maybe our support of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip? we have given the Israeli's millions of dollars AND weapons and aircraft. what have we given the people whos land we took to give to them? several hundred thousand dollars and no protection from a military who has killed thousands of palistinian children.
America supports Israel, because Israel's enemies want to exterminate every last living Jew. (At least that's what their leaders say, and state run papers in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, Egypt, etc. say). This policy was led by the US's post WWII leadership which had served in the war and saw first hand some horrible things.
Israel does a lot of nasty things, but without US support they'd all be slaughtered in a much more nasty way than anything that's happening to the Palestinians. The only possibly moral thing for the US to do is to protect Israel at the same time while trying to negotiate for a peaceful resolution to the conflict.
think about it - if 10 or 20 years ago an american hellicopter came in and blew up your dad or your uncle or your brother or your friend you'd be pissed wouldn't you. Lucky for you, you're American. You will most likely never have to experience someone coming onto your soil and accidentally killing your friends and/or family because they had to shove their nose where it didnt belong.
Fact is we should have invaded Afghanistan years before 9/11. We should have stopped the Taleban -- even though many innocents would die in such a war -- because they were evil, and the US has an ideological obligation to fight such fights.
The US was attacked not because we stood up and _tried_ to do the right thing in helping Israel. We were attacked because we ignored so many evil things because of economic expedience (supporting the Shah in Iran, allowing the Taleban to thrive, supporting the Saudis,etc, etc). Our policy was the realpolitck mantra of stability and commerce over all and justice be damned to fairy tales. Israel was the one exception to that policy (it is economically expedient to criticize Israel and support Iran, ala the policies of France and Germany -- The US only supports Israel for ideological reasons.).
I'm not saying that they are right in what they do . All I'm saying is that perhaps we should pick the stick from our own eye before we attempt to pick the splinter from theirs.
We stood up to a bully and tried to protect the little guy. We made mistakes, but our intentions were laudable. If you forget about the techniques employed by these 'freedom fighters' and look at their goals and motivations you see that we should be trying to stop them even if their tactics were in accord with the Geneva conventions.
I don't think they really understand what the surface is like at the landing site yet... or at least they haven't published anything yet. The original 'creme brulée' theory was wrong. It looks like the penetrator hit a pebble and knocked it to the side before penetrating the softer surface below the pebble.
What's significant about this was that it was initially hypothesized that since titan had a considerable atmosphere of methane and other hydrocarbons, that the surface of Titan was possibly covered in either a massive liquid methane ocean or a methane ice sheet. However once the Huygens probe landed, that hypothesis was disproved (the one about liquid methane on the surface).
No methane ice sheet either.... Cassini's instruments (specifically VIMS I think) have shown that the surface is mostly water ice. Titan's surface is turning out to be pretty bizarre and defying any of the earlier notions of what it would be like.
to clarify... Jupiter --> Jove --> Jovian. I propose Saturn --> Cronos --> Cronic, mostly because it sounds like Chronic, which is way better than Sess.
Sunlight breaks down methane, so to have it in Titan's atmosphere (particularly at such high levels) it has to be continually replaced. You can make methane on Titan via either life or some sort of weird chemical process. So the methane is a hint at possible life.
Titan's atmosphere is also full of a haze of complex organic molecules that continually rain down on the surface... leaving deposits of hydrocarbons on the surface hundreds of meters thick.
Now if only these complex organics could get mixed in with water. (And it has to be water, because you need the oxygen). Guess what 'rocks' on Titan are made out of:)
So you might have something happening in this methane lake with methane being the liquid and oxygen coming from ice... but this would be completely different from life as we know it...
My own bet is on the volcano to look for life (The volcano on Titan erupts molten water). Also there might be life in Titan's mantle (it's made of liquid water + ammonia mixture).
For the most part, US tax money can't be given to foreign governments... NASA can only barter for things. ESA gives us an instrumnet for this spacecraft, we give them an instrument for another. Combined with ITAR this makes international cooperation very hard.
