Many of the ETX's were offered in both a low end dumb equatorial mount version and a high end AltAz smart goto version I was talking about the cheap equatorials google ETX-90RA or ETX-70RA for an example.
The Orion mini EQ is a nice little mount for use with a camera, as long as you have a solid base to put it on (concrete picnic table, etc). You generally don't want to place it at ground level where someone could kick it. The only bad thing about it is the use is fairly limited to piggy back photography (or something like I bought my for, solar H alpha viewing with a double stacked PST) I have one of their older units with drive motors in my living room right now, I think I paid $35 for it used, at the time I bought it they were selling for around $100 new.
You can get a first generation LX-200 (well generation 1.5, 18V drive and High Precision Pointing, not the flaky original 12V version) for a lot less than that, I paid $850 for a near mint condition 8 inch LX-200 about 5 years ago.
In that budget range, just buy a used commercial drive base from a broken small equatorial telescope like a Meade ETX-70 or ETX-90 that are typically sold in Wal-Mart at Chirstmas time. It is common to find them on ebay cheap with broken optical components. Another option is an old B&L 4000, the optics on most of these were junk, but they had a decent AC powered drive base, and since everyone knows the optics were junk, just ask google, they tend to sell cheap ($100 or so) on ebay.
Probably nothing if you do get enough people to donate money to your "cause". I am not saying this is what this guy did, but this sort of thing is a great way for someone that has no money to support their dream to sail across an ocean. The same scheme works for getting a free 50 state U.S. vacation in an electric car, etc..
It would be like when Sony bought out a major Hollywood studio some years ago, in the end they found out they had paid X billions of dollars for some industrial land in Burbank when all the talent walked off.
Wanting something does not make it the right decision or even possible. The reality of the mater is unless we collapse into a world wide dark age, creation of nuclear weapons (and other weapons of mass destruction) is going to become more and more trivial. 60 to 70 years ago building nuclear weapons was a national effort of great expense by major world powers using custom built ultra high precision machine tools. 30-40 years ago it was could it was a major effort second tier nations (India, Israel, etc) mostly working from the design information of those that came before, using some of the best off the shelf machine tools to manufacture. Today it is mostly an issue of gathering the building blocks, and assembling them with a few minor engineering modifications using black market copies of cold war era bomb plans using CNC machine tools that are found in many of the better equipped small machine shops. If this trend continues, in another 20, 30, or even 40 or 50 years, building a nuclear weapon will be within the range of any reasonably wealthy small group of individuals with the required basic skills and access to raw materials. (We have already seen laser systems made from scrap laser printer parts that can zap misquitos out of the air, how long before someone comes up with a way to to gassious isotope separation the same way)
Probably much less than that, most oil wells either on shore or off shore are at unmanned sites, that just get very occasional maintenance visits. The biggest cost will be for electricity to run the pumps.
You do have a point here, still we are talking a decade or more of practice, however I think a better distinction than a specific depth, should be the technique used in drilling, for example if the rig is of a traditional type with legs planted into the sea floor, or if it is a free floating platform using either anchors or dynamic positioning to remain on target with a floating style drill table.
I am from Louisiana, and I say fine, but first remove all those Federal imposed limits on how much the state can tax the oil industry and the oil leaving the state, so we can pay for all damage this will do to the local economy for decades to come.
Keep in mind this is the first major off shore drilling accident in almost 20 years, how many other industries can claim as good of record. This was just a particularly bad one.
Ok, I am blowing my moderator points for this, but there are just too many people here with no idea of what they are talking about. And for the record, I do live in Louisiana, and I know people that make their livings off the oil industry, and I know people that make their living off the seafood industry, etc.
Thing 1, A deep water drilling rig (note DRILLING RIG, not oil well) costs around 500,000 per day to lease, and about that much again to operate, that operational budget goes to pay the hundreds of skilled workers on board, plus the other hundreds or thousands that are involved in supporting the rig, both on shore and off shore. Multiply this by 31 and you will see how the trickle down of a shutdown will hurt the local economy. This is something that will take years if not decades to recover from.
Thing 2, Production oil Wells and drilling rigs are not the same thing, Drilling rigs are the factories that make production oil wells (at a typical rate of 2-4 per month). Off shore there may be dozens of production wells that funnel all their oil to one production platform, which then connects to a pipeline to bring that oil to shore. The majority of these production platforms are unmanned 90+% of the time. These production wells may produce oil for many years, but do run out sooner or later.
Thing 3, As has already been mentioned, once these rigs move away they will not be back in 6 months, not in 1 year, or even 2, or 3. I don't know where you live, but think of what it would be like if one day the President of the U.S. decides to kill your main local industry, without consulting experts, without due process, just because it plays good on TV?
