And those same ultra-high-capacity 120GB hard drives have horrible seek times. SCSI is so much better there...
How the hell does the data interface have jack to do with seek times??? Seek time is a function of drive mechanics only. It is the average time it takes for the arms to move the heads to the right track and for the track to spin to the place where the data actually is. So, it is a function of actuator speed, and platter speed. Basically, the same size 10000RPM SCSI drive and 10000RPM IDE drive from the same manufacturer will have the same seek time.
The correct statement is that manufacturers do not make 10000RPM and 15000RPM IDE drives, therefore if you need the fastest seek times you are forced to go with SCSI.
The unit of charge should be the charge on a down quark. (1/3 e)
Actualy e is probably the better unit since it is much easier to observe, and no one has actually observed a charge that was not an integer multiple of e (within measurement error). Free quarks don't exist at currently available energies.
The basic units of time, length, and mass should be chosen so that G,c, and hBar = 1. Those are the constant of universal gravitation, the speed of light, and Planck's constant (a constant from quantum mechanics related to wave/particle duality.)
I don't think G works since it has its basis in classical mechanics instead of general relativity.
Personally, I don't think it matters what the basic unit is as long as the standard used to determine that unit is repeatable to a very high degree of accuracy. The standard for the second is probably the best example. I believe the current standard has to do with the energy transitions of a Cesium atom. But, the is that if you put two of Cesium clocks next to each other, and count the ticks you won't see the tick counts diverge for a long time.
Since I recently heard that microsoft could sell windows for around $45 and make a profit (I think that's right), if they really want to make sure linux doesn't take over, knock the price of windows down. More people would be willing to buy windows xp if it was $50 rather than $200. I know they want to make a big profit, but I think if they got more sales (by discounts on prices) they would have more volume. But what do I know, I'm not a marketing analyst.
Doesn't work since Microsoft is a monopoly. They have about 90% market share. So, to make the calculations easy, let's say the market is 1 million people. And, lowering the price to $50 would get MS 100% market share. Currently there are 900,000 units at $200 or $180,000,000. If they lowered the price to $50 they would only get $50,000,000. So, lowering prices isn't a good move.
Of course that is realy simplistic. It doesn't take into account the people who just stick with their old version of Windows because of the increased price that might upgrade if the price were lower. But, the monopoly situation helps with that too, eventually most of the people sitting on the old version will upgrade because they get a new computer, or a new gadget that requires the new verison. And, MS gets the money that way.
The new lcensing scheme just demonstrates that MS has a monopoly. Increasing price will increase their revenue because there isn't sufficient competition to cause enough people to defect such that reduced voume will result in reduced revenue.
This has a significant impact on the logistics of DMCA suits. It means that these plaintiffs in similar actions will have to determine the appropriate jurisdiction for for their suits and will not always have the home court advantages (mostly of pushing up the costs of defendants who have to travel from other jurisdictions). While not a major victory over DMCA, this is a definite victory in constraining DMCA's implementation.
Actually, thsi ruling will have zero impact on DMCA suits. As this suit was not brought as a DMCA suit, but a California Trade Secrets suit. A DMCA suit would be brought in Federal Court over which the California Supreme Court has no jurisdiction.
I repeat this ruling has no impact on DMCA suits whatsoever.
Basically, what you have shown is that in a small organization it doesn't make sense to have some one whose job is to support software unless you can fill that person's time with stuff. Instead a support contract allows you to purchase a portion of a person's time. And, it becomes the commercial entities job to figure out how much support they have to provide, and to hire the appropriate number of people to support the entire group of customers, not just a single installation. Plus, by having mor ethan one person that commercial entity is not impacted by a single person departing as badly.
trying to catch up to the leading server OS's, like Solaris or IRIX
Trying to catch up?? What freaking planet have you been living on for the past 2 years? IRIX's core market, movie animation, has all but vanished due to Linux. Sun is running about as scared as they ever have over Solaris. It's very fair to say that open source has done a wee more than just "catch up".