On top of this with Russia you have the Iran Non-proliferation Act (INA) which bars NASA from doing business with Russia or Russian companies because of Russia's support for Iran's nuclear weap^H^H^H^H energy program. (However, the white house recently asked congress to give NASA an exemption from this law... we'll see where it goes).
The argument here is whether seizing your private property and giving it to another private entity qualifies as "public use" because that person will pay more taxes than you.
Does this decision mean if I own some rare painting, baseball card, etc the gubberment can take it and give it to a museum because of the public benefit from higher tourism? Sounds like it to me.
This is a terrible decision. Alas, there's no higher court
You could map out a list of topics and then allow users to create a 'position page' for each topic. Users can then only edit one position page per topic. If users notice abuse they can flag it for the editors who can then ban someone from further edits to a topic.
You could even allow a rebuttal page for each position page. This could lead to a very interesting collection of editorials as it approaches the asymptote.
For Editorials... perhaps two types of Karma. One which is based on the insightfulness of comments, regardless of political bias. This could be handed out by a small cadre of superusers. Another one that rates comments as simple pro/con of the article being discussed (this one could be set by other readers). If a comment was good support of the article it would get ++pro, if it was a good argument against it would get ++con.
Anyway, slashdot is a good model for what they want to do because slashdot has already found solutions to many of the problems that they apparently haven't recognized yet. Slashdot's moderation system isn't perfect (you still see stories with all of the good comments buried), but it seems to work a good bit more than any other system I've seen to bubble the good comments to the top.
And why start out with a controversial topic like the Iraq War?? It was Father's Day, they should have started out with a 'Thank You to Dads' or some other softball to see if the wiki-concept could handle that.
Personally, I can't see a wiki working for an editorial. A wiki could work for movie reviews or restaurant reviews maybe... but what's the value of using it for an editorial?? What they should do is model evil old slashdot and its moderation system... heck maybe even use the slashcode itself... or better yet hire Taco as a consultant. They could post their staff editorials with slashdot style discussion. Maybe even experiment by modifying the moderation to mark a comment red or blue.
It's one thing to be passionate about your work and another to get angry at someone who criticizes your work. A professional cares more about doing a good job than about protecting their egos. And if you want to do a good job you need to seek out ways to find errors in your work... getting angry is counterproductive to such an endeavor.
How the heck can anyone get away with trademarking a common word?
You mean like: Apple?
Re:I'm all for science/technology/astronomy but...
on
Back to Moon in 2015?
·
· Score: 1
1. When is the reaction initiated? Sometime before the rocket is ready to leave? In that case what happens to the working fluid that is heated before we're ready to go?
In most proposals, the reaction is initiated far from Earth. Otherwise, it is vented to the atmosphere somewhere near the launch pad. You can pass fuel through it in such a way that it mostly cools and produces very little thrust when it is vented. Extra coolant/fuel would probably be provided by an umbilical before launch.
Cryogenically fueled rockets (like the Shuttle) vent extra hydrogen and oxygen while they sit on the pad... otherwise the pressure from the gases expanding from the heat of the atmosphere would rupture the tanks.
2. It sounds to me like the working fluid doubles as coolant, so what happens when you run out? Will you be able to carry enough working fluid with you to last long enough for an inter-planetary journey?
Yeah the fuel doubles as coolant... but with engines like this you can throttle it down so that the thrust is low, but the Isp is high and conserve fuel until you need it... then you throttle up and burn more fuel but get higher thrust when you need to do a maneuver.
NTR engines are very efficient (as shown by their high Isp) so its not a big deal to carry enough fuel to use as coolant during the mission.
3. What happens when you want to stop or slow down? You can't just turn off the reaction, and you also can't cut the coolant.
You have to design the trajectory to keep in mind that the engine is always on... this is a different problem than the normal one, but entirely doable. The NTR will save much more fuel from its higher efficiency than it wastes by venting out extra coolant. (if that wasn't true, it would be more efficient to carry the mass of a closed-loop cooling system on board.)
