2. I seem the recall that it has been calculated that mining Helium 3 on the moon would be cost inefficient and furthermore mining on the Moon would make dust fly around and create a kind of smog. What the hell would you want to mine on an asteroid, and do you realise how hard it would be to go to an asteroid (which are all thankfully orders of magnitude further from the Earth than the Moon), mine there and send tons of minerals back to Earth?
3. Which? How?
I have nothing of substance to contribute on #1 and #4. For lunar mining, there are benefits to excavating regolith beyond just He-3: think of the benefits to a lunar colony. For example, the regolith could be used as a building material once sintered. Using a high-powered laser, you can reduce the main component, SiO2, into Si and O2. Remote sensing data suggest that there's a bunch of water-ice near the poles of the moon, which would be useful for a colony. Terraforming is also useful so that landing/launch pads can be isolated via berms from the outpost to prevent jet-blast damage.
Oh... and "a kind of smog?" You, sir, are obviously misinformed. The only force on the moon capable of such a phenomenon is electromagnetic (ie: no wind currents). Regolith is only partially magnetized and the EM force in this situation would act on a small scale, not a "smog" scale.
As for proteins... *shrug*. I do know, however, that materials like aerogel and many crystals form "better" in microgravity.
As for mining the Moon, it means developing fully automated mineral extraction facilities that can be built and shipped from Earth while operating on the Moon and being more or less self-sustaining. They can be used to manufacture more copies of themselves too, but this is a insanely long shot.
As someone who has designed, analyzed, built, and ground-tested a lunar mining machine, I call B.S.
Give us a feasible launch vehicle and adequate funding, and our team will put a functioning autonomous mining machine on the moon in under 5 years. Give us a crapload of money (ie: hire a big team and allow purchase of gobs of exotic materials), and we'll do it in 3.
I was on the fence about whether to go to the EAA fly-in this year. When I had heard of the RRL race, I immediately notified my boss of the upcoming vacation day. That was a month ago. =)
The article you cite is from January. From Obama's current Pre-K-12 Education Plan PDF on his site:
The early education plan will be paid for by delaying the NASA Constellation Program for five years...
Delaying the Constellation program, which encompasses not only Mars missions, but also manned LEO and manned Lunar missions, will kill it. You can't lay off thousands of aerospace engineers for 5 years and expect them to willingly come back.
If you'd like to work in the aerospace field, I'd suggest learning Russian.
Basically, figure out which companies would have dream jobs for you. Then decide what would look good on a resume for them. NASA... Russian. ESA... German, French or Italian. Much of the semiconductor industry... Mandarin or Japanese (depending on the company).
I called into net@nite awhile ago and Leo Laporte suggested I go search out the information. I eventually found the city's cable webpage, which is woefully not up-to-date, but the city's scheduling system had the meeting listed.
Someone needs to tell Charter that you don't "enhance" suck. That "someone" could be you.
If you live in the Madison, WI area, attend the Madison Broadband Telecommunications Regulatory Board Meeting this Thursday (May 15, 2008) at 5:30pm in Room 103A of the City-County building (210 MLK Blvd). Complain during the Public Comment part of the meeting, which is immediately after Call to Order and Roll Call. I plan to be there.
If you don't live in the Madison, WI area and have Charter as the local franchise, find out when your municipality holds its regulatory meetings. They tend to be monthly or bimonthly and should be open to the public.
[To no one in particular:] Get out from behind your computer desk and get in someone's face! Tell your government that maintaining a laissez-faire attitude towards Charter is not working.
In response to your accusation (or, rather: bet) that I've never attended a meeting, see my reply. I've attended every meeting since last summer, save for the one or two when I was out of town on a business trip.
Prior to a few months ago, I was getting some traction, resulting in some official face time on the agenda. Unfortunately, my state (WI) recently passed legislation allowing telcos to get franchised by the state with woefully inadequate build-out promises. This state bill essentially outlaws individual municipalities from overriding the state franchise. This is good in that it will allow easier competition. It's bad, however, in that we, in our communities, get practically no say over state issues.
Have you gone to DSL and abandoned cable? I have. I use DSL and no longer get cable TV. Charter deserves no more of my money.
Have you been to a meeting? I have. I've been to four or five. At my request, there is even a recurring item on the agenda regarding the possibility of deploying a municipality-owned cable network that would be rented out.