Wow great use of adding "on the internet" to a concept (buying a weapon) that has probably been around as long as their has been money. Also do you really consider this more dangerous than any modern handgun or rifle? This is just proof that the whole concept of licensing firearms if faulty. If you want to cause injury and blindness to a random crowd of people there are easier, cheaper and lower tech methods, just get a $25 super soaker and a $5 gallon jug of 20 baume (32%) muriatic (Hydrochloric) acid at any hardware store.
The point is not google maps, it is google street view, and satellite view to spot nice houses located in secluded areas and nice neighborhoods, as well as escape routes avoiding the major roads, etc. Do your scouting from home rather than take the chance of being spotted looking out of place in the gated community like areas. Think of the potential as the resolution on these technologies gets higher, is there a dog at the house, how tall is the fence in the back yard, exactly where is the nearest road, etc.
The sad thing is in this economy for many people that are living paycheck to paycheck the choice is buy the cheap printer where they screw you on ink refills, or don't have a printer. As these people are often incapable of saving up for the good stuff.
I too live in an older house, built over a century ago that has these sorts of insulation problems. I have considered upgrading the insulation, there is just this little matter called MONEY. Upgrading to the point where it would save an estimated average of $50 per month would cost $15,000. Lets do a little math here, that is 300 months, or 25 years to pay back, much more than that if it involves loan payments.
Throughout the history of the world seas have dried up. Watch any nature documentary, particularly the ones touching on geology and you can't seem to go 5 minutes without someone saying something about some place being a dried up seabed.
This is part of the problem of continuing to lower the bar on the definition of rape. Keep this trend up then in another 20 or 30 years less than perfectly fulfilling sex will be considered rape.
If I download and watch last nights / last weeks episode of the must see HBO miniseries of the moment, should it be piracy if I am an HBO subscriber?
How about watching the new Dr. Who before it is shown in the US, even though I do get BBC America?
Or that one scene from the opening of some 1980's sitcom?
Now here is another one, how is it different to watch the streaming version of hit show of the moment on Hulu brought to you with no commercial interruptions vs. downloading the torrent of the same show and watching it when I don't have a broadband connection?
As I see it this is all about control, you will watch the show how and when the media companies want you to, and while some are making attempts to change, this world is so alien to them that don't understand the problems with their "on demand" options. For example what good does it do to post the old episodes of your show online with a 2 week delay, people can never get caught up if they miss an episode. Alternatively posting a streaming version of last weeks episode only will only allow for current followers of the show to see what they missed, worse yet much of the time rerun episodes count as "last weeks" episode.
It is time for a change in the way programming is made and paid for, for network shows, realize commercial breaks as we know them will not work, let everyone share the content, but produce it in a way so that the "pirates" will want to include the advertisements. Perhaps product placement has its place here, have the actor drink a "coke" instead of generic "drink", maybe have sneak peak, behind the scenes trivia scrollers below the commercials. Just do something other than trying to hold back the flood as your head is going under water.
Although not officially diagnosed (I don't see the point of spending a lot of money being diagnosed given the lack of effective treatment), I too show all the symptoms of DSPD, and feel there is likely a genetic component to this problem as my father suffers from what appears to be ASPD, and my son (now in his 20's) also shows many signs of a sleep phase disorder (he has done sleep studies, etc, but as yet with no official detailed results, other than acknowledgement of a problem). I have been lucky enough to find others who share my sleep patterns if not my exact condition, and have also found ways to cope with my problem while holding down a somewhat regular job. I sometimes wonder if the internet could possibly bring all of us night dwellers together so we could form our own physical community, one where businesses are open to fit our sleep cycles, one where doctors, dentist, etc. don't demand one shows up for appointments 5 hours before our natural waking times, one where as a parent we don't have to deal with notes from schools about how our children are having problems in classes that occur during the middle of their natural sleep cycle, etc. Can you imagine it, going to a restaurant while they are serving breakfast and not be half asleep, going to the grocery store and having more than one lane open, aisles not blocked by restockers and boxes, much more importantly other people there that don't look like zombies.
Slashdot Mirror
Many of the ETX's were offered in both a low end dumb equatorial mount version and a high end AltAz smart goto version I was talking about the cheap equatorials google ETX-90RA or ETX-70RA for an example.
The Orion mini EQ is a nice little mount for use with a camera, as long as you have a solid base to put it on (concrete picnic table, etc). You generally don't want to place it at ground level where someone could kick it. The only bad thing about it is the use is fairly limited to piggy back photography (or something like I bought my for, solar H alpha viewing with a double stacked PST) I have one of their older units with drive motors in my living room right now, I think I paid $35 for it used, at the time I bought it they were selling for around $100 new.
