The US is proposing to put devices capable of aiming megawatt beams into orbit? And who exactly will control this?
The US has been fielding megaton-range nuclear weapons (lately they're more sub-megaton) around the world for most of the last six decades (as have a few other countries). You're worried about a few megawatt beams?
Capturing solar power in space has no obvious overall advantage over capturing it on the ground....other than being brighter (no atmospheric or cloud loss) and available 24 hours a day (except for a few hours a day near the equinoxes).
what makes you think the solar panel will generate more power with more light?
This is exactly the way they work.
Go get yourself one of those toy solar-powered cars, or a solar energy demo kit (solar cell and motor) from Radio Shack or someplace. Move the cell towards a light bulb; observe how the motor speeds up or slows down as the cell gets more or less light.
Yes, there's an upper bound. Probaby shortly before the silicon starts to melt.
which means all the heat needs to be bled off by radiation
Yes, but it helps if you're radiating toward the 3 kelvin background temperature of most of space, and aren't surrounded by air at around 300 kelvins radiating back at you.
[gp] geostationary orbits is exactly where they intend to put them.
[p]... that space is too valuable and too crowded.
You put the current communication satellite transponders (rather, their replacements) aboard the powersats. You give them bigger antennae. The bigger the antenna (at either end) the better the angular resolution.
The "too crowded" comes down to angular resolution, not actual distance. They're not (much) worried about collisions but about a receiver on Earth being able to differentiate between adjacent satellites.
First off, putting them somewhere other than Earth orbit is silly - yes, you can get more energy from the Sun, but how do you transmit it to Earth?
I think it was Robert Forward who raised the possibility of putting the solar power stations on Mercury and just having them make antimatter. The antimatter is then shipped (nice, high energy density stuff that) to Earth.
There are a few engineering details yet to be worked out, of course.
How is it better to lift your solar panels into orbit,
Most solar powersat proposals don't actually suggest this (at least, not the ones I was looking at twenty years ago). The idea is to deploy sufficient systems (as automated and self-repairing/self-replicating as possible) on the Moon that the powersats are constructed from lunar materials. This avoids the costs of manufacturing them on Earth and lifting them to orbit. Some proposals just had leaving the panels on the Moon and beaming the power from there, but geosynchronous orbit is probably better.
Synchronous orbit also gets sunlight most of the time (24 hours a day part of the year, due to Earth's tilt) and you don't have to worry about cloud cover. That compensates for a 50% efficiency loss right there.
The power beams aren't much of a navigation hazard. The energy density isn't that high, and the vehicle's skin (eg aircraft fuselage) is more than enough shielding. It might well be restricted airspace anyway, more to prevent disruption on the ground than concern about the aircraft.
Obviously this is not "current technology levels" if by that you mean "off the shelf", but there's nothing there that hasn't been prototyped at some level or other.
(Okay, completely autonomous self-replicating lunar solar cell factories are a bit out there, but we could do partially autonomous, partially self replicating, with a mix of teleoperation from Earth and local hands-on and low-latency teleoperation on the Moon. Teleoperating a vehicle with a ~3 second latency takes a bit of getting used to but isn't that hard, and computational assists on the display make it pretty easy. We did some experiments with this back in the late 80s using RC vehicles with wireless cams, feeding the controls through a computer for time delay and watching it via TV, as well as simpler setups using wire controlled toy vehicles delayed through a Commodore 64 and joystick, as a portable exhibit for kids. The real young ones had an easier time of it, the older kids with their video-game reflexes couldn't handle the delay and kept over-controlling.)
That would be Karbon14. (KDE seems to have gone through a few iterations of vector graphic tools, or maybe the same tool under different names. I know KIllustrator was renamed because of pressure from Adobe, to Kontour. And there was a Krayon in there too. I don't know how many of these may actually have been different codebases.)
Well, at the moment there's still not a lot of Office 2007 out there, and KOffice works fine with the pre-'07 stuff.
In theory, if ODF and MSOOXML were reasonably well defined, it'd be possible to create an XSLT sheet to transform one to the other. I won't hold my breath on that, though, and I have my doubts as to how well what MSOffice 2007 uses matches what is defined by the MSOOXML spec. Given the size of that spec, the XSLT stylesheet would be huge.
KOffice already has Kivio for flowcharting. QCad strikes me as a bit of overkill for this. It (kivio) could stand to expand its stencil library but it's supposed to support Dia stencils too.
