> High frequency electronics? Plastics? Explosives?
None had to do with NASA, so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. But them again I'm not sure what any of the remainder of your poorly-spelled and almost unreadable rant is supposed to be saying.
> Part of the reason those shuttle launches were so expensive was that they carried a lot of science.
Nope, that's not factored into launch costs. The Shuttle required a complete tear-down, rebuild and re-assemble after every flight. This was astonishingly expensive. Airline travel would be just as expensive if it had drop-tanks or launch boosters and required re-assembly after every flight. This is why single-shot rockets continue to dominate launches, the cost of the equipment is rarely as much as the cost of putting it back together.
> Of course, much of that delay you mention is the endless lawsuits by the anti-nukes and NIMBY types.
No it's not, the vast majority is due to the long lead times providing ample time for "something to go wrong" and the project goes into hiatus.
Why? Because if the time-to-build crosses an election boundary, the cancellation probability goes non-linear. Not so much a problem where there are no real elections to speak of, like the Philippines during Marcos, but a serious problem for places that do have free elections, like the Philippines after Marcos.
If they took 18 months to built, like a wind farm, we wouldn't have partially completed plants all over the place.
> solving the problem is NOT what most environmentalists really want.
And as long as you keep blaming them for the problem, then the actual problem will never get solved.
> Note: I'm not asking the impossible, climate change luminaries like James Hansen have called for nuclear power to be used
Not impossible, just expensive. As the CAPEX is generally three to four times that of wind, and the lead times are four to five times as long, no one is giving them the money. That's it, end of story. Start here:
Now turn to page 11. On-shore wind was going in for $1.40 to 1.80/Wp in 2014, it's gone down since publication. Combined with a 30% CF, that gives you an effective CAPEX/Wh of $4.66 to 6. Lazard gives $5.39 to 8.40 for nuclear, although it's gone up since publication (current average is around $9/Wp). Combined with an 85% CF, that's $6.35 to $10/Wh. Which means, all else considered, wind power costs around half that of nuclear.
And that's why no one other than the Chinese, who are handing out billions of dollars of interest-free and risk-free money for infrastructure, is building them. And even their program is on serious hiatus. The money simply isn't there.
The *actual problem* with nuclear is that practically every other option is cheaper and lower risk. It is, straight up, a bad investment. So unless you have a few hundred billion sitting in your bank account to buy one, guess what, you're part of the problem.
"At the same time, sending a rocket into space, through the vast gulf that separates Earth's and Mars' orbit, and then firing thrusters in the opposite direction to slow down, requires a great deal of fuel."
The Hohmann Transfer is, mathematically provably, the *most efficient* way of travelling between any two orbits. It may require a "great deal of fuel", but that's still a great deal less than any other trajectory, which is precisely why we're willing to wait for the launch windows.
As to the rest, aerobraking and aerocapture is clearly more energy efficient. This article is like saying coal is better than wood for heating your home, while failing to mention gas.
> Greatest among them is to safeguard the species from any catestrophic impacts on Earth they would extinguish us
The majority of extinction threats are either man-made or multi-planet. GBRs don't care about the distance between Earth and Mars.
And why is this a "good thing" anyway? What's so special about us? We could set up an ant colony on Mars far more easily, there's forty trillion of them.
"It's certainly not true for places like where I live that are running 6.5-cents/kwh."
Does that include all distribution fees and taxes? Because if it doesn't then your parity rate is likely closer to 10 to 15 cents, which is about the current going rate for large scale PV. Residential it's higher until you remove the price of a roof job. Still not parity, but not far.
Watch carefully kids, "thekohser" constructs a totally bogus metric, posts his conclusion as a question because he's gutless, and then uses that "conclusion" to moan about this and that.
> generated about 5 million edits per month
Well anyone reading this who has even the slightest clue about how internet billing is handled, which I assume includes "thekohser", knows that the cost of hosting is based on throughput, not "the number of edits".
So:
1) the number of bytes per article in the English wiki has just under doubled since 2005:
If we consider bandwidth to be size times accesses, this implies that the total bandwidth has increased about 15 to 20 times since 2005. Yet the number of edits, which you have divided by, as increased only three times.
So, then, that seems to go a long way to "explain a 30-fold increase in spending per edit", doesn't it?