4. What if there's an accident? Is it possible to adequately shield a Nuclear Thermal Rocket to allow for uncontrolled re-entry? Since the minimum amount of Pu-238 necessary to power a reactor is ~10kg the rocket would have to be designed to maintain integrety even if there were a disaster. How much weight would adequate shielding and reinforcing add? Would it still be capable of achieving the required thrust? The Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators used to power the voyager craft and other satellites seem much simpler to me, and hence simpler to shield and reinforce.
Most NTR designs have very little shielding and put the engines on a long boom far away from the crew quarters which are shielded for radiation from solar flares and the engines. (In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the spaceship used an NTR which is why the engines were on a long boom.)
This is why most NTR designs are proposed to be used outside of lunar orbit where there is no danger of the reactor hitting the earth. The reactor wouldn't be made critical until the spacecraft was a safe distance away.
Now I'm not one to run scared at the mention of anything nuclear, but I also don't sneeze at the potential problems radiation can cause. The biggest problem I see is that I can't imagine that it would be possible to carry enough working fuel to constantly cool the reactor and provide thrust as a by-product for the long time scales necessary in inter-planetary travel.
I'm also a fan of nuclear technology and nuclear rockets in particular... but the safety concerns are real and are the reason why we aren't using this technology.
Nuclear engines *could* do constant thrust, but most aren't designed that way. Running the reactor hot enough for that long tends to wear out the components rather quickly.
Most designs require constant thrust because the fuel is used a coolant. But the thrust levels are less during the thrusting-to-avoid-meltdown phases in order to save fuel. And the components do wear out fairly quickly, and radioactive debris begins to pollute the exhaust. This is why nuclear thermal rockets aren't useful (yet).
I think you'll see Spiral Two initially consisting of nuclear rockets (since the astronauts will need to get to the moon quickly), then you'll later see Ion rockets used for cargo-only runs.:-)
Using Nuclear thermal rockets to get to the moon is a dumb ass idea. Chemical rockets can get there in a perfectly reasonable amount of time. Compare Apollo's Earth to moon time to how long it takes a Soyuz or Shuttle to rendezvous with the ISS... 4 days vs. 2 days... perfectly reasonable.
Durn tootin' they are. Most of this fear is irrational and out of proportion. (Nuclear power is dangerous, but global warming is much, much more dangerous... and what does geenpeace concentrate on?) BUT, nuclear rockets are dangerous and need to be developed carefully. And that careful development is very expensive and it is often far cheaper to spend effort of well behaved chemical systems like hydrogen peroxide.
In the case of CEV Spiral Two, the engines would be used for pure orbital work, so there would be little to no concern of any materials reaching Earth.
This is a VERY EXPENSIVE thing to prove. And they'll have to prove it if they want to use anything nuclear... the courts will make them. Just look at the crazy stuff that happened to Cassini during its Earth flyby.
Man, I thought I'd gotten everyone around here trained in how Nuclear Thermal Rockets work. [...]Unfortunately, there was a Graphite Ablation problem from the heat
Graphite Ablation == Deadly Radioactive Cloud.
Early testing of Nuclear Thermal Rockets is a big part of why St. George Utah has such mind-bogginly high cancer rates.
but the modern TRITON engine fixes that by utilizing Tungsten cladding.
Yeah, but how do you test this system? You need to collect all of the exhaust from the rocket and scrub it for any radioactive particles. THIS IS HARD. And that's why we haven't built an NTR.
One thing that has me excited about a moon base is that it will be an ideal place to test dangerous stuff like a nuclear thermal rocket and get it to the point where the exhaust is just really, really hot hydrogen. NTR is an amazing technology that will make going to Mars much easier.
