The question is not whether global warming exists (If it didn't earth would average 33C colder). The real question is: What is the magnitude of human emitted Greenhouse gasses retaliative to natural greenhouse gas emitters (volcanos, meteorites, etc.)?
Colonizing Venus is crazy. Mars has almost everything we need already frozen in its atmosphere to create a successful colony today, even without terraforming. It is also easier to create global warming than it is to reverse it.
The idea is to initiate a run-away greenhouse effect on Mars using a super-effective Greenhouse gas that is safe and easy to produce on Mars. 10-20*10^9 Kg of C2F8, a greenhouse gas 12,000 more effective than CO2, would seem to do the trick. Assuming that 10% of all sunlight reaching Mars could be trapped, Mars could be warmed enough to reach the triple point of CO2 within 100 years. This would release the CO2 (and hopefully water) frozen within the Martian Regolith into the atmosphere and possibly add enough atmosphere to allow for human exploration with only an oxygen mask a few yars later. At this point martian life, if it does exist, should flourish. If it does not we can start populating the planet with Earth species without nasty Mars life preservation debates.
This is not an easy process. Our CFCs, in the Martian atmosphere, would last for thousands of years, so VERY careful monitoring would be required in order to prevent us from terraforming a Venus.
Mars does not have a magnetosphere so our terraformed atmosphere would only have a life of about ten million years before evaporating.
I have notes of the ongoing Mars Society Conference here if you want more information on the current state of manned Mars exploration.
Some information in this article is at least 12 years old. I remember overclocking my own TI-85, and then several friend's TI-85s in middle school. We then had fun writing benchmarking software that measured speed and how much error was introduced into mathmatical operations in both Basic and ASM (yay zshell!). No wonder I never had a date before HS graduation. I also installed the switch doodad under the battery cover so that I could switch to the original clock frequency when too much error was introduced around the 10e-6 and lower digits. Thank god I did not destroy any TI-85 PC boards with my $5 RadioShack Iron and my non-ESD protected work area.
Anyway, the TI-85 uses a RC resonator to clock the CPU. When a smaller cap (1pf in this case) is substituted for the original, the RC constant becomes roughly 150% faster (cap takes less time to charge) which increases the overall speed of the voltage rise. This allowed me to build a 15MHz TI-85 that mostly worked. Incidentally the use of an RC resonator is why the calculator gets slower when the battery starts to sag-- apparently TI was too cheap to spring for a $0.20 quartz crystal.
Anyway, the TI-85 uses a RC resonator to clock the CPU. When a smaller cap (1pf in this case) is substituted for the original, the RC constant becomes roughly 150% faster (cap takes less time to charge) which increases the overall speed of the circuit. This allowed me to have a 15MHz TI-85 that mostly worked. Incidentally the use of an RC resonator is why the calculator gets slower when the battery starts to sag. Apparently TI was too cheap to use a $0.20 quartz crystal.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/09/international/ mi ddleeast/09IRAQ.html
Peace is patriotic!
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
It is a sad time for America. Through the Bush administration's actions America is now the most prosperous terrorist state in the world. No international or national law or policy legalizes these attacks on Iraq. No resolutions of the United Nations' Security Council or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization could provide a legal justification for these attacks. Bush has undermined the credibility of the United Nations. Bush has made this country look like complete fools in the eye of the international community.
There was no need for an Iraqi invasion unless the Iraqi government was found to be in violation of UN resolution 1441 (passed in Nov 2002). Iraq, while having a long history of obtaining, developing, and deploying weapons of mass destruction, had no choice but to comply with weapons inspectors and the UN. The US has yet to produce any verifiable evidence that Iraq had any active WMD programs. The only item that inspectors found were missiles that slightly exceeded the prescribed range when launched without a warhead. Iraq destroyed these at the international community's urgings. At the time of the departure of the inspectors in 1998, Iraq was mostly disarmed, although there is some evidence that they still had some biological capability. Weapons inspectors were looking into this issue as well as ensuring that weapons slated for destruction prior to 1998 remained scuttled before the US decided to attack. There is nothing like disarming a country before invading.
A full invasion will likely cause the death of ~500,000 Iraqi citizens (UN estimate), mostly due to the disruption of the state welfare service and damage to food, electrical, and water supplies (which are war targets). This is how our 1991 invasion killed so many citizens. In addition we will be again using depleted uranium shells, which have been documented to increase cancer rates. A Kurdish uprising is also very probable, as they have been trying to create their own country for years, which could destabilize parts of Iran and Turkey.
