the danger zone, is it OK to shorten each and every life in it by one month per launch?
The Moon is *not* en route to the stars. It's like stepping across the brook 100,000 times over and over again and claiming that it helps Columbus to get to America. We do not have any technology that is good enough for going to the stars, and we don't even have any knowledge how to make it, or where to start. All we have is a crude chemical rocket that, at great expense, can jump to the other side of this here brook. It is of little use even if you want to go to Mars, just because the weight (and waste) of fuel is immense. And you physically can't use anything like that to go to Jupiter, Saturn or anywhere farther - because you would be moving too slow, and your life span is too short.
If I were to have the funds and need to decide what to spend them on, I would invest the money into physics and into [molecular] biology and nanoengineering and AI. These are the areas which can tell us how to move the spacecraft without all this chemical mess, possibly FTL, and how to modify human bodies so that they can survive in a hostile environment. Otherwise humans will be always the proverbial "spam in a can", an unwanted, expensive and demanding payload on otherwise automated space missions.
As another example, you can ride a horse all the way from Paris to Bejing, as many times as you want, but it won't help in designing a commercial jet.
Considering these reasons, going to the Moon may be helpful only if there is an artifact somewhere that holds all the ancient knowledge of a long gone race.
If the administration was foolish to plan to go to other planets, at least it corrected itself by failing to spend any money on it. The whole plan was just a political song and dance, with no intention to follow through. You probably can't find more "down to Earth" administration in the recent history.
For example, how big and how perfect of a pure silicon crystal could you grow there?
And, once grown, what would you do with this crystal? In many cases it is cheaper to make 1,000 similar crystals on Earth and throw away 999 of them, rather than to fly The Precious One from the orbit. There is no immediate, obvious industrial need in pretty much anything that microgravity offers. Not to say that there may not be any; we are like a caveman who does not need a CNC lathe; the time of that technology hasn't arrived yet.
The near-nothing atmosphere means that probably all the energy you would need would be available via solar panels.
The downside to that is that solar energy is all you have. It's not enough for most industrial processes. Aluminum plants are built only where cheap hydro or nuclear energy is available, for example. You would be hard pressed to refine enough Al on ISS to make a teaspoon.
Energy collection could be a business in itself
I wonder why it isn't already? A hint: it isn't profitable. It costs too much to launch a solar energy collector; it costs 100x that much to convert the sunlight into something else; it costs 1000x that much to deliver that energy where it is needed. And I fear to think about how much it will cost to service that thing in orbit.
How about almost nothing to any location on planet Earth?
Sounds like magic; unfortunately, things are not that simple. If you don't want your microwave beam to circle the Earth (which would be quite unfortunate to great number of creatures in its path) then you need to hang your dish in the geostationary orbit. That orbit is crowded, and full of sensitive comms sats. You do not want to have a multi-gigawatt microwave transmitter anywhere near them (even assuming that you know how to make such a transmitter - nobody else on this planet does.)
There are also other interesting effects, like beam focusing and aiming. If you miss your target - which itself has to be a thousand square km zone of death - you can say goodbye to any city that the beam happens to flick across.
I imagine even small towns would have a designated delivery port where lunar cargo could be dropped with the accuracy of a smart-bomb... cheaper and faster than a cargo ship from China
Oceangoing cargo ships are the cheapest transport on the planet. Besides, what lunar cargo do you plan to drop on Earth that is worth dropping and that will survive the drop? Raw materials will do, but they are better used in orbit, not on the surface. Lunar manufacturing will need to come up with some real miracles to be worth of lugging all the way to Earth - and that presumes that the technology will never work on Earth, so it has to stay up there. As it stands, Earth does not really need anything from space; what it badly needs is smart people in right places, and you can't [easily] fetch them from the outer space. The last time one such guy showed up he was promptly crucified, and I see every reason for that to happen again.
Each IP address can also directly address 64K computers, via the existing port structure
You probably meant to say that each IP address can provide 64K different services. But they all must be on one host. You can't assign the same IP address to both your toaster and your refrigerator, unless you have a NAT. And even then behind the NAT they will have different addresses.
All in all, if IPV6 were being deployed in the early 1990's it might have made sense to avoid some of the pain we went through. Now, its like the pre-IP protocol stacks - its time has passed.
