As opposed to the left forcing a socialist "health" law down our throats?
If only it actually were a socialist law. The big problem with the bill in question is that it's pretty much the exact same, essentially fascist, law originally proposed by the Republicans. If it were actually socialist it wouldn't shy away from the concept of a public option.
Other threads have mentioned that this has already been debunked and that this is actually a movie prop. So, does that make everyone in Hollywood who has ever had anything to do with building a fake boat insane?
Isn't Backblaze paying somebody else to backup your data in The Cloud
I was just talking about Backblaze storage pods. They built themselves a relatively cheap storage solution and released the information to build your own.
You lose a lot of inflection and verbal cues in the transcription, though. When we're talking national security and a giant budget, why skimp?
True, but you can still do something like keep 5% (prioritized through data mining) of phonecalls online as full audio in a hard drive solution and put the other 95% on tape, and use the transcript as a sort of index to the whole thing.
I don't think I did either...by my math I just implied that the data had to be available sometime the same day (or within 24 hours, I guess) to get the bandwidth figure. Of course, the longer it takes to be available, the less valuable the system is for dealing with threats happening Right Now.
Tape solutions typically have the data available in a matter of a few hours. In theory, you can get data out of a tape library as fast as the autoloader can load the tape and the drive can scan forward to the right part of the tape.
In any case, dealing with threats happening Right Now is usually a ridiculous super hero/spy thriller fantasy. If there's an urgent, sudden situation that pops up out of nowhere like that and you're a spy agency like the NSA, you're just going to miss it. In real life, if a terrorist sleeper cell one day wires up a bus so that it will blow up if it goes over 55 MPH, and you need to track them down in half an hour to take the detonator from them... Well, aside from the fact that it's not going to happen, you're not going to be able to find the data and piece things together on time unless you'd already done it a month ago. Despite thisThe kind of child-men who seem to run these agencies obviously have adolescent power fantasies about being able to deal with such a situation. That's why they build places like the Information Dominance Center
The backblaze solution is a hard drive solution. The tape solution was the $15,000 per Petabyte solution, the backblaze solution is a hard drive solution costing $150,000 per Petabyte, and the EMC solution is a hard drive solution costing 20 times as much. So, using the backblaze solution brings the cost up to about 8.5 billion a year. Still within the theoretical budget of the NSA. Not to mention that, as I and others have pointed out, speech recognition really is good enough these days that many conversations could be kept immediately available as a text transcript, possibly with short audio snippits of bits the speech recognition had trouble with and the actual full audio could be saved to tape.
Also, I don't think anyone on this thread except you imposed the restraint that the solution had to be immediately available online rather than after a brief delay.
He doesn't really have a point since the discussion was about mining the asteroid belt. Asteroids have gravity. They're also stable locations to build centrifugal processing equipment if you need higher g-forces and have problems getting some sort of free-fall tethered arrangement to work.
Yes, but the very next part of my sentence after you cut it off was "(a la backblaze)". The NSA, having a secret budget may very well be able to get away with rolling its own cheap solution where typical government agencies have to take bids from contractors then ignore the bids and go with the most politcally connected bidder (then pay three times the bid amount)/
Phone conversations are, from the perspective of the actual callers, in-channel two way communication. If A is talking on the phone to B for ten minutes, then the total phone time for both is twenty minutes, but the actual length of the single phone call is only ten minutes. So, if everyone in the world spends 10% of their time on the phone every day you actually divide that by 2.
Of course, you've already given a very generous compression rate. It's possible that, with good voice recognition, you can turn large parts of that into pure text transcripts, just saving the bits of the conversation that the recognition software isn't confident about, but we'll ignore that. So, we'll just say that your 3,520 petabytes is about right for a month.
A petabyte of storage is going to run you anywhere from about $15,000 for tape to $150,000 for a cheap hard drive solution (a la backblaze) to about $3 million for a solution from EMC. So, we're talking from around $53 million per month to $530 million per month to $11 billion per month.
The cost for the bandwidth would be harder to figure out. Let's say $.05 per gigabyte, although it's quite likely that the NSA can get it a lot cheaper by basically just forcing the telecoms to give it to them and passing the costs on to us as hidden taxes. In any case, the final costs would be something like $4 billion to $132 billion per year with the majority of it being bandwidth costs if the storage is done on the cheap. The budget of the NSA is classified, but is estimated at something like $10 billion per year.
So, the conclusion is that storing the phone communications of everyone in the entire world is entirely doable by the NSA.
I'm pretty sure the Space Nutter troll is some sort of ex sci-fi fan who got seriously burned when the childhood fantasies didn't come true in a few decades. Now they're attacking anyone interested in space with the zealotry of a convert and projecting like crazy.
He's calling it "The Government" for the same reason prosecutors bring their cases in the name of "The People" or he himself talks about the opinion of "The Court". That's just the convention.
