..."once you've got your admittedly heavy smelter up in orbit..."
You don't need a heavy smelter. Smelters are heavily built to handle & contain heat, but vacuum is better, doesn't weigh anything, and is free in space.
Of course, to actually do smelting you'll need to add more weight of coke & limestone to your ore than you're going to get in iron, so space-born smelting is still ridiculous. And that's even before you get to the various foundries and machine tools you are going to need to make anything useful from your iron; even simple beams.
"Think on a very big amount of easy to extract..."
It's in space, orbiting the sun. With this scheme nobody's tried, maybe we can put it in earth orbit, twice as far away as men have ever gone. In short, it's about as far from "easy to extract" as it could be.
As I understand it, a brick that can provide 10 watts will need some cheap electronics so when you plug it into a 130 watt device, they will gracefully refuse to work. If you plug a brick capable of 130 watts into a 10 watt device, maybe you paid too much for the brick, and it won't be as efficient, but it will work.
Personally, I've got 4 or 5 devices I want to plug in, not generally at the same time, but in 3 or 4 locations. If I could stop carrying power bricks around, and leave one that can handle my laptop at each spot, I'd gladly eat the inefficiency when I plug in my phone.
I've got a great Android based pocket-sized Wi-Fi tablet. Is it supposed to be a negative that I could theoretically pay for service and use it to make phone calls?
It's a negative if the device cost you substantially more than 300 USD,
I paid $200, which will buy your choice of various not-quite-latest Android phones. Mine is a Motorola Cliq.
It's a negative if the applications you want to use require multitouch
They don't.
A lot of applications, especially games that use on-screen buttons to simulate a gamepad, require multitouch.
I just suffer through using an actual d-pad, right next to the actual keyboard.
It's a negative if your device doesn't come with access to the market that has the apps you want.
What are you talking about? I've got a great Android based pocket-sized Wi-Fi tablet. Is it supposed to be a negative that I could theoretically pay for service and use it to make phone calls? I can't see why.
Yes, the iPhone is comparable to a heavily locked-down Andoid phone.
Which is why I have a non-locked-down Android phone, and I "guess I think I have my utopia platform" since neither of your disagreements apply.
"With Android carriers gain more control over the software delivered on their phones than is available with iOS."
Carriers have less control because Apple keeps the control. Wow, that's great for me.
iPhone: as open as Android if you only consider Android phones the carrier locked down as much as the iPhone. Also as open as various other not-very-open things.
If you don't care about it being an open platform, fine. But your suggestion that people who do care should think the iPhone is fine because there are other similarly closed platforms out there is weird. There are perfectly excellent, far more open platforms available too. So I'm going to keep buying them and thinking they are better by my criteria, because they are.
Huh? We've never drilled deeper than a scratch; anything we "know" about the center of the earth is certainly something we deduce/extrapolate/theorize based on our model. Even without slipping into pure solipsism, surely what we "know" about the center of the earth is based on entirely the same sort of deduction you seem to reject for the Big Bang.
:"we'll never lower the barrier of getting humans into space - and that's where we want to be, eventually" Why?
"Unmanned vehicles have their time and place, but they will only take us so far" Further and faster than manned flights.
"It's like when airplanes replaced ships for long-distance travel" I'd say it's like when electronic communications replaced sending letters. Communications got easier because electrons are a better way to transmit information than paper. It's not a matter of waiting until mail delivery gets cheaper. Lot's of people early on didn't think of an electronic copy of a document was as "real" as actual paper, but they are getting over that. So shall it be with tele-robotic exploration.
I guess it depends on your goal for space flight:
Exploration: This is my goal. I want to learn what Mars (and other planets) are like, and look for life to which we are not related. This goal is better served via unmanned probes, and I expect it will be forever. Particularly looking for life; Humans are giant balls of contamination and do not take well to being autoclaved.
Tourism: It won't get cheap enough before I die for me to personally go into space, nor in the long run for significant fractions of humanity to do so. As far as the future wealthy and the current mega-wealthy: screw 'em.
Colonization: A population of humans who could live on independent of Earth has some appeal. But it isn't close, and being able to cheaply launch humans into space isn't the big hurdle. I'd argue exploration via robotic probes is a better way to advance this goal today.
So the IIS would be radically cheaper in a slightly higher orbit? Say 2 * geosyncronous. Drag and space debris there are irrelevant. Weird that the IIS planners didn't want to make it so much cheaper.
