Don't try this bullshit of 'its perfectly safe nothing can possibly go wrong' because it just makes it obvious you either are full of shit/hiding the truth, or just stupid.
We've lived with radio waves all over the place for over a century. Countless studies have shown that electromagnetic radiation produces no deleterious effects. The burden of proof is on you to come up with repeatable experiments providing evidence for falsifiable claims that radio waves are harmful at the levels proposed.
Each geosynchronous eclipse season lasts about 46 days and the maximum duration of the eclipse in each season is about 72 minutes
For practical purposes, a geosynchronous orbit's solar irradiation is close enough to constant that it doesn't matter. If your satellite is actually solar thermal, then it really doesn't matter.
Hell, the mains power goes out more often than that here in Buffalo, NY.
Each geosynchronous eclipse season lasts about 46 days and the maximum duration of the eclipse in each season is about 72 minutes
For practical purposes, a geosynchronous orbit's solar irradiation is close enough to constant that it doesn't matter. If your satellite is actually solar thermal, then it really doesn't matter.
Hell, the mains power goes out more often than that here in Buffalo, NY.
So is it something magical about IR or is it simply that a wide variety of objects just so happen (by coincidence) to have a high correspondence between IR radiation and temperature?
Correct. The frequency at which an object glows is directly related to its temperature. It just so happens that objects we ordinarily deal with radiate in the infrared. If we ordinarily dealt with objects hot enough to glow red hot, then we'd consider red light to be "heat radiation".
Except that in space, you don't need to deal with atmospheric attenuation. That increases the effective power output of your solar cells quite a bit, even if their efficiency is the same. 50% (to pick an arbitrary figure) of 500MW is a lot more than 50% of 250MW.
The amount of stored energy on earth doesn't matter. Only the energy in the climactic system matters. That's why carbon is so bad: it causes more incident solar radiation to stay in the atmosphere and influence the climate. From the atmosphere's point of view, both conventional power generation and this setup involve the addition of "new" energy: it's just that for fossil fuels, we're talking about a lot more new energy.
In geosynchronous orbit, the sun's practically always shining.
Also, if you think orbital solar is expensive, imagine trying to string HVDC lines across hundreds of miles of shifting sand dunes, then under the Mediterranean sea or across Gibraltar. Then think how expensive it'll be to send people into the middle of one Earth's largest deserts to service all this equipment. It makes space look cheap.
And now you see why dismantling our education system was the greatest injury we've ever inflicted on ourselves. These days, most people, even on Slashdot, lack the ability to reasonably weigh evidence without resorting to intuition and emotion.
Are there any purely electric space propulsion systems?
If you're talking about attitude of a spacecraft in orbit, then as a matter of fact, there are purely electric systems: magnetic torquers. Lots of satellites use them, including Hubble.
You don't even need to do that. Just launch a couple of heavy bricks up into space and de-orbit them on command. The kinetic energy from the impact would be enough to take out an installation. If you really wanted to get creative, instead of bricks, use nuclear warheads, which lets you nuke any spot on earth with virtually no warning.
Yes, invulnerable. There's a huge difference between hitting a satellite in low earth orbit and geosynchronous orbit, which is a few times higher up and which requires a lot more delta-v to reach.
In case that's not snark: Niagara Falls is already one of the largest hydroelectric power installations in the world. There are two, actually: one Canadian. and one American.
Even if it weren't for the earthquakes (an overblown danger, IMHO), geothermal power isn't really generally practical. When you pump water through rocks to generate steam, you cool the rocks. Over a few decades, they become too cool to generate power.
Sure, if you let the field idle for a century or so, the rocks will recharge themselves from the underlying strata. But who wants to wait that long?
The additional energy input doesn't matter because the energy already here is locked up on molecular bonds. The contribution to the climatic energy system, which is the one that counts, is the same. Think about it!
First of all, the power being there doesn't mean that you absorb it. We're talking about microwaves (and not the cooking kind). It's not visible light or ultraviolet. You won't notice a thing. You won't get a sunburn.
Second, rectennas are stupidly efficient: 87%. We can barely get to 50% with solar. Furthermore, it's a lot cheaper to build a kilometer of rectenna than a kilometer of solar panels, and you can actually use the land underneath for something useful. And also unlike conventional solar, this thing would work all day and all night, every day of the year.
So it's all right because others do it? That's a bullshit argument. It's still a tricky way of getting unwanted software onto unsuspecting people's computers. If people actually wanted this software, vendors wouldn't have to pay to have it piggybacked onto completely unrelated programs. It's deliberately deceptive, and just because you know enough to uncheck the box doesn't mean that everyone does, or should have to, know to do that.
Why the hell do people like you continually advocate for the interests of faceless corporations over your own?
The good programmers are usually the ones that can find work and that can actually meet arbitrary deadlines set forth by restrictions in amount of money to be spent.
