While I agree Mars was probably a bad choice, changing course again will just make things worse. That's the main problem; we don't have the political will to stick with one strategy and see it through.
We'll get good science and engineering out of the Mars missions, and hopefully open some opportunities for the private sector in space as well. I was hoping we'd get a moon base first, but I'd rather we stick with a plan and actually accomplish it than switch back and forth and accomplish nothing.
Deserts have the advantage that they tend to be large and there's no shortage of them. Habitat loss is minimal. A solar thermal plant might be large, but it takes up only a tiny percentage of the desert it's in.
I understand your sentiment, but you should probably save it for ecologies that actually need the protection.
It was apparently a bad day for posting on/., as my memory is apparently failing me. I was probably thinking about batteries, but who knows.
I knew there were environmental issues with PV, but I misremembered what they were. Apparently, they're related to the manufacturing process. According to Wikipedia:
The manufacturing processes of solar cell involve the emissions of several toxic, flammable and explosive chemicals. Lately, in the field of photovoltaic research, there has been a continual rise in research and development efforts focused on reducing mass during cell manufacture. Such efforts have resulted in reducing the thickness of solar cells and thus the next generation solar cells are becoming thinner and eventually risks of exposure are reduced nevertheless, all chemicals must be carefully handled to ensure minimal human and environmental contact. The large scale deployment of such renewable energy technologies could result in potential negative environmental implications. These potential problems can pose serious challenges in promulgating such technologies to a broad segment of consumers.
Glass doesn't have that problem, although I can't really say for the mirror backing.
The manufacturing processes of solar cell involve the emissions of several toxic, flammable and explosive chemicals. Lately, in the field of photovoltaic research, there has been a continual rise in research and development efforts focused on reducing mass during cell manufacture. Such efforts have resulted in reducing the thickness of solar cells and thus the next generation solar cells are becoming thinner and eventually risks of exposure are reduced nevertheless, all chemicals must be carefully handled to ensure minimal human and environmental contact. The large scale deployment of such renewable energy technologies could result in potential negative environmental implications.
PV panels wear out and have to be replaced periodically. Mirrors do too (you can only repolish them so much), but they're just glass with a thin metallic backing, and unlike PV panels, they could be produced locally. Depending on your heat source, glass is about as eco-friendly as you get materials-wise.
There's no reason why they couldn't use battery storage with this. The thermal battery is just a byproduct of the way solar thermal works - you have the stored heat whether you want it or not, so why not keep the turbine running all night?
I haven't run the numbers, but I'd imagine that solar thermal does pretty well in regards to waste and ecological damage.
Like most other energy plants, it's mostly concrete and steel. The HTF is some kind of synthetic oil that gets reused. If they reclaim the water from the steam turbine, the plant will use very little resources once it's finished. So right there, it's already beating coal, oil, and gas.
Mirrors would need repolished, but considering that could probably be done onsite, it would be using clean energy. Motors would have to be rebuilt occasionally. Electronics would have to be replaced from time to time. Any energy plant would require maintenance of some sort anyway, so it's not really much different than wind in that regard.
It shades areas of the desert, but not completely. I'd be willing to bet it has less effect on desert life in that area than a hydro plant would have.
It doesn't require rare earth metals like a photovoltaic setup would. There's no mining involved other than the steel and concrete (which any power plant would have plenty of anyway - wind probably more steel and less concrete). Glass isn't bad, environmentally speaking - heat, sand, and some common minerals. So there really shouldn't be much in the way of toxic waste, unless they're using a particularly nasty paint (those can vary widely in eco-friendliness).
I'd say this is about as eco-friendly as you can get for a power plant. Feel free to point out anything I missed, I just woke up.
Oh, that's right. I completely forgot about Plus!. Both the DEC and Gateway machines at the time had Plus! installed from the factory.
I didn't run 95 much personally, except at work where I did tech support for it. My home machine at the time was a 386, so I ran 3.11. By the time I upgraded, the 98 betas were out, and I got into Linux.
I've got Microsoft OS/2 v1.3 around here somewhere. Looks like NT 3.x. I never ran any of the later IBM versions (I only ran 1.3 because I found the disks and installed them to see what they looked like).
The difference is that Andy Weir actually did try to make it as scientifically accurate as he could (besides the windstorm scene). He got a lot of stuff right. IIRC, he's actually worked for NASA, so he knows quite a bit (and knows people who know more) about space exploration. (It was either Andy Weir or Randall Munroe who said that no matter what you do at NASA, if you work there you tend to talk a lot about space.)