Skip replacing the crew too and just go for the cost of the unmanned supply drones that are most flights to IIS anyway: it's still orders of magnitude more than sending the rovers to Mars. The number of pounds you have to boost to LEO to keep a man alive for a year is the same if he stays there or keeps going to Mars. Well, actually Mars is about 30% more boost, because contrary to your assertion, the IIS isn't at escape velocity. (Hence it's lack of escaping) But just the part of the IIS cost that is boosting food/water/etc. to LEO is all by itself orders of magnitude more expensive than the rovers.
"Way ahead of state-of-the-art? This is Werner von Braun had all figured out in the 70s."
The state of the art is you actually do, not what you imagine before you figure out the details by actually doing it. In any case, NASA is way beyond where von Braun ever imagined. They have taken advantage of huge technological progress over what he could do. Notably, progress in tele-robotics has allowed them to explore Mars!
The cost of any space mission is almost entirely the R&D before launch (still got a bunch to do for Mars compared to the IIS) and the amount of weight you need to get up there. The weight of a manned mission is mostly the supplies to keep him alive which is the same in LEO as on Mars.
"That sound you heard was my point going over your head." Then why does your reply reiterate exactly the point I thought I understood? To be clear, you're claiming humans exploring Mars via remote probes aren't as efficient or effective as those who do not use remote probes. Please do correct me if this is not you claim, because that is the claim I am arguing against. If that is your claim, please dispense with ridiculing people for not understanding you when they clearly just disagree with you.
Humans using robotic probes got the job done much faster and much more cheaply. What definition of "efficient" are you using? Efficient in terms of what? Not time or cost obviously. Humans driving via remote control have photographed the rock. Humans driving via steering wheel have not. What does "effective" mean if it doesn't involve accomplishing the task? Human exploration of Mars via remotely controlled probe is wildly more efficient and effective than human exploration of Mars without remote probes. This is not speculation, or a romantic assumption, it's historical fact. The effective approach is the one that get's the job done. I have the picture of the rock right here on my desktop, and it was taken by a human who used a remote control.
Seriously, is there any other field of endeavor where you would say: "Team A finished up the job yesterday. Team B speculates they might finish 20 years from now for a thousand times the cost. Team A isn't as efficient and effective as Team B, not even close."? Of course you wouldn't, it's ridiculous.
"A thousand launchers, alone, would outstrip the cost of such a venture..."
Look up the cost to put two rovers on mars for the last several years vs. the cost to operate the ISS (in LEO!) over the same time. If you can get a man to Mars for 1 day and back alive for less than 1000 times what Spirit cost, you're way ahead of the state of the art. Do you suggest the cost of a manned presence on Mars ought to be vastly cheaper than a manned presence skimming Earths atmosphere in the ISS?
"All the progress made by the Mars rovers in six years could probably have been accomplished by human astronauts in just a few days"
Then why didn't they? It's been six years, and there is no indication human astronauts will accomplish the same thing in the next twenty, so your "few days" estimate may be off. When it comes to exploring Mars, moving across the surface and pointing a camera isn't actually the whole task. Getting there and remaining operational/alive are actually part of the problem. Accepting a less efficient means for accomplishing one part of a task because it makes a vastly harder part less difficult isn't cheating, it's smart. Which is why the humans that have been exploring using rovers have been exploring Mars; while humans who physically go there themselves have spent orders of magnitude more money to explore low earth orbit.
"Spirit's motor is jammed? No prob, here's a spare."
No prob, other than establishing a manned base on Mars. If you want to repair the rover, and you've got the budget for a manned outpost on Mars, why not just some entire spare rovers instead? Like a few thousand or so.
"Steven Squyres' book about how one of the rovers spent an entire week backing and filling so it could photograph a rock from all sides - something a human being could have done in minutes."
The humans that drove their rover around that rock via remote control got the photographs a few years ago. If humans using a steering wheel to drive their rover around the rock are so much more efficient, why aren't they anywhere close? If the objective is to get photographs of that rock, humans driving rovers by remote control have won the race by decades for a vanishingly small fraction of the cost. Why does it not count? Just because they used better tools? Certainly a human in direct control would be more efficient if you ignore the cost and difficulty of getting them there and keeping them operational/alive. But getting there and remaining operational is actually the entire problem.
Do you have similar objection to bomb-defusing robots? Why put up with tediously maneuvering a manipulator arm? A human could reach in and clip that wire in seconds!
