If plastics which would otherwise go into a landfill or are already contaminating the environment can be used, if it has similar/better performance characteristics to traditional road materials and if its is a similar/cheaper in price then of course. But there are a lot of ifs in there.
No doubt government is always attempting to co-opt the press to portray only what makes them look good and they have been successful to a degree. But the various leaks, corruption/waste stories and abuse of power pieces over the last decade or so have show that there are some holdouts that scoff at the government line. Also to a degree the internet has taken over for some of the "shaming" of "oppressive officers" that was once predominantly taken care of the press, with blog stories, Debt clocks & internet video/audio.
The press in its various forms (blogs, newspapers and some filmmakers) are the defense attorneys of a free country. The Founding fathers wrote at length how the press and freedom of speech on its own was one of the major impediments to a government sinking into corruption & totalitarianism.
"The last right we shall mention regards the freedom of the press. The importance of this consists, besides the advancement of truth, science, morality, and arts in general, in its diffusion of liberal sentiments on the administration of Government, its ready communication of thoughts between subjects, and its consequential promotion of union among them, whereby oppressive officers are shamed or intimidated into more honourable and just modes of conducting affairs."
Continental Congress, 1774
This woman isn't some random person hanging out with "scum", she's an award winning documentary filmmaker. She also helped create the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Unfortunately the press has to hang out with various groups of morally/legally questionable people in order to get to what is important, most of those people reside in our various halls of government.
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
Key words spelled out right in the constitution at least here in the US are "Authors and Inventors" and "limited Times", both of which appear to be FAR beyond the veil here. The artists have been dead since 1946 and no one with their head screwed on straight wound consider over a hundred and twenty years to be a "limited time" especially when you take into account that at the time the constitution was written you considered yourself lucky if you lived into your 40s.
Hopefully this thing is just a proof of concept, any such system should be able to capture multiple pieces of debris whereas this this thing seems physically limited to capturing a single piece of debris and deorbiting. That simply is impractical with over 19k pieces of debris over 3.9 inches in size to launch a satellite for each and every one. Even if each satellite had the fuel and storage to capture 100 pieces of debris that would be around 190 satellites. A better concept might be to have a couple dozen LARGE satellites (Delta IV or Falcon Heavy) in different orbits each with a dozen or so retrieval craft that go out and collect a few pieces of debris and then return to the mother satellite and drop off their debris and refuel for another trip. After the mother satellite is either out of fuel or full of debris it deorbits itself along with its retrieval craft.
I may be reading from some overly cheerful sources but from what I understand the air cooler system was the only real technological hurdle needed to make the SABRE engine viable and it's been tested and proven. No doubt a full prototype engine will need to be built and flown to confirm the engines performance characteristics and viability but beyond that it appears to be "simple" aircraft design/development. Expensive no doubt, but not all that different from developing an advanced airliner which are usually in the $10-15 Billion range.
Who knows, maybe they'll be able to get Skylon up and flying. If that happens they'll be giving rides to the rest of the space-fairing nations. A long shot I know, but beyond SpaceX it is the only fully reusable orbital launch system in some form of active development that has some physical hardware built and tested and no fancy new "10 years out" technological requirements.
Maybe its just me but I found that article to be less than useless. Their company site may read like a commercial brochure but it seems quite a bit more informative about the actual technology.
I don't think 'anomaly' or 'problem' are the words I'd use as there is at times humorous attempt by agencies/contractors to use such terms to describe totally catastrophic failures.
As a thought experiment perhaps, but when factoring in real world requirements such as disposal, transportation, labor & logistics you're hard pressed to justify a major effort to replace bulbs wholesale.
The Model S may be in the same price range as other cars in its class but at ~$80K its way out of the ranger of your average person. Most people are looking in the $12-$30k new range. The battery packs alone are around $8-12k for all electric vehicles which is reflected in the price differences in ICE/Electric vehicles. A Ford focus for example runs about $17k in an ICE setup but even with government help runs $29k in electric. The issue of course appears to be the battery packs, they're just too expensive and probably have serious longevity issues (5-10 years). The best thing we can probably do at this point is a middle of the road solution, much smaller battery packs (7-25 miles) with a small gas engine that runs in an on/off fashion at its most efficient RPM range to keep the batteries above say 20%. That would be at least enough to take a big chunk out of our petroleum usage and begin moving us away from ICE engines to electric powertrains so that when we do find a battery technology that works the transition will be much easier.