Pre-emptive warfare is wrong. The CIA, for all their transgressions (Venezuela, Chile, Guatemala, Congo, Indonesia,...) is against the war, as well as many West Point professors and senior military advisors. Even so, the Bush administration bangs the war drum, and continues to lie to the American public about Iraq. The best documentation of this lies in the fact that a majority of Americans think that Saddam was directly involved with 9-11 even though Osama himself calls Saddam an infidel coward and none of the hijackers themselves were Iraqi. The US and its allies have a 10 trillion dollar prize for direct control of the region (and OIL company contracts have already been signed). The US already has plans to invade Saudi Arabia after the Iraq campaign as part of a larger goal of obtaining a majority share of the world's energy supplies. There is a reason why the rest of the world is against the US/UK/SP campaign.
Should Saddam be tried and sentenced for war crimes? Yes. Should Bush be tried and sentenced for war crimes against Iraq and Afganastan? Yes. Should the international community help Iraq become better country and improve the lives of its citizens? Yes. Should the money derived from oil sales be returned to Iraqi citizens to help improve their well-being instead of being diverted to international mega-corperations? Yes. Will a US/UK/SP/AU invasion achieve any of these goals. In all likelihood, no.
Thank you Bush for putting every American at risk worldwide.
Google around, this has all been documented.
Illigal War http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr26-72.htm
REAL AUTHORS OF IRAQ DOSSIER BLAST BLAIR http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/page.c fm?obje ctid=12620001&method=full&siteid=50143
UK accused of lifting dossier text http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/02/07/sp rj.irq.uk.dossier/index.html
Why invade when the U.N. system is disarming Iraq?
And for the budget market:
MacOSX.lcII
MacOSX.lcIII
MacOSX.lcIIIplus
Now lets go retro!
MaxOSX.IIe
MaxOSX.IIgs
Or they can use the great X naming scheme:
MacOSX2, and eventually MacOSX11R6:P
Moon composition, He3, and a reality check...
on
Mining On The Moon
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Moon Composition*:
Compound Apollo II Basalt Apollo 14 Breccia Appollo 17 Regolith
SIO2 40.46 48.09 44.47
TiO2 10.41 1.51 2.84
Al2O3 10.08 16.72 18.93
FeO 19.22 9.53 10.29
MgO 7.01 10.18 9.95
CaO 11.54 10.67 12.29
Na2.38.73.43
*L. Haskin and P. Warren "Lunar Chemistry"
Notice that key biogenic substances including hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen do not make up a segnifagent portion of moon rock. (~50ppm)
In addition the moon posses Helium-3 (10ppm) - an isotope otherwise nonexistent in the inner solar system. It is a key substance for magnetic fusion with the reaction D + He3 -> He4 + H1, which produces about 18MeV of energy (and does not produce the nutron bombardment of the D + T -> He4 + n reaction used in current experimental fusion devices). If fusion power generation becomes reliable in near future, He3 is worth at least $1 million per kilo at today's energy prices. Unfourtantly with the ~$10,000 per kilo launch price today, it would cost almost $5 billion to extract $1 millon of He3 and return the product to earch.
Until launch prices drop to about $100 per kilo, moon mining is pointless. Launch prices this low are possible, though it means working around the gridlock of the Lockheed-Boeing-JPL-NASA-Congress monster in the US (who's launch costs are ~$10000/kilo on a delta III and twice that on the shuttle).
**Most of this post is based on information from the book "Entering Space" by Robert Zubrin.
-Chris Howard
May the sacred call of the dogcow guide you down the path towards nerdvana. MOOF!
Early afternoon. Your 20+ IIS boxen automatically get the newest hot fix..and all reboot at the same time!
And cut all current transactions (imagine an online banking system), and boot in the wrong order (hang!), and reinstall IE and Outlook Express, and remove all those wonderful hand tweaked registry entries, and change file permissions, and break third party server and database software and...
The fact that the Windows Update server got CODE RED infected and requires ActiveX authentication (Remember the office assistant hole?) shows how much I trust my servers to update themselves using Microsoft services.
As a member of the University of Colorado based hardware team for this flying rock and having personally researched this matter I can say that radiation should be too much of a problem. This sat will be launched from a low orbit (lower than the ISS) leaving plenty of atmosphere to absorb most of the radiation, protecting the PPC on the industrial RPX lite SPC from being damaged (of course high energy particles are still a problem). Additionally circuitry is protected in heavy aluminum shielding. Because of the short design life of 3CS, hard errors are should not be too much of an issue. Of great concern are soft errors in the kernel memory space in the onboard flash memory - if the kernel is damaged, the sat is useless as it will not even be able to be issued a new copy from the ground. Our team attempted to use Reed-Solomon encoding to correct bit-flips, but we had no driver for writing to flash during the boot sequence.
A good place to look for detailed information of this sat can be found here.