And, bringing it back to the user itnerface issue, doesn't Solaris 9 use Gnome?
Junkyard Wars is a scavenger hunt for planted materials.
Some stuff is definitely planted because you just wouldn't find it in a junkyard (rocket engines, steam engine...) As for the rest, take a few large junkyards, remove the 80% of stuff that is complete crap. And, that is what they give the contestants. So, I would go with the term pre-filtered junk instead of planted junk. You could do it yourself, except you would have to do the prefiltering part causing things to take much much longer.
http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/desk/ds180gxp.htm [ibm.com] Deskstar 180GXP - Average seek time - 8.5 ms and to here: http://www.seagate.com/cda/products/discsales/mark eting/detail/0,1081,549,00.html [seagate.com] 15K.3 Model Number: ST373453LC Seek time: 3.6 ms avg
Do you really expect people to take this sentence seriously!! You are comparing a 7200RPM drive to a 15000RPM drive and claiming SCSI is faster. You obviously have no idea what seek time is. Average seek time is solely a factor of platter size, rotational speed, and speed of the read/write actuators. The interface is insignificant. Slap a SCSI interface on the IBM drive and the seek time would be identical, slap an IDE interface on the Seagate drive and the seek time would be the same. You shoto down your own argument before it even gets started.
Useful in what sense? There's nothing on the moon that we need or want, at least not with current technologies at hand. If you put some kind of space station in a gravitationally unstable point, like L1, then you can use it to launch trips to points elsewhere very inexpensively. (Assuming the cost of maintaining the orbit of the L1 station turns out to be manageable.) Once you're at L1, you've basically spent all the energy you need to spend to get out of the Earth-moon system. Refueling or restaging at L1 for longer trips to Mars and elsewhere makes a lot of sense.
Science fiction from the late 1900's aside, moon bases just don't make that much sense right now.
A moon base would make sense as a complement to the L1 station. If there is water it could provide fuel, food, and water for the L1 station. If enough raw materials were available spacecraft parts could be built there. Basically, if material launched from the moon could replace sufficient material launched from the earth there would be a significant savings in fuel.
I think there is a conflict of terms here. If the earth became a black hole the event horizon would have a radius of about 1 cm. The actual mass of the earth, on the other hand, would have to be compressed to the point where density would become infinite, thus a really small volume.
Nope, the earth would only have to be compressed to 1cm. Which is also the radius of the event horizon. At this point nothing we know of could stop gravity from collapsing the matter to infinite density. Of, course this all happens inside the event horizon, so we can't be sure what actually happens. Basically, we can handle the physics right up to the point where the event horizon appears i.e. light can no longer escape. After that there can be only guesses.
The whole idea behind a black hole is that it is a point with the mass of a star. If it was the size of a star with a really large mass, then it would just be a big star. I really don't believe that a black hole can occupy a volume, else it wouldn't work.
Actually, no one really knows. General Relativity suggests that the mass collapses to a point of infinite density, but that might be an artifact of the mathematics. No one knows what happens inside an event horizon, and according to current physics you cannot know, since nothing escapes the event horizon. For all we know gravitational collapse could stop and there could be a ball of something inside the event horizon. Or, the matter collapses until it rips a hole in space time, and come out somewhere else.
Pretty much CNN got the information screwed up. Read the space.com article it is better. Pluto is 5 1/2 light hours away, so the gist of the data is that there is a mass of 2.6 million to 3.6 million with in the closest approach of the observed star i.e. 17 light hours or about 3 times the size of the solar system. The space.com article states this is 2100 times the radius of the predicted event horizon, or 29 light seconds. (17*3600/2100) For comparison mercury is 3.5 light minutes from the Sun.
Of course it is ethical. Right now we produce far more than enough food to feed the entire world, though perhaps not healthily since we didn't actually evolve to eat all these carbohydrates.
