I realise your point: everything sent into space instantaniously becomes worth it's money in gold. But I think those resources are just too scarse on mars to make it worthwile. Something like it could maybe hypothetically be tried in earth orbit using multiple satellites tugging old material to a junk yard area (duct-taping them together? using a giant bag to put them in? it's not because the idea sounds crazy that it won't work). As more and more stuff becomes available, a great playground emerges for cheap ad-hoc engineering, not to mention you're making life a lot easyer for Norad. Also remember that the first television was built from junk yard materials.
On the other hand, changing the orbits might just be too costly. Some of the debris might still have fuel inside, like hydrazine IIRC a very corrosive material. Also, a lot of satellites contain radioactive material, so caution is adviced. I can also imagine a lot of governments will become very uncomfortable knowing there is a company/state holding vast amounts of radio-isotopes in one place; basically you'll be able to start your own star-wars program. But if your intentions are good, these isotopes could be used to power your junk yard house robots, together with the solar panels you'll recover in large quantities.
On a side-note: I think it is this desctructive side of mankind that is holding back other space mining efforts too. Imagine you are able to capture comets and asteroids. This could be used to provide tons of water cheaply to the ISS and moon colonies. But you will also have the potential of dropping an asteroid on a specific city, wiping it of the earth without the fallout of a nuclear weapon.
As long as we must carry the burden of having to be suspicious that others are willing to exterminate us, hope of any serious space projects remaine very low IMHO, because with a bad intention, the vast energies you're trying to control can be used as monstruous weapons. And mankind IS able of using monstruous weapons, in fact it has a rich history in doing so. Mankind must lose it's murdering instinct first or eventually we will all die. (Rationale: if we remain here on earth, a mass extingtion event will wipe us all out of existance). End side-note.
Wrong, spirit's landing site is known to within half a metre: check it out yourself if you don't believe me. But even with this knowledge, current technologies don't have the landing precision to land near to the rover. Opportunity landed 24 km from the target spot, spirit 13km IIRC. Those are considered very precise landings. And if you would send a rover that could drive 24km say in a few weeks, why bother trying to fix a rover that will only be driving 100m/day (and I'm being optimistic here). I think it would be cheaper trying to cover the martian soil with lego bricks (if you get a large volume discount:)).
Well, according to the FAQ, it is expensive primarily because it is made in low quantities. So it could become cheaper in the future.. Maybe thinkgeek should sell samples, it would be fun to play with! And small samples can't cost that much, anyway.
It took me a few moments to figure it out.. i was looking at the image with my Red/Blue glasses, then I scrolled down and saw the texture-mapped sideview. I have seen a documentary about the imager and the scientists were looking at a screen with 3D glasses (polarized), so when the headline said "3D", I was a bit biassed and excited. This quickly turned into disapiontment.
Knoppix is cute, indeed. As I am writing this, I am using it on my super-new bought-today system, copying files from a small 60GB disk to a larger 120GB disk. The 60GB will be the new systems primary disk, while the 120GB go in to the old PC, soon to be called 'server'. Then I will run dpkg --get-selections on my old debian system and a --set-selections on my new system. This will (hopefully;)) give me all the apps I use, on my new system without much hassle.
I have used Slackware in the early 90s, moving to redhat since Slackware wall a bit painful at the time, then to Suse because of their KDE support, and finally to Debian. I like it. One thing I learned though: no single distro is perfect. They all have their pros/cons. I still miss Suse, in some way, but apt-get, together with the fact that it is a not-for-profit organisation, keeps me sticking to Debian.
They can hardly pretend they didn't have enough time to put the list together, this has been going on for months now.. It seems this 'millions of lines'-claim is as reliable as the 'Iraq can launch a biological attach within 45 minutes'-claim.
They must have a reason to pretend this however. Most likely they just want to slow down Linux development/acceptance to buy their good friends at microsoft some time. If such a scenario were true, you would expect them to stay fuzzy about details, take as much time as they can, draw as much media attention as possible, etc..
Quake I: played it for years. At that time, I was at the university, so having a great network connection, my friends and I regulary played until everybody else left the server out of frustration. I still consider it the best multiplayer game (FPS, anyway) ever written. Return To Castle Wolfenstein: The teamplay is is a great addi(c)tion, IMHO. Unless the team you're in has never heard of teamplay. It then becomes very depressing.