Don't tell me I'm wrong until you've written your FA and got the admin bit.
> but the writers are not typically compensated with anything more than pizza, sandwiches, and soft drinks.
I've written some measurable amount of the entire Wikipedia. I have no received pizza, sandwiches or soft drinks. Where do we get these?
> Meanwhile, they spend almost as much money (about $2 million) on travel and conferences.
Good. And maybe by continuing this, they will convince more people to open up their locked-away storehouses of dead information so I can use it to write more articles. Because right now, that's my biggest problem, idiots like the IEEE that charge $31 for a PDF of an article published in 1946 on a technology that's no even used any more. Still interesting historically, but of exactly zero commercial value. So if all those visits and junkets get Nature or Science to start giving away content after a year, that's the best money ever spent by anyone, ever.
> The WMF staff busy themselves on things that rarely have anything to do with writing
Because we don't let them. What, you think I want to be competing with someone in the back office? Screw that.
> software programmers who don't really seem to be doing anything worthwhile
Says the person that almost certainly uses it constantly for all sorts of things, like everyone else on the planet. But, unlike most other sources of human knowledge developed in ALL OF RECORDED HISTORY, the Wikipedia gives you, anyone, the ability to fix things. But why do that when you can just moan about it?
Nothing, but why do we need more syntax for it? That's my real complaint with Swift - lots and lots of one-off syntax in places where it didn't seem to be needed. What's wrong with:
var view: NSView = (NSView)anyObject
It's just as explicit, yet this uses familiar syntax that everyone already knows and uses. For that matter, why did they decide to use this syntax:
var view: NSView = (NSView)anyObject
When:
NSView view = (NSView)anyObject
It exactly the same in terms of expressiveness, yet is using a syntax that we're already familiar with? Does adding var really make the code more clear? I certainly don't think so. And the colon? Really? I know the answer already, it's because they picked language X as their model rather than language Y, which is *precisely my point*. Generally if you're going to introduce a new language you have exactly one chance to get it right, and I can't say I'm at all pleased with v1.0.
Ugh. More inside-the-box thinking. You don't need header files to do this right, which is your implication, and ideally you want more than one API for another. Dylan, yes, *Dylan*, did this way better than any language I've seen since. You could have a private API, a public API, a beta API and a release API all from the exact same code.
While it's true that using headers makes certain aspects simpler for the compiler author, it's also true that it pushes that work onto the end user - you - by forcing you to keep your headers up to date with manual edits. One could semi-automate this, but that's precisely the purpose of public/private. I have yet to see a real-world use-case where public/private didn't work.
> you are still exposing your entire class code and layout to users of it
Slashdot Mirror
> Really, who paid for the developmental science of tang?
http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2011/01/tang-was-not-invented-for-the-space-program/
> Teflon?
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/molecule-of-the-month-teflon-the-nonstick-myth-that-stuck-did-you-think-that-your-hitech-frying-pan-was-a-spinoff-from-the-space-race-john-emsley-explains-that-the-truth-is-the-other-way-around-1414648.html
> Transistors
Bell Labs all the way, totally private. This is well recorded in any number of great books. You might want to try "Silicon Fire".
> , ic circuits?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_of_the_integrated_circuit
> High frequency electronics? Plastics? Explosives?
None had to do with NASA, so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. But them again I'm not sure what any of the remainder of your poorly-spelled and almost unreadable rant is supposed to be saying.
> Part of the reason those shuttle launches were so expensive was that they carried a lot of science.
Nope, that's not factored into launch costs. The Shuttle required a complete tear-down, rebuild and re-assemble after every flight. This was astonishingly expensive. Airline travel would be just as expensive if it had drop-tanks or launch boosters and required re-assembly after every flight. This is why single-shot rockets continue to dominate launches, the cost of the equipment is rarely as much as the cost of putting it back together.
Especially that new exhaust system.
> If we ever get bulletproof failproof rocket launches
Well if you're just going to wave your fairy wand and create perfect rockets, why not just skip a step and wish the fuel into non-existence?
After all, it's much easier to build bulletproof failproof reactors and bulletproof failproof underground storage, but we don't have those either.
Also, $10,000 a kg does really bad things to your OPEX.
> Of course, much of that delay you mention is the endless lawsuits by the anti-nukes and NIMBY types.