---
May the sacred call of the dogcow guide you down the path toward nerdvana. MOOOOOF!
Slashdot Mirror
The question is not whether global warming exists (If it didn't earth would average 33C colder). The real question is: What is the magnitude of human emitted Greenhouse gasses retaliative to natural greenhouse gas emitters (volcanos, meteorites, etc.)?
Colonizing Venus is crazy. Mars has almost everything we need already frozen in its atmosphere to create a successful colony today, even without terraforming. It is also easier to create global warming than it is to reverse it.
The idea is to initiate a run-away greenhouse effect on Mars using a super-effective Greenhouse gas that is safe and easy to produce on Mars. 10-20*10^9 Kg of C2F8, a greenhouse gas 12,000 more effective than CO2, would seem to do the trick. Assuming that 10% of all sunlight reaching Mars could be trapped, Mars could be warmed enough to reach the triple point of CO2 within 100 years. This would release the CO2 (and hopefully water) frozen within the Martian Regolith into the atmosphere and possibly add enough atmosphere to allow for human exploration with only an oxygen mask a few yars later. At this point martian life, if it does exist, should flourish. If it does not we can start populating the planet with Earth species without nasty Mars life preservation debates.
This is not an easy process. Our CFCs, in the Martian atmosphere, would last for thousands of years, so VERY careful monitoring would be required in order to prevent us from terraforming a Venus.
Mars does not have a magnetosphere so our terraformed atmosphere would only have a life of about ten million years before evaporating.
I have notes of the ongoing Mars Society Conference here if you want more information on the current state of manned Mars exploration.
Anyway, the TI-85 uses a RC resonator to clock the CPU. When a smaller cap (1pf in this case) is substituted for the original, the RC constant becomes roughly 150% faster (cap takes less time to charge) which increases the overall speed of the circuit. This allowed me to have a 15MHz TI-85 that mostly worked. Incidentally the use of an RC resonator is why the calculator gets slower when the battery starts to sag. Apparently TI was too cheap to use a $0.20 quartz crystal.
Hz=1/s
Hz per second == 1/s/s == 1
So we have have a clockless 1.8 Giga CPU -- Cool!
C.I.A. Warns That a U.S. Attack May Ignite Terror
/ mi ddleeast/09IRAQ.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/09/international
It is a sad time for America. Through the Bush administration's actions America is now the most prosperous terrorist state in the world. No international or national law or policy legalizes these attacks on Iraq. No resolutions of the United Nations' Security Council or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization could provide a legal justification for these attacks. Bush has undermined the credibility of the United Nations. Bush has made this country look like complete fools in the eye of the international community.
...) is against the war, as well as many West Point professors and senior military advisors. Even so, the Bush administration bangs the war drum, and continues to lie to the American public about Iraq. The best documentation of this lies in the fact that a majority of Americans think that Saddam was directly involved with 9-11 even though Osama himself calls Saddam an infidel coward and none of the hijackers themselves were Iraqi. The US and its allies have a 10 trillion dollar prize for direct control of the region (and OIL company contracts have already been signed). The US already has plans to invade Saudi Arabia after the Iraq campaign as part of a larger goal of obtaining a majority share of the world's energy supplies. There is a reason why the rest of the world is against the US/UK/SP campaign.
.uk.dossier/index.html
There was no need for an Iraqi invasion unless the Iraqi government was found to be in violation of UN resolution 1441 (passed in Nov 2002). Iraq, while having a long history of obtaining, developing, and deploying weapons of mass destruction, had no choice but to comply with weapons inspectors and the UN. The US has yet to produce any verifiable evidence that Iraq had any active WMD programs. The only item that inspectors found were missiles that slightly exceeded the prescribed range when launched without a warhead. Iraq destroyed these at the international community's urgings. At the time of the departure of the inspectors in 1998, Iraq was mostly disarmed, although there is some evidence that they still had some biological capability. Weapons inspectors were looking into this issue as well as ensuring that weapons slated for destruction prior to 1998 remained scuttled before the US decided to attack. There is nothing like disarming a country before invading.
A full invasion will likely cause the death of ~500,000 Iraqi citizens (UN estimate), mostly due to the disruption of the state welfare service and damage to food, electrical, and water supplies (which are war targets). This is how our 1991 invasion killed so many citizens. In addition we will be again using depleted uranium shells, which have been documented to increase cancer rates. A Kurdish uprising is also very probable, as they have been trying to create their own country for years, which could destabilize parts of Iran and Turkey.
