Why on Earth would you spend the energy to take thousands of pounds of ceramic tiles (for re-entry) to the Moon, when you can't even use them to get back to Earth from a Lunar return (too hot) ?
The ISS needs frequent resupply, so there would have to be some sort of lunar ferry. Thus doesn't exist now and would have to be created.
The ISS is not rated to protect astronauts against solar flares. There would need to be a on-board shielded bunker for them.
A fast boost would stress the system. A slow boost would put astronauts in the Van Allen belts for extended periods, which dangerous to astronauts and probably also to onboard electronics. If the slow boost is manned, there is danger, if unmanned, there would be no one to fix any problems.
Oh, and the inclined orbit for the ISS is not the same as the inclination of the Lunar orbit, so it will take more energy to get the ISS there than a simple 2-D calculation would indicate.
Here is an idea - get the Russians to build another MIR, updated of course, and boost it to Lunar orbit. At the same time, work on an Lunar ferry. The Soviets discussed putting a MIR into Lunar Orbit, so why not do it, except from French Guiana (the Arianne launch site) or the Kenyan Proton launch site (to save energy by having a low latitude launch site).
I think that Berlusconi is a testa di cazzo. The way things are going here, we will probably get the same - good thing Rupert Murdoch can't run for president.
I may or may not vote for Obama - haven't made up my mind - but I sure won't give him any money unless he changes course. This is a third rail issue for me.
When I lived in France, our apartment was near (~100 meters) the site of an "Action Direct" bomb that blew up a think tank and killed a night watchman. It happened at exactly midnight, I was sitting next to an open window, and felt the blast on my neck like somebody slapped it.
We had a Tunisian friend with us - we were having coffee and he was getting ready to leave when the bomb went off. He became very scared - saying that if the DGI saw him leaving the scene, he would be arrested for sure and might never be seen again. I had to walk him to the metro and wait for the train - as a (white) American, I could vouch for him.
There are problems and issues everywhere. The only thing is - do you let it control you or not ?
Here is where leadership comes in - we would be much better off if our leaders had tried to unify and calm us after 9/11, rather than stoking the fear.
On a deeper note, the events of 9/11 changed a hijacking from a police matter to war. And in war, if you have to injure some of the passengers to prevent the plane from being destroyed, you will.
Don't think that the pilots wouldn't do this if they thought it was necessary.
The pilots I know were quite confident that they could prevent hijackers from getting near the cockpit door. I suspect a lot (if not all) of them had "war gamed" this in their head.
I am not a pilot, but I see no reason to doubt them. And, yes, you can turn a 747 upside down. Wouldn't want to be near the beverage cart when that happened.
you're an airline pilot. A terrorist organization just used Semtex to destroy your reinforced door.
Well, at that point, you are probably dead, given where the blast would go. But the thing to note here is that
Pilots don't need weapons
They have the plane ! They are belted in and have Oxygen masks. They can
- depressurize the cabin
- turn the plane upside down
- cause sufficient acceleration to incapacitate the passengers
- put the plane in a vertical climb, so everyone falls to the rear
- etc., etc.
Don't think pilots haven't thought about this. I know several, and they were all confident, after 9/11, of being able to control any hijackers that the passengers couldn't.
The fear level in American culture is, as Noam Chomsky puts it, "off the scale."
The weird thing is that I don't feel afraid (and I travel frequently) and I don't know anyone who is really afraid. Where are all of these scared people ? Who are they ? More importantly, do we know that the above statement is really true, or is it just what we are told ?
Living in the DC area, and seeing the Washington Times (owned by the unification church) in action, I don't consider it a reputable paper and would want some independent confirmation of this.
My advice is to find out where the gear is physically, then call the sympathetic cop back.
If you cannot find that out, you cannot expect them to. I would take the IP address and contact the ISP that serves it. If they won't help you, get the cop to do it.
An obvious question is, do these computers have built in cameras that can be turned on remotely ? That might produce useful info.
You might also be able to read the thieves' email. If you do that long enough, I bet you will get their names and addresses.
Not much Google can do now if ordered by a court to turn it over, but I'm a bit (lot) creeped out by why they think they need to keep this type of detailed personalized history in the first place.
