The one big thing it does offer is that lots of people want to go there: tourism and adventure. Hence the only things showing signs of commercial life are tourism and adventure companies.
Except, you know, communications and earth observation. That's where 99% of the "signs commercial life" go. It's only a trillion dollar industry, nothing big or anything.
It's a stepping stone. There's all these business models that you can do to make a profit, gain experience and drive down the price of space access which people are pursuing now. Everything from launching people's remains into space as a secondary payload (cheap to do, and LOTS of people will pay for it), to suborbital and orbital space tourism, to satellite constellation based radio, broadband access, and tracking. Then there's the guys at the top of the spectrum. Orbital Recovery are developing a space tug to interface with communications satellites and extend their revenue-producing lifetimes beyond original specifications. The space tug is a critical part of space infrastructure. If you want to build a space hotel at the ISS and drag it out to the L1 point (where Earth and Luna gravity meets) you'll need a space tug. Once you've got that in place you're half way to the moon. It's not conceivable to build massive landers in space, with enough equipment to extract oxygen from the luna soil (or that water they keep talking about) and boost it up. That reduces the amount of oxygen that needs to be brought up from earth which reduces the costs for your space tourists. Now that you've got a presence on the moon you can go prospecting. All those craters on the moon, each one created by a planet killer, most of them contain vast amounts of precious metals. Most notably the Platinum Group Metals. If you're on the moon anyways, you might as well pick them up, process em and send em back to earth where they can be used in fuel cells, jewelry and Carmack style monoprop rockets which are capable of single stage to orbit, reducing the costs of space access yet again. And so it goes and so it goes. It's not the Saturn V, flags and footprints space exploration of our parents generation, or the triple stage tractor factory military operations of Wernher van Braun, but eventually the commercialisation of space will result in enough people living and working in space that we can claim with a straight face that our society is interplanetary.
Ya know, you're the first person I've heard actually state that. I agree with you, but I have never actually seen the math to back it up. SpaceX's Falcon I can deliver 580kg to the space station, for $5.9 million. What you're claiming is that if we only want to deliver 2kg to the space station we're still going to have to pay $5.9 million if no-one else wants to go with us..
No offense, but what you're arguing is that people are abusing the word nanotechnology to get funding whilst claiming that nanotechnology is just chemistry. i.e., you're assigning malice to people based on an argument founded in ignorance. Yes people get funding to do things which are not related to nanotechnology in the slightest just because they throw "nano" into the title of the funding application, but have you considered that maybe they, like you, actually think nanotechnology is related to their field? Nanotechnology is the study of precise control of molecular scale systems. Eric Drexler's work is nanotechnology. Ralph C. Merkle's work is nanotechnology. To claim it is just organic chemistry is naive.
An idiot who doesn't know what he's talking about gets modded up by other idiots who don't know he's an idiot. Gotta love Slashdot. It'd be funny if it didn't remind us so much of the US congress.
You can introduce novelties though.. it's simply a case of doing the least amount of work possible to maintain the current userbase. It's a business justification.
Ya know what annoys me. When MMOGs are "finished" being developed and players are let in, the live team basically fixes bugs and adds new content. Development just stops. Compare this with MUDs. Every week new features will be added to a MUD. Submit a good suggestion to the devs and you're almost guarenteed to see it implemented.
Please don't tell me you just linked to an exe on the front page of Slashdot! Jesus H. Christ. Don't give the hackers, virus and worm writers, or spyware makers a challenge will ya?
If that's your goal then you should pick up the latest KDE tree, apply styles and change code so that your desktop environment looks 100% like Windows XP short of the logos. Users simply will not learn a new system.
A typical 500 megawatt coal power plant produces 3.5 billion kWh per year. To produce this amount of electrical energy, the plant burns 1.43 million tons of coal. It also produces 10,000 tons of sulfur dioxide (causes acid rain), 10,200 tons of nitrogen oxides (causes smog and acid rain), and 3,700,000 tons of CO2.
