Actually, he points out an advantage to a spinning scope on the Moon -- no atmosphere means no wind when you spin it. He estimated that one could easily build a spinning scope three times as large as is practical on Earth.
As for sloshing off, wouldn't you just build a deeper container?
As for maintenance, yes you would need it for almost any lunar astronomy. But the raw materials are all right there.
I've always thought the Moon would be a great place for a telescope, and he lays it all out in detail, including:
The Shackleton crater near the south pole is so deep it never gets sunlight.
Its rim, however, gets continual sunlight, so would be perfect for a solar-powered base
The ice cap provides lots of water for drinking and hydrolyzing into air(O2) and fuel(h2)
As a start, you could build a spinning-liquid telescope that points straight up, perfect for deep-field observation
Later on, you could build a huge optical scope, or even cover the whole crater with an interferometric array
nearby is one of the oldest, most geologically interesting craters on the moon
He does miss one trick, which is that the moon itself provides the stiff structure required for long-baseline interferometry, which would be necessary to image planets around other stars.
It's really nice to see this idea wrapped up in a neat package.
After reading some of garcia's comment history, neither do I.
Way too many "I love Linux, but MS rocks" comments. And he always seems to get modded up for them. I suppose he has a well-established circle of moderator buddies.
I am almost not kidding. Even though I don't want her family to be on the line for $150,000 per song or whatever the assinine fine is, I think it would be just the thing to get pressure on Congress to reverse the excesses of copyright law.
Oh, and if you read the article, you'll find she wasn't collecting or redistributing the songs, but more using Kazaa as an on-demand radio! Maybe there's a chance for a nice P2P fair use precedent, or at least a good argument for a broadcast exemption. Wishful thinking, I suppose.
Do we know whether it's SpaceDev that will be providing the engine, or are they still competing with eAc? (Both companies have recent ground tests listed on scaled.com)
BTW, I see little evidence that any other X-Prize competitors are anywhere near as ready as SpaceShipOne. Or maybe they're the only ones that seem to be building a commercially useful vehicle. Thoughts?
I think you pretty much got my point -- the "problems" with Linux won't be solved by mere code or docs or support, but only with time, which is on our side.
The fact that all these other idiots use Windows
on
Worst Linux Annoyances?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Seriously, if Windows just went away, all my Linux problems would be solved. Here are some annoyances:
I can't get support from my cable company because most of their customers use Windows.
I can't use some web sites, especially for streaming media, because most of their customers use Windows.
My boss worries about using OpenOffice.org because it may not be compatible with MS Office.
I have to pay more for a laptop because it has Windows preinstalled or the OEM pays MS even if it doesn't.
Then there's the availablity of apps or clients or drivers, compatibility with Windows networks, Winmodems, kids' games.
Geez, it's so bad, someone should think about looking into whether any other OS could even fairly compete! Oh, wait, there's another annoyance:
I have to worry about Linux being made illegal in one way or another, because Gates has bought up all the politicians!
So expensive to run? They claim 5 cents / kWh. That's below retail for most of the US.
The reason they are aiming for the subsidized market is because there they can realize the most profit, maybe even enough to capitalize research that will bring their costs down further.
Finally, you're saying that a 100MW power plant is going to go broke cleaning mirrors? Huh?
Look, all they are claiming is that they've found a route to economically viable solar power. If you can't see the advantage of a power source that doesn't run out and frees our nation and others from dependance on foreign suppliers, maybe you need to leave your politics out of it.
But, unlike the tower described, the convection tower does not provide the means to store the energy and throttle production up and down at will -- that is what keeps solar off the radar screen of the big utilities.
As for the simplicity, you're saying that a humongous enclosure and a kilometer-high chimney (I'm sure you build those in your back yard all the time) is somehow simpler than a bunch of swivelling mirrors? And that gearing a fan to handle spikes and drops and still efficiently work as a turbine is easier than just pumping hot sat through a boiler?
Finally, "retro" means "we've done this before, we know what we're doing."
Doesn't anyone get it? Forget what the submitter tossed in, and the sunny-country factor, this tech is potentially the real deal for one reason:
STORAGE
That is, the plant they describe makes it possible to generate electricity any time, day or night, rain or shine. The only limit is that you can't run more than 13 hours without sun at one go.
This means you can throttle it up and down according to need like a real power plant.