More importantly, is growing plants the most efficient way to convert sunlight to usable energy? Which gets you more useable energy growing corn on 1 acre of land for 10 years? Or, 1 acre of photovoltaics for 10 years? Which one results in more energy net energy inputs?
Then you have to consider which process results in more hydrogen for mobile applications. Photovoltaics & electrolysis of water. Or, corn plus the process described in the article.
Diesel engines tend to emit a lot of acrid balck smoke. You can filter it out of the exhaust with a corresponding reduction in power output from the increased back-pressure.
On the other hand due to the higher efficiency of a diesel engine. You should get less total combustion by products i.e. fewer by products per mile. So, that begs the question of what is worse, particulate pollution or higher overall pollution?
That's fine as there's nothing up there. In a tunnel, there ain't much up. Under a city bus...
The gas tank on a city bus explodes it spreads burning gasoline on anyone and everyone in and around it, and that gasolinecontinues to burn. Hydrogen is a gas, it doesn't stick to anything. It burns and dissipates very quickly. If the bus doesn't have anything easily flammable, there is no fire after a few seconds, unlike gasoline that will continue burning for minutes.
Also, a pressurized hydrogen tank is more likely to be punctured rather than explode. So, the gas spews out of the puncture. If it happens to get ignited, you get an invisible plume of burning hydrogen in one direction, but no explosion. Why? Because there is no oxygen in the tank to combust and generate enough pressure to cause an explosion, and he outgassing is rapid enough that the tank doesn't heat up much either. A leaking tank of gasoline leaves a very combustible liquid on the ground. If the leak ignites it burns to the tank, and the tank explodes.
That is two situations where I would argue hydrogen is safer than gasoline in a car. I can't think of a reasonable one where it is not.
That is because, what people call attractive designs, for the most part, are more aerodynamic driven backwards!! The most aerodynamic shape is a teardrop shape, round in front, and pointy in back. Look out your window as you drive down the freeway and think about how many of those cars you see, are exactly the opposite.
We do have nuclear powered spacecraft, anything going much beyond jupiter uses an RTG which is basically a chunk of plutonium used to make electricity, although not by fission, but by capturing the energy of decay.
But, we don't use it to escape earth because no one has a way to get a enough energy out of a nuclear reaction safely and quickly enough, and transfer that energy to reaction mass to push a spacecraft out of earth's atmosphere. Now, once out of earths atmosphere RTGs combined with an ION engine could be used for propulsion, and would be extremely efficient.
The energy comes from the reaction of the hydrogen with the oxygen inside the fuel cell, there's your source...
And, hydrogen for that reaction is produced by the electrolysis of water, at a net loss of energy. Where does the energy for the hydrogen come from???? Hydrogen will replace petroleum as an energy storage medium, but it will require an extensive build out of solar, fission, and/or fusion power production to be plausible.
Bullshit. The richer deposits are already playing out, and while I'm sure there's a goodly quantity of U ore somewhere in the earth's crust, it will take more and more energy to retrieve it.
Really?? That seems weird. Just where is all that Uranium going? Could you please expound and site some references?
However, there is one thing about a space station that everyone seems to be missing, and that is the absence of gravity. Studying physical, chemical and biological processes in such an environment has a tremendous potential payback, both scientifically and economically (e.g., producing extremely pure crystals, pharmaceutical applications, etc.)
That was the gravy I mentioned.
Also, a space station allows us to study the effects of zero gravity on the human body. Could be useful when using the space station as a stepping stone.
Yes, Bingo. But, let's call it what it is instead of coming up with other stupid justifications.
However, consider that all these ambitious colonization plans are going to be much more expensive than the ISS. A space station that (hopefully) is a huge success could pave the way (politically and in terms of budget allocation) for greater things.
Again, correct. But, call it what it is, one step in the process of putting people on other planets permanently. We need to quit trying to come up with other justifications. Oh, and cost is kind of hard to quantify since it gets spread out over a lot of years. On top of that, one theme you missed was self-sufficiency, and hopefully extra productivity beyond that, in order to change the net movement of resources from Earth to Space into Space to Earth. And, also the cost will be reduced by reducing the amount of stuff that has to be hauled out of earths gravity by building large things using material from places with less gravity.
