All I'm presuming is the geologist will have a vehicle and the same instrument suite the MER's do.
Well, I assumed that you wanted to do something new that the MERs haven't already done. There's certainly no point now in sending humans at 1000X the cost to do what's already been done.
If we hadn't sent robotic probes, your human mission would still not even have launched by now, so we still got the results earlier this way.
Well, if it were a contest between you trying doing all that in a bulky space suit before your oxygen runs out vs a housecat-sized nuclear powered robot that could patiently spend months exploring one cave, I'd put my money on the robot.
Given that a human geologist can accomplish in a month what it has take both Spirit and Opportunity years to do...
That's mainly because you're presuming that the humans will bring along an entire geology lab and a base station to do their work.
So instead of sending humans (who will spend 99% of their time and money in the harrowing effort of simply not getting killed), send a robotic base station and geology lab instead. Throw in a bunch of rovers to gather the samples for the lab, and you'll most likely get more science done at 1/10th the cost of a human mission.
If they say "IE 6.latest" or "Foxpro 2.latest" doesn't count as "latest" and those versions have no known unpatched vulnerabilities not shared by IE 7.latest or Foxpro 3.latest then they aren't counting properly.
I agree. dBASE III works just fine for me, and I see no reason to update to dBASE IV when Ashton Tate currently provides the same level of support for both.
I think you have sampling bias. The sun looks yellowish at the only times of the day that most people can stand to even glance at it: the morning and evening. That's because it's filtered through lots of dust in the atmosphere. Look at a sheet of paper in the sunlight at high noon on a clear day. It won't look yellow at all.
The resource on the moon is the isotope He3. It might be useful for certain fusion scenarios. However, investing $billions now would be putting the cart before the horse.
We don't know if *any* kind of hot or cold fusion will be feasible with any fuel. IIRC, He3 will be harder to fuse (but less radioactive) than the usual D/T combination. OTOH, there are other more abundant fuels, harder to fuse than He3, which would also have low radioactivity. We'll have to see which, if any, fusion reactors end up as workable possibilities.
The He3 is in trace quantities distributed across the surface of the moon. Mining it would require gathering moon dirt in quantities comparable to the amount of coal mined here on earth, then distilling a few tons of He3 annually from these countless megatons of dust. This doesn't seem economical with any foreseeable space technology.
The huge amounts of money it would take to develop this moon fuel capability would probably be better spent on fusion cycles that don't need He3, or other energy technologies altogether.
"According to iBiquity, the name "HD Radio" is simply iBiquity's brand for its digital radio technology,[6] and does not stand for "Hybrid Digital" or "High Definition" such as HDTV does."
Ain't it funny how random coincidences work out. The odds against picking a 2-letter brand name that happen to match the acronym for "High Definition" are 676-to-1. And, gosh darn it, they just happened to hit it!
How many School Teachers, Pilots, and Scientists has NASA lost in the last 20 years again?
Fourteen, after having achieved several man-years in orbit
How many has Rutan lost?
Three, after having achieved about 5 man-minutes in a parabola
Look, NASA has been stupid, bloated and has wasted hundreds of $billions of our money on the ISS and shuttle, which both should have been scrapped a decade ago. However, that doesn't mean that Rutan has done anything useful either. Compared to *real* space activities, he is just puttering around. By the time he builds anything that could safely get humans in and out of orbit (which would require 100X his current fuel capacity, heat shields, life support systems, etc.), his "shoestring budgets" would be totally busted.
Rutan 1 (low earth orbit vehicle on a shoe string budget)
He has not put a vehicle into orbit. He launched a flimsy rocketplane into a little parabola with only about 1% of the energy required to reach orbit. Nor will his next design achieve orbit.
Get back to me when you get your basic facts straight.
That would provide an initial base for the astronauts going to the moon and give the ISS a purpose other than performing yet more studies on the effect of micro gravity on humans.
That's right: Its new purpose would be the pointless study of the effects of cosmic radiation and solar storms on humans who would enjoy neither the deflection of the earth's magnetosphere nor the shelter of a layer of moon dirt.
What if it's ability to enter cells and "to usurp traditional biological protective mechanisms" is precicely what we need to cure AIDS, cancer, and every other ailment mankind faces from natural threats that definitely can "usurp... protective mechanisms"?
Great, then we can make powerful drugs with nanoparticles. But that just reinforces the point that maybe we should think twice before going along with current trends, such as liberally slathering nanoparticle-laced sunscreen on ourselves.
It's stealing: you're depriving the intellectual property owner of one of their property rights, i.e. exclusivity. The same way I may choose who gets to stay in my realty (i.e. I control the exclusivity of the property)
You seem doubly confused. If someone violates the "exlusivity" of your property, that's called trespassing, not theft.
Don't you remember 2006? When the largest upheaval in Congressional history happened, giving a clear mandate to our lawmakers to end the war? Somehow that didn't happen.
Due to the threat of filibusters, until you get 60% of the Senate on the same page, nothing changes. That's what happened.
It's actually saying to take Linux, and shift it "windows" bit places to the left. I have no idea what that gets you.
