While the references indicate that the actual mileage is lower than what is claimed, the vehicles do get better gas mileage than standard automobiles.
How do you figure? My 84 CRX averaged 34 mpg from 1984-2000, over 250k miles (RIP). City, hwy, no difference, and I drive like the proverbial bat. It could also beat a 911 off the line to 30mph, and I only had to pull over a couple of times ever on a twisty mountain road.
So here it is 20 years later, and the latest high tech cars don't do as well as my 20 year old Honda?
That is such a bad analogy. The first guy to put a boat in a lake was doing an experiment by just trying. We've done that with Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, MIR, and the shuttle. The lake is littered with boats. The ISS was sold precisely on the predication that they'd go up there and do something useful, and the link you sent me to earlier was about the experiments they'd do. Just paying tons of money to keep them sitting up there trying not to suck vacuum isn't a useful experiment in my mind, or at least no different than Skylab in 1978.
I submit that those experiments are meaningless, ask you to provide an example of one that isn't, and since you can't, you resort to meaningless analogies.
I'm not proposing to abandon space experiments, I'm proposing to quit wasting money keeping the ISS floating around. I can list ten space projects I think we should do. But the ISS and shuttle just suck money out of those projects.
If you have something useful that the ISS does beside simply exist, let me know, cause just living in space has been done to death.
That's just advertising. Show me one meaningful result that has come out of the ISS or the Shuttle for that matter. They have to go around begging people to come up with stuff to do in microgravity, because frankly it's all BS. Crystals don't grow any differently. Flames might burn differently but who cares? Life sciences? Nothing new since Skylab.
The last shuttle had an experiment from a perfume company, for chrissakes. Do you think if they had anything real to do, they would be spending billions to send up perfume experiments? That's desperation to show results, any result.
What is possibly useful about the ISS? Basically it's very expensive housing for two astronauts, and that's all it will ever be. Perhaps more than two someday.
No real science, no stepping stone to anyplace else, no capabilities.
Of course, I want to mount a land-mine dropper to drop mines with a two second delay behind me - that should teach people what "safe following distance" is (Fire the mine out at rest relative to the road surface, "One Mississippi, Two Mississipp-BANG!").
And of course I have often fantasized about mounting an under car TOW missile to force people like you quit driving slow in the fast lane (pull over to the right hand lanes), or to actually follow the law and SLOWER TRAFFIC USE PULLOUTS.
Heaven forfend that traffic laws be set reasonably - that speed limits are set to the 85% rule instead of to maximize revenue.
Just because the speed limit is set at a certain level doesn't mean that it should be that. If it were legally set to 10 mph citywide, would you follow it, or would you become, heaven forfend, a speeder?
Speed limits are set for all sorts of reasons, and many have little to do with safety, and everything to do with revenue enhancement.
The US signed the death warrant of 800 000 innocent civilians
The US signed no death warrant, Sparky. The people who actually killed them did that.
Could the US have done more? Sure. So could a lot of countries. I don't remember hearing about the (insert your country here) government deploying their military to stop this atrocity.
imagine going from Chicago to Minneapolis-Saint Paul in just over a hour!
The problem is, what do you do once you get there? How is public transportation in M-SP? (No, really, I'm asking, I don't know.) But replace that with LA-Las Vegas, and ask the same question. Neither place is particularly easy to get around without a car once you are there. The reason passenger rail works in the BoWash corridor is that there is public transportation once you get there. So the problem becomes a much bigger one of building high-speed passenger rail, and building public transportation at the end points.
The spent fuel will burn up in the atmosphere, disintegrating into small particles. It will spread out and deliver a dose probably less than what you get in a doctor's office from an X-ray machine.
Assuming, of course, that you don't breathe. Getting a dose externally and inhaling a radioactive particle that sits in your lungs and emits in one place for years are two very different things.
And yes, I am a nuclear physicist. Small particles of radioactive dust floating around are in general less desirable than big chunks that can be avoided.
The posting of this article to Slashdot is FUD, pure and simple, as is most anti-nuclear propaganda. Radioactive material, like all other toxins, requires a certain concentration to be lethal. The danger is only to spacecraft, and that from collisions.
Let me disclaim that I'm not anti-nuclear per se, but this statement is pure bullshit. Alpha emitters in bulk form are generally nothing to be feared, but an alpha emitter inhaled into your lung can be quite lethal. Spreading them around in the atmosphere as small particulates will increase deaths from lung cancer, just as surely as smoking cigarettes.