"but PEPCO insisted that they didn't have enough data"
This situation sounds like a serious conflict of interest where the utility has at the very least no incentive to work towards LED street lights and could very well actively attempt to prevent such a switchover. Street lights by their very nature operate at night, a time where the system load has for the most part has dropped below the utilities baseload capacity. In simplistic terms they are generating power that isn't being used, so they aren't being paid for it. There is a significant impetus for them to WANT "someone" to use power in the midnight to 6 AM period and they're probably hoping that municipalities with power hungry street lights and homeowners with "security" lights will take up at least part of the slack.
A better methodology might be to simply stop buying standard bulbs and start buying LEDs. As standard bulbs go out swap them out. Sure you won't see the savings immediately but you also won't throw away a boatload of perfectly good bulbs and you won't have quite such a sticker shock. I can definitely see the use of this leasing service, but only in cases with especially pigheaded bureaucrats, kind of like those ones who claim the world is 7,000 years old or those who think we can convert 100% to renewable electricity and organic food and not have rolling blackouts and half the population starving to death.
You could, but why would you? It wasn't the most efficient engine (around 263 Isp using RP1). The SSME is far more efficient (~452 Isp using LH2), though it is wickedly expensive at about $40M each. There are several other engines would be far more efficient, cost far less overall and be more reliable.
Why? Because a small subset of religious/environmental/cultural zealots don't like it? I suppose all of the world should have just gave up on the heliocentric model when Galileo was convicted of heresy for postulating findings based on observation instead of reading religious texts? I suppose we should give up on teaching evolution in public schools because it offends the sensibilities of a small percentage of parents religious beliefs. I'm not saying that significant efforts shouldn't be made to avoid offending as many people as possible, but there are very few places on this planet where these kinds of things can be built and a very small part of one of many historical/cultural sites isn't an unreasonable thing to ask. "Just don't build it" is about as unacceptable as saying "don't challenge doctrine".
Yes, but unfortunately most materials don't go straight from solid to liquid. Think chocolate, at 75F it usually is perfectly solid, at 85F you might get a little on your hand but not bad and at 95F it may hold its shape but will practically fall apart in your hand. ABS plastic is probably similar. Sure it may turn to liquid a 220F and be pretty solid at 90F, it may be seem pretty decent at 110F-130F sitting on a shelf but it could be wearing pretty quickly if being stressed because it is semi malleable.
"The position that nobody's religious views should ever matter"
You don't know much about this case do you? Each site apparently has to be blessed, there are reams of paper work for cultural and "environmental" considerations that in TMT's case took over 7 years to complete. The proposal has cleared several court challenges. As I mentioned there has been a agreement to remove several telescopes and it has been mentioned by others that there are some rather crazy requirements (plastic sheets below parked trucks) to try to appease these people and its apparently still not enough. I don't know what more could be done.
There are over a dozen telescopes at the same site where they intend to build the TMT, some of which have been there since the late 60s. Their complaints that their "most sacred site will be desecrated" seem to be a bit late. I think there has already been an agreement to remove quite a few of the current telescopes to revert a significant portion of the site to a more natural state. There is another larger mountain on the same island, something tells me if they began building telescopes on that mountain it would suddenly become a "most sacred site". This to me smells much more like a NIMBY group using vague religious/cultural references to try to get there way.
Unless a better method/technology is invented it might become standard practice to inlay wire mesh into home wrap/roofing underlay to basically turn each home/apartment into a faraday cage.
The day that the courts, or any part of the government for that matter, can openly "reinterpret" a basic word to mean something completely different is a dark day indeed. Love or hate the ACA, you can't argue with a straight face that the provision in question, "enrolled in through an exchange established by the state" means anything but what it says. An exchange established by any one of the 50 states. Either congress/president should have to correct the wording through a legislative process or simply accept that states that didn't establish exchanges would not receive subsidies. Arguing "intent" that goes directly against the wording of the passed law itself sets a dangerous precedent.