A lot of people look at the book (haven't seen the movie) as being the closest to a scientifically accurate story about someone stranded on Mars. Finding inaccuracies just comes natural. It's part of the fun, really.
I mean, no one cares that Plan 9 from Outer Space isn't accurate, because it isn't meant to be. Same for Weir's old webcomic Casey & Andy.
Windows 95 had Internet Explorer 1.0. I'm pretty sure it was included on the non-OEM disks, but it was definitely included on disks that came with Digital Equipment and Gateway 2000 machines.
It didn't do much, but it was enough for my coworkers and I to set up a little "mini-web" on the network shares. I learned HTML before I ever used the internet:)
We're not going to get single-payer. We're not going to get fully socialized health care. We might get Alan Grayson's "Republican health care", if the libertarians gain more foothold, but that's as bad or worse than what we had before.
We have to live with the system we have. I'd prefer it to work.
If that's the case, then surface life would probably be difficult. I don't think radiation wouldn't be very harmful for life in an ocean, however.
And yeah, I'm not suggesting a habitable planet would stay habitable after being inside a red giant. However, if a planet became habitable after the red giant phase (imagine the amount of chaos going on after the star collapsed - planets would change position, possibly collide, lose their atmospheres, possibly gain new atmospheres and oceans from outgassing, etc.), it could potentially allow life a longer time to evolve than it would have had before.
I'm sure that's not horribly likely, but hey, there's a whole lot of stars out there.
Considering white dwarfs live an insanely long time, the star isn't "running out of time."
If a habitable planet was orbiting a white dwarf, life on that planet could potentially go on for billions and billions of years, barring any planet-killing catastrophes. The star would slowly cool, but life once formed might be able to adapt to the cooling temperatures over billions of years.
A red dwarf would be better, though. They're practically immortal and keep a steady output over their lifetime. Only problem there is that the habitable zone is really, really close to a red dwarf.
I have met (and am one) people who think the ACA is marginally better than what we had before, and support it only because no decent medical plan has a chance of passing.
So yeah, while I'd prefer a single payer system, I know I"m not going to get it. I'd like this fixed.
people who install GNU/Linux OSes don't do it "because it's fun" or "because they want a challenge of running command-line tools", they do it because they *know* and trust the digital audit trail based on the publicly-verifiable reputation of the 1000+ developers behind each distribution, and, because that trail exists, they can feel that they're safe from malware and spyware when they follow the install procedures that come with their OS.
I install Linux because it's fun and I enjoy running command line tools.
I did so back in the days when your only option for installing software was to download the source code and compile it.
I have been doing so since before GPG existed (PGP was around, but people didn't sign packages with it).
I have been doing so since before Debian started signing their repositories.
I've watched Red Hat users install RPMs downloaded from third party sites because they had no recourse - Red Hat did not have the comprehensive package archive made possible thousands of volunteers the Debian project has (not sure what it's like now - I've heard it's improved).
I've watched Solaris users install unsigned Solaris packages they got off people in newsgroups. I've installed unofficial Solaris packages from websites - things like newer versions of gcc that someone had built that were newer than those available on the GNU disk.
You couldn't actually do anything with it, of course - that'd defeat the purpose (Microsoft's purpose, that is). But it allowed government agencies with a POSIX requirement to install NT, letting Microsoft get a foot into a lot of doors it was previously locked out of.
OpenBSD can install off the serial console on a PC, so I assume NetBSD also has the capability.
The machine in question was a little booksize box with no serial ports though, and while I've got USB to serial converters, I've had bad luck with them as serial consoles (at least on FreeBSD). I would have had to dig around in the closet to find one, and the ISCSI idea was just a whim anyway.
I'd like to use a Sparc as my firewall, but unfortunately I don't have any sbus network cards.
They're different, but not horribly so. Most basic configuration is similar, and they both have excellent documentation. FreeBSD does have a lot of features that OpenBSD lacks, but I think that's a good thing; I use OpenBSD for network services (firewall, DHCP, DNS, etc.) and it's dead simple to deal with. That simplicity can make unusual things easy - getting my firewall to run diskless and boot off the DHCP server, for instance.
My basic rule of thumb: if I need ZFS or jails, I use FreeBSD - otherwise, I use OpenBSD.
I tried to set up NetBSD as a backup server (since it can act as a ISCSI target), but the monitor I use in the server room freaks out every time I boot it. It does it with OpenBSD too, but if I boot it with the KVM somewhere else and switch after boot, it works with OpenBSD. Oh well, maybe next upgrade cycle, I'll get a better monitor for in there.
I've never tried GhostBSD, nor heard much about it.
Mint's a good choice if you're looking for a minimum of change. The Cinnamon desktop has a very similar workflow to Windows, and most stuff just works out of the box.