Unfortunately people having the odd assault rifle lying around does not a successful armed revolution make - not in this day and age anyway. I applaud the intent, but I suspect you'd find that any attempted revolt would quickly find itself labelled "terrorists" and have the full force of the US military brought to bear if necessary.
Having only the odd assault rifle seems to be better than nothing for the Vietnamese, the Afghani, and currently the Iraqis. Successful? I don't know, but the US doesn't control Vietnam, the USSR doesn't control Afghanistan, and last I heard, we'll be checking out of Iraq around 30 June.
The proposed Earth-based giant telescopes are not 30m solid glass, but are segmented, as it JWST, and yes you can do that in orbit (segments or arrays), e.g., JWST and TPF. My point is that large telescopes require large sums of money. And large telescopes in orbit or on the moon require large sums of money to support and build. To be quite explicit, the next-generation telescopes on the earth with >30m apertures will cost >$1B. The next-gen space telescopes (TPF, JWST, SIRTF), cost upwards of $1B, even though their apertures are 10m. So a moon-based telescope is not going to be any cheaper than building a) a very large aperture telescope on the earth or b) a smaller aperture in orbit.
Why had they better build it on the moon? In many ways orbit (or earth) is a better environment for this sort of telescope instead of being stuck on the moon where you have to turn it off half the time (the dark side of the moon is only dark to us, it still gets exposed to sunlight half the time).
What on earth (no pun intended) good is He3 mining? Do you have some sort of use for this material other than fantasy sci-fi non-existent fusion reactors?
This wasn't Bush's call. This was NASA trying to appear "decisive" in implementing the new space push. Mismanagement on their part as usual. Don't be so dismissive of it either. If we do establish a presence on the Moon, we'll be able to build a telescope that will make Hubble look like a 25-cent plastic magnifying glass.
You don't think that O'Keefe works for Bush?
How much do you think it costs to build a telescope that makes "Hubble look like a 25 cent plastic magnifying glass?" Check out the cost of OWL and the proposed 30m earth based telescopes. Those are over $1B. So you think you are going to build something better than Hubble for less than that on the moon?
Keeping Hubble up costs money. Even before the Mars/Moon push, doing another Hubble mission meant huge cuts in LISA and TPF and other programs.
I did my graduate work at Brookhaven. Outside the counting house, it would often be either Long Island hot (summer) or Long Island cold (winter). Inside the counting house, I always kept a jacket because the temp was in the 60s. In the lower level, to keep the electronics cool, there was also a 30 mph wind. In addition, when the beam was on, we'd be exposed to roughly 2mr/hr. 25mr/day some days, depending on where you stood. Every three seconds, the beam klaxon would sound to let you know a spill was occuring. In between the klaxons, you could hear the chipmunks going off (background radiation monitors). And you had to get up every five or six minutes to change out the 9-track tape. 9 hour shifts, seven days a week, when things were going good.
Not to mention the overhead crane, the flammable gases, the 1T magnets that regularly ruined watches and credit cards, and the inescapable mullets and plaid shirts.
But you got used to it. I used to sleep on the ratty old couch there in the summer because at least it was air-conditioned.
Perhaps it is true that most of the money for the next Hubble reservicing has been spent, and only 40M will be saved by not servicing it at this point. But let's remember that 40M is the TPF budget for this year (which is going to be cut). Let's also remember that 240M is just for the instrument costs - it costs upwards of 600M for the shuttle mission. So total cost to keep the Hubble up is damn close to 1B.
That's an entire TPF. That's probably an entire JWST (I didn't check the numbers, but it's close - it's much cheaper to launch things on Delta IVs than on the shuttle). Do you want spend all of Nasa's telescope money on keeping the Hubble up, or do you want to build new telescopes?
Those are the choices. Nasa only has so much money. When SIRTF or GPB sits on the launch pad, it comes out of someone else's budget. When you decide to spend 1B to reservice Hubble and then another.6B to bring it back to the Smithsonian, something else doesn't fly.
I started accumulating CDs in 1982, and they didn't cost $25 back then. I don 't pay $25 now, since for many things I can find them on Amazon for $11 or $12. I do buy used CDs and bargain stuff. And during the boom dotcom years, there was even a delivery service that sold CDs for $10 each and delivered them same day to your door at no extra charge! I bought a lot of those. So using your figures, you can cut that figure down by a factor of two. $8000 over the last 20 years is $400 year, which isn't that hard to imagine for an average collector. Even using your figures, that's less than $1k per year.