Titan has an ammonia-water sea under its crust... a crust that is covered by heaping mounds of complex hydrocarbons. Around these volcanoes, this liquid water is mixing with a lot of complex organic molecules... Who knows what sort of crazy stuff will happen when you mix water and complex organic molecules:)
These ice volcanoes would be very interesting places to visit.:)
Triton, Neptune's large moon also has a substantial Nitrogen atmosphere, enough to entrain geyser plumes that move downwind. Ganymede has a thin atmosphere as well.
Titan's atmosphere is much, much thicker than the atmosphere on Triton, Ganymede, or Enceladus. These other moons have atmospheres but they are much thinner than even Mars' atmosphere. Hence the 'substantial' qualifier about Titan's atmosphere (which is thicker than Earth's).
since when did hp start making ipods? they don't. they only sell ipods that apple has manufactured out of the country with hp rebranding on them. it's not like apple licensed the ipod design to hp to run off and fab themselves.
ahh the nuances...
I think this would make snese for Macs... Apple makes them and lets HP put their logo on them and sell them as PC's that run both Windows and OS X. That way Apple doesn't have to say the W-word, but can still grow their market.
I've heard the rumors of Apple licensing HP to make Macs, but I don't see how that makes sense.
Right now, Apple doesn't make Macs... companies in Taiwan build them and Apple sells them. This seems to be a much better deal than letting HP sell its own Macs made by some other company in Taiwan.
If Apple directly contracts with the manufacturers they can:
1) loose less money to a middle man. Heck, isn't this why Apple is opening its own stores.
2) have more control over quality.
3) reduce the number of different models if some start to cannibalize each other.
Slashdot Mirror
maybe our support of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip? we have given the Israeli's millions of dollars AND weapons and aircraft. what have we given the people whos land we took to give to them? several hundred thousand dollars and no protection from a military who has killed thousands of palistinian children.
America supports Israel, because Israel's enemies want to exterminate every last living Jew. (At least that's what their leaders say, and state run papers in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, Egypt, etc. say). This policy was led by the US's post WWII leadership which had served in the war and saw first hand some horrible things.
Israel does a lot of nasty things, but without US support they'd all be slaughtered in a much more nasty way than anything that's happening to the Palestinians. The only possibly moral thing for the US to do is to protect Israel at the same time while trying to negotiate for a peaceful resolution to the conflict.
think about it - if 10 or 20 years ago an american hellicopter came in and blew up your dad or your uncle or your brother or your friend you'd be pissed wouldn't you. Lucky for you, you're American. You will most likely never have to experience someone coming onto your soil and accidentally killing your friends and/or family because they had to shove their nose where it didnt belong.
Fact is we should have invaded Afghanistan years before 9/11. We should have stopped the Taleban -- even though many innocents would die in such a war -- because they were evil, and the US has an ideological obligation to fight such fights.
The US was attacked not because we stood up and _tried_ to do the right thing in helping Israel. We were attacked because we ignored so many evil things because of economic expedience (supporting the Shah in Iran, allowing the Taleban to thrive, supporting the Saudis,etc, etc). Our policy was the realpolitck mantra of stability and commerce over all and justice be damned to fairy tales. Israel was the one exception to that policy (it is economically expedient to criticize Israel and support Iran, ala the policies of France and Germany -- The US only supports Israel for ideological reasons.).
I'm not saying that they are right in what they do . All I'm saying is that perhaps we should pick the stick from our own eye before we attempt to pick the splinter from theirs.
We stood up to a bully and tried to protect the little guy. We made mistakes, but our intentions were laudable. If you forget about the techniques employed by these 'freedom fighters' and look at their goals and motivations you see that we should be trying to stop them even if their tactics were in accord with the Geneva conventions.
I don't think they really understand what the surface is like at the landing site yet... or at least they haven't published anything yet. The original 'creme brulée' theory was wrong. It looks like the penetrator hit a pebble and knocked it to the side before penetrating the softer surface below the pebble.
What's significant about this was that it was initially hypothesized that since titan had a considerable atmosphere of methane and other hydrocarbons, that the surface of Titan was possibly covered in either a massive liquid methane ocean or a methane ice sheet. However once the Huygens probe landed, that hypothesis was disproved (the one about liquid methane on the surface).