When it comes to GMO's and fracking, environmentalists like yourself are the ones denying science. Both have been proven to be safe
Safe in what respect? Fracking uses dangerous chemicals which are ending up in ground and surface water. Groundwater is ending full of dissolved methane, propane and ethane, which is dangerous even when it doesn't catch fire or explode. A significant amount of released gases are ending up in the atmosphere. Then there are byproducts of flaring, which is done on a vast scale. At the moment, "safe" is an odd thing to call fracking.
not that this has actually stopped people from Rule 34'ing every Disney Princess in a multitude of ways
"Disney" characters like Snow White, or Sleeping Beauty, or the Little Mermaid? You mean all of those public domain characters? Sure, Disney created their own versions of them. Then used the existence of their versions to pretty much lay claim over those characters entirely.
The cabin is "pressurized" in the sense that they have 1 ATM of pressure inside it and the pressure inside the cabin won't change even if they go to 40,000 ft
Close. It's more like.75 to.85 ATM depending on the plane and leaning towards.75.
A hero, in my view, isn't somebody who runs away from a fight they don't think they can win....
Sure. Also, true heros don't wear protective gear. All those "heroic" firemen who have run into burning buildings? Did they run in naked without respirators? Well, obviously not heroes then. In fact, if they didn't go in and stand in the fire heroically until the fire burned out, then they're obviously not heroes.
This is exactly like an employer providing employees with a computer for work.
This is where so many people seem to be going wrong here. The computers aren't really property of the CIA itself, they're property of the US government and, through the government, the people of the USA . They don't technically belong to congress either, but if you're going to make an employer/employee comparison, you've got the relationship backwards. The President may be the head of the executive branch, but Congress still holds the pursestrings. This is actually a case of an employer (congress) providing computers to an employee (the CIA) and the employee breaking the rules. Basically, if you're siding with the CIA here, then you should also logically have sided with Terry Childs when he was refusing to hand over control of the network he maintained to his supervisors. The difference being that Terry Childs actually had some legitimate reasons in their security policy to initially withhold the passwords from his supervisors. The CIA had no such justification in this case.
I know what I meant. Apparently I didn't do as good a job of explaining it as I thought I did.
I know what you meant as well. You meant: " I think you're Mars mission relies on Handwavium to convert chemical transformation formulas into actual non-laboratory processes." It's pretty clear. It clearly does _not_ mean: "you won't be able to get the water".
Electrolysis systems for 6 people on the ISS are going to be radically different in scale than those for a bunch of colonists.
That's the key word: scale.
Uh, yeah. No kidding? You mean you can't use the same resources you would for 6 people to maintain 12, or 24, or 48? Well gee, shucks, you've really shown me the error of my thinking there!
Seriously, what are you thinking? If anything, the efficiency and redundancy of these systems is going to go up with scale, if anything. At worst, you still only have to scale the amount of support equipment linearly with the number of people you intend to support. How is "scale", some sort of smoking gun?
Now, you claim that I must have thought that, by handwavium, I thought you meant something like "chemistry will be different on Mars". I didn't, and I thought that should have been obvious, but then you go and write things like:
The equipment (and spare parts, and maintenance, and assembly and repair, etc) needed to do all that stuff will be much more complicated on Mars than you think.
When it's already clear that we're talking about equipment that already exists and is already in use terrestrially and in space. Which seems to suggest that maybe you really do believe that chemistry is somehow different on Mars.
On Earth, we can send out some geologists or a surveying crew, rent or buy heavy machinery, parts, drilling mud, explosives, etc of a variety of forms from a jillion different sources.
Sometimes. Other times we have to plan things out very carefully or there's no chance of salvaging the endeavor and thousands of tons of expensive equipment gets left behind to become a playground for penguins. Other times, things go wrong enough that everyone dies. Even here on Earth.
OTOH, every bit of every kind of stuff needed on Mars will have to be sent at the beginning (whether on one ship or multiple doesn't matter), and that will drive up the cost of the expedition to absurd heights.
Yes, plenty of stuff will need to be sent at the beginning. That's no surprise. I'm pretty sure I've said as much myself elsewhere on this thread. If you're really trying to bootstrap a viable colony on Mars, you spend extra to send both the supplies the astronauts will need to survive without in situ resources and you also send the equipment they can use to try to live without using those supplies. Since the technologies are pretty proven by now, however, it's pretty clear that you can recycle every drop of water at least a few times. So you can get by with about a ton of consumable supplies per astronaut per year (which includes the water, food and oxygen that they need to consume). Right now, the Falcon heavy looks like it can realistically get a kg to Mars for around $11,000. We'll triple that and say 33,000 per kg. So that's $33 million per year, per astronaut of consumable living supplies. A lot of money, to be sure. Relatively speaking, however it's not that bad viewed in the context of a manned mission to another planet.
To be a crime it needs to be, you know, a crime--assault, harassment, theft of assets, etc.
