When I have ordered MRI scans I have always had to ask whether patients have used metal grinding machinery and could have metal particles around their eyes. I think the radiology department did standard xrays of the head to check for any shards (which would show up nice and bright on xray) before doing an MRI scan.
Particles of the size described would be unlikely to feel enough force to cause damage in even a strong magnetic field. I don't think this would be a problem, but I don't have the physics to do the maths myself.
Well I am a doctor, but it's not really my field and I've had a few drinks. I'll have a go anyway.
There are two problems with this technique for dealing with viruses like HIV. One is that viruses can only reproduce inside human cells and spend most of their time there. None of these nanoparticles are going to be able to get inside the cells so they are not going to get to where the virus is. Instead there is the much trickier task of detecting cells which have the virus inside.
The other problem is that the HIV virus in particular appears to mutate very rapidly. There is one part of the outside of the virus capsule which has to stay the same as it binds strongly to a particular protein on the outside of the cells it is going to infect in order to attach to them. This region which stays the same is flanked by areas that change rapidly from generation to generation to make it difficult for the body to recognise the virus.
Ok everyone, relax.:)...The waves would be directed so that it bathes a small target on the ground (less than 10 feet in diameter). So even if the guidance cutoff failed and the satellite were to hit a city with microwaves, the damage would be fairly localized (imagine a disaster the scale of a 747 crashing into a neighborhood - not a nuclear or biological weapon event).
Well probably not that reassuring to everyone. The saftey cutoff measures you describe are probably reasonable, but it is more of a "I've lost my keys" than a "747 crashing into neighbourhood" disaster.
Because of the long wavelength of microwaves they are not that easy to focus. Because the satelites are in geostationary orbit (36,000 miles away or so) that means the beam is a lot more than 10 foot across when it arrives -- about 5 miles is the figure I have in mind
In fact most realistic(?) schemes place the overall intensity of beam at the collector at about half that of natural sunlight. The reasons that this low intensity microwave beam is so useful is that A) in contrast to the sunlight it would be there all the time (day or night, and microwaves penetrate cloud pretty well too), and that B) microwaves can be converted into electricity far cheaper and with a much higher efficiency than sunlight. The only figure I have is from O'Neil's book which gives a 55% efficiency rate -- but that was 35 years ago.
I don't think that the man should be running to Canada. If he is going to commit such inflammatory actions then I think he should take up the responsibility and face the injustice that he has provoked in order to showcase his cause, otherwise, he will just cause the erosion of more of our freedoms.
If you look at the details of it he is claming asylum on a "Human Rights Violation Refugee Claim" in Canada. If a Canadian court upholds that (and I don't think they have traditionally been favourable to scientology) then that would certainly make for an interesting standoff, and quite possibly more adverse Scientology publicity than if he appeals to court which might rule no more fairly than the orriginal. A refugee claim based on human rights violations is probably also more likely to bring the freedom aspect out in the media than what you suggest.
And herein is exhibited the difference between Open Source and Free Software. The GPL, written by Stallman to protect Free Software, says nothing about a guarantee of the ability to make money off software. That's totally orthogonal to the GPL and Free Software. They don't care.
Very true, but arguably the Open Source movement has promoted Free Software as a side effect. I've seen advocates of OS who believe in the freedom aspece arguing that "openess" is merely a better way of marketing FS to buisness - they buy it because (they think?) it makes buisness sense, consumers get more Free software, and everyone's happy. Whether the results of that deception are now coming home to roost are another matter...
But if you intend to make money from software *itself*, as opposed to services and t-shirts, well, I guess then your choice has to be to make up a new license.
Surely it is possible to make money from the software itself under the GPL, but just not from the large volume consumer software market. It is perfectly feasible to be commissioned to write software under the GPL for a company or group of companies.
Note that some devices are already emulated in bochs (ne2k ethernet card and SB16 sound card come to mind), and porting these to plex86 is comparatively trivial. Here is some stuff I picked up from lurking on the developers list...