According to their numbers (which aren't explained, but I assume are based on the 4 years they've been running the prototype plant) they can produce at $.05/kWh, which is below the retail price of electricity in the US, and probably much cheaper than in oil-hungry places like Japan. Also, since those costs are largely (wholly local) construction, land, and maintenance, sunny countries with low labor costs and some desert (India, Pakistan, Brazil, Mexico, Egypt, etc.) would realize an even better price.
Then there are circumstances they don't mention working in their favor, like:
World oil production is levelling off and may decrease if more easy reserves aren't found.
Natural gas supplies aren't as plentiful as hoped.
No one is building power plants at anything like the rate needed to keep up with demand, and
Nuclear is still politically untouchable.
Throw it all together, and a new plant that can produce at that price is a steal.
Now, if they could float the mirrors around an offshore platform, even the land costs would disappear...
Since technology (spread-spectrum, digital) now makes broadcasts of many more channels on these frequencies possible, and since broadcast TV is still the best way to get a consistent message out to a mass audience, and since we'd all like to keep elections from being decided by amount of airtime bought, I think it's time to reslice the pie.
Either chop up and sell the licences in smaller pieces for shorter terms, or sell them to broadcast "utilities" that themselves sell the ability to broadcast, but can not create or edit programming. (I'm sure such utilities would quickly discover how many channels they can slice their limited frequencies into!)
Toss in some regulations about not owning too many channels in one spot, and some about providing free air to public-interest programming, political candidates, private citizens, etc. and you've created a more diverse, more accessible, free version of cable.
Why would this matter to politics? Well, this could be a great chance to reform the rules as a whole new game is created. Maybe you could ban selling political ads, and give politicians free air time instead. Maybe you could even give parties their own little channels. Maybe, if you dealt with the ownership/licensing rules correctly, there would be a natural diversity and competition of ideas and viewpoints, and less political influence wielded by any particular media company.
Even more humorous is that agent double-0-IQ couldn't possibly have learned anything you couldn't read on a public mailing list. I mean, there is no secret Linux cabal planning our anti-Microsoft strategy. Except that one Linux site on the web that hasn't been poisoned by astroturfers, trolls, MS ads, and newbies: ifyouknowsuchasitepleasetellmeidlovetoknow.com
Of course, now that you've read this, I'll have to kill you.
So, to give you all something to bicker about, I wonder if this means we should go to coins only, and start minting $100, $50, $20, $10, and $5 coins.
Pros:
they can't be counterfeited (or at least it's much harder, correct?) machine sorting is easier last longer that cool jingle in your pocket will accelerate use of debit cards
Cons:
Form factor - need a coin purse, not a wallet (correctible? credit-card shaped & sized coins?) Heavier More expensive to produce (but really, how bad can it be if pennies are coins and $100 bills are paper?) How big would a $100 coin be anyway? Will accelerate use of credit cards
It would be a shame for this to impact LinuxNetworx, as well. They are the ones building the Linux supercomputing clusters that are taking over that industry.
LinuxNetworx and TrollTech et al should be screaming at Canopy to stop this stupidity.
Talk about throwing out healthy babies with some rancid bathwater...
In O'Reilly's "Open Sources" book, Tiemann says that RedHat decided a while ago that growing the Linux market was more important than growing RedHat's share of the market.
So he's probably fine with it. Now he has 120,000 potential customers he didn't have before.
All Linux distros contain Free Software (i.e. at least the Linux kernel), which licenses by definition do not allow the distributor to restrict the rights of users to make and even distribute as many copies of the Free Software in the distro as they wish.
So the distro can charge for media, can forbid distribution of non-free portions of the distribution and can even arrange pricing on a per-seat basis (although I think this must imply support or implementation services -- they cannot forbid their customers from making copies or performing multiple installations), but every user of every distro can freely copy and redistribute all the GPL, LGPL, BSD, and other Free Software contained in it.
Just remember the simple rule -- if you didn't write the software, you can't impose limits on its distribution. Since Free Software authors expressly remove the limits on copying and distribution, distros can't reimpose those limits.
All I'm saying is that a broadcasting company would be a public utility whose job is to be the conduit for programming. Is it too much to ask a corporate entity that has been created for the purpose of broadcasting to not use that right for undue influence?
Government-sponsored or approved or even elected press will never have the accountability of a free, private-sector press.
The problem is that although there's no limit to the number of newspapers, websites, etc, there sure is a limit to the number of frequencies on which one can legally broadcast -- and since radio and tv have about wiped newspapers off the map in terms of national political influence, those limits on who can broadcast can be abused, and are being abused. I'm suggesting that the public airwaves return to being a neutral forum.