Don't kid yourself - this is what Google does. This is their business model. This is why I don't do every search on Google (and don't use Google analytics). You can bet they have a lot more information on many people than that, and also that they do a lot of cross-referencing.
Now, excuse me while I go clean out my browser cache.
And, since they don't penetrate our ionosphere, in order to do this
The knowledge could also be used by Earth's astronomers to detect planets around other stars, if they can build a new radio telescope big enough for the search.
Those radio telescopes would have to be built in space, not here on Earth.
To do this properly with load sharing and immediate failover, at the moment the professional solution would be that you should
- get business class connections and - run BGP over both links.
If you don't already know what BGP is, this solution is probably too complicated for you. Worse, the global BGP routing table is a shared expense, and your extra route would impose a (slight) extra cost on literally every other ISP running BGP. (The business class connections are because you will need several static fully routable IP addresses to do this, plus run BGP, and that requires more than a consumer class connection.)
There is a lot of discussion at the moment about this at the IETF, and people are working on something called LISP (no relation to the computer language), which would provide true multi-homing without the bother of running BGP and adding to the global routing tables. Things like immediate failover and load balancing should follow more or less automatically.
There is a lot more information available at Lisp4.net. I have heard of some initial testing, but in my opinion this is still a ways from commercial use.
This is perceptive, and leads to what I call the "matrix" theory of religion. Any religious belief can be accepted if we live in the matrix, and all of this is just a computer simulation. If the Chief Programmer (aka God) wants there to be a flood, or whatever, all that is necessary is to invoke the water subroutine. Later on, other routines can be used to restore terrain, put back the beetles, and whatever else is needed.
This is a theory, and it is unassailable - there is literally no evidence that could disprove it. Maybe the world was created an instant ago, with our memories embedded in it. But, is it a useful theory ? Not within the matrix, at least. It doesn't make predictions, and is consistent with everything. All that is left is to sit around and say, God willing, whatever happens.
It is dangerous to say that history teaches things, but I think that it is pretty clear that history teaches the dangers of this type of thinking.
Not to mention that there are places like the Atacama Desert in Chile or Death Valley that have been dry for a very long period of time. Heck, the ice packs in Greenland and Antarctica are evidence that there has been no flood there for a very long time, as the ice would have just floated off. Oh, and really big floods leave scours, as the water runs off, and most places on Earth show no evidence of recent scours.
I suspect that the Noah stories (the Sumerians had one too, and maybe other peoples) may refer to an historical event (maybe even the filling of the Black Sea), but a global flood ? No way.
I always say that the geological, astronomical and physical arguments for the age of the Earth are even stronger than the biological. I don't know why the Creationists pick on Darwin so much when they should be picking on Einstein and Hubble just as strongly.
Anyone with the capacity to down multiple satellites (losing one wouldn't do much) 20,200 kilometers above the surface of the Earth is not going to be posting about it on slashdot.
Or anything else that you can wedge between those two parts and still have it make some kind of sense.
This could go in Mad Magazine - they do a feature like this regularly. Here are some more choices (pick one from each)
There's not a day that I don't send a piece of e-mail
[after I've smoked 5 joints | praising Satan | from my Mac Book | blasting the idiots who work for me | bidding on a small island nation | trying to destroy slashdot ]
but
[only an idiot would think I wrote something | I've never been stoned enough to write anything | the PI reporter must have been really blasted to make up dreck | only my evil twin writes | Steve Jobs was in my office and sent out a bunch of stuff]
Slashdot Mirror
You are precisely right. Plus, it doesn't buy you much (even if in the right orbit) as orbital assembly doesn't really need a space station.
Why on Earth would you spend the energy to take thousands of pounds of ceramic tiles (for re-entry) to the Moon, when you can't even use them to get back to Earth from a Lunar return (too hot) ?
Here are some issues I see :
The ISS needs frequent resupply, so there would have to be some sort of lunar ferry. Thus doesn't exist now and would have to be created.
The ISS is not rated to protect astronauts against solar flares. There would need to be a on-board shielded bunker for them.