It's a good thing for your argument that wiretapping isn't a crime, then. The fact is, without the law allowing it, arrest is kidnapping (and usually assault), taking people's property is theft, and some kind of searches are basically sexual assaults. When any of those things are done outside the defined areas that allow authorities to do them, they should fall back to their default position of crimes. It's frankly deplorable that anyone could engage in practices like beating people with clubs, choking them, applying electic shocks to them, etc. without a legal cause, but with the only option of the victims being a civil suit, but it happens all the time.
Faster spin speeds are needed for faster random access on spinning media. If you want to be able to write to them faster, is it better to do a whole lot more engineering on both the drive and the discs to make them spin 10% faster, or to just find a way to squeeze in another write head?
National Pride and bureaucratic inertia are two factors which can keep some big project going well past it's Sell By date.
Except of course that British Airways was a private operation for more than 2/3rds of the life of the Concorde, and they flew it at a profit.
Why did Boeing cancel it's 2027 project? Why have there been no other SSTs (either European or American) since then?
Because they aren't economical.
More because people who are worried that they might not be economical and the companies behind this sort of development are risk averse (when they aren't on a government contract, anyway).
Anyway, why are we even discussing the blasted Concord? Can we just stop. It's a real thing, it operated for nearly three decades. You think it somehow proves something, I don't agree. We won't see eye to eye but who cares because the remaining Concordes are museum pieces now. I'd rather discuss the topic at hand.
This is the Handwavium:
you can just dig under the dirt a little and hit a layer of pure water ice
But what you wrote was:
This is the crux of the disagreement between us. You say it's hard but doable, whereas I think you're Mars mission relies on Handwavium to convert chemical transformation formulas into actual non-laboratory processes.
How is the availability of water on Mars therefore the handwavium? That's not what you meant when you wrote that and you know it. I'm going to have to assume that your information about extant efficient electrolysis systems was very out of date, but you finally looked it up and now you're trying to claim you were talking about water in that last sentence. It doesn't even make any sense for water to be what you were talking about.
A few shovel digs and up comes potable water?
You can't just keep misrepresenting what I'm saying. I didn't say shovel digs, although there are certainly places where you could reach the ice with a shovel, or maybe just a broom to sweep off some of the soil. The use of powered equipment would only make sense, even if only to haul it. I'm also not saying that you could just do it anywhere. Clearly you have to choose your location so that you have access to a usable source of water if you want it to be this easy. I'm also not saying "up comes potable water" which implies that the water will be liquid and have nothing dissolved in it.
What I'm saying is that we've already found spots, within range of areas that are suitable for a base, that have, at the very least, millions of kilograms of concentrated water ice. We've been able to identify these spots specifically because the ground over the ice in these spots is thin. That means it can be dug up, cut it into blocks, thrown into the back of a truck and driven back to the base. Then it can be melted, purified as needed (using the consumable supplies I mentioned way, way back) and used to make oxygen, as raw material for fuel-making or concrete or other chemical processes or just used for drinking, re-hydrating food, growing food, brushing teeth, etc.
There just isn't that much mystery about how you would do it. We're still not as sure about all the ideal sites for it, but we know some already (and remember, this is only if you want to do it the really easy way, there's water in plenty of other places too, it's just not in the form of almost pure ice. The exact equipment and techniques you would use are still up for debate and experiment as well. Traditional ice cutting techniques probably wouldn't be up to snuff because the ice could be so cold it's as hard as rock or even steel. On the other hand, you can melt a cut through the ice pretty trivially with some sort of hot wire or heated blade. Or it might be more efficient to just blow it into fragments with explosives. Heck, for a Mars mission, a laser cutter might not actually be far fetched. Or maybe it would t
Believe me, I'm as thrilled as anyone that we now have an interplanetary giant robot vaporizing an alien landscape with lasers! That fact is though, unless you have a plan for large, near autonomous swarms of exploratory robots, a decent sized human exploration mission has the potential to get more bang for the buck. A human, even stuck in a space suit, is just so much better at going out to a site, then excavating, bagging and tagging, then analyzing a bunch of samples than any existing robot. It doesn't even seem to matter that we're technically reliant on machines of one kind or another for pretty much every stage of the process, we're still better at it for the moment.
I'll disagree until you show me some evidence. Presumably you think the same way.
The evidence is that the Concorde put in nearly three decades of service. Things that are impractical to the point of impossibility aren't kept in service that long. That's actually a decently ripe old age for an international passenger jet. During that lifetime, people wanted to fly on it, paid their money and flew on it. It successfully filled the niche it lived in.
You agree with me, but seem to be fighting anyway.
We obviously have a different definition of what a beancounter is. I go by the fairly standard definition of a penny pinching accountant who is incapable of grasping the big picture. For example someone who eleminates a bunch of neccessary $20/hr jobs and compensates by dumping the duties of those jobs onto $80 an hour employees. Or someone who eliminates a less-profitable division because their definition of profit doesn't discern between less-profitable and unprofitable.
Go back and read my original post on cost:
I obviously read it since I quoted it in my last post. You provided the Concorde of something that was "sooo expensive that the problem isn't worth solving" and were basically implying that a working supersonic passenger is basically an impossibility. The history of the Concord seems to prove otherwise.