But I lost steam, and am a slacker. I have friends who are serious collectors and have thousands of CDs, and don't even ask about albums. But I do have a replacement cost insurance policy on my CDs for $20k.
Why would anyone buy an iPod too small to hold their entire collection.
Because 100 G and 200 G iPods are still a couple of years off. I have a 20G iPod also, and not to start a DSW, it holds about a fifth of my music collection. Lots of folks have much bigger libraries than 20 G.
Why is this modded Insightful? Is it that hard to imagine a that many people have large music collections?
Okay, sorry, I generalized a bit too much. I'm roughly an order of magnitude off (10^3 vs 10^4) versus the people who compare 10^4 to 10^7.
No personal spin here, just trying to point out that there are many fewer big birds than pigeons and comparing the number of raptors killed by turbines to the number of pigeons killed by window panes is bogus.
It isn't fair to compare pigeons and sparrows to hawks and eagles. Yes, many more pigeons are killed by vehicles and window panes. Who cares? I would venture that virtually NO hawks or eagles are killed by vehicles or window panes, so turbines appear to be a disproprortionate killer of raptors.
There are many fewer raptors than there are pigeons. Fuzzy the cat didn't kill any raptors last year. So let's compare those numbers. Number of raptors killed by vehicles (0). Number of raptors killed by window panes (0). Number of raptors killed by kittie (0). Number of raptors killed by turbines (10,000 to 40,000). Seems a little worse when you take away the industry spin, eh?
I probably have bad mechanics, and I am not training for marathons, but I run sub-7 minute miles, and my iPod doesn't like it. It freezes as soon as the cache empties.
My battery is dying also, after 18 months.
I love my iPod, but I'm not minimizing its shortcomings either. Now 12 more people can post telling me how they can "jog" with theirs (I don't jog, I run), and how their battery is lasting just fine. But they have their anecdotes, and I have mine.
Slashdot Mirror
While the references indicate that the actual mileage is lower than what is claimed, the vehicles do get better gas mileage than standard automobiles.
How do you figure? My 84 CRX averaged 34 mpg from 1984-2000, over 250k miles (RIP). City, hwy, no difference, and I drive like the proverbial bat. It could also beat a 911 off the line to 30mph, and I only had to pull over a couple of times ever on a twisty mountain road.
So here it is 20 years later, and the latest high tech cars don't do as well as my 20 year old Honda?
Can't think of anything else? How about a true 64 bit operating system?
That is such a bad analogy. The first guy to put a boat in a lake was doing an experiment by just trying. We've done that with Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, MIR, and the shuttle. The lake is littered with boats. The ISS was sold precisely on the predication that they'd go up there and do something useful, and the link you sent me to earlier was about the experiments they'd do. Just paying tons of money to keep them sitting up there trying not to suck vacuum isn't a useful experiment in my mind, or at least no different than Skylab in 1978.
I submit that those experiments are meaningless, ask you to provide an example of one that isn't, and since you can't, you resort to meaningless analogies.
I'm not proposing to abandon space experiments, I'm proposing to quit wasting money keeping the ISS floating around. I can list ten space projects I think we should do. But the ISS and shuttle just suck money out of those projects.
If you have something useful that the ISS does beside simply exist, let me know, cause just living in space has been done to death.
That's just advertising. Show me one meaningful result that has come out of the ISS or the Shuttle for that matter. They have to go around begging people to come up with stuff to do in microgravity, because frankly it's all BS. Crystals don't grow any differently. Flames might burn differently but who cares? Life sciences? Nothing new since Skylab.
The last shuttle had an experiment from a perfume company, for chrissakes. Do you think if they had anything real to do, they would be spending billions to send up perfume experiments? That's desperation to show results, any result.
What is _useful_ beside providing basic needs?
What is possibly useful about the ISS? Basically it's very expensive housing for two astronauts, and that's all it will ever be. Perhaps more than two someday.
No real science, no stepping stone to anyplace else, no capabilities.
Cingular does the same thing in Los Angeles, so don't give them too much credit.
Of course, I want to mount a land-mine dropper to drop mines with a two second delay behind me - that should teach people what "safe following distance" is (Fire the mine out at rest relative to the road surface, "One Mississippi, Two Mississipp-BANG!").
And of course I have often fantasized about mounting an under car TOW missile to force people like you quit driving slow in the fast lane (pull over to the right hand lanes), or to actually follow the law and SLOWER TRAFFIC USE PULLOUTS.
Let's have an arms race.