Why are we building the International Space Station?
Good question. Personally, I think all current official justifications of the space program are pretty weak. The only long term goal of the space program is should be very simple. The eventual self-sufficient colonization of the rest of the solar system, and subsequently extra-solar planets.
The current justification for the space station is weak, it should be called what it is and the majority of the work should be focused on the end goal. Any additional science is gravy. The space station is a stepping stone, the next step is the moon. Which requires thorough robotic exploration in order to locate materials suitable for use in developing human habitation (food, water), spacecraft fuel, and building material.
From the moon you build and launch additional spacecraft for shuttling between the space station and the moon. You also build the craft for exploring, exploiting, and eventually colonizing other locations in the solar system.
Once we can self sufficiently colonize locations in this solar system, the next (and much more difficult) step is to find other solar systems to colonize. The first job will be finding systems with the raw materials for human colonization. Then, barring discovery of FTL, we will need to turn a large asteroid, or conglomeration of asteroids (i.e. icy, rocky, metallic) into a colonyship with a nuclear(fission or fusion) energy source, machines and equipment, and enough people to maintain a population for the lifetimes it will take to get to another system, and begin exploiting the resources available to do the same things we did in our solar system.
Can this happen soon? Not a chance, it is the project of multiple lifetimes. But, each step is simply an evolution of what was done before, and is definitely possible. The key to everything is the moon, it is a nearby source of raw materials with low gravity, launching stuff form the moon is a hell of a lot easier than from earth. Eventually, the only thing you would want launched from earth are people and light stuff.
Diesel generally has more particulate emissions, on the other hand you use a lot less per mile driven. So, take the jetta example, a jetta unleaded 4 might get 30 miles/gallon, but the jetta TDI gets 50 miles per gallon. So, for every 50 miles driven the unleaded puts out 1.67 gallons worth of emissions vs the 1 gallon worth the diesel.
So, then the question is whether you would rather have 1 gallon worht of diesel emissions or 1.6 gallaons worth of unleaded emission?
The hardware sounds great until you realize that unless your customers want to pay at least a $500 start-up fee for their CPE they'll be using, you're going to get killed in hardware costs. Mostly user-end. You expect the APs to cost alot!
If you could get 1200 customers in a 2 mile radius. This isn't so bad. The AP is about $25 per customer, so that is fairly trivial. Then, $500 per customer for the premises equipment is $42 a month for a year. You of course then need at few T1s/T3s to provide access to those customers (I don't know what MB/customer a backend would want). Let's call it 2 T1/AP or 12T1 or ~$12000/month or $10/customer/month.
So, from a co-op stand point, you could offer two choices: a) $525/user startup, and say $15/month. The extra mooney going into a reserve fund to cover busted AP, and possibly future upgrades.
b) $70/month until the startup costs are covered and then $15/month.
Although if Nokia got their CPE to $500 or less I think it works better due to the NLOS nature of the system, my area doesn't get cable or DSL because Adelphia is going bankrupt, and Verizon doesn' do squat to expand DSL coverage. And, there are too many trees to get good LOS.
I think the court did screw up here. It probably should have declared the 1953 law adding the words under god unconstituional. Not the entire pledge or even saying it in school.
Can you name another law that specifically mandates that God be referred to? I don't think money has a law that says it should say "In God we Trust". But, it was designed that way, so it is no big deal.
The pledge was said for 100years without under god, and only in the last 50 without it. So, there is no tradition of the pledge including under god, I woudl say it is the exact opposite. Therefore, I think there is no question that Congress enacted a law that made a religious statement which is blatantly unconstitutional.
Slashdot Mirror
And those same ultra-high-capacity 120GB hard drives have horrible seek times. SCSI is so much better there...