A fast boost would stress the system. A slow boost would put astronauts in the Van Allen belts for extended periods, which dangerous to astronauts and probably also to onboard electronics. If the slow boost is manned, there is danger, if unmanned, there would be no one to fix any problems.
Oh, and the inclined orbit for the ISS is not the same as the inclination of the Lunar orbit, so it will take more energy to get the ISS there than a simple 2-D calculation would indicate.
Here is an idea - get the Russians to build another MIR, updated of course, and boost it to Lunar orbit. At the same time, work on an Lunar ferry. The Soviets discussed putting a MIR into Lunar Orbit, so why not do it, except from French Guiana (the Arianne launch site) or the Kenyan Proton launch site (to save energy by having a low latitude launch site).
I would guess that you have never spent any time in the PR China, or similar political organization. Or, for that matter, in the study of history.
he also made reference to the fact that he can change things when he gets into office.
That should be if he gets into office. He may not. Many things can happen between now and then, and then where would we be ?
I think that Berlusconi is a testa di cazzo. The way things are going here, we will probably get the same - good thing Rupert Murdoch can't run for president.
I may or may not vote for Obama - haven't made up my mind - but I sure won't give him any money unless he changes course. This is a third rail issue for me.
Uh, I hate to say it, but that is just silly.
When I lived in France, our apartment was near (~100 meters) the site of an "Action Direct" bomb that blew up a think tank and killed a night watchman. It happened at exactly midnight, I was sitting next to an open window, and felt the blast on my neck like somebody slapped it.
We had a Tunisian friend with us - we were having coffee and he was getting ready to leave when the bomb went off. He became very scared - saying that if the DGI saw him leaving the scene, he would be arrested for sure and might never be seen again. I had to walk him to the metro and wait for the train - as a (white) American, I could vouch for him.
There are problems and issues everywhere. The only thing is - do you let it control you or not ?
Here is where leadership comes in - we would be much better off if our leaders had tried to unify and calm us after 9/11, rather than stoking the fear.
On a deeper note, the events of 9/11 changed a hijacking from a police matter to war. And in war, if you have to injure some of the passengers to prevent the plane from being destroyed, you will.
Don't think that the pilots wouldn't do this if they thought it was necessary.
The pilots I know were quite confident that they could prevent hijackers from getting near the cockpit door. I suspect a lot (if not all) of them had "war gamed" this in their head.
I am not a pilot, but I see no reason to doubt them. And, yes, you can turn a 747 upside down. Wouldn't want to be near the beverage cart when that happened.
Yes its the fear of the fear of terror that I'm afraid of.
And that, of course, means that there are people in the Government afraid of the fear of the fear of the fear of terror.
you're an airline pilot. A terrorist organization just used Semtex to destroy your reinforced door.
Well, at that point, you are probably dead, given where the blast would go. But the thing to note here is that
Pilots don't need weapons
They have the plane ! They are belted in and have Oxygen masks. They can
- depressurize the cabin
- turn the plane upside down
- cause sufficient acceleration to incapacitate the passengers
- put the plane in a vertical climb, so everyone falls to the rear
- etc., etc.
Don't think pilots haven't thought about this. I know several, and they were all confident, after 9/11, of being able to control any hijackers that the passengers couldn't.
The fear level in American culture is, as Noam Chomsky puts it, "off the scale."
The weird thing is that I don't feel afraid (and I travel frequently) and I don't know anyone who is really afraid. Where are all of these scared people ? Who are they ? More importantly, do we know that the above statement is really true, or is it just what we are told ?
Living in the DC area, and seeing the Washington Times (owned by the unification church) in action, I don't consider it a reputable paper and would want some independent confirmation of this.
My advice is to find out where the gear is physically, then call the sympathetic cop back.
If you cannot find that out, you cannot expect them to. I would take the IP address and contact the ISP that serves it. If they won't help you, get the cop to do it.
An obvious question is, do these computers have built in cameras that can be turned on remotely ? That might produce useful info.
You might also be able to read the thieves' email. If you do that long enough, I bet you will get their names and addresses.