"Good" is such a vague term. Good for whom? If you're talking about "good" for quality of software in general, then clearly, the open source coders win.
On the other hand, if you're talking about "good" in terms of business, when the executive hiring the programmer will cash out his options in less than a year and doesn't give a damn about long-term maintenance costs, then you're correct.
Now, let's suppose you're right, and that the "good for [short-term] business" coders can find work more easily, and presumably earn more money. Would that extra value be worth working for a soulless entity, not caring about the quality of your work, and reading about some bug hurting people? Would it be worth giving up on learning new ideas, or receiving meaningful peer feedback, or doing something for the first time ever?
Maybe for you, it's wroth it. Me, I'd rather do what I love.
Just because you have the right to do something doesn't mean the manufacturer has to support it.
My arguments has two parts. First, I was replying to a poster asking why he should be able to modify his 360. It's private property, and that's why anyone should be able to modify his own iPhone or 360.
However, I also argue that Apple be forced to open up the iPhone, i.e. make it easy to modify at least in a limited way. This position doesn't rely on the private property argument, but instead on the idea that closed platforms are anticompetitive, and that we have a collective interest in opening them up.
In other words, you should be able to use any tool you can imagine to open up a closed device that you own, but additionally, companies shouldn't be allowed to sell closed devices in the first place.
"Moral authority" doesn't enter into it, mate.
Not really, no. You can make the argument on purely economic grounds. But on the other hand, closed platforms really do feel wrong, and that feeling resonates with a lot of people.
...believe me, they'd take that ability away from you in a heartbeat if they could, since they believe that they have a fundamental right to any revenue resulting from future sales of their "intellectual property".
Right. I don't begrudge Apple for taking advantage of the current system: I blame us for allowing Apple to do it. Publishers actually tried to legally bar book resales, and succeeded until the courts ruled that the idea is fundamentally unfair, and created the First Sale Doctrine.
We need something like the First Sale Doctrine for software. An idea isn't good simply because a giant company likes it.
Don't get me started on your XMLHttpRequest argument...
Flash allows you to request content from sites that would be blocked by XMLHttpRequest. Can you refuse that statement or not?
I bet if it was made by Linus/RMS/Jobs, the same crowd would have worshiped it...
You inadvertently make a good point. If Linus or RMS had developed flash, its source would have been open sourced, and by now, its capabilities would have been integrated into the browser. We wouldn't talk about what "Flash" can do as distinct from something else, but simply about the abilities of browsers.
That's what the rich media part of HTML5 is all about: doing what Flash can do in a browser.
It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
Jailbreak the device and install your own apps - apple doesn't really stop you from doing this.
Apple tries its hardest to stop jailbreaker, and you know damn well that ordinary people won't and can't jailbreak their phones.
If Apple provided a simple switch allowing installation of applications from outside the app store, I'd have no problem with the app store's rejection policy. But they don't, so I do.
Slashdot Mirror
We've lived with radio waves all over the place for over a century. Countless studies have shown that electromagnetic radiation produces no deleterious effects. The burden of proof is on you to come up with repeatable experiments providing evidence for falsifiable claims that radio waves are harmful at the levels proposed.
I already responded to this criticism:
He's right:
For practical purposes, a geosynchronous orbit's solar irradiation is close enough to constant that it doesn't matter. If your satellite is actually solar thermal, then it really doesn't matter.
Hell, the mains power goes out more often than that here in Buffalo, NY.
Correct. The frequency at which an object glows is directly related to its temperature. It just so happens that objects we ordinarily deal with radiate in the infrared. If we ordinarily dealt with objects hot enough to glow red hot, then we'd consider red light to be "heat radiation".
Except that in space, you don't need to deal with atmospheric attenuation. That increases the effective power output of your solar cells quite a bit, even if their efficiency is the same. 50% (to pick an arbitrary figure) of 500MW is a lot more than 50% of 250MW.
The amount of stored energy on earth doesn't matter. Only the energy in the climactic system matters. That's why carbon is so bad: it causes more incident solar radiation to stay in the atmosphere and influence the climate. From the atmosphere's point of view, both conventional power generation and this setup involve the addition of "new" energy: it's just that for fossil fuels, we're talking about a lot more new energy.
In geosynchronous orbit, the sun's practically always shining.
Also, if you think orbital solar is expensive, imagine trying to string HVDC lines across hundreds of miles of shifting sand dunes, then under the Mediterranean sea or across Gibraltar. Then think how expensive it'll be to send people into the middle of one Earth's largest deserts to service all this equipment. It makes space look cheap.
And now you see why dismantling our education system was the greatest injury we've ever inflicted on ourselves. These days, most people, even on Slashdot, lack the ability to reasonably weigh evidence without resorting to intuition and emotion.
If you're talking about attitude of a spacecraft in orbit, then as a matter of fact, there are purely electric systems: magnetic torquers. Lots of satellites use them, including Hubble.