Also, I realize now that I should have pointed out that, for the Concorde itself, what really killed it was old age. The other things I mentioned were contributing factors. They were more central to the death of the supersonic passenger plane in general than the Concorde specifically.
See, we agree!!
Not really.
OTOH, technology marches on.
Now that Pratt & Whitney has developed a supercruise engine for the F-22, if Boeing demonstrates that the 787's carbon fiber body is durable, then combining those technologies with NASA's boom reduction research the concept of supersonic passenger aircraft could be brought out of mothballs (especially for long Asian and Pacific routes).
Interesting. I have my doubts about the carbon fiber body being able to withstand the heating/cooling cycles of supersonic flight, but it certainly is possible that supersonic passenger flight could re-emerge.
Anyway, you never did answer my question of what handwavium is required to make electrolysis work as an oxygen generation mechanism. It can't be the technique itself, it's known to work and there are commercially available units. The water can't be the obstacle, since we now know of numerous spots on Mars where you can just dig under the dirt a little and hit a layer of pure water ice. So what part requires the handwavium?
It's the getting the Martian water which I think is much more difficult than you do.
There are plenty of deposits of water ice all over Mars. If you want pure water ice you might need to truck it from the poles but, otherwise, you can get water from the ground from locations all over the planet. Well, in order to get enough water to make oxygen for one astronaut for one year, you need 366 kilograms of water. For them to drink and possibly rehydrate freeze-dried food for an entire year with no water recycling, you need about 1464 kilograms of water. So, for a whole year (ignoring things like washing water, etc. which you can continuously recycle even if you aren't recycling drinking water), a single astronaut needs maybe 1830 kgs of water to live. which is about how much water you can get out of an average 13 cubic meters of Martian soil. Unless you're in a poorly chosen area, that's not going to be very hard to obtain. That's not going to be a year's worth of work to obtain. Anywhere from a day to maybe a month at worst depending on what equipment you're using and how well chosen your source is.
That's not my recollection.
Then your recollection is incorrect. The Concorde had trouble recouping development and safety testing costs, to be sure. If you try amortizing those costs over only twenty units, you're obviously going to struggle. The operating costs themselves, are all we need to consider here, and they were modest for what the Concorde actually was. A more modern big passenger jet gets about three times the fuel economy per passenger, tops and other costs are comparable. That's not really "sooo expensive". It's first class prices, sure, but it's not astonomical. If we'd continued with supersonic passenger jet design, the fuel consumption per passenger would have gone down just like it did for the jumbo jets. It certainly would have always required more fuel per passenger, but not that much more. The Concorde was basically killed by beancounting and politics. It wasn't some impossible thing.
Silly fly-over hayseeds not wanting their windows rattling multiple times per day!
The concerns about sonic booms were greatly magnified by military tests producing much more powerful sonic booms. It led to lots of politically motivated rules about where the Concorde could fly or even land, completely ignoring the fact that the Concorde could also fly at subsonic speed and, in fact, had to for takeoff and landing.
It suggests that your examples were of good, proper attitudes.
Anyway, that misunderstanding aside, I have to agree with you that we shouldn't be pulled in the direction of every new idea "just because". But the crank Electric Universe theory is not the same thing as the drive for exploration. Among other details, the drive for exploration is not new. It's ancient. If we didn't have it, chances are pretty good we would have gone extinct ages ago. It drives us to develop new technologies and new science and just generally try new things. I've seen you argue that we don't have the technology to do various things a Mars colony would require, with the implication that we shouldn't try for a Mars colony because we don't have those things. But why would we even develop those things if we weren't going to colonize another world? Necessity being the mother of invention and all that.
You wondered why I thought of your attitude as nihilistic. It's because your answer to the general question of "if not now, when" seems to be "never!". To me, that just seems like a total surrender.
It's really hard to read what you wrote there without coming to the conclusion that you're arguing that racism is a good thing. Or, at least that racism is a good default position and you should only switch with extraordinary proof that it's bad. I don't think I like that.
I don't understand that response.
I was saying that "Because it's there" is not a Very Nonsensical Reason. At least, if it's not a good reason, then most of the motivations for all the great things the human race has accomplished are also not good reasons.
I'm curious, which part of electrolysis requires handwavium? That's how the oxygen is generated on the ISS. All that's required is water, and Mars has water. The fact that it takes some effort to extract it doesn't make doing it somehow impossible. To my mind, that's the crux of the disagreement between us, you believe that things that are difficult shouldn't and possibly can't be done.
(This is similar to -- but on a much larger scale than -- why we don't have supersonic passenger aircraft: some problems' only solutions are sooo expensive that the problem isn't worth solving.)
Except that the Concorde wasn't that expensive compared to a regular passenger jet. It was killed by noise concerns and irrational safety concerns and the fallout from the events of September 11th 2001.
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As opposed to the left forcing a socialist "health" law down our throats?
