It's in the wrong orbit to do anything other than be reachable by launches from mainland Russia. It's not like no one ever thought of using the space station as a jumping-off point before, it's just that such ideas were made more or less impractical as soon as we decided to put the space station in this silly orbit.
Of course, the fact that the goal was to be reachable by launches from Baikonur means it's not a silly orbit, considering inclination changes are the most expensive in terms of delta-v (and money, as a result).
* I would have used 'three-peat' or '3-peat' instead of 'hat trick' but I believe those are trademarked.
Perhaps...but is it trademarked for use on an online discussion board? Because obviously, to the USPTO, saying some commonly known phrase is innovative if it's in a new venue.
Actually, because the radius is also larger the estimates are around 1.1g to 1.7g, which should be tolerable.
Not to mention that our bodies would mostly adapt within a single generation. A child who lives their entire life subjected to higher gravity will almost certainly develop the muscle to handle it. Just look how quickly our muscles lose the ability to handle Earth gravity after a few months of weightlessness. Our other internal organs evolved in 1g, but it is reasonable to assume our increased muscle will make it tolerable even at the upper edge of predictions. It is also reasonable to assume that we will have artificial gravity for the trip, so the passengers will have had time to adjust.
I'm with you on most of that, but unfortunately with limited budget we need some priority. Colonizing our Solar System, to me, should be our top priority, so we should focus on the places where we stand the best chance of building permanent habitats in a relatively short time. The moon, obviously, plus Mars, asteroids including especially Ceres and Vesta, Jupiter's Galilean moons (though probably not Io), and Titan for its nitrogen-rich atmosphere. It will be very interesting when our Dawn spacecraft reaches Vesta in the next couple years and Ceres a few years later.
Mercury and Venus, unfortunately, are much, much further away from that goal. If only Mercury were tidally locked with the Sun, we might colonize the band where the temperatures are reasonably comfortable. It'd be interesting to send a flyer to Venus, but we simply couldn't survive the atmosphere right now. Orbiters around the gas giants themselves aren't going to help us as much as orbiters that are free to explore their moons. Pluto has New Horizons speeding towards it, so we'll get to find out what interesting properties it has, but we'll likely have something similar much closer to us.
Project Orion actually calls for the use of nukes at launch, too...on the order of 1000 of them just to get to LEO. So yeah, controlling all of those explosions is pretty highly suspect, considering all we've done is prove that graphite-covered steel spheres can survive a nuclear blast.
A far better plan is colonizing our own Solar System. Perhaps there is an asteroid or moon with sufficient natural resources that it would be better to build and launch the Super Orion from there. Of course, by that time some other technology may render the plan obsolete, but the journey would be worth it.
Also, compare the sixth images. In the webp version, the red lights are much more pronounced. Indeed, the smaller red lights to the right are almost entirely invisible in the jpeg version.
I'd love to have more choice. Especially in the last election. I voted for Obama mainly because of Palin. Had the Republican party selected someone with a brain for the number 2 position, I would have voted for McCain instead.
And I was fully aware of third party candidates. Over the years I've voted for some, just as I know I will be this coming November. But I'm equally aware that in the present system of elections in America, the proverbial "snowball in hell" has a better chance at existence than there is of a third party candidate becoming President. The last three Presidential elections have been so close between the Dumbocrats and Rebubakins that voting third party is merely throwing your vote to the wind. If you want real change, the system is going to have to change, not just the voters.
There's an important point in there: a lot of people aren't necessarily voting for the lesser of two evils...they only vote for one party because they really, really don't want the other to win. That's an important distinction: many people do realize there are third party candidates, but they want to put their vote towards the person with the best chance to defeat the one they don't want.
If I say "we will have flying cars by 2001" and we don't have flying cars after 2001, then I had better reverse that position. Maybe I'll make a new position: "we will have flying cars by 2020", but if I, in 2002, staunchly hold to my belief that we'll have flying cars by 2001, then I'm a loon.
I've been using the Go-OO version for a long time, myself... I think a lot of distros use that as the default base... would be nice to just see the Go-OO group take the lead on this, and bring it back under one roof, so to speak.
From the website:
Q: What does this announcement mean to other derivatives of OpenOffice.org?
A: We want The Document Foundation to be open to code contributions from as many people as possible. We are delighted to announce that the enhancements produced by the Go-OOo team will be merged into LibreOffice, effective immediately. We hope that others will follow suit.