No methane ice sheet either.... Cassini's instruments (specifically VIMS I think) have shown that the surface is mostly water ice. Titan's surface is turning out to be pretty bizarre and defying any of the earlier notions of what it would be like.
to clarify... Jupiter --> Jove --> Jovian. I propose Saturn --> Cronos --> Cronic, mostly because it sounds like Chronic, which is way better than Sess.
Could you perhaps clarify what you mean by "molten water"? Isn't molten water just.... liquid water?
:)
Yeah, but molten water sounds like lava. Cryovolcanos are cool - get it? cool
Cronic :)
Sunlight breaks down methane, so to have it in Titan's atmosphere (particularly at such high levels) it has to be continually replaced. You can make methane on Titan via either life or some sort of weird chemical process. So the methane is a hint at possible life.
:)
o duct-presentations.cfm has lots of good inside information about the science results... the end of the "Titan: First Views of an Alien World" discusses where to look for life on Titan)
Titan's atmosphere is also full of a haze of complex organic molecules that continually rain down on the surface... leaving deposits of hydrocarbons on the surface hundreds of meters thick.
Now if only these complex organics could get mixed in with water. (And it has to be water, because you need the oxygen). Guess what 'rocks' on Titan are made out of
So you might have something happening in this methane lake with methane being the liquid and oxygen coming from ice... but this would be completely different from life as we know it...
My own bet is on the volcano to look for life (The volcano on Titan erupts molten water). Also there might be life in Titan's mantle (it's made of liquid water + ammonia mixture).
(This website: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/products/pr
For the most part, US tax money can't be given to foreign governments... NASA can only barter for things. ESA gives us an instrumnet for this spacecraft, we give them an instrument for another. Combined with ITAR this makes international cooperation very hard.
On top of this with Russia you have the Iran Non-proliferation Act (INA) which bars NASA from doing business with Russia or Russian companies because of Russia's support for Iran's nuclear weap^H^H^H^H energy program. (However, the white house recently asked congress to give NASA an exemption from this law... we'll see where it goes).
. which means that Hollywood should be liable for promoting the use of guns for killing people whenever they show guns being used for killing people ..
:)
not only Hollywood. Videogame makers, too!
And also grokster for promoting sharing of such movies and video games.
The argument here is whether seizing your private property and giving it to another private entity qualifies as "public use" because that person will pay more taxes than you.
Does this decision mean if I own some rare painting, baseball card, etc the gubberment can take it and give it to a museum because of the public benefit from higher tourism? Sounds like it to me.
This is a terrible decision. Alas, there's no higher court
time to write congress and state assemblies.
This is a good idea!
You could map out a list of topics and then allow users to create a 'position page' for each topic. Users can then only edit one position page per topic. If users notice abuse they can flag it for the editors who can then ban someone from further edits to a topic.
You could even allow a rebuttal page for each position page. This could lead to a very interesting collection of editorials as it approaches the asymptote.
And the plunger is his sceptre?
I wrote this once, many years ago:
Ode to a plunger*...
Threads like these show why the slashdot crowd isn't welcome on the mainstream media's wiki pages.
For Editorials... perhaps two types of Karma. One which is based on the insightfulness of comments, regardless of political bias. This could be handed out by a small cadre of superusers. Another one that rates comments as simple pro/con of the article being discussed (this one could be set by other readers). If a comment was good support of the article it would get ++pro, if it was a good argument against it would get ++con.
Anyway, slashdot is a good model for what they want to do because slashdot has already found solutions to many of the problems that they apparently haven't recognized yet. Slashdot's moderation system isn't perfect (you still see stories with all of the good comments buried), but it seems to work a good bit more than any other system I've seen to bubble the good comments to the top.
And why start out with a controversial topic like the Iraq War?? It was Father's Day, they should have started out with a 'Thank You to Dads' or some other softball to see if the wiki-concept could handle that.