If only it actually were a socialist law. The big problem with the bill in question is that it's pretty much the exact same, essentially fascist, law originally proposed by the Republicans. If it were actually socialist it wouldn't shy away from the concept of a public option.
Seconded. I'd mod you up if I didn't already comment.
Which makes one wonder why you're posting AC here.
Other threads have mentioned that this has already been debunked and that this is actually a movie prop. So, does that make everyone in Hollywood who has ever had anything to do with building a fake boat insane?
Isn't Backblaze paying somebody else to backup your data in The Cloud
I was just talking about Backblaze storage pods. They built themselves a relatively cheap storage solution and released the information to build your own.
You lose a lot of inflection and verbal cues in the transcription, though. When we're talking national security and a giant budget, why skimp?
True, but you can still do something like keep 5% (prioritized through data mining) of phonecalls online as full audio in a hard drive solution and put the other 95% on tape, and use the transcript as a sort of index to the whole thing.
I don't think I did either...by my math I just implied that the data had to be available sometime the same day (or within 24 hours, I guess) to get the bandwidth figure. Of course, the longer it takes to be available, the less valuable the system is for dealing with threats happening Right Now.
Tape solutions typically have the data available in a matter of a few hours. In theory, you can get data out of a tape library as fast as the autoloader can load the tape and the drive can scan forward to the right part of the tape.
In any case, dealing with threats happening Right Now is usually a ridiculous super hero/spy thriller fantasy. If there's an urgent, sudden situation that pops up out of nowhere like that and you're a spy agency like the NSA, you're just going to miss it. In real life, if a terrorist sleeper cell one day wires up a bus so that it will blow up if it goes over 55 MPH, and you need to track them down in half an hour to take the detonator from them... Well, aside from the fact that it's not going to happen, you're not going to be able to find the data and piece things together on time unless you'd already done it a month ago. Despite thisThe kind of child-men who seem to run these agencies obviously have adolescent power fantasies about being able to deal with such a situation. That's why they build places like the Information Dominance Center
The backblaze solution is a hard drive solution. The tape solution was the $15,000 per Petabyte solution, the backblaze solution is a hard drive solution costing $150,000 per Petabyte, and the EMC solution is a hard drive solution costing 20 times as much. So, using the backblaze solution brings the cost up to about 8.5 billion a year. Still within the theoretical budget of the NSA. Not to mention that, as I and others have pointed out, speech recognition really is good enough these days that many conversations could be kept immediately available as a text transcript, possibly with short audio snippits of bits the speech recognition had trouble with and the actual full audio could be saved to tape.
Also, I don't think anyone on this thread except you imposed the restraint that the solution had to be immediately available online rather than after a brief delay.
He doesn't really have a point since the discussion was about mining the asteroid belt. Asteroids have gravity. They're also stable locations to build centrifugal processing equipment if you need higher g-forces and have problems getting some sort of free-fall tethered arrangement to work.
Yes, but the very next part of my sentence after you cut it off was "(a la backblaze)". The NSA, having a secret budget may very well be able to get away with rolling its own cheap solution where typical government agencies have to take bids from contractors then ignore the bids and go with the most politcally connected bidder (then pay three times the bid amount)/
Phone conversations are, from the perspective of the actual callers, in-channel two way communication. If A is talking on the phone to B for ten minutes, then the total phone time for both is twenty minutes, but the actual length of the single phone call is only ten minutes. So, if everyone in the world spends 10% of their time on the phone every day you actually divide that by 2.
Of course, you've already given a very generous compression rate. It's possible that, with good voice recognition, you can turn large parts of that into pure text transcripts, just saving the bits of the conversation that the recognition software isn't confident about, but we'll ignore that. So, we'll just say that your 3,520 petabytes is about right for a month.
A petabyte of storage is going to run you anywhere from about $15,000 for tape to $150,000 for a cheap hard drive solution (a la backblaze) to about $3 million for a solution from EMC. So, we're talking from around $53 million per month to $530 million per month to $11 billion per month.
The cost for the bandwidth would be harder to figure out. Let's say $.05 per gigabyte, although it's quite likely that the NSA can get it a lot cheaper by basically just forcing the telecoms to give it to them and passing the costs on to us as hidden taxes. In any case, the final costs would be something like $4 billion to $132 billion per year with the majority of it being bandwidth costs if the storage is done on the cheap. The budget of the NSA is classified, but is estimated at something like $10 billion per year.
So, the conclusion is that storing the phone communications of everyone in the entire world is entirely doable by the NSA.
I'm pretty sure the Space Nutter troll is some sort of ex sci-fi fan who got seriously burned when the childhood fantasies didn't come true in a few decades. Now they're attacking anyone interested in space with the zealotry of a convert and projecting like crazy.
He's calling it "The Government" for the same reason prosecutors bring their cases in the name of "The People" or he himself talks about the opinion of "The Court". That's just the convention.