Actually, if you compare the Document Foundation's team with the people behind Go-oo, you will find some overlap. You're right, though, it'd be great if the new office suite had a good name (and a better website, which looks like crap right now), so I wouldn't feel silly recommending Go-oo to people.
Mono is also a solid work. And Oracle has just shown that there are issues with Java as well w.r.t patents and stuff
Java is perfectly fine. It's when you want to mess with the bytecode and VM implementation that you can run into trouble. Mono, on the other hand, the main implementation already violates MS patents for which there is no patent protection (e.g. ASP.NET, ADO.NET, Windows Forms).
Increasing the distance between mirrors increases the effective radius, while decreasing the distance increases the light collection capabilities. A cluster may want to do either depending on what it's trying to image.
[Formations] arguably are not relevant in space...or at least i fail to see the relevance from any standpoint other than purely tactical. The only thing spacecraft require
is an understanding of eachothers location, and an understanding of the location of objects around them. a significantly well developed computer program
would certainly be capable of tracking this information
Disregarding the fairly major difficulty of accurately determining the location of objects around them (not to mention the nontrivial bit of understanding its own location), they also need to have an understanding of the velocity and acceleration as well. In space, moving in one direction doesn't mean what you think it means. If one accelerates in the direction of motion, it will take longer to orbit the Earth. If two satellites at the same altitude are traveling parallel to each other in the same direction, they will collide in 1/4th of an orbit. There's a reason that there was a spacecraft recently whose sole purpose was to demonstrate autonomous rendezvous.
If that still sounds simple, now add a dozen satellites, and realize you can't just make them fly in the same formation all the time. The fuel requirements for stationkeeping of the outermost satellites would be astronomical. You have to minimize course corrections if you want a reasonable mission lifetime. Or carry a great deal of fuel, which can easily defeat the purpose of using smaller spacecraft in the first place. On top of that, when you need to apply collision avoidance maneuvers, you have to make sure you don't put yourself onto a collision course with the other 10 satellites.
As for the purpose of formation flying (note we're talking about the cluster kind - the trailing formations are fairly straightforward): Wikipedia
I was under the impression that BMT Micro was much preferred by indies, though it hasn't been mentioned a single time in this thread. I know that's what Positech uses and he brings in six figures in revenue.
I don't know that that's entirely fair. These things are on a continuum.
You look at an O'Reilly or an Olbermann (to pick two guys with very different politics), and if you're not in line with them politically, you'll probably disagree a lot with their interpretation of an event or its implications, but in some sense their starting point feels based in reality even if where they end up isn't.
I don't get that same sense out of, say, Beck.
Meaning his starting point isn't based in reality either? I know what you mean. I laugh everytime I read what he says about net neutrality, then I stop because I realize how many people actually believe him. Here you go, a transcript straight from his show:
Of course, what can you expect from someone who believes "Marxism" and "socialism" are curse words. How he manages to squeeze those words in there 21 times is particularly impressive.
Actually he was seeing it when it just opened for comments to everybody, but nobody had commented yet (not even subscribers, who see the articles earlier.
In other words, you would rather we simply incinerate the extra embryos created but not used during IVF instead of extracting the potentially life-saving stem cells within. Gotcha.
Technically researchers can still obtain private funding, but in reality they may not be able to obtain federal funding for other research so it effectively shuts down the whole operation. The NIH gave explicit instructions to save "all research resources" so they probably expect either the ruling to be overturned or the law to change.
Slashdot Mirror
It's in the wrong orbit to do anything other than be reachable by launches from mainland Russia. It's not like no one ever thought of using the space station as a jumping-off point before, it's just that such ideas were made more or less impractical as soon as we decided to put the space station in this silly orbit.
Of course, the fact that the goal was to be reachable by launches from Baikonur means it's not a silly orbit, considering inclination changes are the most expensive in terms of delta-v (and money, as a result).
About the only console I play any more is my PSP.
Valkyria Chronicles II, then.
* I would have used 'three-peat' or '3-peat' instead of 'hat trick' but I believe those are trademarked.
Perhaps...but is it trademarked for use on an online discussion board? Because obviously, to the USPTO, saying some commonly known phrase is innovative if it's in a new venue.
Actually, because the radius is also larger the estimates are around 1.1g to 1.7g, which should be tolerable.