Have you looked into the real reason why cable boards put up with this? I have. Public access. The public access groups are freaked out about losing their funding and their channel allocations. Without a franchise, public access TV must get paid from the city's/county's/state's general tax revenue. They're too entrenched to realize that if a municipality-owned network comes to fruition, they essentially get unlimited channels to their constituency via IPTV.
Posting on Slashdot about how ineffective it is to get in somebody's face at cable board meeting is asinine. Stop your office-chair politics, get out into the world, and tell the folks in charge that you're angry. C'mon. How many aldermen do you think read slashdot?
Here's how to get started on fixing our cable woes: Go to your city's website and find info on the municipal cable board. They likely meet monthly or bimonthly, and their meetings will be open to the public. Get there early and make sure someone on the board knows that you have something to say. Hopefully, there will be a local Comcast (or, in my case, Charter) representative there. During the meeting, the board will open up for public comment. At this point, make generalized claims about how Comcast is purposefully hindering innovation which is bad for the city (anecdotal evidence will likely not work here unless it supports a generalized claim... the cable board is not there to hear your personal story). Assert that maintaining a franchising agreement with Comcast is beneficial only to Comcast and that residents of your city are being unfairly price-gouged.
Now, here's the tricky part: Keep going to the meetings, asserting the same thing. Heck, try to get a group to go. Make sure the board knows that Comcast is pissing off a bunch of really smart people. This works even better if this happens in multiple cities.... the folks at the cable HQs will get these odd reports of citizens showing up at tons of municipalities and complaining.
And just hand them the opportunity to live on another world? Screw that. Give the opportunity to some of the most gifted minds of science and engineering.
Your comment was obviously tongue-in-cheek, but there are reasons for a plow. First is for infrastructure: it's useful to push off all of the fluffy regolith (moon dirt) to get to the compacted stuff when you want to drive moon buggies and such things.
More interesting (for me, at least) is for excavation. The plow is used to strip the top layer of loose regolith so that a mining attachment can dig up the compacted stuff. There is evidence of water ice near the poles as well as He-3, so an effective cutterhead and muck retriever could collect resource-laden material. I just so happen to be lead mechanical engineer on such a Chariot-attachable mining module.:)
You are correct, sir. Instead of freezing, the water would actually vaporize. The near-instantaneous drop in pressure trumps the comparatively slow radiative cooling process. If you remember your phase chart for water (you know, the one with the regions for solid, liquid, and gas and a triple point joining all three), the state would fall from the liquid region into the gas region before moving left into the solid region.
Then again, there is the sliver of possibility of freezing if the water is initially at 0C, but again, that's because the pressure drop brings it through the solid phase (then back into the gaseous phase). Radiative cooling doesn't cause the freeze.
Instead of whining that a single p2p user is affecting other subscribers in a cell, implement a "minimum guaranteed bandwidth" commensurate with their actual available bandwidth. So, if you have a 1 Gbps line going to a group of 1000 customers, offer a 1 Mbps guaranteed minimum, with up to 20 (or whatever) Mbps depending on a network traffic.
See? That wasn't so hard. Now they can implement QoS such that a heavy user is the first to get bumped down to 1 Mbps when another user wants bandwidth.
Look at Apple's "Select Developer Membership." At the base configuration, the difference between (ADC Select Membership + Mac Pro w/ discount) and (Mac Pro w/o discount) is $1... in favor of the membership. Bumping up the Mac Pro to the 8-core version yields $300 savings (ie: $800 savings - $500 membership). Plus you get everything that comes with the membership, including the Leopard Early Start Kit and two free tech support incidents.
If you're a student, the membership price drops from $500 to $100, though you're only allowed to use the hardware discount once ever, whereas the Select Membership lets you buy hardware with the discount once per year (at a price of $500/year).
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously, you either have never been to Nevada or have very poor business sense.
A lawn mowing business would never succeed in Nevada.
How about some perspective on that reality?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Fy2008spendingbycategory.png
Here's a hint: The NASA slice is the 0.6% one. Double NASA's budget and you're still not up to the level of "Other Off-Budget Discretionary Spending."
Stephen Colbert puts water bears as #1 on his threat down. How could he not?