KOffice also opens MS docs and spreadsheets, and can save in.doc or.xls format. I don't know how well that is supported in terms of very elaborate stuff, but the docs and spreadsheets readily accessible to me here worked fine.
The Moon has some geological (alright, selenological) activity. A mixture of heat left over from initial formation and heating and motion caused by Earth's tidal influence.
Remember, cellular mitosis doesn't work well in freefall.
Debatable. Skimming through the hits turned up by a google of "mitosis+microgravity", the experimental results are all over the place, with some of the biggest effects seen in experiments where there was little control against other effects (cosmic rays, high G and vibration effects from launch (sounding rocket experiments), etc. There also seem to be result differences between simple lifeforms (eg yeast), plants, and animals.
If mitosis really screwed up in freefall, astronauts spending more than a couple of months on a space station would start to die horrible deaths due to non-replacement of their blood cells.
It's been done. I just skimmed TFA briefly, but did see an explicit reference to Bios-3, a (Soviet) Russian closed-loop habitat at a research center in Krasnoyarsk (Siberia). Unlike the later Biosphere 2 (the greenhouse-like one in Arizona you're probably thinking of) this was much smaller, indoors (lighting for the plants was artificial -- and the whole thing had an external water cooling system to remove excess heat) and focussed mainly on recycling air and water. They did grow some of their own food (algae and wheat, yum), but also had regular food inputs from outside. Partly this last was due to Russian regulations governing experiments involving humans, by law they were required to be supplied with a regular ration of meat.
Anyway, the experiments were successful within the design parameters. (I had a chance to visit the facility a few months after Krasnoyarsk was opened to westerners, I still have a sample of the wheat grown within it.)
Biosphere 2 was more ambitious, aiming for 100% closed and no artificial lighting for the plants, for a two-year duration. They didn't make it, due to some surprises in the atmospheric chemistry (and things like interaction with the still-setting concrete), and the thing was way more than would be set up on the Moon anytime soon anyway. Bios-3 was much closer to a Lunar habitat prototype, and proved to be workable. (Yes, there'd still be some supply issues -- it will be a long time before anywhere off-Earth is totally self-sufficient, you need huge buffers and/or very good monitoring to make up for random events in the ecosystem. (Being biological, there are always random events.)
I designed a self-sufficient lunar habitat as a high-school science fair project back in the spring of 1969, a couple of months before Apollo 11. Took a couple of prizes for it, too (include a prize from the Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, probably mostly for pointing out that the Sudbury Basin is an impact structure rather than (as commonly held at the time) a geosyncline, and may suggest places to look for ores on the Moon.)
Although I daresay this study is probably a little more detailed than mine, I bet it doesn't come with a cool model including one of the Thunderbirds rockets...
Microsoft has more than 50 billion dollars in the bank
No, they don't. Their revenues (not profit) are about $50B. They only have about $20B in the bank. Not that that negates your main point, but that $50B number is ancient history (if it was ever true).
The have more money. MSFT's market capitalisation is $282.43B, IBM's is $160B.
Market capitalisation is irrelevent to how much money a company has, it's useless as a figure of merit. It's just the number of shares times whatever price per share the last trade was made at. If company X has a billion shares out there trading at $1/share, the market cap is $1B. If someone then offers $2/share for a small trade -- even one share if it's a low-volume company -- the market cap is now $2B. That second billion is entirely virtual money, only hypothetically realizable if the other 999,999,999 share could also sell at $2 each. Even if they could, it only does company X any good if they own those shares -- if the company doesn't retain any to sell itself, market cap is useless. (Almost -- a high market cap is a defense against a hostile takeover.)
What matters is cash on hand and revenue. Microsoft has revenue of about $51B and about $21B cash on hand (not the ancient $50B number that still floats around -- Microsoft has been forced to give a lot of that away on dividends because of stagnant growth, and some of that in fines and settlements). IBM only ("only") has a bit over $10B cash on hand, but has nearly twice Microsoft's revenue at about $95B.
Did you try opening another window and actually looking?
As a matter of fact, yes I did. There's some recent apparently made-for-DVD stuff (not cheap, either), as well as a bunch of old VHS stuff. Couldn't find the old half-hour "Bill Nye the Science Guy" PBS shows, though.
Sounds like something from the Bill Nye (the Science Guy) show.
(BTW, anyone know if that's available on DVD? My younger kids were just asking about it and the tapes I made off the air years ago are getting pretty worn.)