There are other ways of doing this though. You can write a guest specific driver that is designed specifically to pass information to plex86 rather than to try and emulate an existing card. This may be more efficient, but means you have to write drivers for all your different OSes. VMWare does something similar with its video driver
One really nice idea (in certain situations) is to give a piece of hardware over to the virtualised OS entirely. No virtualisation is then needed - the OS running in plex86 accesses the hardware directly with just some I/O address translation done by plex86 (sort of equivalent to the difference between IP masquerading and transparent proxying). For something like a parallel port which holds little state, a device can be assigned to the virtualised OS temporarily, and then be claimed back.
I think someone was also working on allowing certain PCI slots to be given over to the virtualised OS. eg. If you have to NICs you can have Linux using one and your virtualised OS using the other directly. The same should work if you are lucky enough to have two video cards and monitors - display one OS on one monitor, and the other on the other, using the host drivers in both case (and therefore hopefully getting opengl/directx support etc. with no extra work). Of course this would have to remain as just an option if you happen to have spare peripherals.
So what you're basically saying is that everything would be much better in the world of science if everyone was forced to work without recognition or reward? That noone can claim any sort of ownership over their own work, or seek any reward from it.
You are mixing recognition and financial reward which are two very different things. People don't in general go into science for the money. Scientists need recognition for their acheivments, but large financial rewards (which don't normally go to the person who made the discovery anyway) don't necessarily go in hand with that. "Science is like sex. Sometimes something useful comes out of it, but that isn't the reason we do it".
My impression is that the problem comes from commercial organisations' funding of research. If a drug company is funding research then it respects some financial return on it. The scientists involved rarely get any of the money (witness the guy who designed viagra who has made an absolute fortune for his company, but whose salary apparently hasn't changed at all). In addition this attitude has probably filtered down into the scientists a little from the top. I have heard the head of one lab (biotech stuff related) saying "The problem is that you get advances when all the top people in the field sit around and bash some ideas out between themselves. We're not getting that properly any more because everyone's worried they might give away some big idea that could have made millions".
What advocates of that raving lunatic RMS don't seem to grasp is that the majority of people are motivated to some extent by self-interest and that one is unlikely to achieve much by removing elements of self-interest. I wait with interest to see if these deluded people will eventually work it out on their own.
RMS talks about software which has a fairly low capital cost, and so eople can be motivated by recognition and a love of what they are doing - his arguments are actually pretty reasonable there. For science his arguments wouldn't work so well since, while the motivation is there, you need a lot of money and that tends to come with strings attatched. Maybe for science the current situation is a good as it can get, maybe it isn't, but to dismiss RMS by applying his arguments to soemething he never attempted to apply them to in the first place, and then show how they are wrong isn't a very honest argument.
The power grid may work fairly efficiently at the moment, but that is because (I imagine) there are a number of different generation points spread reasonably evenly across the grid, and so there is no large bulk flow of current long distance across the grid. Put all the generators in one area and all the consumers in another and you'll have much more current flowing long distances, and more heat related losses as a result.
The actual situation would not be quite that extreme as you point out because much of the high power consuming areas are near the costs. If places further away can have their part of the grid bolstered by other sources (solar, wind etc.) meaning less long distance current flow needed to supply them, then the sytem could well be workable. An efficient electricity storage system would be the real bonus for these potentially erratic sources of power.
Parkinson's disease is caused by degeneration of dopamine producing neurones in a certain area of the brain, and there is some evidence that transplanting dopamine producing cells into this area may help to treat the disease. I think the research you mention involved persuading embryonic stem cells to differentiate into dopamine producing cells in the laboratory, which would then allow a much larger supply of dopamine producing cells for transplantation than if they had to be transplanted directly. I don't think there was any question of these cells growing the proper interconnections with other nerve cells after they had been implanted, so they can only have a fairly crude effect on brain function.
It is probably better to think of it as a clever way of delivering a drug (dopamine) directly to the part of the brain it is needed in than as anything like a brain transplant.
We probably don't need to be too worried about a complete extinction, Armageddon like, asteroid - the chances are very small. There have been a significant number of smaller asteroid strikes though. There was one in Northern Siberia in the early 1900's that flattened an area roughly the size of Greater London (2000 square kilometers or so bigger than many cities). There have been 2 or 3 others in the last thousand years or so as well, but I can't remember where. With a greater world population and cities that are more spread out then their is a chance that the next one will get a fair few people. No it's not worth insuring your house against, bu it is more likely than global extinction.