Not to mention that our bodies would mostly adapt within a single generation. A child who lives their entire life subjected to higher gravity will almost certainly develop the muscle to handle it. Just look how quickly our muscles lose the ability to handle Earth gravity after a few months of weightlessness. Our other internal organs evolved in 1g, but it is reasonable to assume our increased muscle will make it tolerable even at the upper edge of predictions. It is also reasonable to assume that we will have artificial gravity for the trip, so the passengers will have had time to adjust.
I'm with you on most of that, but unfortunately with limited budget we need some priority. Colonizing our Solar System, to me, should be our top priority, so we should focus on the places where we stand the best chance of building permanent habitats in a relatively short time. The moon, obviously, plus Mars, asteroids including especially Ceres and Vesta, Jupiter's Galilean moons (though probably not Io), and Titan for its nitrogen-rich atmosphere. It will be very interesting when our Dawn spacecraft reaches Vesta in the next couple years and Ceres a few years later.
Mercury and Venus, unfortunately, are much, much further away from that goal. If only Mercury were tidally locked with the Sun, we might colonize the band where the temperatures are reasonably comfortable. It'd be interesting to send a flyer to Venus, but we simply couldn't survive the atmosphere right now. Orbiters around the gas giants themselves aren't going to help us as much as orbiters that are free to explore their moons. Pluto has New Horizons speeding towards it, so we'll get to find out what interesting properties it has, but we'll likely have something similar much closer to us.
Project Orion actually calls for the use of nukes at launch, too...on the order of 1000 of them just to get to LEO. So yeah, controlling all of those explosions is pretty highly suspect, considering all we've done is prove that graphite-covered steel spheres can survive a nuclear blast.
A far better plan is colonizing our own Solar System. Perhaps there is an asteroid or moon with sufficient natural resources that it would be better to build and launch the Super Orion from there. Of course, by that time some other technology may render the plan obsolete, but the journey would be worth it.
Also, compare the sixth images. In the webp version, the red lights are much more pronounced. Indeed, the smaller red lights to the right are almost entirely invisible in the jpeg version.
I'd love to have more choice. Especially in the last election. I voted for Obama mainly because of Palin. Had the Republican party selected someone with a brain for the number 2 position, I would have voted for McCain instead.
And I was fully aware of third party candidates. Over the years I've voted for some, just as I know I will be this coming November. But I'm equally aware that in the present system of elections in America, the proverbial "snowball in hell" has a better chance at existence than there is of a third party candidate becoming President. The last three Presidential elections have been so close between the Dumbocrats and Rebubakins that voting third party is merely throwing your vote to the wind. If you want real change, the system is going to have to change, not just the voters.
There's an important point in there: a lot of people aren't necessarily voting for the lesser of two evils...they only vote for one party because they really, really don't want the other to win. That's an important distinction: many people do realize there are third party candidates, but they want to put their vote towards the person with the best chance to defeat the one they don't want.
The fact that they called themselves socialist doesn't mean they were, they were fascists
Riiight, and next you're going to tell me that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea...oh those clever bastards!
If I say "we will have flying cars by 2001" and we don't have flying cars after 2001, then I had better reverse that position. Maybe I'll make a new position: "we will have flying cars by 2020", but if I, in 2002, staunchly hold to my belief that we'll have flying cars by 2001, then I'm a loon.
Not necessarily...you could convert to Islam.
Well, Bruce Willis' head in a jar at least.
To get to the asteroid well ahead of impact, we have to send Bruce Willis' head in a jar right now.
Will they finally change the name of their binary away from "soffice"?
Nope, the code is so ugly nobody can figure out how.
I've been using the Go-OO version for a long time, myself... I think a lot of distros use that as the default base... would be nice to just see the Go-OO group take the lead on this, and bring it back under one roof, so to speak.
From the website:
Q: What does this announcement mean to other derivatives of OpenOffice.org?
A: We want The Document Foundation to be open to code contributions from as many people as possible. We are delighted to announce that the enhancements produced by the Go-OOo team will be merged into LibreOffice, effective immediately. We hope that others will follow suit.
Actually, if you compare the Document Foundation's team with the people behind Go-oo, you will find some overlap. You're right, though, it'd be great if the new office suite had a good name (and a better website, which looks like crap right now), so I wouldn't feel silly recommending Go-oo to people.