Heaven forfend that traffic laws be set reasonably - that speed limits are set to the 85% rule instead of to maximize revenue.
Just because the speed limit is set at a certain level doesn't mean that it should be that. If it were legally set to 10 mph citywide, would you follow it, or would you become, heaven forfend, a speeder?
Speed limits are set for all sorts of reasons, and many have little to do with safety, and everything to do with revenue enhancement.
The US signed the death warrant of 800 000 innocent civilians
The US signed no death warrant, Sparky. The people who actually killed them did that.
Could the US have done more? Sure. So could a lot of countries. I don't remember hearing about the (insert your country here) government deploying their military to stop this atrocity.
Codetek Virtual Desktop does this for OS X.
imagine going from Chicago to Minneapolis-Saint Paul in just over a hour!
The problem is, what do you do once you get there? How is public transportation in M-SP? (No, really, I'm asking, I don't know.) But replace that with LA-Las Vegas, and ask the same question. Neither place is particularly easy to get around without a car once you are there. The reason passenger rail works in the BoWash corridor is that there is public transportation once you get there. So the problem becomes a much bigger one of building high-speed passenger rail, and building public transportation at the end points.
The spent fuel will burn up in the atmosphere, disintegrating into small particles. It will spread out and deliver a dose probably less than what you get in a doctor's office from an X-ray machine.
Assuming, of course, that you don't breathe. Getting a dose externally and inhaling a radioactive particle that sits in your lungs and emits in one place for years are two very different things.
And yes, I am a nuclear physicist. Small particles of radioactive dust floating around are in general less desirable than big chunks that can be avoided.
The posting of this article to Slashdot is FUD, pure and simple, as is most anti-nuclear propaganda. Radioactive material, like all other toxins, requires a certain concentration to be lethal. The danger is only to spacecraft, and that from collisions.
Let me disclaim that I'm not anti-nuclear per se, but this statement is pure bullshit. Alpha emitters in bulk form are generally nothing to be feared, but an alpha emitter inhaled into your lung can be quite lethal. Spreading them around in the atmosphere as small particulates will increase deaths from lung cancer, just as surely as smoking cigarettes.
Energia launch: ??? 20-50 million per
A shuttle launch flight runs about $600M per. You really think you are going to do that for 10% of that cost? Get real.
Unfortunately people having the odd assault rifle lying around does not a successful armed revolution make - not in this day and age anyway. I applaud the intent, but I suspect you'd find that any attempted revolt would quickly find itself labelled "terrorists" and have the full force of the US military brought to bear if necessary.
Having only the odd assault rifle seems to be better than nothing for the Vietnamese, the Afghani, and currently the Iraqis. Successful? I don't know, but the US doesn't control Vietnam, the USSR doesn't control Afghanistan, and last I heard, we'll be checking out of Iraq around 30 June.
NASA to Earth:
Give us more money.
It costs $1B to keep Hubble up. What programs are you going to bitch about being cut if that money is spent keeping an old small telescope in orbit?
And then will you bitch about your taxes being higher?
The proposed Earth-based giant telescopes are not 30m solid glass, but are segmented, as it JWST, and yes you can do that in orbit (segments or arrays), e.g., JWST and TPF. My point is that large telescopes require large sums of money. And large telescopes in orbit or on the moon require large sums of money to support and build. To be quite explicit, the next-generation telescopes on the earth with >30m apertures will cost >$1B. The next-gen space telescopes (TPF, JWST, SIRTF), cost upwards of $1B, even though their apertures are 10m. So a moon-based telescope is not going to be any cheaper than building a) a very large aperture telescope on the earth or b) a smaller aperture in orbit.
Why had they better build it on the moon? In many ways orbit (or earth) is a better environment for this sort of telescope instead of being stuck on the moon where you have to turn it off half the time (the dark side of the moon is only dark to us, it still gets exposed to sunlight half the time).
What on earth (no pun intended) good is He3 mining? Do you have some sort of use for this material other than fantasy sci-fi non-existent fusion reactors?
This wasn't Bush's call. This was NASA trying to appear "decisive" in implementing the new space push. Mismanagement on their part as usual. Don't be so dismissive of it either. If we do establish a presence on the Moon, we'll be able to build a telescope that will make Hubble look like a 25-cent plastic magnifying glass.
You don't think that O'Keefe works for Bush?
How much do you think it costs to build a telescope that makes "Hubble look like a 25 cent plastic magnifying glass?" Check out the cost of OWL and the proposed 30m earth based telescopes. Those are over $1B. So you think you are going to build something better than Hubble for less than that on the moon?
