Since a rocket launcher is obviously a legitimate personal armament, and this is simple a non-portable rocket launcher... He'll probably find quite a market among the survivalist militias!
First of all, just having any quantity of mass outside of Earth's gravity well is a huge plus - mass is absolutely essential for radiation shielding for one, and as reaction mass for rocketry (there are several relatively high-ISP rocket fuels that could be made out of lunar materials, and almost anything would work for nuclear or ion/plasma drives). The biggest component of the lunar surface is oxygen, which has a number of uses... second is silicon. And of course for any sort of significant construction effort you need structural materials in bulk.
At first a lot of things will have to be brought up from earth, and there will certainly be human or robotic (tele-operated?) work to actually make the habitats/instruments/spacecraft needed. In the long run what the moon is low on (as far as Apollo measurements could tell) are the volatile elements: hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, sodium, etc. These may possibly be available in sufficient quantities elsewhere - measurements by Clementine and Lunar Prospector in the last 10 years gave pretty strong evidence for hydrogen (presumably in water ice) at the poles. If not the poles, needs for hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen may have to be met from near-earth comets or asteroids in the long run; in the short run from earth - at least these elements tend to be light!
The space between Earth and Moon has, of course, essentially none of those physical elements, which is why the article (rather overdone) made the analog of space a "desert". It really does make sense to try to get to the other side of Earth's gravity well and get something moving over there.
TransOrbital, which has appeared on/. a few times, is part of a private effort to make the commercial potential of the Moon a reality - they have a test launch coming up December 20th. The Moon Society, where I am currently on the board of directors, is devoted to research and development of the Moon, and recently endorsed the Space Settlement Initiative, one possible way to make all this really happen, and soon.
There's plenty of ways for any of you to get involved - all of these efforts and the cheap launch side of things can all use as much support as possible...
The one thing about games is that people always seem to want something "new" - there are tons of old open-source games, most very playable, and for people who have tried them, huge time-wasters... which is probably why there's not that much effort to bring out new OS games:-)
Is source code really equivalent to blueprints? Blueprints to me means more the high-level design and architecture. Now that may be included in what the author here means by "source" - certainly in some cases it is included as comments. But really software is something that exists on many levels: machine code (binary), source code, algorithms and design patterns, requirements and specifications, etc. Having source code allows the user to re-compile with various optimizations; even to debug, and to compile for other platforms, but it doesn't necessarily give the whole farm away...
Would it satisfy the question here if the source code were run through a munger that removed all comments and randomly changed all variable and method names?
Anyway, I feel all this would be a lot clearer if the copyright law on electronic files was a little more widely accepted and understood...
It cares about fonts if the characters you're trying to render don't exist in the font!!!
We're talking about obscure math symbols like the curly harpoon/arrow combinations or fraktur H that really means something distinct from roman H in the context. Almost all of the ones we're working on have unicode numbers assigned - and almost all of them show up in some form in some existing font, but there is no existing single set of fonts that has all these characters in a consistent style.
For the visually impaired, these are perfectly scalable fonts, so there's no problem with magnifying them to 36 point or whatever you want on the screen.
Also, if somebody does come along with another set of fonts with the same set of unicode characters represented, it should be possible (via CSS say) to substitute those other fonts if that's what you want...
Hmm, that answer probably needs to be fixed. I'll mention it to Tim.
Finally packaging of the fonts is still kind of up in the air - we're looking at Type-1 and OpenType at least, possibly doing a Truetype version as well (hinting would have to be re-done). And then whether the fonts are "big" or "little" ( 256) depends in part on the encoding (that's how Tahoma does their different languages within a single font) - there still seems to be a real 256-character limit to doing anything that can be considered a "symbol" font, but we need to figure out just where we have to bend over to support OS quirks, and where we should just do what the specs say and hope for the best...