Nope. Having them knocked off the surface of Mars by metorites etc. may indeed heat the rocks up to extreme temperatures and put them under a fair amount of stress. You don't get alterations to radioisotopes from that sort of processs though since that would be a nuclear rather than chemical chagne. Some elements may be boiled off more than others, but this will affect all the radioisotopes of that element equally (well not quite, but the diffierence isn't going to be significant). The tests look at the ratios of various isotopes and so will not be affected by this process either.
A sample return mission is justified for other reasons though. You destroy a lot of other information in the process of ejecting fragments of planet by metor strike!
"Remember all those news reports a couple of months ago about unexpected deaths during gene therapy?"
As far as I remember it that was a problem with the vector used to deliver the gene rather than gene therapy - the genes were put into the cells using an inactivated virus. That worked fine, but then the body's immune system recognised those cells as having been infected with virus and attacked them causing a large amount of inflammation, cell death, and unfortunately patient death too.
There is a serious problem with "hacking on the genome" though. The body is essentially a program with every variable exported - there is little segmentalisation between various functions at the biochemical level. Certain chemicals are used for one thing in one tissue and another entirely different thing in another.
If you code like that then your code crashes! The reason the human body doesn't is it has been so extensively shotgun debugged by natural selection. But... Start playing around too much and you are likely to get in real trouble really easily. Kind of like changing the partition that root is on from hda1 to something else, and then finding that every time a program needed to use a constant of 1 it just used the minor device number of the device mounted as root because it was handy!
And you don't need to be running the most recent version of debian in
order to make upgrade smoothly to 2.2 - not by a long way. Out of
interest I found an old debian 1.1 (buzz) installation, and had a look
to see how the upgrade to 2.2 went. Debian 1.1 is a 1996, libc5
distribution with a 2.0.0 kernel, but the upgrade worked with one piece
of manual intervention halfway through, and a single reboot in order to
install the new kernel. Not bad, though admittedly probably not very
useful for very many people!
As cool as this may be I think they would be better of plowing more money into a replacement for the shuttle, possibly a return to the moon, and the ISS. I know that alot of people consider the ISS a wast of money but with a bit of work it could really achieve something. All three of the above might act as stepping stones to future exploration of the solar system, providing cheaper lifting and bases from which cheaper missions can be launched.
Both the moon and ISS have serious problems as stepping stones. The ISS is in a nice low orbit because otherwise the shuttle wouldn't be able to reach it, but ideally a set off point for solar system travel would be in a much looser orbit so that it would be easier to leave earth's orbit from it. Also it is all very well to say the ISS is useful as a stepping stone, but what would you actually do there? It could be used to assemble huge ships that were too big to be launched from earth, but quality control in an orbiting space station is going to be far worse than on the earth, and if your ship is that large then costs will be prohibitive anyway. It doesn't make a difference that you can leavefrom the ISS with very little fuel because you still need to get up there in the first place.
The moon is generally put forwar as a stepping stone because it is close to us, has a smaller greavity well than earth, and would therefore be easier to launch large ships from, the idea being that these would be constructed on the moon. The only problem is that the moon does not have an atmosphere, so you need almost as much fuel at the far end of your journey to slow down as you do at the start to speed up. Mars on the other hand has an atmosphere, and so you can use aeorbraking (orbit around the outer reaches of the atmosphere and slow yourself down with atmospheric drag). The result is that, sounterintuitively, you actually need less fuel for a trip to Mars than you do for one to the Moon. Granted the trip is longer and windwos for return less frequent which bring out other complications, but as a base for futher solar system exploration the moon is not a good idea.
If you are interested then there is more info on the general ideas of nanotechnology at the foresight institute's web site. In particular Engines of Creation - the book that started the whole thing - is online there, and might be worth a read/skim if you are interested. It is a bit dated though, but it is amusing when he mentions this wonderful new idea called "hypertext".
They also have a book that gives more of a "what it means" or "what would it be like" viewpoint here.