So if you accept that there's an average of 12 hours of useful sunlight per day, that means you need about an 800 megawatt solar farm to match that output. You'd need about 6 million square meters of the cheap solar cells available today. That is, a square of 2.5 km on a side. Such a farm could be maintained for much cheaper than it costs to mine and deliver coal and it would produce zero emmissions. As such, no matter how many polutants were released in the manufacture of all them solar cells, the amortised cost to the environment would be in our favour.
What are you comparing them against? Even if solar panels were 10 times more polluting to produce than a coal plant you'd still win in the end because the solar panels would produce energy with zero emissions for their operational life whereas a coal plant would spew CO2 into the atmosphere for the entirety of its operational life. So take your own advice and consider the total life cycle cost.
Unstructured Information Management Architecture SDK. The UIMA SDK (Software Development Kit), is an all-JavaTM implementation of the UIMA framework, and it supports the implementation, description, composition, and deployment of UIMA components and applications. It also supports the developer with an Eclipse -based development environment that includes a set of tools and utilities for using UIMA.
Unfortunately, unless there's a massive breakthrough in battery or fuel cell technology, it will be cheaper to run automobiles on oil even if the prices triple or quadruple. Thankfully, even in the US, governments are demanding that car emissions be reduced to zero within the next 20 years.
At the Earth's surface an average of 1000 watts of solar energy fills every square meter of space. The average US style house rarely uses more than 10 kilowatts of power even at peak demand. In total, the Earth receives every day a total of 18,000 terawatts of power. The total amount of energy used today globally is no more than 9 terawatts.
Unfortunately, it is impossible to capture all of the solar energy that falls on Earth and convert it to power. Today, the best solar cells that you can purchase are made for satellites and convert about 28.5% of the energy from the sun into DC electrical power. You can purchase them from Emcore or SpectroLab. They are very expensive, costing about $300 per watt of power produced.
There are alternatives to the high tech solar cells that are available at most high tech electronics outlets. They are made of multi-cystalline silicon and have efficiencies of between 10 to 15%. They only cost about $10 per watt at the retail level. That's still more expensive than power from the grid if you live in a major city, but many US states have tax breaks for the installation of such systems.
Obviously if you were building a massive solar farm to produce hydrogen you could get solar cells for cheaper. And if we're talking about 10 or 20 years from now, when the price of oil and coal have reached a level where it is no longer economical to burn them to produce electricity, the more efficient solar cells will be available and, conceivably, even better cells based on quantum dot technology will be available.
Here in Australia we have over 40% of the world's supply of uranium and we have one (1) nuclear reactor which contributes little to none of the national power supply. You'd figure we'd be utilizing all the uranium assets we have to make hydrogen and export it to the world. You'd figure we'd have paved roads to all the populated areas of our country. You'd figure we'd have a massive pipeline to deliver desalinated water to our farmers. It's not like we can't afford it, we have a massive budget surplus and next to no national debt.
Connect electrolisis up to Hoover dam. Where's the pollution? Connect electrolisis up to solar panels. Where's the pollution? Connect electrolisis up to wind turbines. Where's the pollution? Just because you can burn coal to make hydrogen doesn't mean you should.
Absolutely, if you can mine the moon without sending a single human then all the better. Unfortunately, we can't even mine on earth without human labor.
I obviously wasn't clear enough in this post as at least 4 people have read it and think I am suggesting that we launch poor people into space to get rid of them. The point of my post was that the earth has limited resources and therefore cannot support the current or future world population at a standard of living that is acceptable. As such, I believe we must bring the resources of space down to earth so that it can support an increasing population. And no, this isn't fantasia bullshit. For $20 billion the US could build a sustainable manned moon colony which could send down unthinkably large amounts of resources. Of course, next you're gunna claim there are no resources on the moon and that the only way forward is to huddle in the dark as we use up all the resources on earth.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is just another reduce the scope so you have an argument strategy.
Except, you know, communications and earth observation. That's where 99% of the "signs commercial life" go. It's only a trillion dollar industry, nothing big or anything.