If anybody has any suggestions on this, or knows a person or company that would be particularly helpful (yes we've talked with Adobe and Microsoft - we'd like somebody that would actually spend a bit of time working with us...) please follow up to my email address (above). Thanks!
at least when used together with Times-Roman text, which is the standard for most major publishers. Almost nothing besides TeX actually uses CM fonts for anything, and the goal here is to have fonts that are very widely usable. Since I'm working on the project I know a little about what we're trying to do...:-)
The major thing here first is that we've tried to collect all the symbol glyphs used at least occasionally, including alphabetic symbols (script, fraktur, openface, etc.). Not just arrows, or what's in cmex, or the ams groups - but everything we could get our hands on. After collecting the glyphs and associated characters and their meanings in use, we managed to run it through Unicode so the new Unicode 3.2 has standardized positions and descriptions for the majority of the thousands of characters we're working on. The current phase is actual font creation - creating a single set of consistent-looking fonts, with an overall goal of being "Times compatible", in weight, x-height, general style, etc. The final phase will be packaging and distribution; we need to get these in a form that they're usable by both TeX (Type-1's) and general applications on the widest range of OS's (probably OpenType based on the Type-1's).
Unfortunately, while the hyperref package works fine for TeX (I actually wrote the original HyperTeX standard used to make that happen) I'm not aware of any other publishing platforms that do automatic linking in PDF's - it's pretty rare to see it, anyway. And the end-point of the link may bring up a browser or another acrobat file, depending on where it goes, which makes the whole thing less than seamless... How many times have you actually followed a PDF link? You can always add them manually, but that definitely qualifies as "difficult". In any case, PDF files are a fixed page layout, and tend to be larger than HTML/XML, so they have a number of disadvantages besides linking.
Aluminum is the largest component of the most easily formed "quasicrystals", and this analysis seems to be yet another indication that the seemingly normal metal face-centered-cubic structure of alumnium is actually not very far removed from some quite strange states of matter. Further evidence is right there on the periodic table - gallium, just below Al, has one of the strangest ground-state structures of any metal, and melts at a balmy 35 degrees Celsius!
For those who have access, I actually wrote a paper on this over 10 years ago... ah the memories...
Safety problems are actually pretty minimal. Aside from the radiation shielding provided by all the other material around you (cutting down on the solid-angle from which you expect radiation exposure), all you need is a few feet of glass or similar material to cut the radiation flux down to normal sea-level rates.
Sealable sections aren't necessary in something this big - it would take weeks for air to leak out when there's that much of it, and the design was intended to allow rapid replacement of any breaks. These things have been designed by people who know what they're doing, believe it or not:-)
L1 is an ideal point to test-drive a solar power satellite - rather than beaming the energy to Earth, beam it to a colony on the Moon. The distance is about the same as from GEO to Earth, and the one, big, primary problem with a lunar colony (other than near the poles) is the 14-day-long lunar "night". With an L1 power satellite for energy, there's no need for elaborate energy storage systems or running a nuclear power plant; just tap into the solar stream. And if it works well there, it should work equally well on Earth!
One of the primary purposes of a lunar outpost then would be to test the usability of various proposed processes for making use of lunar materials; a primary market for those materials would be solar power satellites, so an L1 SPS system for lunar power would be both a proof of concept and a way to bootstrap general SPS construction. And then: no more need for oil!
[Credit for this idea has to go to Charles Radley]
Other than the vagueness of the definitions, the concept of restricting publication of scientific articles for national security purposes isn't anything new. In the 1940's, there were a number of papers relating to radar and nuclear weapons that could have been published in US-based journals, but which were suppressed until the end of WWII. Sometimes it's a good idea. One of the problems now, however, is it's not clear there will be any "end" to the "war" that would allow these "sensitive" things to be published again!
Last Friday I was talking to somebody from the FAA who is working with the Air Force on upgrading their equipment - right now they use old C-band radar for tracking rockets from launch, and it's expensive to maintain. Cost is somewhere around $1 million per launch. You could do the same thing for about 1/1,000 the cost with off-the-shelf GPS equipment. The plan is to get the upgrade done in the next 2-3 years.
Terry Hancock has some ideas for doing just that, and recently started the spacelift/Narya project to try to get it going - not very active recently though...
TransOrbital didn't said any representatives to the next steps meeting at Los Alamos, so they get no mention. The odd way these things work in the space business (everybody ignores everybody else unless they're staring you in the face).