Well, it's shifting the bits to the right rather than left. If we assume that the Linux OS disk image is a single unsigned integer of magnitude around 8^(5e8), then shift that number right by a similarly sized Windows integer, then we always get a final result of zero. (Which would make the original statement False.)
Intel tried to push the complexities of increasing computing speed off into software before. When they designed the Itanium, they figured that the software compiler would magically find extra concurrency in the apps and utilize the large number of functional units in the core, and that this would make other architectures obsolete. Well, it didn't quite work out as they planned.
Hopefully they won't spend $Billions going down the "hypothetical software will enable radical hardware changes" road again just to learn the same lesson as last time.
you wouldn't make a railway bridge out of aluminium nor a plane out of steel
The main reason that they don't make railway bridges out of aluminum is that it costs somewhat more than steel. Otherwise, it would probably be a superior solution because it's not subject to as many corrosion problems. If there were suddenly a huge shortage of steel, you very well might see railway bridges made from aluminum.
Likewise, airplanes have been constructed with large amounts of steel. For example, the Mach 3 XB-70 Valkyrie was made largely of stainless steel honeycomb for heat resistance. At any rate, the recent trend has been to replace aluminum in aircraft with composites anyway, which is an example of the concept of finding substitute materials, which from your posts you seem to be unable to comprehend.
IMO, assuming that mankind solves the singlular problem of finding a sufficiently large source of energy (such as fusion, solar, etc.), then we could probably support most of our modern civilization exclusively using stuff fabricated out of the most abundant dozen or so elements in the earth's crust and oceans. This would provide, among other things, aluminum, most ceramics, and essentially all organic materials. These materials, possibly augmented by nanoengineering advances, could most likely eventually be substituted for any materials we are using today. There is little chance that we would exhaust any of the top dozen elements within any foreseeable timeframe.
Researchers need to calibrate real-world scales to measure macroscopic objects. You can't do this by calibrating a 1e-27 gram scale then "multiplying".
why not use, say, electrons, as in 1kg=weight of 1.1xxxe30 electrons (at rest)?
They tried that, but when they charged their terafarad capacitor with 1e30 electrons so that they could calibrate their scale, somebody accidentally grounded it and the massive arc of current blew the roof off of the lab.
Slashdot Mirror
All I'm presuming is the geologist will have a vehicle and the same instrument suite the MER's do.
Well, I assumed that you wanted to do something new that the MERs haven't already done. There's certainly no point now in sending humans at 1000X the cost to do what's already been done.
If we hadn't sent robotic probes, your human mission would still not even have launched by now, so we still got the results earlier this way.
Well, if it were a contest between you trying doing all that in a bulky space suit before your oxygen runs out vs a housecat-sized nuclear powered robot that could patiently spend months exploring one cave, I'd put my money on the robot.
Given that a human geologist can accomplish in a month what it has take both Spirit and Opportunity years to do...
That's mainly because you're presuming that the humans will bring along an entire geology lab and a base station to do their work.
So instead of sending humans (who will spend 99% of their time and money in the harrowing effort of simply not getting killed), send a robotic base station and geology lab instead. Throw in a bunch of rovers to gather the samples for the lab, and you'll most likely get more science done at 1/10th the cost of a human mission.
If they say "IE 6.latest" or "Foxpro 2.latest" doesn't count as "latest" and those versions have no known unpatched vulnerabilities not shared by IE 7.latest or Foxpro 3.latest then they aren't counting properly.
I agree. dBASE III works just fine for me, and I see no reason to update to dBASE IV when Ashton Tate currently provides the same level of support for both.
Fine. But you'd still be crazy to browse the web from an OS that hasn't had any security updates in years.
I still keep around a machine with a Win98 partition. It stays strictly local.
I think you have sampling bias. The sun looks yellowish at the only times of the day that most people can stand to even glance at it: the morning and evening. That's because it's filtered through lots of dust in the atmosphere. Look at a sheet of paper in the sunlight at high noon on a clear day. It won't look yellow at all.
The resource on the moon is the isotope He3. It might be useful for certain fusion scenarios. However, investing $billions now would be putting the cart before the horse.
We don't know if *any* kind of hot or cold fusion will be feasible with any fuel. IIRC, He3 will be harder to fuse (but less radioactive) than the usual D/T combination. OTOH, there are other more abundant fuels, harder to fuse than He3, which would also have low radioactivity. We'll have to see which, if any, fusion reactors end up as workable possibilities.
The He3 is in trace quantities distributed across the surface of the moon. Mining it would require gathering moon dirt in quantities comparable to the amount of coal mined here on earth, then distilling a few tons of He3 annually from these countless megatons of dust. This doesn't seem economical with any foreseeable space technology.
The huge amounts of money it would take to develop this moon fuel capability would probably be better spent on fusion cycles that don't need He3, or other energy technologies altogether.
"According to iBiquity, the name "HD Radio" is simply iBiquity's brand for its digital radio technology,[6] and does not stand for "Hybrid Digital" or "High Definition" such as HDTV does."
Ain't it funny how random coincidences work out. The odds against picking a 2-letter brand name that happen to match the acronym for "High Definition" are 676-to-1. And, gosh darn it, they just happened to hit it!