I'd take it one step further. The studios recognize that our mass culture is made up almost exclusively of _their_ property -- they've worked hard to make this the case, and they intend to keep it that way.
Fortunately for the studios, mass culture includes political discourse, and they have also worked hard to own that, with the coup-de-grace being buying up all the broadcasters.
So the chance of our current political culture waking up to the harms of this monopolization is about nil.
I agree with Lessig's call to arms, but I think we need to be more creative in the laws _we_ ask for. For example:
Stop and reverse consolidation of broadcast rights. Probably hand out more frequencies, revoke/expire some licenses, limit the rights more, and insist that broadcasters NOT produce content and NOT sell political access. This goes for the new networks (cable, satellite, wireless, DSL) as well as the old.
Stop the practice of work-for-hire. If artists own copyrights, there won't be the unified, overpowering hoarding of cultural work there is today.
Recognize that we now have *less* of a need to give economic assistance (in the form of copyright) to allow publishing. The sheer noise of Usenet and weblogs should be proof enough of that. Limit copyright *more* than its original provisions.
We need to get creative, and go on the offensive. When people see that the Internet changes the old balance, they feel a need to do something (hence Hatch feeling snookered that DMCA would help restore sanity, when really it made things worse.) Let's give them something positive to chew on.
I don't know that it's at all settled that the conditions we now consider extreme weren't the first home of life. After all, the hydrothermal vents provide an environment richer in heat and life-aiding minerals (especially iron sulfide) than a coastal seafloor.
This environment also would have been safer from solar radiation (remember, life may have been necessary to create the ozone layer), and could have provided its energy source even earlier than the sun, since volcanic ash may well have been blocking the sun continuously during the active volcanism on the early Earth -- volcanism that also would have made the thermal vents quite common.
In general, the isolation of the extremophiles from the rest of the biosphere, and their independence from so many potentially life-generated conditions: an ozone layer, an oxygen-rich atmosphere, a carbon-regulated climate allowing liquid water on the surface, says to me that they may be prime examples of life that would arise first on a planet.
I consider it entirely possible, if not likely, that the hydrothermal vents hosted Earth's first life, and thus could host the genesis of life elsewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, he points out an advantage to a spinning scope on the Moon -- no atmosphere means no wind when you spin it. He estimated that one could easily build a spinning scope three times as large as is practical on Earth.
As for sloshing off, wouldn't you just build a deeper container?
As for maintenance, yes you would need it for almost any lunar astronomy. But the raw materials are all right there.
I've always thought the Moon would be a great place for a telescope, and he lays it all out in detail, including:
He does miss one trick, which is that the moon itself provides the stiff structure required for long-baseline interferometry, which would be necessary to image planets around other stars.
It's really nice to see this idea wrapped up in a neat package.
How many Longhorn articles is this now?
Is Slashdot still interested in Free Software?
Or did someone forget to tell me that Longhorn is GPL'd?
Also, isn't there someplace better than the front page to discuss minor updates to legacy systems?
I mean, really, Windows?? Who uses this crap any more?
Sorry to hear about your toe.
After reading some of garcia's comment history, neither do I.
Way too many "I love Linux, but MS rocks" comments. And he always seems to get modded up for them. I suppose he has a well-established circle of moderator buddies.
I am almost not kidding. Even though I don't want her family to be on the line for $150,000 per song or whatever the assinine fine is, I think it would be just the thing to get pressure on Congress to reverse the excesses of copyright law.
Oh, and if you read the article, you'll find she wasn't collecting or redistributing the songs, but more using Kazaa as an on-demand radio! Maybe there's a chance for a nice P2P fair use precedent, or at least a good argument for a broadcast exemption. Wishful thinking, I suppose.
: noogie
Sequent's code belongs to IBM! Hello? McBride?
Do we know whether it's SpaceDev that will be providing the engine, or are they still competing with eAc? (Both companies have recent ground tests listed on scaled.com)
BTW, I see little evidence that any other X-Prize competitors are anywhere near as ready as SpaceShipOne. Or maybe they're the only ones that seem to be building a commercially useful vehicle. Thoughts?
I think you pretty much got my point -- the "problems" with Linux won't be solved by mere code or docs or support, but only with time, which is on our side.
Seriously, if Windows just went away, all my Linux problems would be solved. Here are some annoyances:
I can't get support from my cable company because most of their customers use Windows.
I can't use some web sites, especially for streaming media, because most of their customers use Windows.