It's a stepping stone. There's all these business models that you can do to make a profit, gain experience and drive down the price of space access which people are pursuing now. Everything from launching people's remains into space as a secondary payload (cheap to do, and LOTS of people will pay for it), to suborbital and orbital space tourism, to satellite constellation based radio, broadband access, and tracking. Then there's the guys at the top of the spectrum. Orbital Recovery are developing a space tug to interface with communications satellites and extend their revenue-producing lifetimes beyond original specifications. The space tug is a critical part of space infrastructure. If you want to build a space hotel at the ISS and drag it out to the L1 point (where Earth and Luna gravity meets) you'll need a space tug. Once you've got that in place you're half way to the moon. It's not conceivable to build massive landers in space, with enough equipment to extract oxygen from the luna soil (or that water they keep talking about) and boost it up. That reduces the amount of oxygen that needs to be brought up from earth which reduces the costs for your space tourists. Now that you've got a presence on the moon you can go prospecting. All those craters on the moon, each one created by a planet killer, most of them contain vast amounts of precious metals. Most notably the Platinum Group Metals. If you're on the moon anyways, you might as well pick them up, process em and send em back to earth where they can be used in fuel cells, jewelry and Carmack style monoprop rockets which are capable of single stage to orbit, reducing the costs of space access yet again. And so it goes and so it goes. It's not the Saturn V, flags and footprints space exploration of our parents generation, or the triple stage tractor factory military operations of Wernher van Braun, but eventually the commercialisation of space will result in enough people living and working in space that we can claim with a straight face that our society is interplanetary.
That's obvious, you ban the guy, even though you promised you weren't going to use your powers to interfere in the game anymore and then watch the society you built crumble into dust.
Ya know, you're the first person I've heard actually state that. I agree with you, but I have never actually seen the math to back it up. SpaceX's Falcon I can deliver 580kg to the space station, for $5.9 million. What you're claiming is that if we only want to deliver 2kg to the space station we're still going to have to pay $5.9 million if no-one else wants to go with us..
No offense, but what you're arguing is that people are abusing the word nanotechnology to get funding whilst claiming that nanotechnology is just chemistry. i.e., you're assigning malice to people based on an argument founded in ignorance. Yes people get funding to do things which are not related to nanotechnology in the slightest just because they throw "nano" into the title of the funding application, but have you considered that maybe they, like you, actually think nanotechnology is related to their field? Nanotechnology is the study of precise control of molecular scale systems. Eric Drexler's work is nanotechnology. Ralph C. Merkle's work is nanotechnology. To claim it is just organic chemistry is naive.
An idiot who doesn't know what he's talking about gets modded up by other idiots who don't know he's an idiot. Gotta love Slashdot. It'd be funny if it didn't remind us so much of the US congress.
but what's the point? Sounds like a circle jerk to me.
Or at least use the money to improve the game.
You can introduce novelties though.. it's simply a case of doing the least amount of work possible to maintain the current userbase. It's a business justification.
sellout poser.
Ya know what annoys me. When MMOGs are "finished" being developed and players are let in, the live team basically fixes bugs and adds new content. Development just stops. Compare this with MUDs. Every week new features will be added to a MUD. Submit a good suggestion to the devs and you're almost guarenteed to see it implemented.
Please don't tell me you just linked to an exe on the front page of Slashdot! Jesus H. Christ. Don't give the hackers, virus and worm writers, or spyware makers a challenge will ya?
No offense or anything, but if you start a project and you don't get 20 people submitting patches in the first month you might as well stop.
If that's your goal then you should pick up the latest KDE tree, apply styles and change code so that your desktop environment looks 100% like Windows XP short of the logos. Users simply will not learn a new system.
A typical 500 megawatt coal power plant produces 3.5 billion kWh per year. To produce this amount of electrical energy, the plant burns 1.43 million tons of coal. It also produces 10,000 tons of sulfur dioxide (causes acid rain), 10,200 tons of nitrogen oxides (causes smog and acid rain), and 3,700,000 tons of CO2.