2. I seem the recall that it has been calculated that mining Helium 3 on the moon would be cost inefficient and furthermore mining on the Moon would make dust fly around and create a kind of smog. What the hell would you want to mine on an asteroid, and do you realise how hard it would be to go to an asteroid (which are all thankfully orders of magnitude further from the Earth than the Moon), mine there and send tons of minerals back to Earth?
3. Which? How?
I have nothing of substance to contribute on #1 and #4. For lunar mining, there are benefits to excavating regolith beyond just He-3: think of the benefits to a lunar colony. For example, the regolith could be used as a building material once sintered. Using a high-powered laser, you can reduce the main component, SiO2, into Si and O2. Remote sensing data suggest that there's a bunch of water-ice near the poles of the moon, which would be useful for a colony. Terraforming is also useful so that landing/launch pads can be isolated via berms from the outpost to prevent jet-blast damage.
Oh... and "a kind of smog?" You, sir, are obviously misinformed. The only force on the moon capable of such a phenomenon is electromagnetic (ie: no wind currents). Regolith is only partially magnetized and the EM force in this situation would act on a small scale, not a "smog" scale.
As for proteins... *shrug*. I do know, however, that materials like aerogel and many crystals form "better" in microgravity.
As for mining the Moon, it means developing fully automated mineral extraction facilities that can be built and shipped from Earth while operating on the Moon and being more or less self-sustaining. They can be used to manufacture more copies of themselves too, but this is a insanely long shot.
As someone who has designed, analyzed, built, and ground-tested a lunar mining machine, I call B.S.
Give us a feasible launch vehicle and adequate funding, and our team will put a functioning autonomous mining machine on the moon in under 5 years. Give us a crapload of money (ie: hire a big team and allow purchase of gobs of exotic materials), and we'll do it in 3.
Here's a jug of stuff that my instruments tell me is ricin. Why don't you go ahead and verify that for me?
Of course it's real.
We cheeseheads are not a subgroup of hicks, you FIB.
(oh snap)
I was on the fence about whether to go to the EAA fly-in this year. When I had heard of the RRL race, I immediately notified my boss of the upcoming vacation day. That was a month ago. =)
I generally follow Hofstadter's Law:
It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter's Law into account.
The article you cite is from January. From Obama's current Pre-K-12 Education Plan PDF on his site:
Delaying the Constellation program, which encompasses not only Mars missions, but also manned LEO and manned Lunar missions, will kill it. You can't lay off thousands of aerospace engineers for 5 years and expect them to willingly come back.
If you'd like to work in the aerospace field, I'd suggest learning Russian.
Basically, figure out which companies would have dream jobs for you. Then decide what would look good on a resume for them. NASA... Russian. ESA... German, French or Italian. Much of the semiconductor industry... Mandarin or Japanese (depending on the company).
The image: http://i7.tinypic.com/5z6vt4n.jpg
I called into net@nite awhile ago and Leo Laporte suggested I go search out the information. I eventually found the city's cable webpage, which is woefully not up-to-date, but the city's scheduling system had the meeting listed.
If you live in the Madison, WI area, attend the Madison Broadband Telecommunications Regulatory Board Meeting this Thursday (May 15, 2008) at 5:30pm in Room 103A of the City-County building (210 MLK Blvd). Complain during the Public Comment part of the meeting, which is immediately after Call to Order and Roll Call. I plan to be there.
If you don't live in the Madison, WI area and have Charter as the local franchise, find out when your municipality holds its regulatory meetings. They tend to be monthly or bimonthly and should be open to the public.
[To no one in particular:] Get out from behind your computer desk and get in someone's face! Tell your government that maintaining a laissez-faire attitude towards Charter is not working.
In response to your accusation (or, rather: bet) that I've never attended a meeting, see my reply. I've attended every meeting since last summer, save for the one or two when I was out of town on a business trip.
Prior to a few months ago, I was getting some traction, resulting in some official face time on the agenda. Unfortunately, my state (WI) recently passed legislation allowing telcos to get franchised by the state with woefully inadequate build-out promises. This state bill essentially outlaws individual municipalities from overriding the state franchise. This is good in that it will allow easier competition. It's bad, however, in that we, in our communities, get practically no say over state issues.
@postbigbang:
Have you gone to DSL and abandoned cable? I have. I use DSL and no longer get cable TV. Charter deserves no more of my money.