I bet they were pretty surprised by that one.
How many School Teachers, Pilots, and Scientists has NASA lost in the last 20 years again?
Fourteen, after having achieved several man-years in orbit
How many has Rutan lost?
Three, after having achieved about 5 man-minutes in a parabola
Look, NASA has been stupid, bloated and has wasted hundreds of $billions of our money on the ISS and shuttle, which both should have been scrapped a decade ago. However, that doesn't mean that Rutan has done anything useful either. Compared to *real* space activities, he is just puttering around. By the time he builds anything that could safely get humans in and out of orbit (which would require 100X his current fuel capacity, heat shields, life support systems, etc.), his "shoestring budgets" would be totally busted.
Rutan 1 (low earth orbit vehicle on a shoe string budget)
He has not put a vehicle into orbit. He launched a flimsy rocketplane into a little parabola with only about 1% of the energy required to reach orbit. Nor will his next design achieve orbit.
Get back to me when you get your basic facts straight.
That would provide an initial base for the astronauts going to the moon and give the ISS a purpose other than performing yet more studies on the effect of micro gravity on humans.
That's right: Its new purpose would be the pointless study of the effects of cosmic radiation and solar storms on humans who would enjoy neither the deflection of the earth's magnetosphere nor the shelter of a layer of moon dirt.
Why don't they just outsource it to Burt Rutan and get out of his way.
Because as of yet he has only achieved a small subset of what the X-15 had already accomplished by 1963.
Before the make more energy than it takes to build them.
No, the idea is that you have to set the panels outside in the *sunlight*. You don't set them up next to you on the couch in your mom's basement.
I bet you would be singing a different tune if 911 didn't answer~
911 is for cases not covered by free speech. For example, you call 911 if there's a fire in a crowded theater.
What if it's ability to enter cells and "to usurp traditional biological protective mechanisms" is precicely what we need to cure AIDS, cancer, and every other ailment mankind faces from natural threats that definitely can "usurp ... protective mechanisms"?
Great, then we can make powerful drugs with nanoparticles. But that just reinforces the point that maybe we should think twice before going along with current trends, such as liberally slathering nanoparticle-laced sunscreen on ourselves.
It's stealing: you're depriving the intellectual property owner of one of their property rights, i.e. exclusivity. The same way I may choose who gets to stay in my realty (i.e. I control the exclusivity of the property)
You seem doubly confused. If someone violates the "exlusivity" of your property, that's called trespassing, not theft.
You certainly did not get this right. The GP specifically asked how the mandate to end the war was ignored.
Don't you remember 2006? When the largest upheaval in Congressional history happened, giving a clear mandate to our lawmakers to end the war? Somehow that didn't happen.
Due to the threat of filibusters, until you get 60% of the Senate on the same page, nothing changes. That's what happened.
It's actually saying to take Linux, and shift it "windows" bit places to the left. I have no idea what that gets you.
Well, it's shifting the bits to the right rather than left. If we assume that the Linux OS disk image is a single unsigned integer of magnitude around 8^(5e8), then shift that number right by a similarly sized Windows integer, then we always get a final result of zero. (Which would make the original statement False.)
Intel tried to push the complexities of increasing computing speed off into software before. When they designed the Itanium, they figured that the software compiler would magically find extra concurrency in the apps and utilize the large number of functional units in the core, and that this would make other architectures obsolete. Well, it didn't quite work out as they planned.
Hopefully they won't spend $Billions going down the "hypothetical software will enable radical hardware changes" road again just to learn the same lesson as last time.
you wouldn't make a railway bridge out of aluminium nor a plane out of steel
The main reason that they don't make railway bridges out of aluminum is that it costs somewhat more than steel. Otherwise, it would probably be a superior solution because it's not subject to as many corrosion problems. If there were suddenly a huge shortage of steel, you very well might see railway bridges made from aluminum.
Likewise, airplanes have been constructed with large amounts of steel. For example, the Mach 3 XB-70 Valkyrie was made largely of stainless steel honeycomb for heat resistance. At any rate, the recent trend has been to replace aluminum in aircraft with composites anyway, which is an example of the concept of finding substitute materials, which from your posts you seem to be unable to comprehend.
IMO, assuming that mankind solves the singlular problem of finding a sufficiently large source of energy (such as fusion, solar, etc.), then we could probably support most of our modern civilization exclusively using stuff fabricated out of the most abundant dozen or so elements in the earth's crust and oceans. This would provide, among other things, aluminum, most ceramics, and essentially all organic materials. These materials, possibly augmented by nanoengineering advances, could most likely eventually be substituted for any materials we are using today. There is little chance that we would exhaust any of the top dozen elements within any foreseeable timeframe.
Researchers need to calibrate real-world scales to measure macroscopic objects. You can't do this by calibrating a 1e-27 gram scale then "multiplying".
why not use, say, electrons, as in 1kg=weight of 1.1xxxe30 electrons (at rest)?
They tried that, but when they charged their terafarad capacitor with 1e30 electrons so that they could calibrate their scale, somebody accidentally grounded it and the massive arc of current blew the roof off of the lab.
What did you do, sneak in and take his final exam for him?