Oh, and what's cooler is that it doesn't even take reaction mass to control attitude. IKAROS uses an array of LCDs around the edges of the sail to create torque.
Force is force, so if the sail generates a force it can add energy to the system and raise the orbit. Angle the sail right at each point in the orbit and you can get the tangential force needed to spiral outward without going elliptical.
But your cost argument breaks down in the time value of money. Just the waiting is expensive, but the risk of failure during the waiting may be more expensive. Best to pick a launch window that gets you through known regions of empty orbital space and to your orbit as expeditiously as astrogation allows. Fuel is comparatively cheap, and development of a known system is cheap, and risk cost of a known system is very cheap.
IKAROS-type propulsion would be useful for tuning orbits without having to send up reaction mass, so it's still a pretty brilliant experiment.
Most LEOs have relied on orbital decay. GEOs rely on being parked or boosted out of the way - shich is in essence a form of deorbiting - but I've never heard of one that was designed to be removed from space entirely.
If you even bother to plan to deorbit it, you put in failsafe mechanisms to put it into deorbit mode if it loses communication for a long enough period. Of course, if it loses power to the deorbit system, then it becomes junk, so you focus on reducing the risk of that happening.
But mostly you calculate the cost of that plus the cost of getting that part of the machine into orbit, and put that in your pocket as profit on the premise that nobody else ever had to bother so there's no reason you should.
First, because it costs almost as much energy to get something out of a good orbit as it took to get it into that orbit.
In low orbits, there's still some atmospheric molecules (billionths of an atmosphere at 400 km altitude) so you just wait for drag to bring it down. Here they're reducing the time by increasing the drag with a sail (making it more of a parachute).
In higher orbits, that won't happen. But packing the fuel needed to cancel the orbital speed enough to make the orbit intersect the planet is costly.
So the answer is, because it was considered cheaper and they didn't care about polluting something that's a couple of orders of magnitude bigger than the planet is in the first place.
It's the wrong part of the election cycle for that sort of hope.
Two months ago this would have made for interesting politics.
Now, lame-duck congress, weakened party of the President, and 22 months until the next election, it'll be old news and nobody will give a damn before anything engages people in their choices.
Right to travel and right to travel by the most inefficient and unstable means possible are two different things.
If you want to argue about right to travel and privacy, get the border guards off our backs.
This is not about the right to travel; it's about the desire to make a month's journey in two hours and share the transportation cost with 280 other people (and get a snack and a movie cuz it's sooooo booooooringggggg otherwise).
Seriously. Don't presume freedoms you don't have. Your insistence on having them will allow your actual freedoms to be eroded by the same means used to erode your priviliges, only that will happen behind your back because you don't notice those freedoms are even there.
The one thing that the big record companies still have that most indies lack is a sense of what talent looks like, and how to manipulate it to look even more like what talent looks like.
Upstarts think that people should just love them for who they are, warts, gargling, and all. Then when they find out that fewer people do that than they expect, they blame the big record companies for not making it easier for them to become famous. But if somehow they become a "viral" hit, they'll get a knock from one of the bigs, rolling out the boilerplate scroll and slapping two fat stacks of benjamins on it. Then when they sign that and get 10X more famous and richer than anyone they've ever met, but find out that the record company kept a bigger slice than the boldface type said because of something in the fine print, they'll sue the record company because they didn't read the contract.
Man, that's a tired song. I wish someone would just make it on their own, buy a fucking island, and let us run their music on our iPods in peace.
You don't need their help or anyone's permission to create, promote, and deliver your own property in high-quality digital format.
And while they're running around trying to put the genie back in the bottle, you can start out with top-flight anti-piracy mechanisms built into your digital content and never have to worry about the sort of headaches they're experiencing.
Damn. Now I wish I wrote DRM code for a living, because I can tell you're going to be the next Jay-Z.
"finding ways to interpret texts to mean what they want them to mean"
And then you drop the facts and the law on them and they vaporize. Provided the judge isn't a Catholic.
"Your comment reminds me of Richard Feynman's attempt to logically confound Jewish seminary students. He failed, utterly"
This is why law isn't founded on logic. Logic lacks semantics, and you can prove anything if your postulates are false. There's no reason a church should ever win a court case, except that somehow they've got the entire court system to postulate that god exists.
If an installation reports in at all, why not issue it a node key the first time, and disable its installation key thereafter?
If it is a bulk-license scheme, it still doesn't explain how they can tell installations apart other than by IP. Unless the first update includes a new set of identifiers that are node-specific.
If they weren't doing the experiement it should be trivial to cripple the software outright on any given update.
In any case, they should be whacking the firm that gave out its key to 700,000 thieves.
If you didn't read the contract you signed when they bought your copyright from you, that's too bad for you, and a good example of where the government should keep its nose out of private individuals' business.
But if you can prove the RIAA or MPAA stole your stuff, you win:
Slashdot Mirror
How about the fact that "former" isn't "current" and the DHS is not a Senator. So that's not pork at all. Just garden-variety self-dealing.
That is because today's "political climate" is pwned by Rush Limbaugh and his spores.
If the left doesn't get its shit together and redefine what the center means, it will never win another election.
Hi. I said "Sane". Please vote for someone else.
Oh, and what's cooler is that it doesn't even take reaction mass to control attitude. IKAROS uses an array of LCDs around the edges of the sail to create torque.
Man, I want one of those for xmas.
Force is force, so if the sail generates a force it can add energy to the system and raise the orbit. Angle the sail right at each point in the orbit and you can get the tangential force needed to spiral outward without going elliptical.