Or did you just mean they didn't make any great Doom-successor?
the spooks are already required to disconnect (or ditch-and-not-listen-to any recording) the instant they realize it's a call that is unrelated to the matter being investigated.
So I can, for example, call my dealer, talk a few minutes about my hemaroids, and then I place my order. Wait until that gets out!
A large percentage of the population use drugs to some extent, but still support or pretend to support the war on drugs Reminds me of the newspaper article we had here in Belgium about a letter sent to stockbrokers not to sniff cocaine on their desks. Also, cocaine has been found in parlement toilets. Makes you wonder, doesn't it? BTW, I don't consider sniffing cocaine a healthy habbit. Nor do I consider smoking healthy. It's just the criminal part that I don't find logical. If it were to be legalized, it would put some real criminal organisations out of buziness, however.
I still can't see why the US spend so much money on drugs related 'crimes'. Hypocrisy is THE word here. Alcohol is a hard drug. Fighter pilots get amphetamines (aka speed) to fight. But if you smoke a joint, oh my god, you're in deep shit. Why spend so much on something that doesn't harm people other than those who take it? What do those people do wrong?
I watched a press meeting at NASA Tv. Actually, the rover has 8 filters on each camera, with only a few in common (also, one of them is a sun filter, so the rover can figure out it's orientation and direct it's antenna to earth). The blue pigment on the sundial is specially selected because it also has a strong infrared signature. So if you watch the blue spot with the infrared filter, the "blue" spot turns out red. Another mistery solved.
A Thether snap doesn't really bother me, it's just that I haven't heard yet how they are going to deal with the 200.000 volt potential that exists between earth and the clouds. The moment that first thin ribbon comes near earth, it should give an enormous spark, melting it in an instant. Even if it is not conducting, once it gets partly wet... So once they have built the elevator they will design a giant umbrella and keep it in place with steel cables, I guess.
..parking! There's no more reason why you couldn't move your wheels 180 degrees! On the other hand, have you seen the size of that wheel? Cars would have a monster-truck appearance!
Indeed, this world needs more KISSing. However, back in the 60s, a diode was High-Tech, dude! How are you going to convince politicians that your diode-based space-probe has the potential for finding new things, and creating some spin-offs etc.
BTW, besides KISS, Divide And Conquer should also be part of an engineer's mantra collection. There obviously is a problem in landing on Mars, so this should be the main focus of any mission. Once this is solved, we can take the next step. Maybe we should be sending very simple probes (nothing more than a radio and perhaps a camera) but send lots of them with all kinds of landing mechanisms. Dare to spend money on launching a dozen of landers! I would also let the guys who designed the black box create the housing of the radio; getting landing information back is crucial in this kind of experiment.
But then again, who said Beagle has crashed? We'll have to play the waiting game a bit longer I'm afraid.
I keep hearing those fantastic stories about space elevators, but there is one thing that concerns me: there is a 200.000 Volt potential between the earth and the ionosphere if I remember correctly. Won't this cause an enormous short-circuit of an enormous capacitor?? I have seen what happened to a screwdriver short-circuiting a (big) capacitor (i.e., it melts). Would you care to explain how this possibly could be prevented??
I agree with you. In fact, I go even further. I never use any commercial distributions any more (Smoothwall is not a 'firewall operating system', it's a specialized distro). The software is free and so should be the distribution. If there is anything I want to spend money on, it's not more features, it's support. But then again, I can solve my own problems most of the time.
IMHO, the problem with commercial distributions is that at some point in time they will need more cash and will try to squeeze it of of their users. Volunteer projects don't suffer from this kind of "strategic decisions".
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I realise your point: everything sent into space instantaniously becomes worth it's money in gold. But I think those resources are just too scarse on mars to make it worthwile. Something like it could maybe hypothetically be tried in earth orbit using multiple satellites tugging old material to a junk yard area (duct-taping them together? using a giant bag to put them in? it's not because the idea sounds crazy that it won't work). As more and more stuff becomes available, a great playground emerges for cheap ad-hoc engineering, not to mention you're making life a lot easyer for Norad. Also remember that the first television was built from junk yard materials.