It definitely isn't the entire problem and it probably varies by state but at least in some cases the government is at least part of the problem, treating rental properties like commercial properties is no doubt going to increase the costs for the owner who in all fairness is going to pass those costs right on to the tenant. An example would be a not all that special home in my area costs around $250 a month if your a homeowner but for a rental that same home costs $400 in property taxes alone. Throw in maintenance, water, sewer, etc and you're probably looking at $700 at least a month in costs to the owner and that assumes they have the place occupied 365 with good tenants who pay on time and no significant maintenance issues come up (furnace, AC, etc). And I live in a fairly reasonably priced area, I don't want to even conceive of the numbers for some areas where a unimpressive 4 bedroom house will go for $500 - $750k.
I thought this was no longer an issue? I think continuous communication had been in use for over a decade with the space shuttle before the end of the program. The solution was to use satellites, being on the other side of the plasma sheath, as relays to communicate between a reentering craft and the ground..
"I'm pretty sure the resulting metal is seriously inferior to standard steel..."
I don't know if it applies to this specific technique or perhaps even to the materials they are using but I've heard it said that at least in standard welding that the weld is actually stronger than the surrounding metal.
Geostationary satellites have their advantages, but when you're dealing with internet communications they also have some pretty significant disadvantages. First off is latency, the proposed LEO satellites would only have to bounce the signal about 1,500 miles as compared to 52,400 miles for GEO satellites. While the speed of light is pretty fast that distance along with the hardware required usually introduce 500-700 MS of latency in GEO systems. Secondly I think there are some significant bandwidth issues with having tens of thousands or even millions of users trying to transmit signals to a few dozen GEO satellites instead of using multiple lower orbits, dish positioning and far more satellites to distribute the load along with some possibly near term communications technologies that may allow this kind of system to use the spectrum far more efficiently.
Earlier this year Google and Fidelity national invested $1 Billion in SpaceX, presumably to help support their efforts to bring a satellite based ISP to fruition. Sounds like a rather odd way to express a lack of interest in a business venture. OneWeb seems to be the focus of the article, and that is only one of two major efforts. I wonder if Google is choosing sides? OneWeb I believe is a Qualcomm/Virgin effort whereas SpaceX is the other.
Slashdot Mirror
If plastics which would otherwise go into a landfill or are already contaminating the environment can be used, if it has similar/better performance characteristics to traditional road materials and if its is a similar/cheaper in price then of course. But there are a lot of ifs in there.
No doubt government is always attempting to co-opt the press to portray only what makes them look good and they have been successful to a degree. But the various leaks, corruption/waste stories and abuse of power pieces over the last decade or so have show that there are some holdouts that scoff at the government line. Also to a degree the internet has taken over for some of the "shaming" of "oppressive officers" that was once predominantly taken care of the press, with blog stories, Debt clocks & internet video/audio.
The press in its various forms (blogs, newspapers and some filmmakers) are the defense attorneys of a free country. The Founding fathers wrote at length how the press and freedom of speech on its own was one of the major impediments to a government sinking into corruption & totalitarianism.
"The last right we shall mention regards the freedom of the press. The importance of this consists, besides the advancement of truth, science, morality, and arts in general, in its diffusion of liberal sentiments on the administration of Government, its ready communication of thoughts between subjects, and its consequential promotion of union among them, whereby oppressive officers are shamed or intimidated into more honourable and just modes of conducting affairs."
Continental Congress, 1774
This woman isn't some random person hanging out with "scum", she's an award winning documentary filmmaker. She also helped create the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Unfortunately the press has to hang out with various groups of morally/legally questionable people in order to get to what is important, most of those people reside in our various halls of government.
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
Key words spelled out right in the constitution at least here in the US are "Authors and Inventors" and "limited Times", both of which appear to be FAR beyond the veil here. The artists have been dead since 1946 and no one with their head screwed on straight wound consider over a hundred and twenty years to be a "limited time" especially when you take into account that at the time the constitution was written you considered yourself lucky if you lived into your 40s.
Hopefully this thing is just a proof of concept, any such system should be able to capture multiple pieces of debris whereas this this thing seems physically limited to capturing a single piece of debris and deorbiting. That simply is impractical with over 19k pieces of debris over 3.9 inches in size to launch a satellite for each and every one. Even if each satellite had the fuel and storage to capture 100 pieces of debris that would be around 190 satellites. A better concept might be to have a couple dozen LARGE satellites (Delta IV or Falcon Heavy) in different orbits each with a dozen or so retrieval craft that go out and collect a few pieces of debris and then return to the mother satellite and drop off their debris and refuel for another trip. After the mother satellite is either out of fuel or full of debris it deorbits itself along with its retrieval craft.