One thing though: changing your OS, especially if you're a power user, is a huge deal. You'll run into a lot of things that will annoy you or piss you off. That's natural. Linux users tend to feel the same when they have to work on Windows.
So if you want to change, follow through. Do your change, and make yourself stick with it for at least a year. Don't shy away from dealing with technical problems. After a while, you'll acclimate and it will feel natural. Until then, it'll feel like pulling teeth just to get stuff done.
Someone else suggested PC-BSD. I would agree, if you're a technical guy and aren't afraid of getting your hands dirty. Driver support isn't as good, but that only matters if you have hardware that it doesn't support. There are a few programs out there that are Linux-only (Rosegarden, for instance), but those are rare. FreeBSD (PC-BSD is just a modified installer over FreeBSD with some extra software) is a whole lot cleaner and more cohesive than Linux - the base system is all part of the project, rather than a collection of separate projects. Everything is very well documented. So yeah, if you're a power user and won't mind a bit of work to get things to your liking, give PC-BSD a try.
You'll have a hard time making the "anti-competitive" argument, considering they're overwriting their own product. Bricking some bootcamp installs (if it happens) is more grounds for a class action suit.
And as far as Linux goes - has Microsoft ever suggested that dual booting is supported? I know their loader is technically capable of it, but being capable of it and supporting it are different things.
The web browser suit was completely different. Microsoft won (for a while) the browser war, and did so by leveraging their monopoly. We all suffered because of it - Microsoft squandered their opportunity and let web standards degrade so badly non-tech people moved to a different browser.
Slashdot Mirror
While I agree Mars was probably a bad choice, changing course again will just make things worse. That's the main problem; we don't have the political will to stick with one strategy and see it through.
We'll get good science and engineering out of the Mars missions, and hopefully open some opportunities for the private sector in space as well. I was hoping we'd get a moon base first, but I'd rather we stick with a plan and actually accomplish it than switch back and forth and accomplish nothing.
Every environment is "extremely fragile."
Deserts have the advantage that they tend to be large and there's no shortage of them. Habitat loss is minimal. A solar thermal plant might be large, but it takes up only a tiny percentage of the desert it's in.
I understand your sentiment, but you should probably save it for ecologies that actually need the protection.
It was apparently a bad day for posting on /., as my memory is apparently failing me. I was probably thinking about batteries, but who knows.
I knew there were environmental issues with PV, but I misremembered what they were. Apparently, they're related to the manufacturing process. According to Wikipedia:
The manufacturing processes of solar cell involve the emissions of several toxic, flammable and explosive chemicals. Lately, in the field of photovoltaic research, there has been a continual rise in research and development efforts focused on reducing mass during cell manufacture. Such efforts have resulted in reducing the thickness of solar cells and thus the next generation solar cells are becoming thinner and eventually risks of exposure are reduced nevertheless, all chemicals must be carefully handled to ensure minimal human and environmental contact. The large scale deployment of such renewable energy technologies could result in potential negative environmental implications. These potential problems can pose serious challenges in promulgating such technologies to a broad segment of consumers.
Glass doesn't have that problem, although I can't really say for the mirror backing.
From Wikipedia:
The manufacturing processes of solar cell involve the emissions of several toxic, flammable and explosive chemicals. Lately, in the field of photovoltaic research, there has been a continual rise in research and development efforts focused on reducing mass during cell manufacture. Such efforts have resulted in reducing the thickness of solar cells and thus the next generation solar cells are becoming thinner and eventually risks of exposure are reduced nevertheless, all chemicals must be carefully handled to ensure minimal human and environmental contact. The large scale deployment of such renewable energy technologies could result in potential negative environmental implications.
PV panels wear out and have to be replaced periodically. Mirrors do too (you can only repolish them so much), but they're just glass with a thin metallic backing, and unlike PV panels, they could be produced locally. Depending on your heat source, glass is about as eco-friendly as you get materials-wise.
There's no reason why they couldn't use battery storage with this. The thermal battery is just a byproduct of the way solar thermal works - you have the stored heat whether you want it or not, so why not keep the turbine running all night?
I haven't run the numbers, but I'd imagine that solar thermal does pretty well in regards to waste and ecological damage.
Like most other energy plants, it's mostly concrete and steel. The HTF is some kind of synthetic oil that gets reused. If they reclaim the water from the steam turbine, the plant will use very little resources once it's finished. So right there, it's already beating coal, oil, and gas.