No it's not, the vast majority is due to the long lead times providing ample time for "something to go wrong" and the project goes into hiatus.
Why? Because if the time-to-build crosses an election boundary, the cancellation probability goes non-linear. Not so much a problem where there are no real elections to speak of, like the Philippines during Marcos, but a serious problem for places that do have free elections, like the Philippines after Marcos.
If they took 18 months to built, like a wind farm, we wouldn't have partially completed plants all over the place.
> solving the problem is NOT what most environmentalists really want.
And as long as you keep blaming them for the problem, then the actual problem will never get solved.
> Note: I'm not asking the impossible, climate change luminaries like James Hansen have called for nuclear power to be used
Not impossible, just expensive. As the CAPEX is generally three to four times that of wind, and the lead times are four to five times as long, no one is giving them the money. That's it, end of story. Start here:
http://www.lazard.com/PDF/Levelized%20Cost%20of%20Energy%20-%20Version%208.0.pdf
Now turn to page 11. On-shore wind was going in for $1.40 to 1.80/Wp in 2014, it's gone down since publication. Combined with a 30% CF, that gives you an effective CAPEX/Wh of $4.66 to 6. Lazard gives $5.39 to 8.40 for nuclear, although it's gone up since publication (current average is around $9/Wp). Combined with an 85% CF, that's $6.35 to $10/Wh. Which means, all else considered, wind power costs around half that of nuclear.
And that's why no one other than the Chinese, who are handing out billions of dollars of interest-free and risk-free money for infrastructure, is building them. And even their program is on serious hiatus. The money simply isn't there.
The *actual problem* with nuclear is that practically every other option is cheaper and lower risk. It is, straight up, a bad investment. So unless you have a few hundred billion sitting in your bank account to buy one, guess what, you're part of the problem.
"At the same time, sending a rocket into space, through the vast gulf that separates Earth's and Mars' orbit, and then firing thrusters in the opposite direction to slow down, requires a great deal of fuel."
The Hohmann Transfer is, mathematically provably, the *most efficient* way of travelling between any two orbits. It may require a "great deal of fuel", but that's still a great deal less than any other trajectory, which is precisely why we're willing to wait for the launch windows.
As to the rest, aerobraking and aerocapture is clearly more energy efficient. This article is like saying coal is better than wood for heating your home, while failing to mention gas.
Me too. It was certainly funny enough. It was one of the funnier movies I've seen in a while. Excellent pacing too.
Another childless, rich, white male plans to live(practically) forever - STOP THE PRESSES!
Dude, have a kid. It's cheaper, more reliable and far more fun.
> Greatest among them is to safeguard the species from any catestrophic impacts on Earth they would extinguish us
The majority of extinction threats are either man-made or multi-planet. GBRs don't care about the distance between Earth and Mars.
And why is this a "good thing" anyway? What's so special about us? We could set up an ant colony on Mars far more easily, there's forty trillion of them.
"It's certainly not true for places like where I live that are running 6.5-cents/kwh."
Does that include all distribution fees and taxes? Because if it doesn't then your parity rate is likely closer to 10 to 15 cents, which is about the current going rate for large scale PV. Residential it's higher until you remove the price of a roof job. Still not parity, but not far.
> "Ability fix things"
Yes, like...
> How do you source something that didn't happen
What's the link?
> Between 2010 and 2014, the cost-per-bit delivered over the Internet has fallen about 58
> If we assume that curve continues
We don't.
And even if you do, that's a five-fold decrease when bandwidth went up 15 to 20 times.
> Therefore, we can conclude
Stop using it then.
> What I do think is reprehensible is raising the spectre of ads in the fundraising banners
The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
Spectre. Really.
> 's a shame that your memory is failing so much.
It's a shame you don't actually edit, and just whine about it.
> . I wonder who should be believed?
Maybe the guy with 7500+ articles and an FA that uses his real name that anyone can verify in seconds.
> Let me help you with some facts
RED HERRING ALERT! RED HERRING ALERT!
Watch carefully kids, "thekohser" constructs a totally bogus metric, posts his conclusion as a question because he's gutless, and then uses that "conclusion" to moan about this and that.