People who talk about self-sufficiency on Mars and being able to do without supplies from Earth are either (1) living in a dream world where closed economies like Albania or North Korea are wildly successful or (2) talking about colonies of millions of people. Take a look at the data in the US Economic Census and you'll see the scope of manufacturing, agricultural production, industry, and services required to have a fully functioning modern economy. Or perhaps you think you could live on Mars with the technology of a 15th century feudal village?
William Mook is offering lunar tours for $60 million apiece, starting 2007, with a planned flight rate of 4 per year. Of course the schedule may lag if demand doesn't meet expectations...
Apple's move to OS X was in response to MS's move to the NT code base; both have an underlying unix-ish heritage (much more so for OS X). Did you ever notice how DOS gradually acquired more UNIX-like features as the years went by? Of course they did make that dumb mistake about forward and back slashes... In both cases, of course, there's a massive windowing system that's been hacked on top of the underlying "unix"; just like X itself. I suspect the next step will see MS working on a "CNT" (completely new technology) OS based on Plan-9...
A few seconds after I touched the ecycle site, my firewall logged an incoming attempt from somebody at 208.245.238.225, trying to connect to port 80 on the home machine. That IP address resolves to:
225.238.245.208.in-addr.arpa. domain name pointer mail.ecycle.com. 225.238.245.208.in-addr.arpa. domain name pointer ecycle.com. 225.238.245.208.in-addr.arpa. domain name pointer e-cycle.com. 225.238.245.208.in-addr.arpa. domain name pointer ftp.ecycle.com. 225.238.245.208.in-addr.arpa. domain name pointer ftp.e-cycle.com. 225.238.245.208.in-addr.arpa. domain name pointer www.ecycle.com. 225.238.245.208.in-addr.arpa. domain name pointer www.e-cycle.com.
Anybody else see this? Are they infected with something? What are they trying to do there?
That one was from 1987 - the 1991 statement pretty much superceded that, although this one is obviously interesting historically as it indicates a significant change in emphasis in a short period of time.
This is actually usually called "small" or "benchtop" physics, as opposed to the real "big physics" that goes on at accelerator labs etc. with hundreds of physicists working together. Making this worse is the coincidence with the bogus element-118 discovery at Berkeley, which was also revealed over the last few months. The APS, where I work, has some rules people are supposed to follow: the 1991 Guidelines for Professional Conduct - but investigation and resolution of problems (which happen more often in lower profile cases such as contested authorship of papers) are left to the institutions where the people involved work; it's starting to seem that perhaps more is needed.
I think the Salon author was confused - what the group at Bell labs was working on (that I'm aware of anyway, though I'm not working in the field myself) were organic superconductors. Taking organic molecules, crystallizing them, and measuring their properties basically. What the Bell Labs group has a history of is being very good at crystallizations - Bertram Batlogg, who hired and supposedly supervised this guy, got some extremely impressive results from the crystals they made of the High Temperature superconductors in the early 1990's.
Uh, data is "information", it's not a physical object. GPS signals are data, satellite broadcasts are data, people out in the remotest part of Nebraska use "data" they get from space all day long. It's very easy to retrieve, once you have a physical facility in place to store and forward (for secure stuff you'd want to be sure it was exceedingly well encrypted). The Moon is the ultimate off-site storage location!
Ummm, technically, they're doing nothing that's not been done a thousand times before in Earth orbit; the technology is completely off the shelf, nothing much to see there. I know they had to put a bit of work into the communications package since it's a factor of 10 further out than GEO, but what would "test results" or "shiny hardware" tell you exactly? Plus they're a privately held company; by its nature a lot of the technical information has to be proprietary or somebody else with a spare $20 million might just snatch up all the ideas and do it first, which sort of cuts into their business. Building a satellite is pretty much like building a computer chip these days - you put together the specs and get a fab company to build it for you.
What they have done and spoken publicly about is go through the full approval process: state dept, FCC, NOAA, etc. And I find that quite impressive. Somebody once said a spacecraft can't launch until the paperwork exceeds is bigger than the ship - looks like they're most of the way through the hard part here!