No, it doesn't. Well, I assume it would eventually, if I went that long without losing my watch; but I don't. If you want a watch with all the basic digital watch features (stopwatch, alarm, etc), it's great and cheap. I've lost a half dozen of them over a few decades. Which is no problem: you look behind the sofa cushions and find either the watch or enough change for a new one.
At least once I've managed to hold onto one for 4-5 years without the battery giving out.
Microsoft (like many others) pursues their own self-interest. They decide what outcome they want based on what's good for them. They don't consider whether it is good for the world. So one would expect them to sometimes take a reasonable position by chance. Just deciding everything MS favors must be bad is an easy metric, but not very helpful.
"You could replace pharmaceutical patents with something like a 4-year monopoly on sale of the drugs in question by the company (or consortium) that paid for the FDA approval process."
You want to give companies that develop new drugs the exclusive right to sell the drug for a limited time, as an alternative to patents?
"I guess that, in Microsoft's world, you can't patent something after releasing it."
Which is indisputably true.
And note that i4i doesn't take the ridiculous position of disputing this foundational concept of patent law. They dispute whether the district court can decide whether they previously released it, or whether they have to assume the Patent Office's previous determination that they did not release it is correct.
So the choice is between admitting MS is right in this one case, versus saying the Patent Office is infallible. A painful choice for a slashdotter, but there you have it.
"Neither Amazon nor B&N open their gardens to competitors."
But Android does, and Windows does. Yes, Apple is not the only company with a more locked down, rent-seeking model than fracking Microsoft, but I'm not sure why I'm supposed to like it any better rather than just hating them too.
When I pay money for products or services, I want to be treated like I'm the customer, not like I'm the product to be captured and used as leverage. If Apple is deriving profit by withholding access to me from people I'd like to do business with, why am I paying them to do it?
Slashdot Mirror
Because unrefined iron ore is great stuff.
..."once you've got your admittedly heavy smelter up in orbit..."
You don't need a heavy smelter. Smelters are heavily built to handle & contain heat, but vacuum is better, doesn't weigh anything, and is free in space.
Of course, to actually do smelting you'll need to add more weight of coke & limestone to your ore than you're going to get in iron, so space-born smelting is still ridiculous. And that's even before you get to the various foundries and machine tools you are going to need to make anything useful from your iron; even simple beams.
"Think on a very big amount of easy to extract..."
It's in space, orbiting the sun. With this scheme nobody's tried, maybe we can put it in earth orbit, twice as far away as men have ever gone. In short, it's about as far from "easy to extract" as it could be.
As I understand it, a brick that can provide 10 watts will need some cheap electronics so when you plug it into a 130 watt device, they will gracefully refuse to work. If you plug a brick capable of 130 watts into a 10 watt device, maybe you paid too much for the brick, and it won't be as efficient, but it will work.
Personally, I've got 4 or 5 devices I want to plug in, not generally at the same time, but in 3 or 4 locations. If I could stop carrying power bricks around, and leave one that can handle my laptop at each spot, I'd gladly eat the inefficiency when I plug in my phone.
I've got a great Android based pocket-sized Wi-Fi tablet. Is it supposed to be a negative that I could theoretically pay for service and use it to make phone calls?
It's a negative if the device cost you substantially more than 300 USD,
I paid $200, which will buy your choice of various not-quite-latest Android phones. Mine is a Motorola Cliq.
It's a negative if the applications you want to use require multitouch
They don't.
A lot of applications, especially games that use on-screen buttons to simulate a gamepad, require multitouch.
I just suffer through using an actual d-pad, right next to the actual keyboard.
It's a negative if your device doesn't come with access to the market that has the apps you want.
I've got the Android Market.
What are you talking about? I've got a great Android based pocket-sized Wi-Fi tablet. Is it supposed to be a negative that I could theoretically pay for service and use it to make phone calls? I can't see why.
There is definitely a teapot in orbit around the sun. I just made tea in it.
I'm not sure why that's relevant in the first place, but salaries of all government workers is a tiny fraction of the budget in any case.
Yes, the iPhone is comparable to a heavily locked-down Andoid phone.
Which is why I have a non-locked-down Android phone, and I "guess I think I have my utopia platform" since neither of your disagreements apply.
"With Android carriers gain more control over the software delivered on their phones than is available with iOS."
Carriers have less control because Apple keeps the control. Wow, that's great for me.
iPhone: as open as Android if you only consider Android phones the carrier locked down as much as the iPhone. Also as open as various other not-very-open things.