The announcement in this story is obviously a long way off being what is described in the books, but even if what is described never comes to pass it is still an interesting read.
Re:I'm surprised no one's mentioned
on
Plex86 Runs DOS
·
· Score: 1
Ooops sorry: s/immature/premature/g the above comment.
Re:I'm surprised no one's mentioned
on
Plex86 Runs DOS
·
· Score: 1
Yes. The most obvious difference is that bochs can actually be used on a non-x86 architecture - you can install bochs on a Sparc if you want, and then run windows or something else under it. VMWare and plex86 only work on an x86, but run much faster as they allow some instructions to be executed natively.
Incidentally the headline is perhaps a little immature - plex86 will currently boot up dos 6.22, but anything other than typing "dir" causes it to panic as the necessary instructions aren't yet virtualized. Booting linux it will currently do:
Calibrating delay loop.. ok - 419.43 BogoMIPS Memory: 13752k/16384k available (396k kernel code, 384k reserved, 412k data) Swansea University Computer Society NET3.035 for Linux 2.0 NET3: Unix domain sockets 0.13 for Linux NET3.035. Checking 'hlt' instruction... Ok. Linux version 2.0.36 (uli@uli) (gcc version 2.7.2.1) #8 Sat Jul 17 23:50:53 MEST
After that it panics, and it is still unoptimized and fairly slow.
I don't think they are. The length of time for a trip to Mars is quite fixed by the positions of the planets orbits relative to each other. With a little bit more fuel (or slightly better propulsion) you can take some time off the transfer journey, but if you throw lots more fuel at the problem you start to get quite seriously diminishing returns. 180 days or so is going to be the optimum transfer time for the forseable future - better propulsion systems are still a good thing, but because they allow you to take more stuff with you not because they shorten the trip. As for your two habitats idea, a variant of it already exists in the more recent mission plans. These tend to use a different vehicle for going to Mars and coming back. The return vehicle is sent out ahead of time, and verified to have landed, and not have any leaks etc. before the astronauts ever leave earth. When they arrive they know they already have this habitat on the planet if their own one is not working, or they can continue to live where they are. If anyone is interested in more I'd reccomend Robert Zubrin's book "The Case for Mars" which addresses quite a few of the points people have brought up here.
Slashdot Mirror
When I have ordered MRI scans I have always had to ask whether patients have used metal grinding machinery and could have metal particles around their eyes. I think the radiology department did standard xrays of the head to check for any shards (which would show up nice and bright on xray) before doing an MRI scan.
Particles of the size described would be unlikely to feel enough force to cause damage in even a strong magnetic field. I don't think this would be a problem, but I don't have the physics to do the maths myself.
I'm no doctor, but I'd make a couple of guesses:
Well I am a doctor, but it's not really my field and I've had a few drinks. I'll have a go anyway.
There are two problems with this technique for dealing with viruses like HIV. One is that viruses can only reproduce inside human cells and spend most of their time there. None of these nanoparticles are going to be able to get inside the cells so they are not going to get to where the virus is. Instead there is the much trickier task of detecting cells which have the virus inside.
The other problem is that the HIV virus in particular appears to mutate very rapidly. There is one part of the outside of the virus capsule which has to stay the same as it binds strongly to a particular protein on the outside of the cells it is going to infect in order to attach to them. This region which stays the same is flanked by areas that change rapidly from generation to generation to make it difficult for the body to recognise the virus.
Ok everyone, relax. :)...The waves would be directed so that it bathes a small target on the ground (less than 10 feet in diameter). So even if the guidance cutoff failed and the satellite were to hit a city with microwaves, the damage would be fairly localized (imagine a disaster the scale of a 747 crashing into a neighborhood - not a nuclear or biological weapon event).
Well probably not that reassuring to everyone. The saftey cutoff measures you describe are probably reasonable, but it is more of a "I've lost my keys" than a "747 crashing into neighbourhood" disaster.