On the other hand, changing the orbits might just be too costly. Some of the debris might still have fuel inside, like hydrazine IIRC a very corrosive material. Also, a lot of satellites contain radioactive material, so caution is adviced. I can also imagine a lot of governments will become very uncomfortable knowing there is a company/state holding vast amounts of radio-isotopes in one place; basically you'll be able to start your own star-wars program. But if your intentions are good, these isotopes could be used to power your junk yard house robots, together with the solar panels you'll recover in large quantities.
On a side-note: I think it is this desctructive side of mankind that is holding back other space mining efforts too. Imagine you are able to capture comets and asteroids. This could be used to provide tons of water cheaply to the ISS and moon colonies. But you will also have the potential of dropping an asteroid on a specific city, wiping it of the earth without the fallout of a nuclear weapon.
As long as we must carry the burden of having to be suspicious that others are willing to exterminate us, hope of any serious space projects remaine very low IMHO, because with a bad intention, the vast energies you're trying to control can be used as monstruous weapons. And mankind IS able of using monstruous weapons, in fact it has a rich history in doing so. Mankind must lose it's murdering instinct first or eventually we will all die. (Rationale: if we remain here on earth, a mass extingtion event will wipe us all out of existance).
End side-note.
Wrong, spirit's landing site is known to within half a metre: check it out yourself if you don't believe me.
But even with this knowledge, current technologies don't have the landing precision to land near to the rover. Opportunity landed 24 km from the target spot, spirit 13km IIRC. Those are considered very precise landings. And if you would send a rover that could drive 24km say in a few weeks, why bother trying to fix a rover that will only be driving 100m/day (and I'm being optimistic here).
I think it would be cheaper trying to cover the martian soil with lego bricks (if you get a large volume discount:)).
For your feet he's working on something involving heat-piped shoes and an anal probe.
orion# ping spirit.nasa.gov
PING ds1.domainspa.com (67.96.63.112): 56 data bytes
--- ds1.domainspa.com ping statistics ---
8 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100% packet loss
orion#
Cartman: No, Marvin, those are not for eating, they are for making photos while we make them explode!
Well, according to the FAQ, it is expensive primarily because it is made in low quantities. So it could become cheaper in the future.. Maybe thinkgeek should sell samples, it would be fun to play with! And small samples can't cost that much, anyway.
No, they should send pigs, they could save some bucks on the video coverage because they can use the intro from the muppet show!
It took me a few moments to figure it out.. i was looking at the image with my Red/Blue glasses, then I scrolled down and saw the texture-mapped sideview. I have seen a documentary about the imager and the scientists were looking at a screen with 3D glasses (polarized), so when the headline said "3D", I was a bit biassed and excited. This quickly turned into disapiontment.
This image is what I call "3D".
No, the butt is on the other side of the planet.
Knoppix is cute, indeed. As I am writing this, I am using it on my super-new bought-today system, copying files from a small 60GB disk to a larger 120GB disk. The 60GB will be the new systems primary disk, while the 120GB go in to the old PC, soon to be called 'server'. Then I will run dpkg --get-selections on my old debian system and a --set-selections on my new system. This will (hopefully ;)) give me all the apps I use, on my new system without much hassle.
I have used Slackware in the early 90s, moving to redhat since Slackware wall a bit painful at the time, then to Suse because of their KDE support, and finally to Debian. I like it. One thing I learned though: no single distro is perfect. They all have their pros/cons. I still miss Suse, in some way, but apt-get, together with the fact that it is a not-for-profit organisation, keeps me sticking to Debian.
They can hardly pretend they didn't have enough time to put the list together, this has been going on for months now.. It seems this 'millions of lines'-claim is as reliable as the 'Iraq can launch a biological attach within 45 minutes'-claim.
They must have a reason to pretend this however. Most likely they just want to slow down Linux development/acceptance to buy their good friends at microsoft some time. If such a scenario were true, you would expect them to stay fuzzy about details, take as much time as they can, draw as much media attention as possible, etc..
Quake I: played it for years. At that time, I was at the university, so having a great network connection, my friends and I regulary played until everybody else left the server out of frustration. I still consider it the best multiplayer game (FPS, anyway) ever written.