Slashdot Mirror
Since a rocket launcher is obviously a legitimate personal armament, and this is simple a non-portable rocket launcher... He'll probably find quite a market among the survivalist militias!
First of all, just having any quantity of mass outside of Earth's gravity well is a huge plus - mass is absolutely essential for radiation shielding for one, and as reaction mass for rocketry (there are several relatively high-ISP rocket fuels that could be made out of lunar materials, and almost anything would work for nuclear or ion/plasma drives). The biggest component of the lunar surface is oxygen, which has a number of uses... second is silicon. And of course for any sort of significant construction effort you need structural materials in bulk.
/. a few times, is part of a private effort to make the commercial potential of the Moon a reality - they have a test launch coming up December 20th. The Moon Society, where I am currently on the board of directors, is devoted to research and development of the Moon, and recently endorsed the Space Settlement Initiative, one possible way to make all this really happen, and soon.
At first a lot of things will have to be brought up from earth, and there will certainly be human or robotic (tele-operated?) work to actually make the habitats/instruments/spacecraft needed. In the long run what the moon is low on (as far as Apollo measurements could tell) are the volatile elements: hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, sodium, etc. These may possibly be available in sufficient quantities elsewhere - measurements by Clementine and Lunar Prospector in the last 10 years gave pretty strong evidence for hydrogen (presumably in water ice) at the poles. If not the poles, needs for hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen may have to be met from near-earth comets or asteroids in the long run; in the short run from earth - at least these elements tend to be light!
The space between Earth and Moon has, of course, essentially none of those physical elements, which is why the article (rather overdone) made the analog of space a "desert". It really does make sense to try to get to the other side of Earth's gravity well and get something moving over there.
TransOrbital, which has appeared on
There's plenty of ways for any of you to get involved - all of these efforts and the cheap launch side of things can all use as much support as possible...
The one thing about games is that people always seem to want something "new" - there are tons of old open-source games, most very playable, and for people who have tried them, huge time-wasters... which is probably why there's not that much effort to bring out new OS games :-)
Is source code really equivalent to blueprints? Blueprints to me means more the high-level design and architecture. Now that may be included in what the author here means by "source" - certainly in some cases it is included as comments. But really software is something that exists on many levels: machine code (binary), source code, algorithms and design patterns, requirements and specifications, etc. Having source code allows the user to re-compile with various optimizations; even to debug, and to compile for other platforms, but it doesn't necessarily give the whole farm away...
Would it satisfy the question here if the source code were run through a munger that removed all comments and randomly changed all variable and method names?
Anyway, I feel all this would be a lot clearer if the copyright law on electronic files was a little more widely accepted and understood...
It cares about fonts if the characters you're trying to render don't exist in the font!!!
We're talking about obscure math symbols like the curly harpoon/arrow combinations or fraktur H that really means something distinct from roman H in the context. Almost all of the ones we're working on have unicode numbers assigned - and almost all of them show up in some form in some existing font, but there is no existing single set of fonts that has all these characters in a consistent style.
For the visually impaired, these are perfectly scalable fonts, so there's no problem with magnifying them to 36 point or whatever you want on the screen.
Also, if somebody does come along with another set of fonts with the same set of unicode characters represented, it should be possible (via CSS say) to substitute those other fonts if that's what you want...
Hmm, that answer probably needs to be fixed. I'll mention it to Tim.
Finally packaging of the fonts is still kind of up in the air - we're looking at Type-1 and OpenType at least, possibly doing a Truetype version as well (hinting would have to be re-done). And then whether the fonts are "big" or "little" ( 256) depends in part on the encoding (that's how Tahoma does their different languages within a single font) - there still seems to be a real 256-character limit to doing anything that can be considered a "symbol" font, but we need to figure out just where we have to bend over to support OS quirks, and where we should just do what the specs say and hope for the best...