If you don't care about it being an open platform, fine. But your suggestion that people who do care should think the iPhone is fine because there are other similarly closed platforms out there is weird. There are perfectly excellent, far more open platforms available too. So I'm going to keep buying them and thinking they are better by my criteria, because they are.
"We know that the center of the earth is hot."
Huh? We've never drilled deeper than a scratch; anything we "know" about the center of the earth is certainly something we deduce/extrapolate/theorize based on our model. Even without slipping into pure solipsism, surely what we "know" about the center of the earth is based on entirely the same sort of deduction you seem to reject for the Big Bang.
:"we'll never lower the barrier of getting humans into space - and that's where we want to be, eventually"
Why?
"Unmanned vehicles have their time and place, but they will only take us so far"
Further and faster than manned flights.
"It's like when airplanes replaced ships for long-distance travel"
I'd say it's like when electronic communications replaced sending letters. Communications got easier because electrons are a better way to transmit information than paper. It's not a matter of waiting until mail delivery gets cheaper. Lot's of people early on didn't think of an electronic copy of a document was as "real" as actual paper, but they are getting over that. So shall it be with tele-robotic exploration.
I guess it depends on your goal for space flight:
Exploration: This is my goal. I want to learn what Mars (and other planets) are like, and look for life to which we are not related. This goal is better served via unmanned probes, and I expect it will be forever. Particularly looking for life; Humans are giant balls of contamination and do not take well to being autoclaved.
Tourism: It won't get cheap enough before I die for me to personally go into space, nor in the long run for significant fractions of humanity to do so. As far as the future wealthy and the current mega-wealthy: screw 'em.
Colonization: A population of humans who could live on independent of Earth has some appeal. But it isn't close, and being able to cheaply launch humans into space isn't the big hurdle. I'd argue exploration via robotic probes is a better way to advance this goal today.
So the IIS would be radically cheaper in a slightly higher orbit? Say 2 * geosyncronous. Drag and space debris there are irrelevant. Weird that the IIS planners didn't want to make it so much cheaper.
Skip replacing the crew too and just go for the cost of the unmanned supply drones that are most flights to IIS anyway: it's still orders of magnitude more than sending the rovers to Mars. The number of pounds you have to boost to LEO to keep a man alive for a year is the same if he stays there or keeps going to Mars. Well, actually Mars is about 30% more boost, because contrary to your assertion, the IIS isn't at escape velocity. (Hence it's lack of escaping) But just the part of the IIS cost that is boosting food/water/etc. to LEO is all by itself orders of magnitude more expensive than the rovers.
"Way ahead of state-of-the-art? This is Werner von Braun had all figured out in the 70s."
The state of the art is you actually do, not what you imagine before you figure out the details by actually doing it. In any case, NASA is way beyond where von Braun ever imagined. They have taken advantage of huge technological progress over what he could do. Notably, progress in tele-robotics has allowed them to explore Mars!
The cost of any space mission is almost entirely the R&D before launch (still got a bunch to do for Mars compared to the IIS) and the amount of weight you need to get up there. The weight of a manned mission is mostly the supplies to keep him alive which is the same in LEO as on Mars.
"That sound you heard was my point going over your head."
Then why does your reply reiterate exactly the point I thought I understood? To be clear, you're claiming humans exploring Mars via remote probes aren't as efficient or effective as those who do not use remote probes. Please do correct me if this is not you claim, because that is the claim I am arguing against. If that is your claim, please dispense with ridiculing people for not understanding you when they clearly just disagree with you.
Humans using robotic probes got the job done much faster and much more cheaply. What definition of "efficient" are you using? Efficient in terms of what? Not time or cost obviously.
Humans driving via remote control have photographed the rock. Humans driving via steering wheel have not. What does "effective" mean if it doesn't involve accomplishing the task?
Human exploration of Mars via remotely controlled probe is wildly more efficient and effective than human exploration of Mars without remote probes. This is not speculation, or a romantic assumption, it's historical fact. The effective approach is the one that get's the job done. I have the picture of the rock right here on my desktop, and it was taken by a human who used a remote control.
Seriously, is there any other field of endeavor where you would say: "Team A finished up the job yesterday. Team B speculates they might finish 20 years from now for a thousand times the cost. Team A isn't as efficient and effective as Team B, not even close."? Of course you wouldn't, it's ridiculous.