The upgrade may actually occur one day, but not because the customers need it. NATs were developed as a workaround to shortage of IP addresses, and they quickly became very desirable because of security features that they offered. It is very convenient to have virtually unlimited pool of private IP addresses that are routed elsewhere through a simple device that you control. IPv6 also can do that, since you are supposed to be given a good number of bits for your network - but why bother giving a secretary a globally addressable IP? There is no reason for that, and every reason to not do it. We may have problems with things, but IPv4 is not one of the problems, and we'd better stop talking as if it is.
Slashdot Mirror
The city will pay, as much as the court awards. And with regard to chances of winning, how do you think unlikely it is to win if a cop opens a gate to your private property (without being invited), walks up to you and takes some of your things without permission or any legal basis?
But what, in your opinion, is easier?
Obviously, an illegally taken photo of the two officers told the attacker that the car's occupants were the police. And not the subtle hint that it was a police car :-)
Yes. An apple, for example, is a part of a tree. Quite a few trees have edible parts - mostly fruits, sometimes branches (if bamboo can be called a tree); bark in two instances that I know...
With regard to the phone tap, a text message with an agreed upon code word would work even better - it gets there faster.
By that reasoning the cardinal himself should be burned on a stake if he believes that the Son and the Holy Spirit are not God...
Or, more likely, the key is in the last 3 portions and the first two are a checksum for it. That's how you prevent people from entering any random key.
It's not a conspiracy, it's simply a consistent policy. The people who define the direction of the country are very well known, they write books about that. My point is simply that they are not presidents, and so they are not constrained to 8 years in the office. They remain around, in one advisory capacity or another.
The answer probably would have been: "I didn't know for sure, but given the situation, I decided that the risk of staying is higher than the risk of going."
Need proof? Check their voting records. Republicans and Democrats are both sock puppets on hands of one puppeteer. Haven't John Kerry declared that he is planning to "win" in Iraq, in an attempt to be more Catholic than the Pope? Hasn't Hillary Clinton said (and not said) enough already?
Who is the puppeteer? That's who gave Cheney his marching orders on those secret energy meetings. Important people with money and influence. Names do not matter, actually.
Not necessarily. However the West provided so many true stories, there was little need to lie. Notably, the USA was not portrayed as an oppressive police state, because at that time it wasn't so. Quite opposite, the USA was painted as a country of opportunities - such as an opportunity to win a million in Las Vegas, or an opportunity to die under a bridge because another hobo wanted your coat. Americans were depicted as hard working, competent people under the rule of millionaire presidents. American elections were shown as honest (they probably were, back then.)
Seriously i don;t understand why you guys cry out loud so much. You guys voted for HIM a second time. Right? First time its a coincidence, second time its delibrate.
That is indeed a problem, caused by the following, simplified:
As result, about 50% of US population does not think at all, and votes for whoever they are told to vote, and believes in whatever they are told to believe. Those are the people who elected the current President, and those are the people who will vote for his successor, whoever they will be told to vote for.
The rest of the country can, and does think, but what "who cares what you think", citing the President. To prevent any rebellion their telephones may or may not be tapped, and they may or may not be subject to attention of the US Secret Police (an amalgam of DHS, FBI, and SS.) If an opposition materializes, it will be dealt with, mercilessly.
I'm actually more of a proponent of what is called "local" power; IOW each home or industrial plant supplies as much power as it needs for itself, and returns surpluses to the grid. Such a thing was hardly practical twenty years ago, and still is very expensive, but it *can* be done with existing technology now.
It is already the case in California. If you have a power generating capability - as large as a wind turbine, or as small as a solar panel, you can feed the power back into the grid when you are not consuming it yourself. And you will be paid for the power that you give to others: link. I know someone who used to own a wind turbine and he was paid for the energy.
If we do not explore the bottom of the ocean then we will never learn how to do that
I fully agree here. We have precious little knowledge about ocean floors, and we have no mechanisms to operate there, even though most of Earth surface is covered with water, and ocean floor is known to contain plenty of useful resources. Not even mentioning tasty fishes :-)
if we do not explore local space, then we will never learn how to explore outer space
I do not quite agree here. Local space == outer space. There is no difference between traveling at LEO vs. traveling to the Moon. There is very, very little of what we don't know already, since it was a busy path for many robotic probes, and they measured everything measurable on their way already, and far better than any human would do.