When it comes to GMO's and fracking, environmentalists like yourself are the ones denying science. Both have been proven to be safe
Safe in what respect? Fracking uses dangerous chemicals which are ending up in ground and surface water. Groundwater is ending full of dissolved methane, propane and ethane, which is dangerous even when it doesn't catch fire or explode. A significant amount of released gases are ending up in the atmosphere. Then there are byproducts of flaring, which is done on a vast scale. At the moment, "safe" is an odd thing to call fracking.
not that this has actually stopped people from Rule 34'ing every Disney Princess in a multitude of ways
"Disney" characters like Snow White, or Sleeping Beauty, or the Little Mermaid? You mean all of those public domain characters? Sure, Disney created their own versions of them. Then used the existence of their versions to pretty much lay claim over those characters entirely.
The cabin is "pressurized" in the sense that they have 1 ATM of pressure inside it and the pressure inside the cabin won't change even if they go to 40,000 ft
Close. It's more like .75 to .85 ATM depending on the plane and leaning towards .75.
A hero, in my view, isn't somebody who runs away from a fight they don't think they can win....
Sure. Also, true heros don't wear protective gear. All those "heroic" firemen who have run into burning buildings? Did they run in naked without respirators? Well, obviously not heroes then. In fact, if they didn't go in and stand in the fire heroically until the fire burned out, then they're obviously not heroes.
This is exactly like an employer providing employees with a computer for work.
This is where so many people seem to be going wrong here. The computers aren't really property of the CIA itself, they're property of the US government and, through the government, the people of the USA . They don't technically belong to congress either, but if you're going to make an employer/employee comparison, you've got the relationship backwards. The President may be the head of the executive branch, but Congress still holds the pursestrings. This is actually a case of an employer (congress) providing computers to an employee (the CIA) and the employee breaking the rules. Basically, if you're siding with the CIA here, then you should also logically have sided with Terry Childs when he was refusing to hand over control of the network he maintained to his supervisors. The difference being that Terry Childs actually had some legitimate reasons in their security policy to initially withhold the passwords from his supervisors. The CIA had no such justification in this case.
I know what I meant. Apparently I didn't do as good a job of explaining it as I thought I did.
I know what you meant as well. You meant: " I think you're Mars mission relies on Handwavium to convert chemical transformation formulas into actual non-laboratory processes." It's pretty clear. It clearly does _not_ mean: "you won't be able to get the water".
Electrolysis systems for 6 people on the ISS are going to be radically different in scale than those for a bunch of colonists.
That's the key word: scale.
Uh, yeah. No kidding? You mean you can't use the same resources you would for 6 people to maintain 12, or 24, or 48? Well gee, shucks, you've really shown me the error of my thinking there!
Seriously, what are you thinking? If anything, the efficiency and redundancy of these systems is going to go up with scale, if anything. At worst, you still only have to scale the amount of support equipment linearly with the number of people you intend to support. How is "scale", some sort of smoking gun?
Now, you claim that I must have thought that, by handwavium, I thought you meant something like "chemistry will be different on Mars". I didn't, and I thought that should have been obvious, but then you go and write things like:
The equipment (and spare parts, and maintenance, and assembly and repair, etc) needed to do all that stuff will be much more complicated on Mars than you think.
When it's already clear that we're talking about equipment that already exists and is already in use terrestrially and in space. Which seems to suggest that maybe you really do believe that chemistry is somehow different on Mars.
On Earth, we can send out some geologists or a surveying crew, rent or buy heavy machinery, parts, drilling mud, explosives, etc of a variety of forms from a jillion different sources.
Sometimes. Other times we have to plan things out very carefully or there's no chance of salvaging the endeavor and thousands of tons of expensive equipment gets left behind to become a playground for penguins. Other times, things go wrong enough that everyone dies. Even here on Earth.
OTOH, every bit of every kind of stuff needed on Mars will have to be sent at the beginning (whether on one ship or multiple doesn't matter), and that will drive up the cost of the expedition to absurd heights.
Yes, plenty of stuff will need to be sent at the beginning. That's no surprise. I'm pretty sure I've said as much myself elsewhere on this thread. If you're really trying to bootstrap a viable colony on Mars, you spend extra to send both the supplies the astronauts will need to survive without in situ resources and you also send the equipment they can use to try to live without using those supplies. Since the technologies are pretty proven by now, however, it's pretty clear that you can recycle every drop of water at least a few times. So you can get by with about a ton of consumable supplies per astronaut per year (which includes the water, food and oxygen that they need to consume). Right now, the Falcon heavy looks like it can realistically get a kg to Mars for around $11,000. We'll triple that and say 33,000 per kg. So that's $33 million per year, per astronaut of consumable living supplies. A lot of money, to be sure. Relatively speaking, however it's not that bad viewed in the context of a manned mission to another planet.
To be a crime it needs to be, you know, a crime--assault, harassment, theft of assets, etc.