I may be reading from some overly cheerful sources but from what I understand the air cooler system was the only real technological hurdle needed to make the SABRE engine viable and it's been tested and proven. No doubt a full prototype engine will need to be built and flown to confirm the engines performance characteristics and viability but beyond that it appears to be "simple" aircraft design/development. Expensive no doubt, but not all that different from developing an advanced airliner which are usually in the $10-15 Billion range.
Who knows, maybe they'll be able to get Skylon up and flying. If that happens they'll be giving rides to the rest of the space-fairing nations. A long shot I know, but beyond SpaceX it is the only fully reusable orbital launch system in some form of active development that has some physical hardware built and tested and no fancy new "10 years out" technological requirements.
Maybe its just me but I found that article to be less than useless. Their company site may read like a commercial brochure but it seems quite a bit more informative about the actual technology.
http://azurawave.com/
I don't think 'anomaly' or 'problem' are the words I'd use as there is at times humorous attempt by agencies/contractors to use such terms to describe totally catastrophic failures.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
As a thought experiment perhaps, but when factoring in real world requirements such as disposal, transportation, labor & logistics you're hard pressed to justify a major effort to replace bulbs wholesale.
The Model S may be in the same price range as other cars in its class but at ~$80K its way out of the ranger of your average person. Most people are looking in the $12-$30k new range. The battery packs alone are around $8-12k for all electric vehicles which is reflected in the price differences in ICE/Electric vehicles. A Ford focus for example runs about $17k in an ICE setup but even with government help runs $29k in electric. The issue of course appears to be the battery packs, they're just too expensive and probably have serious longevity issues (5-10 years). The best thing we can probably do at this point is a middle of the road solution, much smaller battery packs (7-25 miles) with a small gas engine that runs in an on/off fashion at its most efficient RPM range to keep the batteries above say 20%. That would be at least enough to take a big chunk out of our petroleum usage and begin moving us away from ICE engines to electric powertrains so that when we do find a battery technology that works the transition will be much easier.
"but PEPCO insisted that they didn't have enough data"
This situation sounds like a serious conflict of interest where the utility has at the very least no incentive to work towards LED street lights and could very well actively attempt to prevent such a switchover. Street lights by their very nature operate at night, a time where the system load has for the most part has dropped below the utilities baseload capacity. In simplistic terms they are generating power that isn't being used, so they aren't being paid for it. There is a significant impetus for them to WANT "someone" to use power in the midnight to 6 AM period and they're probably hoping that municipalities with power hungry street lights and homeowners with "security" lights will take up at least part of the slack.
A better methodology might be to simply stop buying standard bulbs and start buying LEDs. As standard bulbs go out swap them out. Sure you won't see the savings immediately but you also won't throw away a boatload of perfectly good bulbs and you won't have quite such a sticker shock. I can definitely see the use of this leasing service, but only in cases with especially pigheaded bureaucrats, kind of like those ones who claim the world is 7,000 years old or those who think we can convert 100% to renewable electricity and organic food and not have rolling blackouts and half the population starving to death.
You could, but why would you? It wasn't the most efficient engine (around 263 Isp using RP1). The SSME is far more efficient (~452 Isp using LH2), though it is wickedly expensive at about $40M each. There are several other engines would be far more efficient, cost far less overall and be more reliable.
"They could not build the telescope there."
Why? Because a small subset of religious/environmental/cultural zealots don't like it? I suppose all of the world should have just gave up on the heliocentric model when Galileo was convicted of heresy for postulating findings based on observation instead of reading religious texts? I suppose we should give up on teaching evolution in public schools because it offends the sensibilities of a small percentage of parents religious beliefs. I'm not saying that significant efforts shouldn't be made to avoid offending as many people as possible, but there are very few places on this planet where these kinds of things can be built and a very small part of one of many historical/cultural sites isn't an unreasonable thing to ask. "Just don't build it" is about as unacceptable as saying "don't challenge doctrine".