Not much Google can do now if ordered by a court to turn it over, but I'm a bit (lot) creeped out by why they think they need to keep this type of detailed personalized history in the first place.
Don't kid yourself - this is what Google does. This is their business model. This is why I don't do every search on Google (and don't use Google analytics). You can bet they have a lot more information on many people than that, and also that they do a lot of cross-referencing.
Now, excuse me while I go clean out my browser cache.
Although Google argued that turning over the data would invade its users' privacy, the judge's ruling (.pdf) described that argument as "speculative"
This must be some new use of the word "speculative" with which I am unfamiliar.
All the hafnium will be gone by 2017 also, and another twenty years will see the extinction of zinc.
We are of course not shooting our rare Earth elements into space, they won't be gone, they will be sitting in waste dumps in China and elsewhere.
Maybe the headline should have been "We will be mining landfills by 2017 for Rare Earths."
These are radio waves.
And, since they don't penetrate our ionosphere, in order to do this
The knowledge could also be used by Earth's astronomers to detect planets around other stars, if they can build a new radio telescope big enough for the search.
Those radio telescopes would have to be built in space, not here on Earth.
To do this properly with load sharing and immediate failover, at the moment the professional solution would be that you should
- get business class connections and
- run BGP over both links.
If you don't already know what BGP is, this solution is probably too complicated for you. Worse, the global BGP routing table is a shared expense, and your extra route would impose a (slight) extra cost on literally every other ISP running BGP. (The business class connections are because you will need several static fully routable IP addresses to do this, plus run BGP, and that requires more than a consumer class connection.)
There is a lot of discussion at the moment about this at the IETF, and people are working on something called LISP (no relation to the computer language), which would provide true multi-homing without the bother of running BGP and adding to the global routing tables. Things like immediate failover and load balancing should follow more or less automatically.
There is a lot more information available at Lisp4.net. I have heard of some initial testing, but in my opinion this is still a ways from commercial use.
This is perceptive, and leads to what I call the "matrix" theory of religion. Any religious belief can be accepted if we live in the matrix, and all of this is just a computer simulation. If the Chief Programmer (aka God) wants there to be a flood, or whatever, all that is necessary is to invoke the water subroutine. Later on, other routines can be used to restore terrain, put back the beetles, and whatever else is needed.
This is a theory, and it is unassailable - there is literally no evidence that could disprove it. Maybe the world was created an instant ago, with our memories embedded in it. But, is it a useful theory ? Not within the matrix, at least. It doesn't make predictions, and is consistent with everything. All that is left is to sit around and say, God willing, whatever happens.
It is dangerous to say that history teaches things, but I think that it is pretty clear that history teaches the dangers of this type of thinking.
Not to mention that there are places like the Atacama Desert in Chile or Death Valley that have been dry for a very long period of time. Heck, the ice packs in Greenland and Antarctica are evidence that there has been no flood there for a very long time, as the ice would have just floated off. Oh, and really big floods leave scours, as the water runs off, and most places on Earth show no evidence of recent scours.
I suspect that the Noah stories (the Sumerians had one too, and maybe other peoples) may refer to an historical event (maybe even the filling of the Black Sea), but a global flood ? No way.
I always say that the geological, astronomical and physical arguments for the age of the Earth are even stronger than the biological. I don't know why the Creationists pick on Darwin so much when they should be picking on Einstein and Hubble just as strongly.
Math has axioms, physics does not.
Anyone with the capacity to down multiple satellites (losing one wouldn't do much) 20,200 kilometers above the surface of the Earth is not going to be posting about it on slashdot.
Or anything else that you can wedge between those two parts and still have it make some kind of sense.
This could go in Mad Magazine - they do a feature like this regularly. Here are some more choices (pick one from each)
There's not a day that I don't send a piece of e-mail
[after I've smoked 5 joints | praising Satan | from my Mac Book | blasting the idiots who work for me | bidding on a small island nation | trying to destroy slashdot ]
but
[only an idiot would think I wrote something | I've never been stoned enough to write anything | the PI reporter must have been really blasted to make up dreck | only my evil twin writes | Steve Jobs was in my office and sent out a bunch of stuff]
like that piece of e-mail.