You can get a first generation LX-200 (well generation 1.5, 18V drive and High Precision Pointing, not the flaky original 12V version) for a lot less than that, I paid $850 for a near mint condition 8 inch LX-200 about 5 years ago.
In that budget range, just buy a used commercial drive base from a broken small equatorial telescope like a Meade ETX-70 or ETX-90 that are typically sold in Wal-Mart at Chirstmas time. It is common to find them on ebay cheap with broken optical components. Another option is an old B&L 4000, the optics on most of these were junk, but they had a decent AC powered drive base, and since everyone knows the optics were junk, just ask google, they tend to sell cheap ($100 or so) on ebay.
Ike
I suspect what they are saying is they need someone to collect those reference samples from certain 3rd world nuclear research programs.
Probably nothing if you do get enough people to donate money to your "cause". I am not saying this is what this guy did, but this sort of thing is a great way for someone that has no money to support their dream to sail across an ocean. The same scheme works for getting a free 50 state U.S. vacation in an electric car, etc..
It would be like when Sony bought out a major Hollywood studio some years ago, in the end they found out they had paid X billions of dollars for some industrial land in Burbank when all the talent walked off.
Wanting something does not make it the right decision or even possible. The reality of the mater is unless we collapse into a world wide dark age, creation of nuclear weapons (and other weapons of mass destruction) is going to become more and more trivial. 60 to 70 years ago building nuclear weapons was a national effort of great expense by major world powers using custom built ultra high precision machine tools. 30-40 years ago it was could it was a major effort second tier nations (India, Israel, etc) mostly working from the design information of those that came before, using some of the best off the shelf machine tools to manufacture. Today it is mostly an issue of gathering the building blocks, and assembling them with a few minor engineering modifications using black market copies of cold war era bomb plans using CNC machine tools that are found in many of the better equipped small machine shops. If this trend continues, in another 20, 30, or even 40 or 50 years, building a nuclear weapon will be within the range of any reasonably wealthy small group of individuals with the required basic skills and access to raw materials. (We have already seen laser systems made from scrap laser printer parts that can zap misquitos out of the air, how long before someone comes up with a way to to gassious isotope separation the same way)
Yeah, but you must admit Iraq does make a great staging area to invade Iran.
The better question is where does Germany want to draw its eastern border?
Probably much less than that, most oil wells either on shore or off shore are at unmanned sites, that just get very occasional maintenance visits. The biggest cost will be for electricity to run the pumps.
You do have a point here, still we are talking a decade or more of practice, however I think a better distinction than a specific depth, should be the technique used in drilling, for example if the rig is of a traditional type with legs planted into the sea floor, or if it is a free floating platform using either anchors or dynamic positioning to remain on target with a floating style drill table.
Ike
I am from Louisiana, and I say fine, but first remove all those Federal imposed limits on how much the state can tax the oil industry and the oil leaving the state, so we can pay for all damage this will do to the local economy for decades to come.
Keep in mind this is the first major off shore drilling accident in almost 20 years, how many other industries can claim as good of record. This was just a particularly bad one.
Ok, I am blowing my moderator points for this, but there are just too many people here with no idea of what they are talking about. And for the record, I do live in Louisiana, and I know people that make their livings off the oil industry, and I know people that make their living off the seafood industry, etc.
Thing 1, A deep water drilling rig (note DRILLING RIG, not oil well) costs around 500,000 per day to lease, and about that much again to operate, that operational budget goes to pay the hundreds of skilled workers on board, plus the other hundreds or thousands that are involved in supporting the rig, both on shore and off shore. Multiply this by 31 and you will see how the trickle down of a shutdown will hurt the local economy. This is something that will take years if not decades to recover from.
Thing 2, Production oil Wells and drilling rigs are not the same thing, Drilling rigs are the factories that make production oil wells (at a typical rate of 2-4 per month). Off shore there may be dozens of production wells that funnel all their oil to one production platform, which then connects to a pipeline to bring that oil to shore. The majority of these production platforms are unmanned 90+% of the time. These production wells may produce oil for many years, but do run out sooner or later.
Thing 3, As has already been mentioned, once these rigs move away they will not be back in 6 months, not in 1 year, or even 2, or 3. I don't know where you live, but think of what it would be like if one day the President of the U.S. decides to kill your main local industry, without consulting experts, without due process, just because it plays good on TV?