You don't even need to do that. Just launch a couple of heavy bricks up into space and de-orbit them on command. The kinetic energy from the impact would be enough to take out an installation. If you really wanted to get creative, instead of bricks, use nuclear warheads, which lets you nuke any spot on earth with virtually no warning.
You don't need lasers.
The Environmentalist's Fallacy
It goes something like this:
In reality, X produces far less overall pollution than Y.
I've seen this argument used to oppose:
All of these are great technologies. If we're ever to make any progress, we have to learn to think past the environmentalist's fallacy.
Even if true, that figure only applies during the day. Whose valleys do you want to flood to build enough pumped storage to provide power at night?
Yes, invulnerable. There's a huge difference between hitting a satellite in low earth orbit and geosynchronous orbit, which is a few times higher up and which requires a lot more delta-v to reach.
In case that's not snark: Niagara Falls is already one of the largest hydroelectric power installations in the world. There are two, actually: one Canadian. and one American.
Even if it weren't for the earthquakes (an overblown danger, IMHO), geothermal power isn't really generally practical. When you pump water through rocks to generate steam, you cool the rocks. Over a few decades, they become too cool to generate power.
Sure, if you let the field idle for a century or so, the rocks will recharge themselves from the underlying strata. But who wants to wait that long?
The additional energy input doesn't matter because the energy already here is locked up on molecular bonds. The contribution to the climatic energy system, which is the one that counts, is the same. Think about it!
First of all, the power being there doesn't mean that you absorb it. We're talking about microwaves (and not the cooking kind). It's not visible light or ultraviolet. You won't notice a thing. You won't get a sunburn.
Second, rectennas are stupidly efficient: 87%. We can barely get to 50% with solar. Furthermore, it's a lot cheaper to build a kilometer of rectenna than a kilometer of solar panels, and you can actually use the land underneath for something useful. And also unlike conventional solar, this thing would work all day and all night, every day of the year.
So it's all right because others do it? That's a bullshit argument. It's still a tricky way of getting unwanted software onto unsuspecting people's computers. If people actually wanted this software, vendors wouldn't have to pay to have it piggybacked onto completely unrelated programs. It's deliberately deceptive, and just because you know enough to uncheck the box doesn't mean that everyone does, or should have to, know to do that.
Why the hell do people like you continually advocate for the interests of faceless corporations over your own?
Yet more of this defense-of-authority attitude. Come on. Nobody wants this thing, and the default should be off.
All right, I'll feed the troll.
"Good" is such a vague term. Good for whom? If you're talking about "good" for quality of software in general, then clearly, the open source coders win.
On the other hand, if you're talking about "good" in terms of business, when the executive hiring the programmer will cash out his options in less than a year and doesn't give a damn about long-term maintenance costs, then you're correct.
Now, let's suppose you're right, and that the "good for [short-term] business" coders can find work more easily, and presumably earn more money. Would that extra value be worth working for a soulless entity, not caring about the quality of your work, and reading about some bug hurting people? Would it be worth giving up on learning new ideas, or receiving meaningful peer feedback, or doing something for the first time ever?
Maybe for you, it's wroth it. Me, I'd rather do what I love.
My arguments has two parts. First, I was replying to a poster asking why he should be able to modify his 360. It's private property, and that's why anyone should be able to modify his own iPhone or 360.
However, I also argue that Apple be forced to open up the iPhone, i.e. make it easy to modify at least in a limited way. This position doesn't rely on the private property argument, but instead on the idea that closed platforms are anticompetitive, and that we have a collective interest in opening them up.
In other words, you should be able to use any tool you can imagine to open up a closed device that you own, but additionally, companies shouldn't be allowed to sell closed devices in the first place.
Not really, no. You can make the argument on purely economic grounds. But on the other hand, closed platforms really do feel wrong, and that feeling resonates with a lot of people.
Right. I don't begrudge Apple for taking advantage of the current system: I blame us for allowing Apple to do it. Publishers actually tried to legally bar book resales, and succeeded until the courts ruled that the idea is fundamentally unfair, and created the First Sale Doctrine.
We need something like the First Sale Doctrine for software. An idea isn't good simply because a giant company likes it.
Clipboard.getData().
Only IE, actually.
Flash allows you to request content from sites that would be blocked by XMLHttpRequest. Can you refuse that statement or not?
You inadvertently make a good point. If Linus or RMS had developed flash, its source would have been open sourced, and by now, its capabilities would have been integrated into the browser. We wouldn't talk about what "Flash" can do as distinct from something else, but simply about the abilities of browsers.
That's what the rich media part of HTML5 is all about: doing what Flash can do in a browser.
Apple tries its hardest to stop jailbreaker, and you know damn well that ordinary people won't and can't jailbreak their phones.
If Apple provided a simple switch allowing installation of applications from outside the app store, I'd have no problem with the app store's rejection policy. But they don't, so I do.