If you don't actually do it, you don't actually learn
ISS is there for learning - it's the only purpose of it, really. As I said, you don't have to go around the Moon to learn how to eat zero gravity foods. It costs far less to do all the research you can come up with right in the LEO, at the ISS. The trouble is that not much of that research is left to do - we already know enough about human bodies, and we can predict how badly will they fare over this and that period of time.
The real issue here is not whether a human team will survive a 1 year flight to Mars. It can be done, and we know how. There are several viable projects to that extent. We just don't have any need to go. Take the Mars rovers, for example. They are crawling all over the surface, peering in every crack, drilling every rock they come across - and they do it for a year! Now, what kind of human team can do that, living off of solar energy, staying immune to ionizing radiation and dust storms, and not needing shelter, food, water, rest, not even wanting to go home, and not having any fear about their own survival?
Robots is something that we need badly. Without robots we can not possibly construct anything in orbit, especially large scale. Even proponents of Moon exploration concur that we need to have an army of scavenger robots that will be mining this and that. Humans will be way to scarce for laboring in Moon mines. But we don't need to fly anywhere to develop robots! The money should be spent on research here, on terra firma, and once we have something to try we can screw it to the tip of a rocket and fire it away, to any planet you like. The robot won't mind the travel time, and once there it will work on anything we want, without asking for a flight home.
Repeated human flights to the Moon will not be useful to reach this goal, or, as I already mentioned, /any/ goal at all, except photo-ops on the Moon. Now, why would we need that? You see, I am talking from a deeply practical point of view, trying to come up with a reasonable path to where we want to be. And I accept as a goal that humans want to live on other planets. But we are not ready for that yet. Leonardo Da Vinci had a design of a helicopter, so what? He did not have the materials, and he had no engine at the time. We are in a similar position, like Jules Verne protagonists who just barely managed to cross a continent in a hot air balloon. Yes, it can be done; and no, it is risky and expensive, and only a fool will want to do it again. We would be utter fools to try to set up a commercial airline across the Atlantic that uses such balloons.
And we have an equivalent of a hot air ballon now for all our spaceflight needs; it's costly, dangerous, and barely gets us there when it's not broken. I say, we proved the point, now we need to think well and develop a better technology. There are interesting ideas already, mostly nuclear fusion - and they will wo
I appreciate the link; however it is proposing a system that is 1,000 times less powerful (10 MW) than what we discussed above (10 GW), and it is placed into a low (1000 km) orbit, and it moves in the sky, and it requires multiple rectennas, and so on and so on. I won't be taking it apart, just to save your and my time. And besides, such a small project technically can be done.
Yes, sure, if you want to build something you can do it. However hardly anyone can be awestruck with a 10 MW power plant that works less than 4 minutes per 1.7 hours orbit :-) That amounts to mere 392 kW of continuous power, ignoring the energy storage losses (batteries won't do, you probably need to store it as heat or as potential energy in a mass of water... this paper doesn't explore here.)
Here is a nice picture of a 1.58 GW coal power plant. This is a reasonably sized plant; anything smaller - like the proposed 10 MW ocean-warmer :-) - would be just a toy project of little practical value. Hoover dam, for example, is a 2 GW installation.
In any case, I do not object to any reasonable proposal, and I would gladly work on any serious project of the kind. Unfortunately, space-based power plants are often seen in extreme light - as a universal solution to all Earth's problems or as a universal menace. The Wikipedia article was so unwise (to put it mildly) and so obviously incorrect that I just had to point that out. Way too many articles of that kind are written by people with tunnel vision, who, for example, never mention that 2.4 GHz band is widely used for radio communication, and a power station in the sky would be not very cell phone friendly. Skeptics are just as necessary as starry-eyed inventors.
Credentials aside, the Wikipedia article that you refer to just scratches the surface, so to say. There are many issues with practicalities. For example, there is no way to manufacture an antenna that has no side lobes. Those are unwanted leaks from the main beam, and they point at unprotected humans on the ground, far away from the rectenna. Given geostationary placement, the extra distance won't lessen the harm; side lobes are often very narrow, and can result in small "bright spots" of danger.
Another issue is that to if you want to illuminate a small (10x10 km) spot on the ground from 35,786 km with 95% of your energy, your main beam must be not wider than arctan(10/36000) = 0.016 degrees. Normally an antenna with a beam of a couple of degrees is called super-high gain. Don't you see a disconnect here, of two-three orders of magnitude?