How the hell does the data interface have jack to do with seek times??? Seek time is a function of drive mechanics only. It is the average time it takes for the arms to move the heads to the right track and for the track to spin to the place where the data actually is. So, it is a function of actuator speed, and platter speed. Basically, the same size 10000RPM SCSI drive and 10000RPM IDE drive from the same manufacturer will have the same seek time.
The correct statement is that manufacturers do not make 10000RPM and 15000RPM IDE drives, therefore if you need the fastest seek times you are forced to go with SCSI.
The unit of charge should be the charge on a down quark. (1/3 e)
Actualy e is probably the better unit since it is much easier to observe, and no one has actually observed a charge that was not an integer multiple of e (within measurement error). Free quarks don't exist at currently available energies.
The basic units of time, length, and mass should be chosen so that G,c, and hBar = 1. Those are the constant of universal gravitation, the speed of light, and Planck's constant (a constant from quantum mechanics related to wave/particle duality.)
I don't think G works since it has its basis in classical mechanics instead of general relativity.
Personally, I don't think it matters what the basic unit is as long as the standard used to determine that unit is repeatable to a very high degree of accuracy. The standard for the second is probably the best example. I believe the current standard has to do with the energy transitions of a Cesium atom. But, the is that if you put two of Cesium clocks next to each other, and count the ticks you won't see the tick counts diverge for a long time.
Since I recently heard that microsoft could sell windows for around $45 and make a profit (I think that's right), if they really want to make sure linux doesn't take over, knock the price of windows down. More people would be willing to buy windows xp if it was $50 rather than $200. I know they want to make a big profit, but I think if they got more sales (by discounts on prices) they would have more volume. But what do I know, I'm not a marketing analyst.
Doesn't work since Microsoft is a monopoly. They have about 90% market share. So, to make the calculations easy, let's say the market is 1 million people. And, lowering the price to $50 would get MS 100% market share. Currently there are 900,000 units at $200 or $180,000,000. If they lowered the price to $50 they would only get $50,000,000. So, lowering prices isn't a good move.
Of course that is realy simplistic. It doesn't take into account the people who just stick with their old version of Windows because of the increased price that might upgrade if the price were lower. But, the monopoly situation helps with that too, eventually most of the people sitting on the old version will upgrade because they get a new computer, or a new gadget that requires the new verison. And, MS gets the money that way.
The new lcensing scheme just demonstrates that MS has a monopoly. Increasing price will increase their revenue because there isn't sufficient competition to cause enough people to defect such that reduced voume will result in reduced revenue.
Dastardly
This has a significant impact on the logistics of DMCA suits. It means that these plaintiffs in similar actions will have to determine the appropriate jurisdiction for for their suits and will not always have the home court advantages (mostly of pushing up the costs of defendants who have to travel from other jurisdictions). While not a major victory over DMCA, this is a definite victory in constraining DMCA's implementation.
Actually, thsi ruling will have zero impact on DMCA suits. As this suit was not brought as a DMCA suit, but a California Trade Secrets suit. A DMCA suit would be brought in Federal Court over which the California Supreme Court has no jurisdiction.
I repeat this ruling has no impact on DMCA suits whatsoever.
Basically, what you have shown is that in a small organization it doesn't make sense to have some one whose job is to support software unless you can fill that person's time with stuff. Instead a support contract allows you to purchase a portion of a person's time. And, it becomes the commercial entities job to figure out how much support they have to provide, and to hire the appropriate number of people to support the entire group of customers, not just a single installation. Plus, by having mor ethan one person that commercial entity is not impacted by a single person departing as badly.
Don
trying to catch up to the leading server OS's, like Solaris or IRIX
Trying to catch up?? What freaking planet have you been living on for the past 2 years? IRIX's core market, movie animation, has all but vanished due to Linux. Sun is running about as scared as they ever have over Solaris. It's very fair to say that open source has done a wee more than just "catch up".
And, bringing it back to the user itnerface issue, doesn't Solaris 9 use Gnome?
Don
Then the International Space Station and the astronauts aboard are extraterrestrial too.