If you want that service for yourself, fine -- sign up with MedicAlert who have been doing that sort of thing for 50-plus years, and emergency responders are all trained to look for the MedicAlert tag. They're also a non-profit, which I'm inclined to think makes them more trustworthy than Microsoft.
There are some other outfits that have similar services -- Divers Alert Network (DAN) comes to mind, also a non-profit, they're specialized for divers and offer a number of related services (training, etc - they're associated with Duke University Medical Center).
but I have been the Documentation Lead on the OOo project
Oh, and that qualifies you to make legal pronouncements, does it? I don't think so.
If there is a Legal dispute over the code, we would have to round up EVERYBODY that contributed to the codebase.
Um, no. Where did you get that whacko idea? Oh, right, when everyone who ever contributed code to Linux had to show up in Utah to defend Linux from SCO. Oh, wait...
There's a warning on all drinks that contain a source of phenylalanine, in the UK at least.
The US and Canada too. On this side of the pond the warning explains who it is addressed to (maybe so does the UK warning): phenylketonurics. Those are people with a genetic/metabolic disease where they can't properly process the amino acid phenylalanine, and it can build up to dangerous levels if they're not careful. To most people though, it's harmless.
It's present in many natural foods but phenylketonurics are expected to know this.
Job's did not invent anything of significant or of scientific value,
He was more of a techy in his early days, but definitely overshadowed by Wozniak. However, how many of the inventions that came out of Edison's labs were really Edison's? While no slouch, Edison's real talent was in pulling together an R&D team and focusing them on a problem. In that sense there are a lot of similarities between Jobs and Edison (although I wouldn't rank them equal).
Um, you do realize that both the R-7 and the Soyuz launcher have 20 engines in the first stage.
No, not really. They have five engines, each engine comprising four engine bells and combustion chambers, but only a single set of turbomachinery. US engines tend to have one set of turbines per combustion chamber (or vice versa), hence your confusion.
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The US is proposing to put devices capable of aiming megawatt beams into orbit? And who exactly will control this?
...other than being brighter (no atmospheric or cloud loss) and available 24 hours a day (except for a few hours a day near the equinoxes).
The US has been fielding megaton-range nuclear weapons (lately they're more sub-megaton) around the world for most of the last six decades (as have a few other countries). You're worried about a few megawatt beams?
Capturing solar power in space has no obvious overall advantage over capturing it on the ground.
what makes you think the solar panel will generate more power with more light?
This is exactly the way they work.
Go get yourself one of those toy solar-powered cars, or a solar energy demo kit (solar cell and motor) from Radio Shack or someplace. Move the cell towards a light bulb; observe how the motor speeds up or slows down as the cell gets more or less light.
Yes, there's an upper bound. Probaby shortly before the silicon starts to melt.
which means all the heat needs to be bled off by radiation
Yes, but it helps if you're radiating toward the 3 kelvin background temperature of most of space, and aren't surrounded by air at around 300 kelvins radiating back at you.
[gp] geostationary orbits is exactly where they intend to put them.
... that space is too valuable and too crowded.
[p]
You put the current communication satellite transponders (rather, their replacements) aboard the powersats. You give them bigger antennae. The bigger the antenna (at either end) the better the angular resolution.
The "too crowded" comes down to angular resolution, not actual distance. They're not (much) worried about collisions but about a receiver on Earth being able to differentiate between adjacent satellites.
First off, putting them somewhere other than Earth orbit is silly - yes, you can get more energy from the Sun, but how do you transmit it to Earth?
I think it was Robert Forward who raised the possibility of putting the solar power stations on Mercury and just having them make antimatter. The antimatter is then shipped (nice, high energy density stuff that) to Earth.
There are a few engineering details yet to be worked out, of course.
How is it better to lift your solar panels into orbit,
Most solar powersat proposals don't actually suggest this (at least, not the ones I was looking at twenty years ago). The idea is to deploy sufficient systems (as automated and self-repairing/self-replicating as possible) on the Moon that the powersats are constructed from lunar materials. This avoids the costs of manufacturing them on Earth and lifting them to orbit. Some proposals just had leaving the panels on the Moon and beaming the power from there, but geosynchronous orbit is probably better.
Synchronous orbit also gets sunlight most of the time (24 hours a day part of the year, due to Earth's tilt) and you don't have to worry about cloud cover. That compensates for a 50% efficiency loss right there.