An antenna of such gain can be made, given the size. The Wikipedia article mentions an antenna with a 1 km dia. dish. There will be enormous problems with keeping the sections of the dish all pointing in the right direction. There are radio telescopes that operate sections to point the dish; but in the case of orbital placement the dish will have to stand on its own against solar radiation. And all the while we must remember that the main beam has to be 0.01 degree wide. To make matters simple, if you stand with such a flashlight 1 km from the screen, the spot of light on the screen will be only 1 foot wide. Even a laser beam can not be collimated that well - here are some links for your reading pleasure. Microwave beams have longer wavelength and they require proportionally larger scale equipment.
Now, to illustrate the foolishness of Wikipedia article's assertions about safety. Let's assume that 10 GW of power falls, evenly distributed, into a 10 km diameter circle. This circle has area of 78,500,000 square meters. Therefore, each square meter receives 127 W of microwave energy (10e10 / 78.5e6). If you stand you probably will collect 100W of RF energy; if you lie down you will get 200W or more. What genius wrote the Wikipedia article without using simple formulas to check what he is writing about? His numbers don't make any sense. Your CDMA cell phone has 0.1W transmitter; your GSM phone has up to 1W transmitter. And here we are talking about 100-200W of microwave applied *directly* to your head! Some say that even 100 mW is hazardous, but even using the loose numbers we can see that you should stand away from anything more powerful than a few Watts. Oh, by the way one of common effects of microwave radiation is blindness, since vision-related layer of cells is quite exposed.
Indeed, the author of this piece is not good with numbers, and not good at engineering at all. There is nothing "likely to be comparable" in an engineering project; the numbers are available up front. If you only allow 1 W per square meter (a worst case for the cell phone) then to collect 10 GW you need, obviously, 10e10 square meters, or 10e4 square km - 100 x 100 km area of land, 2 orders of magnitude larger than this author talks about just a few sentences above. It looks to me like the Wikipedia article is just a compilation of "best bits" from multiple s
My point is that at the moment we know enough about rockets and about the mechanics of space travel to the Moon. We have computers which can simulate everything in between at zero cost, compared to actually flying there. Existing simulations, as well as previous actual flights, already tell us all that we need to know - namely that the Moon is there, and we can get there at $10B per year. If anyone suggests that we should spend that money flying the same route again (and again) then I would like to see the itemized list of things of value that we are expected to get from this enterprise. Another ton of lunar soil will not count, we don't know what to do with the samples that are already have. What exactly, and specifically, will we get from another Moon trip?
In other words, flying to the Moon is not going to accelerate progress in fusion research, for example. Funding would accelerate fusion work much more than cheering. Don't fight the last war again. That war is over, and the Moon had been reached. Take your Moon money and give it to physicists, make them build a new class of space vehicle for you. Then you can go to the Moon or elsewhere, depending on what kind of new propulsion you get.
I wish it were so. But what do you think is the use of the Web at a company? Primarily to interface with other companies, research their products, download the datasheets and other documentation. There are thousands of companies that offer products in my line of business, and each one has its own subset of requirements. Some want JavaScript for their online ordering; everyone wants cookies; some need Java, other need ActiveX, some insist on IE... and so on. If you break this and give the user only the barebones Web browser then the user won't be able to do the work.
Often, a translation to a well-documented format that doesn't contain execution capability will do the job. Converting incoming .doc files to Open Document XML format, for example.
I don't think it will work at all if you exchange the .doc files with another company, reviewing and adding comments. That's the main reason to send .doc or .xls files; for everything else PDF is the preferred format.
And you can't compare the complexity and precision and required reliabity of Shuttle components to a rail, or a railroad spike. Amtrak hardware can be upgraded at little cost because there are hundreds of thousands of switch boxes, sensors, semaphores, lights, and other hardware - so the replacement of old components with new ones can be done easily. For example, you have no issues with replacing an old air conditioner with the new one that is made to fit the same hole. And you have no problem to replace an old refrigerator, or to install an aftermarket part into your car - just because they are made to fit, and they are made in large numbers, so that the R&D is justified.
But any large, unique installation / system has to worry about replacement parts; the more unique the system is, the greater is the worry. Normally the parts of such a system are designed to fail at about the same time, so that the whole thing needs to be replaced at once. This is the cheapest approach.