It's a good thing for your argument that wiretapping isn't a crime, then. The fact is, without the law allowing it, arrest is kidnapping (and usually assault), taking people's property is theft, and some kind of searches are basically sexual assaults. When any of those things are done outside the defined areas that allow authorities to do them, they should fall back to their default position of crimes. It's frankly deplorable that anyone could engage in practices like beating people with clubs, choking them, applying electic shocks to them, etc. without a legal cause, but with the only option of the victims being a civil suit, but it happens all the time.
Faster spin speeds are needed for faster random access on spinning media. If you want to be able to write to them faster, is it better to do a whole lot more engineering on both the drive and the discs to make them spin 10% faster, or to just find a way to squeeze in another write head?
National Pride and bureaucratic inertia are two factors which can keep some big project going well past it's Sell By date.
Except of course that British Airways was a private operation for more than 2/3rds of the life of the Concorde, and they flew it at a profit.
Why did Boeing cancel it's 2027 project? Why have there been no other SSTs (either European or American) since then?
Because they aren't economical.
More because people who are worried that they might not be economical and the companies behind this sort of development are risk averse (when they aren't on a government contract, anyway).
Anyway, why are we even discussing the blasted Concord? Can we just stop. It's a real thing, it operated for nearly three decades. You think it somehow proves something, I don't agree. We won't see eye to eye but who cares because the remaining Concordes are museum pieces now. I'd rather discuss the topic at hand.
This is the Handwavium:
you can just dig under the dirt a little and hit a layer of pure water ice
But what you wrote was:
This is the crux of the disagreement between us. You say it's hard but doable, whereas I think you're Mars mission relies on Handwavium to convert chemical transformation formulas into actual non-laboratory processes.
How is the availability of water on Mars therefore the handwavium? That's not what you meant when you wrote that and you know it. I'm going to have to assume that your information about extant efficient electrolysis systems was very out of date, but you finally looked it up and now you're trying to claim you were talking about water in that last sentence. It doesn't even make any sense for water to be what you were talking about.
A few shovel digs and up comes potable water?
You can't just keep misrepresenting what I'm saying. I didn't say shovel digs, although there are certainly places where you could reach the ice with a shovel, or maybe just a broom to sweep off some of the soil. The use of powered equipment would only make sense, even if only to haul it. I'm also not saying that you could just do it anywhere. Clearly you have to choose your location so that you have access to a usable source of water if you want it to be this easy. I'm also not saying "up comes potable water" which implies that the water will be liquid and have nothing dissolved in it.
What I'm saying is that we've already found spots, within range of areas that are suitable for a base, that have, at the very least, millions of kilograms of concentrated water ice. We've been able to identify these spots specifically because the ground over the ice in these spots is thin. That means it can be dug up, cut it into blocks, thrown into the back of a truck and driven back to the base. Then it can be melted, purified as needed (using the consumable supplies I mentioned way, way back) and used to make oxygen, as raw material for fuel-making or concrete or other chemical processes or just used for drinking, re-hydrating food, growing food, brushing teeth, etc.
There just isn't that much mystery about how you would do it. We're still not as sure about all the ideal sites for it, but we know some already (and remember, this is only if you want to do it the really easy way, there's water in plenty of other places too, it's just not in the form of almost pure ice. The exact equipment and techniques you would use are still up for debate and experiment as well. Traditional ice cutting techniques probably wouldn't be up to snuff because the ice could be so cold it's as hard as rock or even steel. On the other hand, you can melt a cut through the ice pretty trivially with some sort of hot wire or heated blade. Or it might be more efficient to just blow it into fragments with explosives. Heck, for a Mars mission, a laser cutter might not actually be far fetched. Or maybe it would t
Believe me, I'm as thrilled as anyone that we now have an interplanetary giant robot vaporizing an alien landscape with lasers! That fact is though, unless you have a plan for large, near autonomous swarms of exploratory robots, a decent sized human exploration mission has the potential to get more bang for the buck. A human, even stuck in a space suit, is just so much better at going out to a site, then excavating, bagging and tagging, then analyzing a bunch of samples than any existing robot. It doesn't even seem to matter that we're technically reliant on machines of one kind or another for pretty much every stage of the process, we're still better at it for the moment.
I'll disagree until you show me some evidence. Presumably you think the same way.
The evidence is that the Concorde put in nearly three decades of service. Things that are impractical to the point of impossibility aren't kept in service that long. That's actually a decently ripe old age for an international passenger jet. During that lifetime, people wanted to fly on it, paid their money and flew on it. It successfully filled the niche it lived in.
You agree with me, but seem to be fighting anyway.
We obviously have a different definition of what a beancounter is. I go by the fairly standard definition of a penny pinching accountant who is incapable of grasping the big picture. For example someone who eleminates a bunch of neccessary $20/hr jobs and compensates by dumping the duties of those jobs onto $80 an hour employees. Or someone who eliminates a less-profitable division because their definition of profit doesn't discern between less-profitable and unprofitable.
Go back and read my original post on cost:
I obviously read it since I quoted it in my last post. You provided the Concorde of something that was "sooo expensive that the problem isn't worth solving" and were basically implying that a working supersonic passenger is basically an impossibility. The history of the Concord seems to prove otherwise.