My boss worries about using OpenOffice.org because it may not be compatible with MS Office.
I have to pay more for a laptop because it has Windows preinstalled or the OEM pays MS even if it doesn't.
Then there's the availablity of apps or clients or drivers, compatibility with Windows networks, Winmodems, kids' games.
Geez, it's so bad, someone should think about looking into whether any other OS could even fairly compete! Oh, wait, there's another annoyance:
I have to worry about Linux being made illegal in one way or another, because Gates has bought up all the politicians!
Damn Windows!
So expensive to run? They claim 5 cents / kWh. That's below retail for most of the US.
The reason they are aiming for the subsidized market is because there they can realize the most profit, maybe even enough to capitalize research that will bring their costs down further.
Finally, you're saying that a 100MW power plant is going to go broke cleaning mirrors? Huh?
Look, all they are claiming is that they've found a route to economically viable solar power. If you can't see the advantage of a power source that doesn't run out and frees our nation and others from dependance on foreign suppliers, maybe you need to leave your politics out of it.
But, unlike the tower described, the convection tower does not provide the means to store the energy and throttle production up and down at will -- that is what keeps solar off the radar screen of the big utilities.
As for the simplicity, you're saying that a humongous enclosure and a kilometer-high chimney (I'm sure you build those in your back yard all the time) is somehow simpler than a bunch of swivelling mirrors? And that gearing a fan to handle spikes and drops and still efficiently work as a turbine is easier than just pumping hot sat through a boiler?
Finally, "retro" means "we've done this before, we know what we're doing."
Doesn't anyone get it? Forget what the submitter tossed in, and the sunny-country factor, this tech is potentially the real deal for one reason:
STORAGE
That is, the plant they describe makes it possible to generate electricity any time, day or night, rain or shine. The only limit is that you can't run more than 13 hours without sun at one go.
This means you can throttle it up and down according to need like a real power plant.
According to their numbers (which aren't explained, but I assume are based on the 4 years they've been running the prototype plant) they can produce at $.05/kWh, which is below the retail price of electricity in the US, and probably much cheaper than in oil-hungry places like Japan. Also, since those costs are largely (wholly local) construction, land, and maintenance, sunny countries with low labor costs and some desert (India, Pakistan, Brazil, Mexico, Egypt, etc.) would realize an even better price.
Then there are circumstances they don't mention working in their favor, like:
World oil production is levelling off and may decrease if more easy reserves aren't found.
Natural gas supplies aren't as plentiful as hoped.
No one is building power plants at anything like the rate needed to keep up with demand, and
Nuclear is still politically untouchable.
Throw it all together, and a new plant that can produce at that price is a steal.
Now, if they could float the mirrors around an offshore platform, even the land costs would disappear...
"BFD"
Right after he appointed all their corporate officers to his cabinet.
Since technology (spread-spectrum, digital) now makes broadcasts of many more channels on these frequencies possible, and since broadcast TV is still the best way to get a consistent message out to a mass audience, and since we'd all like to keep elections from being decided by amount of airtime bought, I think it's time to reslice the pie.
Either chop up and sell the licences in smaller pieces for shorter terms, or sell them to broadcast "utilities" that themselves sell the ability to broadcast, but can not create or edit programming. (I'm sure such utilities would quickly discover how many channels they can slice their limited frequencies into!)
Toss in some regulations about not owning too many channels in one spot, and some about providing free air to public-interest programming, political candidates, private citizens, etc. and you've created a more diverse, more accessible, free version of cable.
Why would this matter to politics? Well, this could be a great chance to reform the rules as a whole new game is created. Maybe you could ban selling political ads, and give politicians free air time instead. Maybe you could even give parties their own little channels. Maybe, if you dealt with the ownership/licensing rules correctly, there would be a natural diversity and competition of ideas and viewpoints, and less political influence wielded by any particular media company.
Even more humorous is that agent double-0-IQ couldn't possibly have learned anything you couldn't read on a public mailing list. I mean, there is no secret Linux cabal planning our anti-Microsoft strategy. Except that one Linux site on the web that hasn't been poisoned by astroturfers, trolls, MS ads, and newbies: ifyouknowsuchasitepleasetellmeidlovetoknow.com
Of course, now that you've read this, I'll have to kill you.
So, to give you all something to bicker about, I wonder if this means we should go to coins only, and start minting $100, $50, $20, $10, and $5 coins.