I wonder if it is E. Coli...
Junkyard Wars is a scavenger hunt for planted materials.
Some stuff is definitely planted because you just wouldn't find it in a junkyard (rocket engines, steam engine...) As for the rest, take a few large junkyards, remove the 80% of stuff that is complete crap. And, that is what they give the contestants. So, I would go with the term pre-filtered junk instead of planted junk. You could do it yourself, except you would have to do the prefiltering part causing things to take much much longer.
http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/desk/ds180gxp.htm [ibm.com] Deskstar 180GXP - Average seek time - 8.5 msk eting/detail/0,1081,549,00.html [seagate.com] 15K.3 Model Number: ST373453LC Seek time: 3.6 ms avg
and to here: http://www.seagate.com/cda/products/discsales/mar
Do you really expect people to take this sentence seriously!! You are comparing a 7200RPM drive to a 15000RPM drive and claiming SCSI is faster. You obviously have no idea what seek time is. Average seek time is solely a factor of platter size, rotational speed, and speed of the read/write actuators. The interface is insignificant. Slap a SCSI interface on the IBM drive and the seek time would be identical, slap an IDE interface on the Seagate drive and the seek time would be the same. You shoto down your own argument before it even gets started.
Don
Useful in what sense? There's nothing on the moon that we need or want, at least not with current technologies at hand. If you put some kind of space station in a gravitationally unstable point, like L1, then you can use it to launch trips to points elsewhere very inexpensively. (Assuming the cost of maintaining the orbit of the L1 station turns out to be manageable.) Once you're at L1, you've basically spent all the energy you need to spend to get out of the Earth-moon system. Refueling or restaging at L1 for longer trips to Mars and elsewhere makes a lot of sense.
Science fiction from the late 1900's aside, moon bases just don't make that much sense right now.
A moon base would make sense as a complement to the L1 station. If there is water it could provide fuel, food, and water for the L1 station. If enough raw materials were available spacecraft parts could be built there. Basically, if material launched from the moon could replace sufficient material launched from the earth there would be a significant savings in fuel.
I think there is a conflict of terms here. If the earth became a black hole the event horizon would have a radius of about 1 cm. The actual mass of the earth, on the other hand, would have to be compressed to the point where density would become infinite, thus a really small volume.
Nope, the earth would only have to be compressed to 1cm. Which is also the radius of the event horizon. At this point nothing we know of could stop gravity from collapsing the matter to infinite density. Of, course this all happens inside the event horizon, so we can't be sure what actually happens. Basically, we can handle the physics right up to the point where the event horizon appears i.e. light can no longer escape. After that there can be only guesses.
The whole idea behind a black hole is that it is a point with the mass of a star. If it was the size of a star with a really large mass, then it would just be a big star. I really don't believe that a black hole can occupy a volume, else it wouldn't work.
Actually, no one really knows. General Relativity suggests that the mass collapses to a point of infinite density, but that might be an artifact of the mathematics. No one knows what happens inside an event horizon, and according to current physics you cannot know, since nothing escapes the event horizon. For all we know gravitational collapse could stop and there could be a ball of something inside the event horizon. Or, the matter collapses until it rips a hole in space time, and come out somewhere else.
Pretty much CNN got the information screwed up. Read the space.com article it is better. Pluto is 5 1/2 light hours away, so the gist of the data is that there is a mass of 2.6 million to 3.6 million with in the closest approach of the observed star i.e. 17 light hours or about 3 times the size of the solar system. The space.com article states this is 2100 times the radius of the predicted event horizon, or 29 light seconds. (17*3600/2100) For comparison mercury is 3.5 light minutes from the Sun.
Dastardly
I'd think an easier solution would be to call 1 800 555-1212, get Southwest's toll-free number from them, and then call that number.
Skip paying for directory assistance, 1-800-I-FLY-SWA.
Of course it is ethical. Right now we produce far more than enough food to feed the entire world, though perhaps not healthily since we didn't actually evolve to eat all these carbohydrates.