Because of the long wavelength of microwaves they are not that easy to focus. Because the satelites are in geostationary orbit (36,000 miles away or so) that means the beam is a lot more than 10 foot across when it arrives -- about 5 miles is the figure I have in mind
In fact most realistic(?) schemes place the overall intensity of beam at the collector at about half that of natural sunlight. The reasons that this low intensity microwave beam is so useful is that A) in contrast to the sunlight it would be there all the time (day or night, and microwaves penetrate cloud pretty well too), and that B) microwaves can be converted into electricity far cheaper and with a much higher efficiency than sunlight. The only figure I have is from O'Neil's book which gives a 55% efficiency rate -- but that was 35 years ago.
The cities are safe./P.
I don't think that the man should be running to Canada. If he is going to commit such inflammatory actions then I think he should take up the responsibility and face the injustice that he has provoked in order to showcase his cause, otherwise, he will just cause the erosion of more of our freedoms.
If you look at the details of it he is claming asylum on a "Human Rights Violation Refugee Claim" in Canada. If a Canadian court upholds that (and I don't think they have traditionally been favourable to scientology) then that would certainly make for an interesting standoff, and quite possibly more adverse Scientology publicity than if he appeals to court which might rule no more fairly than the orriginal. A refugee claim based on human rights violations is probably also more likely to bring the freedom aspect out in the media than what you suggest.
And herein is exhibited the difference between Open Source and Free Software. The GPL, written by Stallman to protect Free Software, says nothing about a guarantee of the ability to make money off software. That's totally orthogonal to the GPL and Free Software. They don't care.
Very true, but arguably the Open Source movement has promoted Free Software as a side effect. I've seen advocates of OS who believe in the freedom aspece arguing that "openess" is merely a better way of marketing FS to buisness - they buy it because (they think?) it makes buisness sense, consumers get more Free software, and everyone's happy. Whether the results of that deception are now coming home to roost are another matter...
But if you intend to make money from software *itself*, as opposed to services and t-shirts, well, I guess then your choice has to be to make up a new license.
Surely it is possible to make money from the software itself under the GPL, but just not from the large volume consumer software market. It is perfectly feasible to be commissioned to write software under the GPL for a company or group of companies.
There are other ways of doing this though. You can write a guest specific driver that is designed specifically to pass information to plex86 rather than to try and emulate an existing card. This may be more efficient, but means you have to write drivers for all your different OSes. VMWare does something similar with its video driver
One really nice idea (in certain situations) is to give a piece of hardware over to the virtualised OS entirely. No virtualisation is then needed - the OS running in plex86 accesses the hardware directly with just some I/O address translation done by plex86 (sort of equivalent to the difference between IP masquerading and transparent proxying). For something like a parallel port which holds little state, a device can be assigned to the virtualised OS temporarily, and then be claimed back.
I think someone was also working on allowing certain PCI slots to be given over to the virtualised OS. eg. If you have to NICs you can have Linux using one and your virtualised OS using the other directly. The same should work if you are lucky enough to have two video cards and monitors - display one OS on one monitor, and the other on the other, using the host drivers in both case (and therefore hopefully getting opengl/directx support etc. with no extra work). Of course this would have to remain as just an option if you happen to have spare peripherals.
So what you're basically saying is that everything would be much better in the world of science if everyone was forced to work without recognition or reward? That noone can claim any sort of ownership over their own work, or seek any reward from it.
You are mixing recognition and financial reward which are two very different things. People don't in general go into science for the money. Scientists need recognition for their acheivments, but large financial rewards (which don't normally go to the person who made the discovery anyway) don't necessarily go in hand with that. "Science is like sex. Sometimes something useful comes out of it, but that isn't the reason we do it".
My impression is that the problem comes from commercial organisations' funding of research. If a drug company is funding research then it respects some financial return on it. The scientists involved rarely get any of the money (witness the guy who designed viagra who has made an absolute fortune for his company, but whose salary apparently hasn't changed at all). In addition this attitude has probably filtered down into the scientists a little from the top. I have heard the head of one lab (biotech stuff related) saying "The problem is that you get advances when all the top people in the field sit around and bash some ideas out between themselves. We're not getting that properly any more because everyone's worried they might give away some big idea that could have made millions".
What advocates of that raving lunatic RMS don't seem to grasp is that the majority of people are motivated to some extent by self-interest and that one is unlikely to achieve much by removing elements of self-interest. I wait with interest to see if these deluded people will eventually work it out on their own.