Mono is also a solid work. And Oracle has just shown that there are issues with Java as well w.r.t patents and stuff
Java is perfectly fine. It's when you want to mess with the bytecode and VM implementation that you can run into trouble. Mono, on the other hand, the main implementation already violates MS patents for which there is no patent protection (e.g. ASP.NET, ADO.NET, Windows Forms).
Increasing the distance between mirrors increases the effective radius, while decreasing the distance increases the light collection capabilities. A cluster may want to do either depending on what it's trying to image.
[Formations] arguably are not relevant in space...or at least i fail to see the relevance from any standpoint other than purely tactical. The only thing spacecraft require is an understanding of eachothers location, and an understanding of the location of objects around them. a significantly well developed computer program would certainly be capable of tracking this information
Disregarding the fairly major difficulty of accurately determining the location of objects around them (not to mention the nontrivial bit of understanding its own location), they also need to have an understanding of the velocity and acceleration as well. In space, moving in one direction doesn't mean what you think it means. If one accelerates in the direction of motion, it will take longer to orbit the Earth. If two satellites at the same altitude are traveling parallel to each other in the same direction, they will collide in 1/4th of an orbit. There's a reason that there was a spacecraft recently whose sole purpose was to demonstrate autonomous rendezvous.
If that still sounds simple, now add a dozen satellites, and realize you can't just make them fly in the same formation all the time. The fuel requirements for stationkeeping of the outermost satellites would be astronomical. You have to minimize course corrections if you want a reasonable mission lifetime. Or carry a great deal of fuel, which can easily defeat the purpose of using smaller spacecraft in the first place. On top of that, when you need to apply collision avoidance maneuvers, you have to make sure you don't put yourself onto a collision course with the other 10 satellites.
As for the purpose of formation flying (note we're talking about the cluster kind - the trailing formations are fairly straightforward):
Wikipedia
I was under the impression that BMT Micro was much preferred by indies, though it hasn't been mentioned a single time in this thread. I know that's what Positech uses and he brings in six figures in revenue.
It's an Apple so you know the margins are very much in their favor.
If you pay attention you'll find iPad margins are less than other products, Apple is gunning for pure marketshare in this space.
According to the numbers I found:
----Version-----+Retail+--Cost---+-Markup-
16 GB WiFi only | $499 | $229.35 | 117.57%
16 GB WiFi + 3G | $629 | $257.65 | 144.13%
32 GB WiFi Only | $599 | $258.85 | 131.41%
32 GB WiFi + 3G | $729 | $287.15 | 153.87%
64 GB WiFi Only | $699 | $317.85 | 119.92%
64 GB WiFi + 3G | $829 | $346.15 | 139.49%
Source
Or to use the words of the immortal Dean Martin:
Ask the rich man he'll confess,
Money can't buy happiness.
Ask the poor man he don't doubt,
But he'd rather be miserable with than without.
I don't know that that's entirely fair. These things are on a continuum.
You look at an O'Reilly or an Olbermann (to pick two guys with very different politics), and if you're not in line with them politically, you'll probably disagree a lot with their interpretation of an event or its implications, but in some sense their starting point feels based in reality even if where they end up isn't.
I don't get that same sense out of, say, Beck.
Meaning his starting point isn't based in reality either? I know what you mean. I laugh everytime I read what he says about net neutrality, then I stop because I realize how many people actually believe him. Here you go, a transcript straight from his show:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,590506,00.html
Of course, what can you expect from someone who believes "Marxism" and "socialism" are curse words. How he manages to squeeze those words in there 21 times is particularly impressive.
You obviously have never seen any of Keith Olberman's political rants.
...which kind of reinforces the point, doesn't it? He doesn't have half the country lapping up his every word.
Actually he was seeing it when it just opened for comments to everybody, but nobody had commented yet (not even subscribers, who see the articles earlier.
I have a PS3, so mine's still free, so ha ha!
Or at least, it would be, if didn't have to stick with firmware 3.20 to keep OtherOS. :(
In other words, you would rather we simply incinerate the extra embryos created but not used during IVF instead of extracting the potentially life-saving stem cells within. Gotcha.
Technically researchers can still obtain private funding, but in reality they may not be able to obtain federal funding for other research so it effectively shuts down the whole operation. The NIH gave explicit instructions to save "all research resources" so they probably expect either the ruling to be overturned or the law to change.