The power beams aren't much of a navigation hazard. The energy density isn't that high, and the vehicle's skin (eg aircraft fuselage) is more than enough shielding. It might well be restricted airspace anyway, more to prevent disruption on the ground than concern about the aircraft.
Obviously this is not "current technology levels" if by that you mean "off the shelf", but there's nothing there that hasn't been prototyped at some level or other.
(Okay, completely autonomous self-replicating lunar solar cell factories are a bit out there, but we could do partially autonomous, partially self replicating, with a mix of teleoperation from Earth and local hands-on and low-latency teleoperation on the Moon. Teleoperating a vehicle with a ~3 second latency takes a bit of getting used to but isn't that hard, and computational assists on the display make it pretty easy. We did some experiments with this back in the late 80s using RC vehicles with wireless cams, feeding the controls through a computer for time delay and watching it via TV, as well as simpler setups using wire controlled toy vehicles delayed through a Commodore 64 and joystick, as a portable exhibit for kids. The real young ones had an easier time of it, the older kids with their video-game reflexes couldn't handle the delay and kept over-controlling.)
how well does XSLT support bitmasks, for example?
Not well, but it can be done using arithmetic operators and constants that are powers of two. (Ugly, though.)
Which is yet another argument against MSOOXML as a standard -- new XML definitions shouldn't include bitmasks.
You do realize that object oriented programming can be done in C?
Sure, and it can be done in assembler or possibly even APL too. But why?
What about a Vector graphic editing tool?
That would be Karbon14. (KDE seems to have gone through a few iterations of vector graphic tools, or maybe the same tool under different names. I know KIllustrator was renamed because of pressure from Adobe, to Kontour. And there was a Krayon in there too. I don't know how many of these may actually have been different codebases.)
Well, at the moment there's still not a lot of Office 2007 out there, and KOffice works fine with the pre-'07 stuff.
In theory, if ODF and MSOOXML were reasonably well defined, it'd be possible to create an XSLT sheet to transform one to the other. I won't hold my breath on that, though, and I have my doubts as to how well what MSOffice 2007 uses matches what is defined by the MSOOXML spec. Given the size of that spec, the XSLT stylesheet would be huge.
KOffice already has Kivio for flowcharting. QCad strikes me as a bit of overkill for this. It (kivio) could stand to expand its stencil library but it's supposed to support Dia stencils too.
KOffice also opens MS docs and spreadsheets, and can save in .doc or .xls format. I don't know how well that is supported in terms of very elaborate stuff, but the docs and spreadsheets readily accessible to me here worked fine.
The Moon has some geological (alright, selenological) activity. A mixture of heat left over from initial formation and heating and motion caused by Earth's tidal influence.
Remember, cellular mitosis doesn't work well in freefall.
Debatable. Skimming through the hits turned up by a google of "mitosis+microgravity", the experimental results are all over the place, with some of the biggest effects seen in experiments where there was little control against other effects (cosmic rays, high G and vibration effects from launch (sounding rocket experiments), etc. There also seem to be result differences between simple lifeforms (eg yeast), plants, and animals.
If mitosis really screwed up in freefall, astronauts spending more than a couple of months on a space station would start to die horrible deaths due to non-replacement of their blood cells.
It's been done. I just skimmed TFA briefly, but did see an explicit reference to Bios-3, a (Soviet) Russian closed-loop habitat at a research center in Krasnoyarsk (Siberia). Unlike the later Biosphere 2 (the greenhouse-like one in Arizona you're probably thinking of) this was much smaller, indoors (lighting for the plants was artificial -- and the whole thing had an external water cooling system to remove excess heat) and focussed mainly on recycling air and water. They did grow some of their own food (algae and wheat, yum), but also had regular food inputs from outside. Partly this last was due to Russian regulations governing experiments involving humans, by law they were required to be supplied with a regular ration of meat.
Anyway, the experiments were successful within the design parameters. (I had a chance to visit the facility a few months after Krasnoyarsk was opened to westerners, I still have a sample of the wheat grown within it.)
Biosphere 2 was more ambitious, aiming for 100% closed and no artificial lighting for the plants, for a two-year duration. They didn't make it, due to some surprises in the atmospheric chemistry (and things like interaction with the still-setting concrete), and the thing was way more than would be set up on the Moon anytime soon anyway. Bios-3 was much closer to a Lunar habitat prototype, and proved to be workable. (Yes, there'd still be some supply issues -- it will be a long time before anywhere off-Earth is totally self-sufficient, you need huge buffers and/or very good monitoring to make up for random events in the ecosystem. (Being biological, there are always random events.)