Have you been to a meeting? I have. I've been to four or five. At my request, there is even a recurring item on the agenda regarding the possibility of deploying a municipality-owned cable network that would be rented out.
Have you looked into the real reason why cable boards put up with this? I have. Public access. The public access groups are freaked out about losing their funding and their channel allocations. Without a franchise, public access TV must get paid from the city's/county's/state's general tax revenue. They're too entrenched to realize that if a municipality-owned network comes to fruition, they essentially get unlimited channels to their constituency via IPTV.
Posting on Slashdot about how ineffective it is to get in somebody's face at cable board meeting is asinine. Stop your office-chair politics, get out into the world, and tell the folks in charge that you're angry. C'mon. How many aldermen do you think read slashdot?
Here's how to get started on fixing our cable woes: Go to your city's website and find info on the municipal cable board. They likely meet monthly or bimonthly, and their meetings will be open to the public. Get there early and make sure someone on the board knows that you have something to say. Hopefully, there will be a local Comcast (or, in my case, Charter) representative there. During the meeting, the board will open up for public comment. At this point, make generalized claims about how Comcast is purposefully hindering innovation which is bad for the city (anecdotal evidence will likely not work here unless it supports a generalized claim... the cable board is not there to hear your personal story). Assert that maintaining a franchising agreement with Comcast is beneficial only to Comcast and that residents of your city are being unfairly price-gouged.
Now, here's the tricky part: Keep going to the meetings, asserting the same thing. Heck, try to get a group to go. Make sure the board knows that Comcast is pissing off a bunch of really smart people. This works even better if this happens in multiple cities.... the folks at the cable HQs will get these odd reports of citizens showing up at tons of municipalities and complaining.
And just hand them the opportunity to live on another world? Screw that. Give the opportunity to some of the most gifted minds of science and engineering.
:)
Like me.
Your comment was obviously tongue-in-cheek, but there are reasons for a plow. First is for infrastructure: it's useful to push off all of the fluffy regolith (moon dirt) to get to the compacted stuff when you want to drive moon buggies and such things.
:)
More interesting (for me, at least) is for excavation. The plow is used to strip the top layer of loose regolith so that a mining attachment can dig up the compacted stuff. There is evidence of water ice near the poles as well as He-3, so an effective cutterhead and muck retriever could collect resource-laden material. I just so happen to be lead mechanical engineer on such a Chariot-attachable mining module.
You are correct, sir. Instead of freezing, the water would actually vaporize. The near-instantaneous drop in pressure trumps the comparatively slow radiative cooling process. If you remember your phase chart for water (you know, the one with the regions for solid, liquid, and gas and a triple point joining all three), the state would fall from the liquid region into the gas region before moving left into the solid region.
Then again, there is the sliver of possibility of freezing if the water is initially at 0C, but again, that's because the pressure drop brings it through the solid phase (then back into the gaseous phase). Radiative cooling doesn't cause the freeze.
Source: http://jobsearch.usajobs.gov/getjob.asp?JobID=62398554&TabNum=3&rc=2
wtf, mate?
What about those of us who will cancel their Charter service? How does a rebate help us?
I had already planned to cancel next Monday when my DSL gets hooked up.
Here's what they should do:
Instead of whining that a single p2p user is affecting other subscribers in a cell, implement a "minimum guaranteed bandwidth" commensurate with their actual available bandwidth. So, if you have a 1 Gbps line going to a group of 1000 customers, offer a 1 Mbps guaranteed minimum, with up to 20 (or whatever) Mbps depending on a network traffic.
See? That wasn't so hard. Now they can implement QoS such that a heavy user is the first to get bumped down to 1 Mbps when another user wants bandwidth.
Here's another tip.
Look at Apple's "Select Developer Membership." At the base configuration, the difference between (ADC Select Membership + Mac Pro w/ discount) and (Mac Pro w/o discount) is $1... in favor of the membership. Bumping up the Mac Pro to the 8-core version yields $300 savings (ie: $800 savings - $500 membership). Plus you get everything that comes with the membership, including the Leopard Early Start Kit and two free tech support incidents.
If you're a student, the membership price drops from $500 to $100, though you're only allowed to use the hardware discount once ever, whereas the Select Membership lets you buy hardware with the discount once per year (at a price of $500/year).