Have you looked inside a modern mass produced desktop lately, there is not much in there, almost everything is on the motherboard?
accessible parts
desktop---vs---notebook
cpu------------cpu (maybe)
hard drive-----hard drive
optical drive--optical drive (maybe)
memory---------memory
power supply---power brick
screen---------screen (getting better)
keyboard-------keyboard (usually easy)
video card ??--video card (probably not)
Wow great use of adding "on the internet" to a concept (buying a weapon) that has probably been around as long as their has been money. Also do you really consider this more dangerous than any modern handgun or rifle? This is just proof that the whole concept of licensing firearms if faulty. If you want to cause injury and blindness to a random crowd of people there are easier, cheaper and lower tech methods, just get a $25 super soaker and a $5 gallon jug of 20 baume (32%) muriatic (Hydrochloric) acid at any hardware store.
The point is not google maps, it is google street view, and satellite view to spot nice houses located in secluded areas and nice neighborhoods, as well as escape routes avoiding the major roads, etc. Do your scouting from home rather than take the chance of being spotted looking out of place in the gated community like areas. Think of the potential as the resolution on these technologies gets higher, is there a dog at the house, how tall is the fence in the back yard, exactly where is the nearest road, etc.
The sad thing is in this economy for many people that are living paycheck to paycheck the choice is buy the cheap printer where they screw you on ink refills, or don't have a printer. As these people are often incapable of saving up for the good stuff.
Lets see, maybe when they recount the story of the pilgrims and the first thanksgiving while completely removing christianity from the story.
This is a bit like teaching sex ed without talking about where babies come from.
I wish we could agree both sides do crazy things, its just the pendulum swinging back and forth.
I too live in an older house, built over a century ago that has these sorts of insulation problems. I have considered upgrading the insulation, there is just this little matter called MONEY. Upgrading to the point where it would save an estimated average of $50 per month would cost $15,000. Lets do a little math here, that is 300 months, or 25 years to pay back, much more than that if it involves loan payments.
Throughout the history of the world seas have dried up. Watch any nature documentary, particularly the ones touching on geology and you can't seem to go 5 minutes without someone saying something about some place being a dried up seabed.
This is part of the problem of continuing to lower the bar on the definition of rape. Keep this trend up then in another 20 or 30 years less than perfectly fulfilling sex will be considered rape.
If I download and watch last nights / last weeks episode of the must see HBO miniseries of the moment, should it be piracy if I am an HBO subscriber?
How about watching the new Dr. Who before it is shown in the US, even though I do get BBC America?
Or that one scene from the opening of some 1980's sitcom?
Now here is another one, how is it different to watch the streaming version of hit show of the moment on Hulu brought to you with no commercial interruptions vs. downloading the torrent of the same show and watching it when I don't have a broadband connection?
As I see it this is all about control, you will watch the show how and when the media companies want you to, and while some are making attempts to change, this world is so alien to them that don't understand the problems with their "on demand" options. For example what good does it do to post the old episodes of your show online with a 2 week delay, people can never get caught up if they miss an episode. Alternatively posting a streaming version of last weeks episode only will only allow for current followers of the show to see what they missed, worse yet much of the time rerun episodes count as "last weeks" episode.
It is time for a change in the way programming is made and paid for, for network shows, realize commercial breaks as we know them will not work, let everyone share the content, but produce it in a way so that the "pirates" will want to include the advertisements. Perhaps product placement has its place here, have the actor drink a "coke" instead of generic "drink", maybe have sneak peak, behind the scenes trivia scrollers below the commercials. Just do something other than trying to hold back the flood as your head is going under water.
Although not officially diagnosed (I don't see the point of spending a lot of money being diagnosed given the lack of effective treatment), I too show all the symptoms of DSPD, and feel there is likely a genetic component to this problem as my father suffers from what appears to be ASPD, and my son (now in his 20's) also shows many signs of a sleep phase disorder (he has done sleep studies, etc, but as yet with no official detailed results, other than acknowledgement of a problem). I have been lucky enough to find others who share my sleep patterns if not my exact condition, and have also found ways to cope with my problem while holding down a somewhat regular job. I sometimes wonder if the internet could possibly bring all of us night dwellers together so we could form our own physical community, one where businesses are open to fit our sleep cycles, one where doctors, dentist, etc. don't demand one shows up for appointments 5 hours before our natural waking times, one where as a parent we don't have to deal with notes from schools about how our children are having problems in classes that occur during the middle of their natural sleep cycle, etc. Can you imagine it, going to a restaurant while they are serving breakfast and not be half asleep, going to the grocery store and having more than one lane open, aisles not blocked by restockers and boxes, much more importantly other people there that don't look like zombies.