Since cancer does not kill instantly, I wonder how did they calculate that one additional fatality? Was it like shortening of life of 100 people by one year? Or maybe shortening of 1000 lives by one month? If the town of Springfield, population 1000, is in the danger zone, is it OK to shorten each and every life in it by one month per launch?
No. I can rent a movie for $3 if I want to see someone walking in a spacesuit.
Investing $10B per year into cancer treatment research, for example, would be far more relevant.
If I were to have the funds and need to decide what to spend them on, I would invest the money into physics and into [molecular] biology and nanoengineering and AI. These are the areas which can tell us how to move the spacecraft without all this chemical mess, possibly FTL, and how to modify human bodies so that they can survive in a hostile environment. Otherwise humans will be always the proverbial "spam in a can", an unwanted, expensive and demanding payload on otherwise automated space missions.
As another example, you can ride a horse all the way from Paris to Bejing, as many times as you want, but it won't help in designing a commercial jet.
Considering these reasons, going to the Moon may be helpful only if there is an artifact somewhere that holds all the ancient knowledge of a long gone race.
If the administration was foolish to plan to go to other planets, at least it corrected itself by failing to spend any money on it. The whole plan was just a political song and dance, with no intention to follow through. You probably can't find more "down to Earth" administration in the recent history.
And, once grown, what would you do with this crystal? In many cases it is cheaper to make 1,000 similar crystals on Earth and throw away 999 of them, rather than to fly The Precious One from the orbit. There is no immediate, obvious industrial need in pretty much anything that microgravity offers. Not to say that there may not be any; we are like a caveman who does not need a CNC lathe; the time of that technology hasn't arrived yet.
The near-nothing atmosphere means that probably all the energy you would need would be available via solar panels.
The downside to that is that solar energy is all you have. It's not enough for most industrial processes. Aluminum plants are built only where cheap hydro or nuclear energy is available, for example. You would be hard pressed to refine enough Al on ISS to make a teaspoon.
Energy collection could be a business in itself
I wonder why it isn't already? A hint: it isn't profitable. It costs too much to launch a solar energy collector; it costs 100x that much to convert the sunlight into something else; it costs 1000x that much to deliver that energy where it is needed. And I fear to think about how much it will cost to service that thing in orbit.
How about almost nothing to any location on planet Earth?
Sounds like magic; unfortunately, things are not that simple. If you don't want your microwave beam to circle the Earth (which would be quite unfortunate to great number of creatures in its path) then you need to hang your dish in the geostationary orbit. That orbit is crowded, and full of sensitive comms sats. You do not want to have a multi-gigawatt microwave transmitter anywhere near them (even assuming that you know how to make such a transmitter - nobody else on this planet does.)
There are also other interesting effects, like beam focusing and aiming. If you miss your target - which itself has to be a thousand square km zone of death - you can say goodbye to any city that the beam happens to flick across.
I imagine even small towns would have a designated delivery port where lunar cargo could be dropped with the accuracy of a smart-bomb... cheaper and faster than a cargo ship from China
Oceangoing cargo ships are the cheapest transport on the planet. Besides, what lunar cargo do you plan to drop on Earth that is worth dropping and that will survive the drop? Raw materials will do, but they are better used in orbit, not on the surface. Lunar manufacturing will need to come up with some real miracles to be worth of lugging all the way to Earth - and that presumes that the technology will never work on Earth, so it has to stay up there. As it stands, Earth does not really need anything from space; what it badly needs is smart people in right places, and you can't [easily] fetch them from the outer space. The last time one such guy showed up he was promptly crucified, and I see every reason for that to happen again.
You probably meant to say that each IP address can provide 64K different services. But they all must be on one host. You can't assign the same IP address to both your toaster and your refrigerator, unless you have a NAT. And even then behind the NAT they will have different addresses.
All in all, if IPV6 were being deployed in the early 1990's it might have made sense to avoid some of the pain we went through. Now, its like the pre-IP protocol stacks - its time has passed.
The upgrade may actually occur one day, but not because the customers need it. NATs were developed as a workaround to shortage of IP addresses, and they quickly became very desirable because of security features that they offered. It is very convenient to have virtually unlimited pool of private IP addresses that are routed elsewhere through a simple device that you control. IPv6 also can do that, since you are supposed to be given a good number of bits for your network - but why bother giving a secretary a globally addressable IP? There is no reason for that, and every reason to not do it. We may have problems with things, but IPv4 is not one of the problems, and we'd better stop talking as if it is.