Pre-emptive warfare is wrong. The CIA, for all their transgressions (Venezuela, Chile, Guatemala, Congo, Indonesia,
Should Saddam be tried and sentenced for war crimes? Yes. Should Bush be tried and sentenced for war crimes against Iraq and Afganastan? Yes. Should the international community help Iraq become better country and improve the lives of its citizens? Yes. Should the money derived from oil sales be returned to Iraqi citizens to help improve their well-being instead of being diverted to international mega-corperations? Yes. Will a US/UK/SP/AU invasion achieve any of these goals. In all likelihood, no.
Thank you Bush for putting every American at risk worldwide.
Google around, this has all been documented.
Illigal War
http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr26-72.htm
REAL AUTHORS OF IRAQ DOSSIER BLAST BLAIR
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/page.c fm?obje ctid=12620001&method=full&siteid=50143
UK accused of lifting dossier text
http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/02/07/sp rj.irq
Why invade when the U.N. system is disarming Iraq?
I can sum up my opinion in one link FLASH WARNING
The disk is twice as large as it needs to be
The new MacOSX release Schedule:
:P
MacOSX.II
MacOSX.IIci
MacOSX.IIcx
MacOSX.IIfx
MacOSX.IIsi
MacOSX.IIvi
MacOSX.IIvx
MacOSX.IIx
Then, of course:
MacOSX.colorclassicII
And for the budget market:
MacOSX.lcII
MacOSX.lcIII
MacOSX.lcIIIplus
Now lets go retro!
MaxOSX.IIe
MaxOSX.IIgs
Or they can use the great X naming scheme:
MacOSX2, and eventually MacOSX11R6
Moon Composition*: .38 .73 .43
Compound Apollo II Basalt Apollo 14 Breccia Appollo 17 Regolith
SIO2 40.46 48.09 44.47
TiO2 10.41 1.51 2.84
Al2O3 10.08 16.72 18.93
FeO 19.22 9.53 10.29
MgO 7.01 10.18 9.95
CaO 11.54 10.67 12.29
Na2
*L. Haskin and P. Warren "Lunar Chemistry"
Notice that key biogenic substances including hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen do not make up a segnifagent portion of moon rock. (~50ppm)
In addition the moon posses Helium-3 (10ppm) - an isotope otherwise nonexistent in the inner solar system. It is a key substance for magnetic fusion with the reaction D + He3 -> He4 + H1, which produces about 18MeV of energy (and does not produce the nutron bombardment of the D + T -> He4 + n reaction used in current experimental fusion devices). If fusion power generation becomes reliable in near future, He3 is worth at least $1 million per kilo at today's energy prices. Unfourtantly with the ~$10,000 per kilo launch price today, it would cost almost $5 billion to extract $1 millon of He3 and return the product to earch.
Until launch prices drop to about $100 per kilo, moon mining is pointless. Launch prices this low are possible, though it means working around the gridlock of the Lockheed-Boeing-JPL-NASA-Congress monster in the US (who's launch costs are ~$10000/kilo on a delta III and twice that on the shuttle).
**Most of this post is based on information from the book "Entering Space" by Robert Zubrin.
-Chris Howard
May the sacred call of the dogcow guide you down the path towards nerdvana. MOOF!
Early afternoon. Your 20+ IIS boxen automatically get the newest hot fix..and all reboot at the same time!
And cut all current transactions (imagine an online banking system), and boot in the wrong order (hang!), and reinstall IE and Outlook Express, and remove all those wonderful hand tweaked registry entries, and change file permissions, and break third party server and database software and...
The fact that the Windows Update server got CODE RED infected and requires ActiveX authentication (Remember the office assistant hole?) shows how much I trust my servers to update themselves using Microsoft services.
As a member of the University of Colorado based hardware team for this flying rock and having personally researched this matter I can say that radiation should be too much of a problem. This sat will be launched from a low orbit (lower than the ISS) leaving plenty of atmosphere to absorb most of the radiation, protecting the PPC on the industrial RPX lite SPC from being damaged (of course high energy particles are still a problem). Additionally circuitry is protected in heavy aluminum shielding. Because of the short design life of 3CS, hard errors are should not be too much of an issue. Of great concern are soft errors in the kernel memory space in the onboard flash memory - if the kernel is damaged, the sat is useless as it will not even be able to be issued a new copy from the ground. Our team attempted to use Reed-Solomon encoding to correct bit-flips, but we had no driver for writing to flash during the boot sequence.
A good place to look for detailed information of this sat can be found here.
---
May the sacred call of the dogcow guide you down the path toward nerdvana. MOOOOOF!
300,000,000 /8 = 37.5 Gigs per inch^3, a much more respectible number.
300 Gb = 293MB per inch^3.
Therefore a 40gig drive would require 137 cubed inches - something that won't likely fit inside an open drive bay.
(About the size of 4.5 VHS tapes)
---
May the sacred call of the dogcow guide you down the path towards nerdvana.