Return To Castle Wolfenstein: The teamplay is is a great addi(c)tion, IMHO. Unless the team you're in has never heard of teamplay. It then becomes very depressing.
Or did you just mean they didn't make any great Doom-successor?
the spooks are already required to disconnect (or ditch-and-not-listen-to any recording) the instant they realize it's a call that is unrelated to the matter being investigated.
So I can, for example, call my dealer, talk a few minutes about my hemaroids, and then I place my order. Wait until that gets out!
A large percentage of the population use drugs to some extent, but still support or pretend to support the war on drugs
Reminds me of the newspaper article we had here in Belgium about a letter sent to stockbrokers not to sniff cocaine on their desks. Also, cocaine has been found in parlement toilets. Makes you wonder, doesn't it?
BTW, I don't consider sniffing cocaine a healthy habbit. Nor do I consider smoking healthy. It's just the criminal part that I don't find logical. If it were to be legalized, it would put some real criminal organisations out of buziness, however.
I still can't see why the US spend so much money on drugs related 'crimes'. Hypocrisy is THE word here. Alcohol is a hard drug. Fighter pilots get amphetamines (aka speed) to fight. But if you smoke a joint, oh my god, you're in deep shit. Why spend so much on something that doesn't harm people other than those who take it? What do those people do wrong?
I watched a press meeting at NASA Tv. Actually, the rover has 8 filters on each camera, with only a few in common (also, one of them is a sun filter, so the rover can figure out it's orientation and direct it's antenna to earth). The blue pigment on the sundial is specially selected because it also has a strong infrared signature. So if you watch the blue spot with the infrared filter, the "blue" spot turns out red. Another mistery solved.
A Thether snap doesn't really bother me, it's just that I haven't heard yet how they are going to deal with the 200.000 volt potential that exists between earth and the clouds. The moment that first thin ribbon comes near earth, it should give an enormous spark, melting it in an instant. Even if it is not conducting, once it gets partly wet... So once they have built the elevator they will design a giant umbrella and keep it in place with steel cables, I guess.
..parking! There's no more reason why you couldn't move your wheels 180 degrees! On the other hand, have you seen the size of that wheel? Cars would have a monster-truck appearance!
I don't see why heating liquid O2 should be a big problem, too. The keyword would be c-a-r-e-f-u-l, though...
BTW, what does a 'flight operations analyst' do?
..then they will all die the day after the waranty voids. Won't this create cleaner air AND dumps filled with highly toxic battery-waste?
Indeed, this world needs more KISSing. However, back in the 60s, a diode was High-Tech, dude! How are you going to convince politicians that your diode-based space-probe has the potential for finding new things, and creating some spin-offs etc.
BTW, besides KISS, Divide And Conquer should also be part of an engineer's mantra collection. There obviously is a problem in landing on Mars, so this should be the main focus of any mission. Once this is solved, we can take the next step. Maybe we should be sending very simple probes (nothing more than a radio and perhaps a camera) but send lots of them with all kinds of landing mechanisms. Dare to spend money on launching a dozen of landers! I would also let the guys who designed the black box create the housing of the radio; getting landing information back is crucial in this kind of experiment.
But then again, who said Beagle has crashed? We'll have to play the waiting game a bit longer I'm afraid.
All your programmers are belong to us!
I keep hearing those fantastic stories about space elevators, but there is one thing that concerns me: there is a 200.000 Volt potential between the earth and the ionosphere if I remember correctly. Won't this cause an enormous short-circuit of an enormous capacitor?? I have seen what happened to a screwdriver short-circuiting a (big) capacitor (i.e., it melts). Would you care to explain how this possibly could be prevented??
I agree with you. In fact, I go even further. I never use any commercial distributions any more (Smoothwall is not a 'firewall operating system', it's a specialized distro). The software is free and so should be the distribution. If there is anything I want to spend money on, it's not more features, it's support. But then again, I can solve my own problems most of the time.
IMHO, the problem with commercial distributions is that at some point in time they will need more cash and will try to squeeze it of of their users. Volunteer projects don't suffer from this kind of "strategic decisions".
Is this thing on sourceforge yet? freshmeat? Or is it just a scheme to lur geeks to church?