More importantly, is growing plants the most efficient way to convert sunlight to usable energy? Which gets you more useable energy growing corn on 1 acre of land for 10 years? Or, 1 acre of photovoltaics for 10 years? Which one results in more energy net energy inputs?
Then you have to consider which process results in more hydrogen for mobile applications. Photovoltaics & electrolysis of water. Or, corn plus the process described in the article.
Dastardly
Diesel engines tend to emit a lot of acrid balck smoke. You can filter it out of the exhaust with a corresponding reduction in power output from the increased back-pressure.
On the other hand due to the higher efficiency of a diesel engine. You should get less total combustion by products i.e. fewer by products per mile. So, that begs the question of what is worse, particulate pollution or higher overall pollution?
That's fine as there's nothing up there. In a tunnel, there ain't much up. Under a city bus...
The gas tank on a city bus explodes it spreads burning gasoline on anyone and everyone in and around it, and that gasolinecontinues to burn. Hydrogen is a gas, it doesn't stick to anything. It burns and dissipates very quickly. If the bus doesn't have anything easily flammable, there is no fire after a few seconds, unlike gasoline that will continue burning for minutes.
Also, a pressurized hydrogen tank is more likely to be punctured rather than explode. So, the gas spews out of the puncture. If it happens to get ignited, you get an invisible plume of burning hydrogen in one direction, but no explosion. Why? Because there is no oxygen in the tank to combust and generate enough pressure to cause an explosion, and he outgassing is rapid enough that the tank doesn't heat up much either. A leaking tank of gasoline leaves a very combustible liquid on the ground. If the leak ignites it burns to the tank, and the tank explodes.
That is two situations where I would argue hydrogen is safer than gasoline in a car. I can't think of a reasonable one where it is not.
Dastardly
That is because, what people call attractive designs, for the most part, are more aerodynamic driven backwards!! The most aerodynamic shape is a teardrop shape, round in front, and pointy in back. Look out your window as you drive down the freeway and think about how many of those cars you see, are exactly the opposite.
We do have nuclear powered spacecraft, anything going much beyond jupiter uses an RTG which is basically a chunk of plutonium used to make electricity, although not by fission, but by capturing the energy of decay.
But, we don't use it to escape earth because no one has a way to get a enough energy out of a nuclear reaction safely and quickly enough, and transfer that energy to reaction mass to push a spacecraft out of earth's atmosphere. Now, once out of earths atmosphere RTGs combined with an ION engine could be used for propulsion, and would be extremely efficient.
The energy comes from the reaction of the hydrogen with the oxygen inside the fuel cell, there's your source...
And, hydrogen for that reaction is produced by the electrolysis of water, at a net loss of energy. Where does the energy for the hydrogen come from???? Hydrogen will replace petroleum as an energy storage medium, but it will require an extensive build out of solar, fission, and/or fusion power production to be plausible.
Bullshit. The richer deposits are already playing out, and while I'm sure there's a goodly quantity of U ore somewhere in the earth's crust, it will take more and more energy to retrieve it.
Really?? That seems weird. Just where is all that Uranium going? Could you please expound and site some references?
However, there is one thing about a space station that everyone seems to be missing, and that is the absence of gravity. Studying physical, chemical and biological processes in such an environment has a tremendous potential payback, both scientifically and economically (e.g., producing extremely pure crystals, pharmaceutical applications, etc.)
That was the gravy I mentioned.
Also, a space station allows us to study the effects of zero gravity on the human body. Could be useful when using the space station as a stepping stone.
Yes, Bingo. But, let's call it what it is instead of coming up with other stupid justifications.
However, consider that all these ambitious colonization plans are going to be much more expensive than the ISS. A space station that (hopefully) is a huge success could pave the way (politically and in terms of budget allocation) for greater things.