But your cost argument breaks down in the time value of money. Just the waiting is expensive, but the risk of failure during the waiting may be more expensive. Best to pick a launch window that gets you through known regions of empty orbital space and to your orbit as expeditiously as astrogation allows. Fuel is comparatively cheap, and development of a known system is cheap, and risk cost of a known system is very cheap.
IKAROS-type propulsion would be useful for tuning orbits without having to send up reaction mass, so it's still a pretty brilliant experiment.
Most LEOs have relied on orbital decay. GEOs rely on being parked or boosted out of the way - shich is in essence a form of deorbiting - but I've never heard of one that was designed to be removed from space entirely.
If you even bother to plan to deorbit it, you put in failsafe mechanisms to put it into deorbit mode if it loses communication for a long enough period. Of course, if it loses power to the deorbit system, then it becomes junk, so you focus on reducing the risk of that happening.
But mostly you calculate the cost of that plus the cost of getting that part of the machine into orbit, and put that in your pocket as profit on the premise that nobody else ever had to bother so there's no reason you should.
First, because it costs almost as much energy to get something out of a good orbit as it took to get it into that orbit.
In low orbits, there's still some atmospheric molecules (billionths of an atmosphere at 400 km altitude) so you just wait for drag to bring it down. Here they're reducing the time by increasing the drag with a sail (making it more of a parachute).
In higher orbits, that won't happen. But packing the fuel needed to cancel the orbital speed enough to make the orbit intersect the planet is costly.
So the answer is, because it was considered cheaper and they didn't care about polluting something that's a couple of orders of magnitude bigger than the planet is in the first place.
However, now that the satellites are starting to interfere with each other, it may become economical to selectively deorbit some of the dead and dying ones. The Russians are putting together a serious program to develop a nuclear-powered space drone to do that.
Good thing that, in matters of space at least, they're our buds, now.
Hi, I'm running for Congress from the Sane Middle Ground Party, and I hope I can get your vote if you remember you held this position in 2 years.
It's the wrong part of the election cycle for that sort of hope.
Two months ago this would have made for interesting politics.
Now, lame-duck congress, weakened party of the President, and 22 months until the next election, it'll be old news and nobody will give a damn before anything engages people in their choices.
Inasmuchas everything has to be built somewhere, saying things are pork is not sufficient to prove that's the only reason they're being done.
Right to travel and right to travel by the most inefficient and unstable means possible are two different things.
If you want to argue about right to travel and privacy, get the border guards off our backs.
This is not about the right to travel; it's about the desire to make a month's journey in two hours and share the transportation cost with 280 other people (and get a snack and a movie cuz it's sooooo booooooringggggg otherwise).
Seriously. Don't presume freedoms you don't have. Your insistence on having them will allow your actual freedoms to be eroded by the same means used to erode your priviliges, only that will happen behind your back because you don't notice those freedoms are even there.
He's living in a yurt in Pakistan, dodging predator drones.
You're living wherever you please.
No, we're not better off than we were, and there's some things we need to straighten out yet, but we're doing better than any taliban.
The one thing that the big record companies still have that most indies lack is a sense of what talent looks like, and how to manipulate it to look even more like what talent looks like.
Upstarts think that people should just love them for who they are, warts, gargling, and all. Then when they find out that fewer people do that than they expect, they blame the big record companies for not making it easier for them to become famous. But if somehow they become a "viral" hit, they'll get a knock from one of the bigs, rolling out the boilerplate scroll and slapping two fat stacks of benjamins on it. Then when they sign that and get 10X more famous and richer than anyone they've ever met, but find out that the record company kept a bigger slice than the boldface type said because of something in the fine print, they'll sue the record company because they didn't read the contract.
Man, that's a tired song. I wish someone would just make it on their own, buy a fucking island, and let us run their music on our iPods in peace.
They don't control the Internet.
You don't need their help or anyone's permission to create, promote, and deliver your own property in high-quality digital format.
And while they're running around trying to put the genie back in the bottle, you can start out with top-flight anti-piracy mechanisms built into your digital content and never have to worry about the sort of headaches they're experiencing.
Damn. Now I wish I wrote DRM code for a living, because I can tell you're going to be the next Jay-Z.
It's part of a glock.
Now ask me about the Royale with cheese...
Start your own company and promise not to do the things they do.
They'll never sign another artist and you'll end up with a monopoly you can defend.
I think we trashed his country, and a couple of its neighbors, quite a bit more.
"finding ways to interpret texts to mean what they want them to mean"
And then you drop the facts and the law on them and they vaporize. Provided the judge isn't a Catholic.
"Your comment reminds me of Richard Feynman's attempt to logically confound Jewish seminary students. He failed, utterly"
This is why law isn't founded on logic. Logic lacks semantics, and you can prove anything if your postulates are false. There's no reason a church should ever win a court case, except that somehow they've got the entire court system to postulate that god exists.
If an installation reports in at all, why not issue it a node key the first time, and disable its installation key thereafter?
If it is a bulk-license scheme, it still doesn't explain how they can tell installations apart other than by IP. Unless the first update includes a new set of identifiers that are node-specific.
If they weren't doing the experiement it should be trivial to cripple the software outright on any given update.
In any case, they should be whacking the firm that gave out its key to 700,000 thieves.
If you didn't read the contract you signed when they bought your copyright from you, that's too bad for you, and a good example of where the government should keep its nose out of private individuals' business.
But if you can prove the RIAA or MPAA stole your stuff, you win:
http://articles.latimes.com/2001/mar/07/business/fi-34293
How you solve that is don't let people like bin Laden think that blowing up buildings will work.
Sing us a song. If it's any good, the entertainment industry will include you.
Your book is very thin and disjoint. Nobody would steal it.
How you solve that is you don't vote for Joe Lieberman. Vote for someone who won't do that.