RMS talks about software which has a fairly low capital cost, and so eople can be motivated by recognition and a love of what they are doing - his arguments are actually pretty reasonable there. For science his arguments wouldn't work so well since, while the motivation is there, you need a lot of money and that tends to come with strings attatched. Maybe for science the current situation is a good as it can get, maybe it isn't, but to dismiss RMS by applying his arguments to soemething he never attempted to apply them to in the first place, and then show how they are wrong isn't a very honest argument.
The power grid may work fairly efficiently at the moment, but that is because (I imagine) there are a number of different generation points spread reasonably evenly across the grid, and so there is no large bulk flow of current long distance across the grid. Put all the generators in one area and all the consumers in another and you'll have much more current flowing long distances, and more heat related losses as a result.
The actual situation would not be quite that extreme as you point out because much of the high power consuming areas are near the costs. If places further away can have their part of the grid bolstered by other sources (solar, wind etc.) meaning less long distance current flow needed to supply them, then the sytem could well be workable. An efficient electricity storage system would be the real bonus for these potentially erratic sources of power.
Parkinson's disease is caused by degeneration of dopamine producing neurones in a certain area of the brain, and there is some evidence that transplanting dopamine producing cells into this area may help to treat the disease. I think the research you mention involved persuading embryonic stem cells to differentiate into dopamine producing cells in the laboratory, which would then allow a much larger supply of dopamine producing cells for transplantation than if they had to be transplanted directly. I don't think there was any question of these cells growing the proper interconnections with other nerve cells after they had been implanted, so they can only have a fairly crude effect on brain function.
It is probably better to think of it as a clever way of delivering a drug (dopamine) directly to the part of the brain it is needed in than as anything like a brain transplant.
We probably don't need to be too worried about a complete extinction, Armageddon like, asteroid - the chances are very small. There have been a significant number of smaller asteroid strikes though. There was one in Northern Siberia in the early 1900's that flattened an area roughly the size of Greater London (2000 square kilometers or so bigger than many cities). There have been 2 or 3 others in the last thousand years or so as well, but I can't remember where. With a greater world population and cities that are more spread out then their is a chance that the next one will get a fair few people. No it's not worth insuring your house against, bu it is more likely than global extinction.
Nope. Having them knocked off the surface of Mars by metorites etc. may indeed heat the rocks up to extreme temperatures and put them under a fair amount of stress. You don't get alterations to radioisotopes from that sort of processs though since that would be a nuclear rather than chemical chagne. Some elements may be boiled off more than others, but this will affect all the radioisotopes of that element equally (well not quite, but the diffierence isn't going to be significant). The tests look at the ratios of various isotopes and so will not be affected by this process either.
A sample return mission is justified for other reasons though. You destroy a lot of other information in the process of ejecting fragments of planet by metor strike!
"Remember all those news reports a couple of months ago about unexpected deaths during gene therapy?"
As far as I remember it that was a problem with the vector used to deliver the gene rather than gene therapy - the genes were put into the cells using an inactivated virus. That worked fine, but then the body's immune system recognised those cells as having been infected with virus and attacked them causing a large amount of inflammation, cell death, and unfortunately patient death too.
There is a serious problem with "hacking on the genome" though. The body is essentially a program with every variable exported - there is little segmentalisation between various functions at the biochemical level. Certain chemicals are used for one thing in one tissue and another entirely different thing in another.
If you code like that then your code crashes! The reason the human body doesn't is it has been so extensively shotgun debugged by natural selection. But... Start playing around too much and you are likely to get in real trouble really easily. Kind of like changing the partition that root is on from hda1 to something else, and then finding that every time a program needed to use a constant of 1 it just used the minor device number of the device mounted as root because it was handy!
And you don't need to be running the most recent version of debian in order to make upgrade smoothly to 2.2 - not by a long way. Out of interest I found an old debian 1.1 (buzz) installation, and had a look to see how the upgrade to 2.2 went. Debian 1.1 is a 1996, libc5 distribution with a 2.0.0 kernel, but the upgrade worked with one piece of manual intervention halfway through, and a single reboot in order to install the new kernel. Not bad, though admittedly probably not very useful for very many people!