Keeping Hubble up costs money. Even before the Mars/Moon push, doing another Hubble mission meant huge cuts in LISA and TPF and other programs.
I did my graduate work at Brookhaven. Outside the counting house, it would often be either Long Island hot (summer) or Long Island cold (winter). Inside the counting house, I always kept a jacket because the temp was in the 60s. In the lower level, to keep the electronics cool, there was also a 30 mph wind. In addition, when the beam was on, we'd be exposed to roughly 2mr/hr. 25mr/day some days, depending on where you stood. Every three seconds, the beam klaxon would sound to let you know a spill was occuring. In between the klaxons, you could hear the chipmunks going off (background radiation monitors). And you had to get up every five or six minutes to change out the 9-track tape. 9 hour shifts, seven days a week, when things were going good.
Not to mention the overhead crane, the flammable gases, the 1T magnets that regularly ruined watches and credit cards, and the inescapable mullets and plaid shirts.
But you got used to it. I used to sleep on the ratty old couch there in the summer because at least it was air-conditioned.
Perhaps it is true that most of the money for the next Hubble reservicing has been spent, and only 40M will be saved by not servicing it at this point. But let's remember that 40M is the TPF budget for this year (which is going to be cut). Let's also remember that 240M is just for the instrument costs - it costs upwards of 600M for the shuttle mission. So total cost to keep the Hubble up is damn close to 1B.
That's an entire TPF. That's probably an entire JWST (I didn't check the numbers, but it's close - it's much cheaper to launch things on Delta IVs than on the shuttle). Do you want spend all of Nasa's telescope money on keeping the Hubble up, or do you want to build new telescopes?
Those are the choices. Nasa only has so much money. When SIRTF or GPB sits on the launch pad, it comes out of someone else's budget. When you decide to spend 1B to reservice Hubble and then another
I started accumulating CDs in 1982, and they didn't cost $25 back then. I don 't pay $25 now, since for many things I can find them on Amazon for $11 or $12. I do buy used CDs and bargain stuff. And during the boom dotcom years, there was even a delivery service that sold CDs for $10 each and delivered them same day to your door at no extra charge! I bought a lot of those. So using your figures, you can cut that figure down by a factor of two. $8000 over the last 20 years is $400 year, which isn't that hard to imagine for an average collector. Even using your figures, that's less than $1k per year.
But I lost steam, and am a slacker. I have friends who are serious collectors and have thousands of CDs, and don't even ask about albums. But I do have a replacement cost insurance policy on my CDs for $20k.
Again, not that hard to imagine.
Why would anyone buy an iPod too small to hold their entire collection.
Because 100 G and 200 G iPods are still a couple of years off. I have a 20G iPod also, and not to start a DSW, it holds about a fifth of my music collection. Lots of folks have much bigger libraries than 20 G.
Why is this modded Insightful? Is it that hard to imagine a that many people have large music collections?
Okay, sorry, I generalized a bit too much. I'm roughly an order of magnitude off (10^3 vs 10^4) versus the people who compare 10^4 to 10^7.
No personal spin here, just trying to point out that there are many fewer big birds than pigeons and comparing the number of raptors killed by turbines to the number of pigeons killed by window panes is bogus.
It isn't fair to compare pigeons and sparrows to hawks and eagles. Yes, many more pigeons are killed by vehicles and window panes. Who cares? I would venture that virtually NO hawks or eagles are killed by vehicles or window panes, so turbines appear to be a disproprortionate killer of raptors.
There are many fewer raptors than there are pigeons. Fuzzy the cat didn't kill any raptors last year. So let's compare those numbers. Number of raptors killed by vehicles (0). Number of raptors killed by window panes (0). Number of raptors killed by kittie (0). Number of raptors killed by turbines (10,000 to 40,000). Seems a little worse when you take away the industry spin, eh?
Apples.
Oranges.
I probably have bad mechanics, and I am not training for marathons, but I run sub-7 minute miles, and my iPod doesn't like it. It freezes as soon as the cache empties.
My battery is dying also, after 18 months.
I love my iPod, but I'm not minimizing its shortcomings either. Now 12 more people can post telling me how they can "jog" with theirs (I don't jog, I run), and how their battery is lasting just fine. But they have their anecdotes, and I have mine.
The bitch of it is that I'm treated better by Canadian customs than U.S. Customs (probably because I'm Canadian and have a Canadian passport).
The bitch of it is that everyone (on average) is treated better by Canadian customs than by US Customs.