If anybody has any suggestions on this, or knows a person or company that would be particularly helpful (yes we've talked with Adobe and Microsoft - we'd like somebody that would actually spend a bit of time working with us...) please follow up to my email address (above). Thanks!
at least when used together with Times-Roman text, which is the standard for most major publishers. Almost nothing besides TeX actually uses CM fonts for anything, and the goal here is to have fonts that are very widely usable. Since I'm working on the project I know a little about what we're trying to do... :-)
The major thing here first is that we've tried to collect all the symbol glyphs used at least occasionally, including alphabetic symbols (script, fraktur, openface, etc.). Not just arrows, or what's in cmex, or the ams groups - but everything we could get our hands on. After collecting the glyphs and associated characters and their meanings in use, we managed to run it through Unicode so the new Unicode 3.2 has standardized positions and descriptions for the majority of the thousands of characters we're working on. The current phase is actual font creation - creating a single set of consistent-looking fonts, with an overall goal of being "Times compatible", in weight, x-height, general style, etc. The final phase will be packaging and distribution; we need to get these in a form that they're usable by both TeX (Type-1's) and general applications on the widest range of OS's (probably OpenType based on the Type-1's).
Unfortunately, while the hyperref package works fine for TeX (I actually wrote the original HyperTeX standard used to make that happen) I'm not aware of any other publishing platforms that do automatic linking in PDF's - it's pretty rare to see it, anyway. And the end-point of the link may bring up a browser or another acrobat file, depending on where it goes, which makes the whole thing less than seamless... How many times have you actually followed a PDF link? You can always add them manually, but that definitely qualifies as "difficult". In any case, PDF files are a fixed page layout, and tend to be larger than HTML/XML, so they have a number of disadvantages besides linking.
Blue is the obvious choice to add to our existing red (democrat), white (Republican) and green (Green) parties.
So who's ready to get the Blue party rolling?
Vote Blue: the party for Nerds and Geeks!
Hey, that's what I did my PhD thesis work in! :-)
Aluminum is the largest component of the most easily formed
"quasicrystals", and this analysis seems to be yet another indication that the seemingly normal metal face-centered-cubic structure of alumnium is actually not very far removed from some quite strange states of matter. Further evidence is right there on the periodic table - gallium, just below Al, has one of the strangest ground-state structures of any metal, and melts at a balmy 35 degrees Celsius!
For those who have access, I actually wrote a paper on this over 10 years ago... ah the memories...
Safety problems are actually pretty minimal. Aside from the radiation shielding provided by all the other material around you (cutting down on the solid-angle from which you expect radiation exposure), all you need is a few feet of glass or similar material to cut the radiation flux down to normal sea-level rates.
:-)
Sealable sections aren't necessary in something this big - it would take weeks for air to leak out when there's that much of it, and the design was intended to allow rapid replacement of any breaks. These things have been designed by people who know what they're doing, believe it or not
L1 is an ideal point to test-drive a solar power satellite - rather than beaming the energy to Earth, beam it to a colony on the Moon. The distance is about the same as from GEO to Earth, and the one, big, primary problem with a lunar colony (other than near the poles) is the 14-day-long lunar "night". With an L1 power satellite for energy, there's no need for elaborate energy storage systems or running a nuclear power plant; just tap into the solar stream. And if it works well there, it should work equally well on Earth!
One of the primary purposes of a lunar outpost then would be to test the usability of various proposed processes for making use of lunar materials; a primary market for those materials would be solar power satellites, so an L1 SPS system for lunar power would be both a proof of concept and a way to bootstrap general SPS construction. And then: no more need for oil!
[Credit for this idea has to go to Charles Radley]
Other than the vagueness of the definitions, the concept of restricting publication of scientific articles for national security purposes isn't anything new. In the 1940's, there were a number of papers relating to radar and nuclear weapons that could have been published in US-based journals, but which were suppressed until the end of WWII. Sometimes it's a good idea. One of the problems now, however, is it's not clear there will be any "end" to the "war" that would allow these "sensitive" things to be published again!
Last Friday I was talking to somebody from the FAA who is working with the Air Force on upgrading their equipment - right now they use old C-band radar for tracking rockets from launch, and it's expensive to maintain. Cost is somewhere around $1 million per launch. You could do the same thing for about 1/1,000 the cost with off-the-shelf GPS equipment. The plan is to get the upgrade done in the next 2-3 years.