"A thousand launchers, alone, would outstrip the cost of such a venture..."
Look up the cost to put two rovers on mars for the last several years vs. the cost to operate the ISS (in LEO!) over the same time. If you can get a man to Mars for 1 day and back alive for less than 1000 times what Spirit cost, you're way ahead of the state of the art. Do you suggest the cost of a manned presence on Mars ought to be vastly cheaper than a manned presence skimming Earths atmosphere in the ISS?
"All the progress made by the Mars rovers in six years could probably have been accomplished by human astronauts in just a few days"
Then why didn't they? It's been six years, and there is no indication human astronauts will accomplish the same thing in the next twenty, so your "few days" estimate may be off. When it comes to exploring Mars, moving across the surface and pointing a camera isn't actually the whole task. Getting there and remaining operational/alive are actually part of the problem. Accepting a less efficient means for accomplishing one part of a task because it makes a vastly harder part less difficult isn't cheating, it's smart. Which is why the humans that have been exploring using rovers have been exploring Mars; while humans who physically go there themselves have spent orders of magnitude more money to explore low earth orbit.
"Spirit's motor is jammed? No prob, here's a spare."
No prob, other than establishing a manned base on Mars. If you want to repair the rover, and you've got the budget for a manned outpost on Mars, why not just some entire spare rovers instead? Like a few thousand or so.
"Steven Squyres' book about how one of the rovers spent an entire week backing and filling so it could photograph a rock from all sides - something a human being could have done in minutes."
The humans that drove their rover around that rock via remote control got the photographs a few years ago. If humans using a steering wheel to drive their rover around the rock are so much more efficient, why aren't they anywhere close? If the objective is to get photographs of that rock, humans driving rovers by remote control have won the race by decades for a vanishingly small fraction of the cost. Why does it not count? Just because they used better tools? Certainly a human in direct control would be more efficient if you ignore the cost and difficulty of getting them there and keeping them operational/alive. But getting there and remaining operational is actually the entire problem.
Do you have similar objection to bomb-defusing robots? Why put up with tediously maneuvering a manipulator arm? A human could reach in and clip that wire in seconds!
No, it doesn't. Well, I assume it would eventually, if I went that long without losing my watch; but I don't. If you want a watch with all the basic digital watch features (stopwatch, alarm, etc), it's great and cheap. I've lost a half dozen of them over a few decades. Which is no problem: you look behind the sofa cushions and find either the watch or enough change for a new one.
At least once I've managed to hold onto one for 4-5 years without the battery giving out.
I'd offer $100 too. But then it would belong to the US gov, which would be forbidden to use it to close GTMO.
I'm not letting Obama off the hook here, he's responsible along with Congress; he hasn't pushed. But he can't act unilaterally either.
I'm not sure an open router is an invitation all by itself. That's why my SSID is "FeelFree".
The only "penalty" so far has been a case of beer from a neighbor whose connection went down.
Seems a lot simpler than that to me:
Microsoft (like many others) pursues their own self-interest. They decide what outcome they want based on what's good for them. They don't consider whether it is good for the world. So one would expect them to sometimes take a reasonable position by chance. Just deciding everything MS favors must be bad is an easy metric, but not very helpful.
"You could replace pharmaceutical patents with something like a 4-year monopoly on sale of the drugs in question by the company (or consortium) that paid for the FDA approval process."
You want to give companies that develop new drugs the exclusive right to sell the drug for a limited time, as an alternative to patents?
You'll note that the Coward quotes a section of the law labeled "(b)". Does this make you wonder if there are any other sections?
"I guess that, in Microsoft's world, you can't patent something after releasing it."
Which is indisputably true.
And note that i4i doesn't take the ridiculous position of disputing this foundational concept of patent law. They dispute whether the district court can decide whether they previously released it, or whether they have to assume the Patent Office's previous determination that they did not release it is correct.
So the choice is between admitting MS is right in this one case, versus saying the Patent Office is infallible. A painful choice for a slashdotter, but there you have it.
"Neither Amazon nor B&N open their gardens to competitors."
But Android does, and Windows does. Yes, Apple is not the only company with a more locked down, rent-seeking model than fracking Microsoft, but I'm not sure why I'm supposed to like it any better rather than just hating them too.
When I pay money for products or services, I want to be treated like I'm the customer, not like I'm the product to be captured and used as leverage. If Apple is deriving profit by withholding access to me from people I'd like to do business with, why am I paying them to do it?