> generated about 5 million edits per month
Well anyone reading this who has even the slightest clue about how internet billing is handled, which I assume includes "thekohser", knows that the cost of hosting is based on throughput, not "the number of edits".
So:
1) the number of bytes per article in the English wiki has just under doubled since 2005:
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesArticlesBytesPerArticle.htm
2) the number of page views has roughly doubled since 2008 (oldest number I have):
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthlyCombined.htm
3) binaries have increased five times since 2005:
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesDatabaseImageLinks.htm
4) the database as a whole has increased over eight times since 2005:
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesDatabaseSize.htm
5) meanwhile the number of edits has grown only three times since 2005:
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesDatabaseEdits.htm
If we consider bandwidth to be size times accesses, this implies that the total bandwidth has increased about 15 to 20 times since 2005. Yet the number of edits, which you have divided by, as increased only three times.
So, then, that seems to go a long way to "explain a 30-fold increase in spending per edit", doesn't it?
Don't tell me I'm wrong until you've written your FA and got the admin bit.
> Except the software was already 90% developed back in 2003
Oh BS.
The current software is absolutely nothing whatsoever like it was in 2003.
I say that as someone that joined well before 2003, and have been editing continually since then.
> but the writers are not typically compensated with anything more than pizza, sandwiches, and soft drinks.
I've written some measurable amount of the entire Wikipedia. I have no received pizza, sandwiches or soft drinks. Where do we get these?
> Meanwhile, they spend almost as much money (about $2 million) on travel and conferences.
Good. And maybe by continuing this, they will convince more people to open up their locked-away storehouses of dead information so I can use it to write more articles. Because right now, that's my biggest problem, idiots like the IEEE that charge $31 for a PDF of an article published in 1946 on a technology that's no even used any more. Still interesting historically, but of exactly zero commercial value. So if all those visits and junkets get Nature or Science to start giving away content after a year, that's the best money ever spent by anyone, ever.
> The WMF staff busy themselves on things that rarely have anything to do with writing
Because we don't let them. What, you think I want to be competing with someone in the back office? Screw that.
> software programmers who don't really seem to be doing anything worthwhile
The efn, sfn and convert tags are worth loads.
Says the person that almost certainly uses it constantly for all sorts of things, like everyone else on the planet. But, unlike most other sources of human knowledge developed in ALL OF RECORDED HISTORY, the Wikipedia gives you, anyone, the ability to fix things. But why do that when you can just moan about it?
> What's wrong with being explicit in casting?
Nothing, but why do we need more syntax for it? That's my real complaint with Swift - lots and lots of one-off syntax in places where it didn't seem to be needed. What's wrong with:
var view: NSView = (NSView)anyObject
It's just as explicit, yet this uses familiar syntax that everyone already knows and uses. For that matter, why did they decide to use this syntax:
var view: NSView = (NSView)anyObject
When:
NSView view = (NSView)anyObject
It exactly the same in terms of expressiveness, yet is using a syntax that we're already familiar with? Does adding var really make the code more clear? I certainly don't think so. And the colon? Really? I know the answer already, it's because they picked language X as their model rather than language Y, which is *precisely my point*. Generally if you're going to introduce a new language you have exactly one chance to get it right, and I can't say I'm at all pleased with v1.0.
> No header files confuscate
Ugh. More inside-the-box thinking. You don't need header files to do this right, which is your implication, and ideally you want more than one API for another. Dylan, yes, *Dylan*, did this way better than any language I've seen since. You could have a private API, a public API, a beta API and a release API all from the exact same code.
While it's true that using headers makes certain aspects simpler for the compiler author, it's also true that it pushes that work onto the end user - you - by forcing you to keep your headers up to date with manual edits. One could semi-automate this, but that's precisely the purpose of public/private. I have yet to see a real-world use-case where public/private didn't work.
> you are still exposing your entire class code and layout to users of it
How is that?
> presents itself as a WebDAV option
Lolz. And you get to it using a QR code!
> world in which a man is judged by the bullets on his resume, not by the knowledge in his head
This world, then.
I suspect than one adds transit to the mix, the headline is rather misleading.
By this means, Canada has met this goal since electricity was commercially available (53% of our electricity is hydro, alone).
> solar panel that has a quantum efficiency of around 40%
Conventional panels have a QE around 90%. That's why they're opaque.