So if you accept that there's an average of 12 hours of useful sunlight per day, that means you need about an 800 megawatt solar farm to match that output. You'd need about 6 million square meters of the cheap solar cells available today. That is, a square of 2.5 km on a side. Such a farm could be maintained for much cheaper than it costs to mine and deliver coal and it would produce zero emmissions. As such, no matter how many polutants were released in the manufacture of all them solar cells, the amortised cost to the environment would be in our favour.
What are you comparing them against? Even if solar panels were 10 times more polluting to produce than a coal plant you'd still win in the end because the solar panels would produce energy with zero emissions for their operational life whereas a coal plant would spew CO2 into the atmosphere for the entirety of its operational life. So take your own advice and consider the total life cycle cost.
Unstructured Information Management Architecture SDK. The UIMA SDK (Software Development Kit), is an all-JavaTM implementation of the UIMA framework, and it supports the implementation, description, composition, and deployment of UIMA components and applications. It also supports the developer with an Eclipse -based development environment that includes a set of tools and utilities for using UIMA.
Go you crazy Java dudes, go.
Unfortunately, unless there's a massive breakthrough in battery or fuel cell technology, it will be cheaper to run automobiles on oil even if the prices triple or quadruple. Thankfully, even in the US, governments are demanding that car emissions be reduced to zero within the next 20 years.
At the Earth's surface an average of 1000 watts of solar energy fills every square meter of space. The average US style house rarely uses more than 10 kilowatts of power even at peak demand. In total, the Earth receives every day a total of 18,000 terawatts of power. The total amount of energy used today globally is no more than 9 terawatts.
Unfortunately, it is impossible to capture all of the solar energy that falls on Earth and convert it to power. Today, the best solar cells that you can purchase are made for satellites and convert about 28.5% of the energy from the sun into DC electrical power. You can purchase them from Emcore or SpectroLab. They are very expensive, costing about $300 per watt of power produced.
There are alternatives to the high tech solar cells that are available at most high tech electronics outlets. They are made of multi-cystalline silicon and have efficiencies of between 10 to 15%. They only cost about $10 per watt at the retail level. That's still more expensive than power from the grid if you live in a major city, but many US states have tax breaks for the installation of such systems.
Obviously if you were building a massive solar farm to produce hydrogen you could get solar cells for cheaper. And if we're talking about 10 or 20 years from now, when the price of oil and coal have reached a level where it is no longer economical to burn them to produce electricity, the more efficient solar cells will be available and, conceivably, even better cells based on quantum dot technology will be available.
Here in Australia we have over 40% of the world's supply of uranium and we have one (1) nuclear reactor which contributes little to none of the national power supply. You'd figure we'd be utilizing all the uranium assets we have to make hydrogen and export it to the world. You'd figure we'd have paved roads to all the populated areas of our country. You'd figure we'd have a massive pipeline to deliver desalinated water to our farmers. It's not like we can't afford it, we have a massive budget surplus and next to no national debt.
Connect electrolisis up to Hoover dam. Where's the pollution? Connect electrolisis up to solar panels. Where's the pollution? Connect electrolisis up to wind turbines. Where's the pollution? Just because you can burn coal to make hydrogen doesn't mean you should.
Absolutely, if you can mine the moon without sending a single human then all the better. Unfortunately, we can't even mine on earth without human labor.
Go read the fuckin' book man. Jesus, you argue just for the sake of argument.
I obviously wasn't clear enough in this post as at least 4 people have read it and think I am suggesting that we launch poor people into space to get rid of them. The point of my post was that the earth has limited resources and therefore cannot support the current or future world population at a standard of living that is acceptable. As such, I believe we must bring the resources of space down to earth so that it can support an increasing population. And no, this isn't fantasia bullshit. For $20 billion the US could build a sustainable manned moon colony which could send down unthinkably large amounts of resources. Of course, next you're gunna claim there are no resources on the moon and that the only way forward is to huddle in the dark as we use up all the resources on earth.