Pros:
they can't be counterfeited (or at least it's much harder, correct?)
machine sorting is easier
last longer
that cool jingle in your pocket
will accelerate use of debit cards
Cons:
Form factor - need a coin purse, not a wallet (correctible? credit-card shaped & sized coins?)
Heavier
More expensive to produce (but really, how bad can it be if pennies are coins and $100 bills are paper?)
How big would a $100 coin be anyway?
Will accelerate use of credit cards
Thoughts?
It would be a shame for this to impact LinuxNetworx, as well. They are the ones building the Linux supercomputing clusters that are taking over that industry.
LinuxNetworx and TrollTech et al should be screaming at Canopy to stop this stupidity.
Talk about throwing out healthy babies with some rancid bathwater...
And yet here you go doing the same thing, by purposefully misspelling "rational" as "irrational"...
In O'Reilly's "Open Sources" book, Tiemann says that RedHat decided a while ago that growing the Linux market was more important than growing RedHat's share of the market.
So he's probably fine with it. Now he has 120,000 potential customers he didn't have before.
I believe some clarification is needed:
All Linux distros contain Free Software (i.e. at least the Linux kernel), which licenses by definition do not allow the distributor to restrict the rights of users to make and even distribute as many copies of the Free Software in the distro as they wish.
So the distro can charge for media, can forbid distribution of non-free portions of the distribution and can even arrange pricing on a per-seat basis (although I think this must imply support or implementation services -- they cannot forbid their customers from making copies or performing multiple installations), but every user of every distro can freely copy and redistribute all the GPL, LGPL, BSD, and other Free Software contained in it.
Just remember the simple rule -- if you didn't write the software, you can't impose limits on its distribution. Since Free Software authors expressly remove the limits on copying and distribution, distros can't reimpose those limits.
All I'm saying is that a broadcasting company would be a public utility whose job is to be the conduit for programming. Is it too much to ask a corporate entity that has been created for the purpose of broadcasting to not use that right for undue influence?
Government-sponsored or approved or even elected press will never have the accountability of a free, private-sector press.
The problem is that although there's no limit to the number of newspapers, websites, etc, there sure is a limit to the number of frequencies on which one can legally broadcast -- and since radio and tv have about wiped newspapers off the map in terms of national political influence, those limits on who can broadcast can be abused, and are being abused. I'm suggesting that the public airwaves return to being a neutral forum.
I'd take it one step further. The studios recognize that our mass culture is made up almost exclusively of _their_ property -- they've worked hard to make this the case, and they intend to keep it that way.
Fortunately for the studios, mass culture includes political discourse, and they have also worked hard to own that, with the coup-de-grace being buying up all the broadcasters.
So the chance of our current political culture waking up to the harms of this monopolization is about nil.
I agree with Lessig's call to arms, but I think we need to be more creative in the laws _we_ ask for. For example:
Stop and reverse consolidation of broadcast rights. Probably hand out more frequencies, revoke/expire some licenses, limit the rights more, and insist that broadcasters NOT produce content and NOT sell political access. This goes for the new networks (cable, satellite, wireless, DSL) as well as the old.
Stop the practice of work-for-hire. If artists own copyrights, there won't be the unified, overpowering hoarding of cultural work there is today.
Recognize that we now have *less* of a need to give economic assistance (in the form of copyright) to allow publishing. The sheer noise of Usenet and weblogs should be proof enough of that. Limit copyright *more* than its original provisions.
We need to get creative, and go on the offensive. When people see that the Internet changes the old balance, they feel a need to do something (hence Hatch feeling snookered that DMCA would help restore sanity, when really it made things worse.) Let's give them something positive to chew on.
I don't know that it's at all settled that the conditions we now consider extreme weren't the first home of life. After all, the hydrothermal vents provide an environment richer in heat and life-aiding minerals (especially iron sulfide) than a coastal seafloor.
This environment also would have been safer from solar radiation (remember, life may have been necessary to create the ozone layer), and could have provided its energy source even earlier than the sun, since volcanic ash may well have been blocking the sun continuously during the active volcanism on the early Earth -- volcanism that also would have made the thermal vents quite common.
In general, the isolation of the extremophiles from the rest of the biosphere, and their independence from so many potentially life-generated conditions: an ozone layer, an oxygen-rich atmosphere, a carbon-regulated climate allowing liquid water on the surface, says to me that they may be prime examples of life that would arise first on a planet.
I consider it entirely possible, if not likely, that the hydrothermal vents hosted Earth's first life, and thus could host the genesis of life elsewhere.