Again, correct. But, call it what it is, one step in the process of putting people on other planets permanently. We need to quit trying to come up with other justifications. Oh, and cost is kind of hard to quantify since it gets spread out over a lot of years. On top of that, one theme you missed was self-sufficiency, and hopefully extra productivity beyond that, in order to change the net movement of resources from Earth to Space into Space to Earth. And, also the cost will be reduced by reducing the amount of stuff that has to be hauled out of earths gravity by building large things using material from places with less gravity.
Dastardly
Why are we building the International Space Station?
Good question. Personally, I think all current official justifications of the space program are pretty weak. The only long term goal of the space program is should be very simple. The eventual self-sufficient colonization of the rest of the solar system, and subsequently extra-solar planets.
The current justification for the space station is weak, it should be called what it is and the majority of the work should be focused on the end goal. Any additional science is gravy. The space station is a stepping stone, the next step is the moon. Which requires thorough robotic exploration in order to locate materials suitable for use in developing human habitation (food, water), spacecraft fuel, and building material.
From the moon you build and launch additional spacecraft for shuttling between the space station and the moon. You also build the craft for exploring, exploiting, and eventually colonizing other locations in the solar system.
Once we can self sufficiently colonize locations in this solar system, the next (and much more difficult) step is to find other solar systems to colonize. The first job will be finding systems with the raw materials for human colonization. Then, barring discovery of FTL, we will need to turn a large asteroid, or conglomeration of asteroids (i.e. icy, rocky, metallic) into a colonyship with a nuclear(fission or fusion) energy source, machines and equipment, and enough people to maintain a population for the lifetimes it will take to get to another system, and begin exploiting the resources available to do the same things we did in our solar system.
Can this happen soon? Not a chance, it is the project of multiple lifetimes. But, each step is simply an evolution of what was done before, and is definitely possible. The key to everything is the moon, it is a nearby source of raw materials with low gravity, launching stuff form the moon is a hell of a lot easier than from earth. Eventually, the only thing you would want launched from earth are people and light stuff.
Dastardly
This comes down to define "cleaner".
Diesel generally has more particulate emissions, on the other hand you use a lot less per mile driven. So, take the jetta example, a jetta unleaded 4 might get 30 miles/gallon, but the jetta TDI gets 50 miles per gallon. So, for every 50 miles driven the unleaded puts out 1.67 gallons worth of emissions vs the 1 gallon worth the diesel.
So, then the question is whether you would rather have 1 gallon worht of diesel emissions or 1.6 gallaons worth of unleaded emission?
The hardware sounds great until you realize that unless your customers want to pay at least a $500 start-up fee for their CPE they'll be using, you're going to get killed in hardware costs. Mostly user-end. You expect the APs to cost alot!
If you could get 1200 customers in a 2 mile radius. This isn't so bad. The AP is about $25 per customer, so that is fairly trivial. Then, $500 per customer for the premises equipment is $42 a month for a year. You of course then need at few T1s/T3s to provide access to those customers (I don't know what MB/customer a backend would want). Let's call it 2 T1/AP or 12T1 or ~$12000/month or $10/customer/month.
So, from a co-op stand point, you could offer two choices:
a) $525/user startup, and say $15/month. The extra mooney going into a reserve fund to cover busted AP, and possibly future upgrades.
b) $70/month until the startup costs are covered and then $15/month.
Although if Nokia got their CPE to $500 or less I think it works better due to the NLOS nature of the system, my area doesn't get cable or DSL because Adelphia is going bankrupt, and Verizon doesn' do squat to expand DSL coverage. And, there are too many trees to get good LOS.
I think the court did screw up here. It probably should have declared the 1953 law adding the words under god unconstituional. Not the entire pledge or even saying it in school.
Can you name another law that specifically mandates that God be referred to? I don't think money has a law that says it should say "In God we Trust". But, it was designed that way, so it is no big deal.
The pledge was said for 100years without under god, and only in the last 50 without it. So, there is no tradition of the pledge including under god, I woudl say it is the exact opposite. Therefore, I think there is no question that Congress enacted a law that made a religious statement which is blatantly unconstitutional.