Personally, I can't see a wiki working for an editorial. A wiki could work for movie reviews or restaurant reviews maybe... but what's the value of using it for an editorial?? What they should do is model evil old slashdot and its moderation system... heck maybe even use the slashcode itself... or better yet hire Taco as a consultant. They could post their staff editorials with slashdot style discussion. Maybe even experiment by modifying the moderation to mark a comment red or blue.
It's one thing to be passionate about your work and another to get angry at someone who criticizes your work. A professional cares more about doing a good job than about protecting their egos. And if you want to do a good job you need to seek out ways to find errors in your work... getting angry is counterproductive to such an endeavor.
Let's hope Numbers take its inspiration from Lotus Improv.
How the heck can anyone get away with trademarking a common word?
You mean like: Apple?
1. When is the reaction initiated? Sometime before the rocket is ready to leave? In that case what happens to the working fluid that is heated before we're ready to go?
In most proposals, the reaction is initiated far from Earth. Otherwise, it is vented to the atmosphere somewhere near the launch pad. You can pass fuel through it in such a way that it mostly cools and produces very little thrust when it is vented. Extra coolant/fuel would probably be provided by an umbilical before launch.
Cryogenically fueled rockets (like the Shuttle) vent extra hydrogen and oxygen while they sit on the pad... otherwise the pressure from the gases expanding from the heat of the atmosphere would rupture the tanks.
2. It sounds to me like the working fluid doubles as coolant, so what happens when you run out? Will you be able to carry enough working fluid with you to last long enough for an inter-planetary journey?
Yeah the fuel doubles as coolant... but with engines like this you can throttle it down so that the thrust is low, but the Isp is high and conserve fuel until you need it... then you throttle up and burn more fuel but get higher thrust when you need to do a maneuver.
NTR engines are very efficient (as shown by their high Isp) so its not a big deal to carry enough fuel to use as coolant during the mission.
3. What happens when you want to stop or slow down? You can't just turn off the reaction, and you also can't cut the coolant.
You have to design the trajectory to keep in mind that the engine is always on... this is a different problem than the normal one, but entirely doable. The NTR will save much more fuel from its higher efficiency than it wastes by venting out extra coolant. (if that wasn't true, it would be more efficient to carry the mass of a closed-loop cooling system on board.)
4. What if there's an accident? Is it possible to adequately shield a Nuclear Thermal Rocket to allow for uncontrolled re-entry? Since the minimum amount of Pu-238 necessary to power a reactor is ~10kg the rocket would have to be designed to maintain integrety even if there were a disaster. How much weight would adequate shielding and reinforcing add? Would it still be capable of achieving the required thrust? The Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators used to power the voyager craft and other satellites seem much simpler to me, and hence simpler to shield and reinforce.
Most NTR designs have very little shielding and put the engines on a long boom far away from the crew quarters which are shielded for radiation from solar flares and the engines. (In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the spaceship used an NTR which is why the engines were on a long boom.)
This is why most NTR designs are proposed to be used outside of lunar orbit where there is no danger of the reactor hitting the earth. The reactor wouldn't be made critical until the spacecraft was a safe distance away.
Now I'm not one to run scared at the mention of anything nuclear, but I also don't sneeze at the potential problems radiation can cause. The biggest problem I see is that I can't imagine that it would be possible to carry enough working fuel to constantly cool the reactor and provide thrust as a by-product for the long time scales necessary in inter-planetary travel.
I'm also a fan of nuclear technology and nuclear rockets in particular... but the safety concerns are real and are the reason why we aren't using this technology.
Nuclear engines *could* do constant thrust, but most aren't designed that way. Running the reactor hot enough for that long tends to wear out the components rather quickly.
:-)
Most designs require constant thrust because the fuel is used a coolant. But the thrust levels are less during the thrusting-to-avoid-meltdown phases in order to save fuel. And the components do wear out fairly quickly, and radioactive debris begins to pollute the exhaust. This is why nuclear thermal rockets aren't useful (yet).