I watched that movie shortly after my own first attempts with model rockets - great inspiration!
Terry Hancock has some ideas for doing just that, and recently started the spacelift/Narya project to try to get it going - not very active recently though...
TransOrbital didn't said any representatives to the next steps meeting at Los Alamos, so they get no mention. The odd way these things work in the space business (everybody ignores everybody else unless they're staring you in the face).
People who talk about self-sufficiency on Mars and being able to do without supplies from Earth are either (1) living in a dream world where closed economies like Albania or North Korea are wildly successful or (2) talking about colonies of millions of people. Take a look at the data in the US Economic Census and you'll see the scope of manufacturing, agricultural production, industry, and services required to have a fully functioning modern economy. Or perhaps you think you could live on Mars with the technology of a 15th century feudal village?
William Mook is offering lunar tours for $60 million apiece, starting 2007, with a planned flight rate of 4 per year. Of course the schedule may lag if demand doesn't meet expectations...
Apple's move to OS X was in response to MS's move to the NT code base; both have an underlying unix-ish heritage (much more so for OS X). Did you ever notice how DOS gradually acquired more UNIX-like features as the years went by? Of course they did make that dumb mistake about forward and back slashes... In both cases, of course, there's a massive windowing system that's been hacked on top of the underlying "unix"; just like X itself. I suspect the next step will see MS working on a "CNT" (completely new technology) OS based on Plan-9 ...
A few seconds after I touched the ecycle site, my firewall logged an incoming attempt from somebody at 208.245.238.225, trying to connect to port 80 on the home machine. That IP address resolves to:
225.238.245.208.in-addr.arpa. domain name pointer mail.ecycle.com.
225.238.245.208.in-addr.arpa. domain name pointer ecycle.com.
225.238.245.208.in-addr.arpa. domain name pointer e-cycle.com.
225.238.245.208.in-addr.arpa. domain name pointer ftp.ecycle.com.
225.238.245.208.in-addr.arpa. domain name pointer ftp.e-cycle.com.
225.238.245.208.in-addr.arpa. domain name pointer www.ecycle.com.
225.238.245.208.in-addr.arpa. domain name pointer www.e-cycle.com.
Anybody else see this? Are they infected with something? What are they trying to do there?
That one was from 1987 - the 1991 statement pretty much superceded that, although this one is obviously interesting historically as it indicates a significant change in emphasis in a short period of time.
This is actually usually called "small" or "benchtop" physics, as opposed to the real "big physics" that goes on at accelerator labs etc. with hundreds of physicists working together. Making this worse is the coincidence with the bogus element-118 discovery at Berkeley, which was also revealed over the last few months. The APS, where I work, has some rules people are supposed to follow: the 1991 Guidelines for Professional Conduct - but investigation and resolution of problems (which happen more often in lower profile cases such as contested authorship of papers) are left to the institutions where the people involved work; it's starting to seem that perhaps more is needed.
I think the Salon author was confused - what the group at Bell labs was working on (that I'm aware of anyway, though I'm not working in the field myself) were organic superconductors. Taking organic molecules, crystallizing them, and measuring their properties basically. What the Bell Labs group has a history of is being very good at crystallizations - Bertram Batlogg, who hired and supposedly supervised this guy, got some extremely impressive results from the crystals they made of the High Temperature superconductors in the early 1990's.
Uh, data is "information", it's not a physical object. GPS signals are data, satellite broadcasts are data, people out in the remotest part of Nebraska use "data" they get from space all day long. It's very easy to retrieve, once you have a physical facility in place to store and forward (for secure stuff you'd want to be sure it was exceedingly well encrypted). The Moon is the ultimate off-site storage location!
What they have done and spoken publicly about is go through the full approval process: state dept, FCC, NOAA, etc. And I find that quite impressive. Somebody once said a spacecraft can't launch until the paperwork exceeds is bigger than the ship - looks like they're most of the way through the hard part here!