Mirrors would need repolished, but considering that could probably be done onsite, it would be using clean energy. Motors would have to be rebuilt occasionally. Electronics would have to be replaced from time to time. Any energy plant would require maintenance of some sort anyway, so it's not really much different than wind in that regard.
It shades areas of the desert, but not completely. I'd be willing to bet it has less effect on desert life in that area than a hydro plant would have.
It doesn't require rare earth metals like a photovoltaic setup would. There's no mining involved other than the steel and concrete (which any power plant would have plenty of anyway - wind probably more steel and less concrete). Glass isn't bad, environmentally speaking - heat, sand, and some common minerals. So there really shouldn't be much in the way of toxic waste, unless they're using a particularly nasty paint (those can vary widely in eco-friendliness).
I'd say this is about as eco-friendly as you can get for a power plant. Feel free to point out anything I missed, I just woke up.
I wouldn't recommend the movie anyway (being as I haven't seen it). Read the book - it's excellent. If you want to see the movie afterward, go for it.
Plan 9 was just the first non-hard sci fi film that popped into my head.
Hrm. Coulda sworn he had. Maybe not directly for them, but I coulda sworn he had done a programming gig there.
My memory is 0/2 today (I forgot about Microsoft Plus! earlier).
Oh, that's right. I completely forgot about Plus!. Both the DEC and Gateway machines at the time had Plus! installed from the factory.
I didn't run 95 much personally, except at work where I did tech support for it. My home machine at the time was a 386, so I ran 3.11. By the time I upgraded, the 98 betas were out, and I got into Linux.
I've got Microsoft OS/2 v1.3 around here somewhere. Looks like NT 3.x. I never ran any of the later IBM versions (I only ran 1.3 because I found the disks and installed them to see what they looked like).
The difference is that Andy Weir actually did try to make it as scientifically accurate as he could (besides the windstorm scene). He got a lot of stuff right. IIRC, he's actually worked for NASA, so he knows quite a bit (and knows people who know more) about space exploration. (It was either Andy Weir or Randall Munroe who said that no matter what you do at NASA, if you work there you tend to talk a lot about space.)
A lot of people look at the book (haven't seen the movie) as being the closest to a scientifically accurate story about someone stranded on Mars. Finding inaccuracies just comes natural. It's part of the fun, really.
I mean, no one cares that Plan 9 from Outer Space isn't accurate, because it isn't meant to be. Same for Weir's old webcomic Casey & Andy.
Can you elaborate?
I haven't read into the history much, but I do know the transistor was developed at Bell Labs, not a university.
Of course, one can argue that AT&T only kept Bell Labs around because they had a guaranteed revenue stream and could think long-term.
I completely agree on your point. That said:
Windows 95 had Internet Explorer 1.0. I'm pretty sure it was included on the non-OEM disks, but it was definitely included on disks that came with Digital Equipment and Gateway 2000 machines.
It didn't do much, but it was enough for my coworkers and I to set up a little "mini-web" on the network shares. I learned HTML before I ever used the internet :)
Because there's no viable alternative.
We're not going to get single-payer. We're not going to get fully socialized health care. We might get Alan Grayson's "Republican health care", if the libertarians gain more foothold, but that's as bad or worse than what we had before.
We have to live with the system we have. I'd prefer it to work.
If that's the case, then surface life would probably be difficult. I don't think radiation wouldn't be very harmful for life in an ocean, however.
And yeah, I'm not suggesting a habitable planet would stay habitable after being inside a red giant. However, if a planet became habitable after the red giant phase (imagine the amount of chaos going on after the star collapsed - planets would change position, possibly collide, lose their atmospheres, possibly gain new atmospheres and oceans from outgassing, etc.), it could potentially allow life a longer time to evolve than it would have had before.
I'm sure that's not horribly likely, but hey, there's a whole lot of stars out there.
Considering white dwarfs live an insanely long time, the star isn't "running out of time."
If a habitable planet was orbiting a white dwarf, life on that planet could potentially go on for billions and billions of years, barring any planet-killing catastrophes. The star would slowly cool, but life once formed might be able to adapt to the cooling temperatures over billions of years.
A red dwarf would be better, though. They're practically immortal and keep a steady output over their lifetime. Only problem there is that the habitable zone is really, really close to a red dwarf.
I agree.
Too bad it'll never happen here.
I've never met anyone who is pro-ACA.
I have met (and am one) people who think the ACA is marginally better than what we had before, and support it only because no decent medical plan has a chance of passing.
So yeah, while I'd prefer a single payer system, I know I"m not going to get it. I'd like this fixed.
people who install GNU/Linux OSes don't do it "because it's fun" or "because they want a challenge of running command-line tools", they do it because they *know* and trust the digital audit trail based on the publicly-verifiable reputation of the 1000+ developers behind each distribution, and, because that trail exists, they can feel that they're safe from malware and spyware when they follow the install procedures that come with their OS.