I designed a self-sufficient lunar habitat as a high-school science fair project back in the spring of 1969, a couple of months before Apollo 11. Took a couple of prizes for it, too (include a prize from the Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, probably mostly for pointing out that the Sudbury Basin is an impact structure rather than (as commonly held at the time) a geosyncline, and may suggest places to look for ores on the Moon.)
Although I daresay this study is probably a little more detailed than mine, I bet it doesn't come with a cool model including one of the Thunderbirds rockets...
Microsoft has more than 50 billion dollars in the bank
No, they don't. Their revenues (not profit) are about $50B. They only have about $20B in the bank. Not that that negates your main point, but that $50B number is ancient history (if it was ever true).
The have more money. MSFT's market capitalisation is $282.43B, IBM's is $160B.
Market capitalisation is irrelevent to how much money a company has, it's useless as a figure of merit. It's just the number of shares times whatever price per share the last trade was made at. If company X has a billion shares out there trading at $1/share, the market cap is $1B. If someone then offers $2/share for a small trade -- even one share if it's a low-volume company -- the market cap is now $2B. That second billion is entirely virtual money, only hypothetically realizable if the other 999,999,999 share could also sell at $2 each. Even if they could, it only does company X any good if they own those shares -- if the company doesn't retain any to sell itself, market cap is useless. (Almost -- a high market cap is a defense against a hostile takeover.)
What matters is cash on hand and revenue. Microsoft has revenue of about $51B and about $21B cash on hand (not the ancient $50B number that still floats around -- Microsoft has been forced to give a lot of that away on dividends because of stagnant growth, and some of that in fines and settlements). IBM only ("only") has a bit over $10B cash on hand, but has nearly twice Microsoft's revenue at about $95B.
Did you try opening another window and actually looking?
As a matter of fact, yes I did. There's some recent apparently made-for-DVD stuff (not cheap, either), as well as a bunch of old VHS stuff. Couldn't find the old half-hour "Bill Nye the Science Guy" PBS shows, though.
Sounds like something from the Bill Nye (the Science Guy) show.
(BTW, anyone know if that's available on DVD? My younger kids were just asking about it and the tapes I made off the air years ago are getting pretty worn.)
If you want that service for yourself, fine -- sign up with MedicAlert who have been doing that sort of thing for 50-plus years, and emergency responders are all trained to look for the MedicAlert tag. They're also a non-profit, which I'm inclined to think makes them more trustworthy than Microsoft.
There are some other outfits that have similar services -- Divers Alert Network (DAN) comes to mind, also a non-profit, they're specialized for divers and offer a number of related services (training, etc - they're associated with Duke University Medical Center).
I am not a lawyer,
That's painfully obvious.
but I have been the Documentation Lead on the OOo project
Oh, and that qualifies you to make legal pronouncements, does it? I don't think so.
If there is a Legal dispute over the code, we would have to round up EVERYBODY that contributed to the codebase.
Um, no. Where did you get that whacko idea? Oh, right, when everyone who ever contributed code to Linux had to show up in Utah to defend Linux from SCO. Oh, wait...
There's a warning on all drinks that contain a source of phenylalanine, in the UK at least.
The US and Canada too. On this side of the pond the warning explains who it is addressed to (maybe so does the UK warning): phenylketonurics. Those are people with a genetic/metabolic disease where they can't properly process the amino acid phenylalanine, and it can build up to dangerous levels if they're not careful. To most people though, it's harmless.
It's present in many natural foods but phenylketonurics are expected to know this.
Job's did not invent anything of significant or of scientific value,
He was more of a techy in his early days, but definitely overshadowed by Wozniak. However, how many of the inventions that came out of Edison's labs were really Edison's? While no slouch, Edison's real talent was in pulling together an R&D team and focusing them on a problem. In that sense there are a lot of similarities between Jobs and Edison (although I wouldn't rank them equal).
Um, you do realize that both the R-7 and the Soyuz launcher have 20 engines in the first stage.
No, not really. They have five engines, each engine comprising four engine bells and combustion chambers, but only a single set of turbomachinery. US engines tend to have one set of turbines per combustion chamber (or vice versa), hence your confusion.