I think you'll see Spiral Two initially consisting of nuclear rockets (since the astronauts will need to get to the moon quickly), then you'll later see Ion rockets used for cargo-only runs.
Using Nuclear thermal rockets to get to the moon is a dumb ass idea. Chemical rockets can get there in a perfectly reasonable amount of time. Compare Apollo's Earth to moon time to how long it takes a Soyuz or Shuttle to rendezvous with the ISS... 4 days vs. 2 days... perfectly reasonable.
2. People are afraid of nuclear.
Durn tootin' they are. Most of this fear is irrational and out of proportion. (Nuclear power is dangerous, but global warming is much, much more dangerous... and what does geenpeace concentrate on?) BUT, nuclear rockets are dangerous and need to be developed carefully. And that careful development is very expensive and it is often far cheaper to spend effort of well behaved chemical systems like hydrogen peroxide.
In the case of CEV Spiral Two, the engines would be used for pure orbital work, so there would be little to no concern of any materials reaching Earth.
This is a VERY EXPENSIVE thing to prove. And they'll have to prove it if they want to use anything nuclear... the courts will make them. Just look at the crazy stuff that happened to Cassini during its Earth flyby.
Man, I thought I'd gotten everyone around here trained in how Nuclear Thermal Rockets work. [...]Unfortunately, there was a Graphite Ablation problem from the heat
Graphite Ablation == Deadly Radioactive Cloud.
Early testing of Nuclear Thermal Rockets is a big part of why St. George Utah has such mind-bogginly high cancer rates.
but the modern TRITON engine fixes that by utilizing Tungsten cladding.
Yeah, but how do you test this system? You need to collect all of the exhaust from the rocket and scrub it for any radioactive particles. THIS IS HARD. And that's why we haven't built an NTR.
One thing that has me excited about a moon base is that it will be an ideal place to test dangerous stuff like a nuclear thermal rocket and get it to the point where the exhaust is just really, really hot hydrogen. NTR is an amazing technology that will make going to Mars much easier.
Titan has an ammonia-water sea under its crust... a crust that is covered by heaping mounds of complex hydrocarbons. Around these volcanoes, this liquid water is mixing with a lot of complex organic molecules... Who knows what sort of crazy stuff will happen when you mix water and complex organic molecules :)
:)
These ice volcanoes would be very interesting places to visit.
Nonetheless, any moon (Triton) where particles can move downwind qualifies as a substantial atmosphere in my book.
What about Iapetus? It has what looks like wind blown streaks, but it doesn't appear to have an atmosphere.
Triton, Neptune's large moon also has a substantial Nitrogen atmosphere, enough to entrain geyser plumes that move downwind. Ganymede has a thin atmosphere as well.
Titan's atmosphere is much, much thicker than the atmosphere on Triton, Ganymede, or Enceladus. These other moons have atmospheres but they are much thinner than even Mars' atmosphere. Hence the 'substantial' qualifier about Titan's atmosphere (which is thicker than Earth's).
since when did hp start making ipods? they don't. they only sell ipods that apple has manufactured out of the country with hp rebranding on them. it's not like apple licensed the ipod design to hp to run off and fab themselves.
ahh the nuances...
I think this would make snese for Macs... Apple makes them and lets HP put their logo on them and sell them as PC's that run both Windows and OS X. That way Apple doesn't have to say the W-word, but can still grow their market.
I've heard the rumors of Apple licensing HP to make Macs, but I don't see how that makes sense.
Right now, Apple doesn't make Macs... companies in Taiwan build them and Apple sells them. This seems to be a much better deal than letting HP sell its own Macs made by some other company in Taiwan.
If Apple directly contracts with the manufacturers they can:
1) loose less money to a middle man. Heck, isn't this why
Apple is opening its own stores.
2) have more control over quality.
3) reduce the number of different models if some start to cannibalize each other.
4) maintain their strong brand.