As cool as this may be I think they would be better of plowing more money into a replacement for the shuttle, possibly a return to the moon, and the ISS. I know that alot of people consider the ISS a wast of money but with a bit of work it could really achieve something. All three of the above might act as stepping stones to future exploration of the solar system, providing cheaper lifting and bases from which cheaper missions can be launched.
Both the moon and ISS have serious problems as stepping stones. The ISS is in a nice low orbit because otherwise the shuttle wouldn't be able to reach it, but ideally a set off point for solar system travel would be in a much looser orbit so that it would be easier to leave earth's orbit from it. Also it is all very well to say the ISS is useful as a stepping stone, but what would you actually do there? It could be used to assemble huge ships that were too big to be launched from earth, but quality control in an orbiting space station is going to be far worse than on the earth, and if your ship is that large then costs will be prohibitive anyway. It doesn't make a difference that you can leavefrom the ISS with very little fuel because you still need to get up there in the first place.
The moon is generally put forwar as a stepping stone because it is close to us, has a smaller greavity well than earth, and would therefore be easier to launch large ships from, the idea being that these would be constructed on the moon. The only problem is that the moon does not have an atmosphere, so you need almost as much fuel at the far end of your journey to slow down as you do at the start to speed up. Mars on the other hand has an atmosphere, and so you can use aeorbraking (orbit around the outer reaches of the atmosphere and slow yourself down with atmospheric drag). The result is that, sounterintuitively, you actually need less fuel for a trip to Mars than you do for one to the Moon. Granted the trip is longer and windwos for return less frequent which bring out other complications, but as a base for futher solar system exploration the moon is not a good idea.
If you are interested then there is more info on the general ideas of nanotechnology at the foresight institute's web site. In particular Engines of Creation - the book that started the whole thing - is online there, and might be worth a read/skim if you are interested. It is a bit dated though, but it is amusing when he mentions this wonderful new idea called "hypertext".
.
They also have a book that gives more of a "what it means" or "what would it be like" viewpoint here
The announcement in this story is obviously a long way off being what is described in the books, but even if what is described never comes to pass it is still an interesting read.
Ooops sorry:
s/immature/premature/g
the above comment.
Yes. The most obvious difference is that bochs can actually be used on a non-x86 architecture - you can install bochs on a Sparc if you want, and then run windows or something else under it. VMWare and plex86 only work on an x86, but run much faster as they allow some instructions to be executed natively.
Incidentally the headline is perhaps a little immature - plex86 will currently boot up dos 6.22, but anything other than typing "dir" causes it to panic as the necessary instructions aren't yet virtualized. Booting linux it will currently do:
Calibrating delay loop.. ok - 419.43 BogoMIPS
Memory: 13752k/16384k available (396k kernel code, 384k reserved, 412k data)
Swansea University Computer Society NET3.035 for Linux 2.0
NET3: Unix domain sockets 0.13 for Linux NET3.035.
Checking 'hlt' instruction... Ok.
Linux version 2.0.36 (uli@uli) (gcc version 2.7.2.1) #8 Sat Jul 17 23:50:53 MEST
After that it panics, and it is still unoptimized and fairly slow.
I don't think they are. The length of time for a trip to Mars is quite fixed by the positions of the planets orbits relative to each other. With a little bit more fuel (or slightly better propulsion) you can take some time off the transfer journey, but if you throw lots more fuel at the problem you start to get quite seriously diminishing returns. 180 days or so is going to be the optimum transfer time for the forseable future - better propulsion systems are still a good thing, but because they allow you to take more stuff with you not because they shorten the trip. As for your two habitats idea, a variant of it already exists in the more recent mission plans. These tend to use a different vehicle for going to Mars and coming back. The return vehicle is sent out ahead of time, and verified to have landed, and not have any leaks etc. before the astronauts ever leave earth. When they arrive they know they already have this habitat on the planet if their own one is not working, or they can continue to live where they are. If anyone is interested in more I'd reccomend Robert Zubrin's book "The Case for Mars" which addresses quite a few of the points people have brought up here.