Also, I realize now that I should have pointed out that, for the Concorde itself, what really killed it was old age. The other things I mentioned were contributing factors. They were more central to the death of the supersonic passenger plane in general than the Concorde specifically.
See, we agree!!
Not really.
OTOH, technology marches on.
Now that Pratt & Whitney has developed a supercruise engine for the F-22, if Boeing demonstrates that the 787's carbon fiber body is durable, then combining those technologies with NASA's boom reduction research the concept of supersonic passenger aircraft could be brought out of mothballs (especially for long Asian and Pacific routes).
Interesting. I have my doubts about the carbon fiber body being able to withstand the heating/cooling cycles of supersonic flight, but it certainly is possible that supersonic passenger flight could re-emerge.
Anyway, you never did answer my question of what handwavium is required to make electrolysis work as an oxygen generation mechanism. It can't be the technique itself, it's known to work and there are commercially available units. The water can't be the obstacle, since we now know of numerous spots on Mars where you can just dig under the dirt a little and hit a layer of pure water ice. So what part requires the handwavium?
It's the getting the Martian water which I think is much more difficult than you do.
There are plenty of deposits of water ice all over Mars. If you want pure water ice you might need to truck it from the poles but, otherwise, you can get water from the ground from locations all over the planet.
Well, in order to get enough water to make oxygen for one astronaut for one year, you need 366 kilograms of water. For them to drink and possibly rehydrate freeze-dried food for an entire year with no water recycling, you need about 1464 kilograms of water. So, for a whole year (ignoring things like washing water, etc. which you can continuously recycle even if you aren't recycling drinking water), a single astronaut needs maybe 1830 kgs of water to live. which is about how much water you can get out of an average 13 cubic meters of Martian soil. Unless you're in a poorly chosen area, that's not going to be very hard to obtain. That's not going to be a year's worth of work to obtain. Anywhere from a day to maybe a month at worst depending on what equipment you're using and how well chosen your source is.
That's not my recollection.
Then your recollection is incorrect. The Concorde had trouble recouping development and safety testing costs, to be sure. If you try amortizing those costs over only twenty units, you're obviously going to struggle. The operating costs themselves, are all we need to consider here, and they were modest for what the Concorde actually was. A more modern big passenger jet gets about three times the fuel economy per passenger, tops and other costs are comparable. That's not really "sooo expensive". It's first class prices, sure, but it's not astonomical. If we'd continued with supersonic passenger jet design, the fuel consumption per passenger would have gone down just like it did for the jumbo jets. It certainly would have always required more fuel per passenger, but not that much more. The Concorde was basically killed by beancounting and politics. It wasn't some impossible thing.
Silly fly-over hayseeds not wanting their windows rattling multiple times per day!
The concerns about sonic booms were greatly magnified by military tests producing much more powerful sonic booms. It led to lots of politically motivated rules about where the Concorde could fly or even land, completely ignoring the fact that the Concorde could also fly at subsonic speed and, in fact, had to for takeoff and landing.
It's the way that you wrote:
That's a good thing... for example...
It suggests that your examples were of good, proper attitudes.
Anyway, that misunderstanding aside, I have to agree with you that we shouldn't be pulled in the direction of every new idea "just because". But the crank Electric Universe theory is not the same thing as the drive for exploration. Among other details, the drive for exploration is not new. It's ancient. If we didn't have it, chances are pretty good we would have gone extinct ages ago. It drives us to develop new technologies and new science and just generally try new things. I've seen you argue that we don't have the technology to do various things a Mars colony would require, with the implication that we shouldn't try for a Mars colony because we don't have those things. But why would we even develop those things if we weren't going to colonize another world? Necessity being the mother of invention and all that.
You wondered why I thought of your attitude as nihilistic. It's because your answer to the general question of "if not now, when" seems to be "never!". To me, that just seems like a total surrender.
It's really hard to read what you wrote there without coming to the conclusion that you're arguing that racism is a good thing. Or, at least that racism is a good default position and you should only switch with extraordinary proof that it's bad. I don't think I like that.
I don't understand that response.
I was saying that "Because it's there" is not a Very Nonsensical Reason. At least, if it's not a good reason, then most of the motivations for all the great things the human race has accomplished are also not good reasons.
I'm curious, which part of electrolysis requires handwavium? That's how the oxygen is generated on the ISS. All that's required is water, and Mars has water. The fact that it takes some effort to extract it doesn't make doing it somehow impossible. To my mind, that's the crux of the disagreement between us, you believe that things that are difficult shouldn't and possibly can't be done.
(This is similar to -- but on a much larger scale than -- why we don't have supersonic passenger aircraft: some problems' only solutions are sooo expensive that the problem isn't worth solving.)
Except that the Concorde wasn't that expensive compared to a regular passenger jet. It was killed by noise concerns and irrational safety concerns and the fallout from the events of September 11th 2001.