"don't get 105 degrees C"
Yes, but unfortunately most materials don't go straight from solid to liquid. Think chocolate, at 75F it usually is perfectly solid, at 85F you might get a little on your hand but not bad and at 95F it may hold its shape but will practically fall apart in your hand. ABS plastic is probably similar. Sure it may turn to liquid a 220F and be pretty solid at 90F, it may be seem pretty decent at 110F-130F sitting on a shelf but it could be wearing pretty quickly if being stressed because it is semi malleable.
"The position that nobody's religious views should ever matter"
You don't know much about this case do you? Each site apparently has to be blessed, there are reams of paper work for cultural and "environmental" considerations that in TMT's case took over 7 years to complete. The proposal has cleared several court challenges. As I mentioned there has been a agreement to remove several telescopes and it has been mentioned by others that there are some rather crazy requirements (plastic sheets below parked trucks) to try to appease these people and its apparently still not enough. I don't know what more could be done.
There are over a dozen telescopes at the same site where they intend to build the TMT, some of which have been there since the late 60s. Their complaints that their "most sacred site will be desecrated" seem to be a bit late. I think there has already been an agreement to remove quite a few of the current telescopes to revert a significant portion of the site to a more natural state. There is another larger mountain on the same island, something tells me if they began building telescopes on that mountain it would suddenly become a "most sacred site". This to me smells much more like a NIMBY group using vague religious/cultural references to try to get there way.
Unless a better method/technology is invented it might become standard practice to inlay wire mesh into home wrap/roofing underlay to basically turn each home/apartment into a faraday cage.
The day that the courts, or any part of the government for that matter, can openly "reinterpret" a basic word to mean something completely different is a dark day indeed. Love or hate the ACA, you can't argue with a straight face that the provision in question, "enrolled in through an exchange established by the state" means anything but what it says. An exchange established by any one of the 50 states. Either congress/president should have to correct the wording through a legislative process or simply accept that states that didn't establish exchanges would not receive subsidies. Arguing "intent" that goes directly against the wording of the passed law itself sets a dangerous precedent.
It definitely isn't the entire problem and it probably varies by state but at least in some cases the government is at least part of the problem, treating rental properties like commercial properties is no doubt going to increase the costs for the owner who in all fairness is going to pass those costs right on to the tenant. An example would be a not all that special home in my area costs around $250 a month if your a homeowner but for a rental that same home costs $400 in property taxes alone. Throw in maintenance, water, sewer, etc and you're probably looking at $700 at least a month in costs to the owner and that assumes they have the place occupied 365 with good tenants who pay on time and no significant maintenance issues come up (furnace, AC, etc). And I live in a fairly reasonably priced area, I don't want to even conceive of the numbers for some areas where a unimpressive 4 bedroom house will go for $500 - $750k.
I thought this was no longer an issue? I think continuous communication had been in use for over a decade with the space shuttle before the end of the program. The solution was to use satellites, being on the other side of the plasma sheath, as relays to communicate between a reentering craft and the ground..
"I'm pretty sure the resulting metal is seriously inferior to standard steel..."
I don't know if it applies to this specific technique or perhaps even to the materials they are using but I've heard it said that at least in standard welding that the weld is actually stronger than the surrounding metal.
Geostationary satellites have their advantages, but when you're dealing with internet communications they also have some pretty significant disadvantages. First off is latency, the proposed LEO satellites would only have to bounce the signal about 1,500 miles as compared to 52,400 miles for GEO satellites. While the speed of light is pretty fast that distance along with the hardware required usually introduce 500-700 MS of latency in GEO systems. Secondly I think there are some significant bandwidth issues with having tens of thousands or even millions of users trying to transmit signals to a few dozen GEO satellites instead of using multiple lower orbits, dish positioning and far more satellites to distribute the load along with some possibly near term communications technologies that may allow this kind of system to use the spectrum far more efficiently.
Earlier this year Google and Fidelity national invested $1 Billion in SpaceX, presumably to help support their efforts to bring a satellite based ISP to fruition. Sounds like a rather odd way to express a lack of interest in a business venture. OneWeb seems to be the focus of the article, and that is only one of two major efforts. I wonder if Google is choosing sides? OneWeb I believe is a Qualcomm/Virgin effort whereas SpaceX is the other.