I install Linux because it's fun and I enjoy running command line tools.
I did so back in the days when your only option for installing software was to download the source code and compile it.
I have been doing so since before GPG existed (PGP was around, but people didn't sign packages with it).
I have been doing so since before Debian started signing their repositories.
I've watched Red Hat users install RPMs downloaded from third party sites because they had no recourse - Red Hat did not have the comprehensive package archive made possible thousands of volunteers the Debian project has (not sure what it's like now - I've heard it's improved).
I've watched Solaris users install unsigned Solaris packages they got off people in newsgroups. I've installed unofficial Solaris packages from websites - things like newer versions of gcc that someone had built that were newer than those available on the GNU disk.
So, speak for yourself, man.
It was incredibly useful, actually.
You couldn't actually do anything with it, of course - that'd defeat the purpose (Microsoft's purpose, that is). But it allowed government agencies with a POSIX requirement to install NT, letting Microsoft get a foot into a lot of doors it was previously locked out of.
He's worded that in an interesting way; you read it, and it sounds like whatever you want to hear.
Considering his libertarian stance, I'd assume this means "let the companies do whatever they want," which is decidedly against net neutrality.
OpenBSD can install off the serial console on a PC, so I assume NetBSD also has the capability.
The machine in question was a little booksize box with no serial ports though, and while I've got USB to serial converters, I've had bad luck with them as serial consoles (at least on FreeBSD). I would have had to dig around in the closet to find one, and the ISCSI idea was just a whim anyway.
I'd like to use a Sparc as my firewall, but unfortunately I don't have any sbus network cards.
So, how long until someone takes that photo of Pluto and tries to use it as proof of aliens, like the "face" on Mars?
That rarely spills over into the scientific world. NASA and Russia's space agency work together on a regular basis.
Besides, these little spats we have with Russia today are nothing compared to the cold war.
I've been using OpenBSD and FreeBSD for years.
They're different, but not horribly so. Most basic configuration is similar, and they both have excellent documentation. FreeBSD does have a lot of features that OpenBSD lacks, but I think that's a good thing; I use OpenBSD for network services (firewall, DHCP, DNS, etc.) and it's dead simple to deal with. That simplicity can make unusual things easy - getting my firewall to run diskless and boot off the DHCP server, for instance.
My basic rule of thumb: if I need ZFS or jails, I use FreeBSD - otherwise, I use OpenBSD.
I tried to set up NetBSD as a backup server (since it can act as a ISCSI target), but the monitor I use in the server room freaks out every time I boot it. It does it with OpenBSD too, but if I boot it with the KVM somewhere else and switch after boot, it works with OpenBSD. Oh well, maybe next upgrade cycle, I'll get a better monitor for in there.
I've never tried GhostBSD, nor heard much about it.
Mint's a good choice if you're looking for a minimum of change. The Cinnamon desktop has a very similar workflow to Windows, and most stuff just works out of the box.
One thing though: changing your OS, especially if you're a power user, is a huge deal. You'll run into a lot of things that will annoy you or piss you off. That's natural. Linux users tend to feel the same when they have to work on Windows.
So if you want to change, follow through. Do your change, and make yourself stick with it for at least a year. Don't shy away from dealing with technical problems. After a while, you'll acclimate and it will feel natural. Until then, it'll feel like pulling teeth just to get stuff done.
Someone else suggested PC-BSD. I would agree, if you're a technical guy and aren't afraid of getting your hands dirty. Driver support isn't as good, but that only matters if you have hardware that it doesn't support. There are a few programs out there that are Linux-only (Rosegarden, for instance), but those are rare. FreeBSD (PC-BSD is just a modified installer over FreeBSD with some extra software) is a whole lot cleaner and more cohesive than Linux - the base system is all part of the project, rather than a collection of separate projects. Everything is very well documented. So yeah, if you're a power user and won't mind a bit of work to get things to your liking, give PC-BSD a try.
You'll have a hard time making the "anti-competitive" argument, considering they're overwriting their own product. Bricking some bootcamp installs (if it happens) is more grounds for a class action suit.
And as far as Linux goes - has Microsoft ever suggested that dual booting is supported? I know their loader is technically capable of it, but being capable of it and supporting it are different things.
The web browser suit was completely different. Microsoft won (for a while) the browser war, and did so by leveraging their monopoly. We all suffered because of it - Microsoft squandered their opportunity and let web standards degrade so badly non-tech people moved to a different browser.