I would like to see you having a phone conversation and taking notes down at the same time...
Phones are for talking and PDA's are digital assistans (note taking, document reading/writing/e-mail composition. Why would I like to use a combined device?
I think these phone-pda devices are for people who can't walk while chewing a gum.:) I can and I need two of these separated.
On the other hand, I can always buy a wireless/wired headset for the phone but what's the point of walking around looking like a badly-puttogether-cyborg?
There were always three people in the ISS crew since it's been cut down in size. Most people don't realise this but America's space station gets smaller all the time. Russians always design their space stations for three.
America's Space Station Alpha was supposed to accomodate around 20 people. Since 80s it is getting smaller and smaller. ISS is nothing but a glorified Mir Mk2.
:-) Well, you have to get there first. Once you have infinite amount of money to spend on these things, everything gets just easier. Most of the writers just ignore that aspect of the whole thing, especially KSR. Red Mars is one of the best books about Mars I have ever read, compared to this book, the rest of the books are just crap. KSR has his problems as well, an scientific-utopian community is not really possible. He just tells about a dream in Red Mars and the following books of the trilogy are just not good as the first one.
You don't? Stanley Kim Robinson envisiones a space elevator which rivals any Clarke version built from a captured carbon-based asteroid. You just use the mass on the asteroid to build the elevator. No need to transport anything. Once the elevator is long enough, you just attach the thing to the ground. On the other hand the same book contains a disastrous crash of the elevator on to Mars when some terrorrist/freedom fighters detach the asteroid from the elevator. The elevator falls down to Mars and it is more than twice the length of the equator, creates quite a lot of devastation.
From Clarke's orbit, it is quite a way down here, 36 thousands kilometers. Still the amount of mass to generate a 100m thick elevator is not that much.
Do you think MSBs were created out of thin air? Everything in engineering starts small. The family tree of MSBs can be traced back to V2's engines. It is perfectly reasonable to start with something small.
I can't think of anything I couldn't do on my HP48S/G. Write games? Check. Write complicated programs that would handle the requirements of my engineering courses? Check. RPN? Check. Why would I ever need anything else (except if I slip on ice, break the LCD and couldn't get a replacement. Meanwhile HP would discontinue the product and leave me out in the cold. Where was that Sharp Zaurus deal? Check.)
I have 1250kg of Nissan Bluebird rusting in front of the house. The engine is running, it is 1987 make. I can't find anyone offering anything, even if the price is down to 25 pounds.
I really wonder from where you get your numbers, the last time I looked at it, it was much cheaper (circa 1994), even with the inflation taken into account.
Now I have a even bigger mass of Volvo 940.:) Still I paid a lot less than what you offer.
Everything can be cheap as hell as long as it is manufactured in large enough quantitites.
IC's are not easy things to produce but they are cheap enough to put in anything, including 50p digital watches.
The shuttle tiles aren't cheap because they are not manufactured in a line, in huge quantities. Once you start producing in those quantities, you tend to solve any problem you encounter. Soon enough the initial cost is so low compared to the quantities you manufacture, the total cost of an individual product gets dirt cheap. At this stage the only thing that limits the price is profitibility.
There are quite a lot of hard-to-produce technologies in large quantities. Lasers deemed to be impossible and very expensive to generate for a long time. When I was a child the articles I read were referring to rubies! Now I have CD-ROM players/writers all around me using miliwatt lasers. Coool!
Not only that, a CPU is not easy to design, not easy to produce but I can still buy a fast enough Athlon under 50 pounds.
Total material cost of a typical car is 50 pounds for the metal, 200 pounds for the energy spent. The average cost of a new car in England is around 10k pounds.
Most of the asteroids and comets are found by robotic telescopes these days.
Still, only a fraction of these are controlled by NASA and there are still a couple of amateurs who manage to find comets themselves, using telescopes.
The heyday of amateur astronomers in comet finding is over but it is definitely not under NASA's control.
Amateurs and hobbyists like radio amateurs are valuable tools to the society.
I believe one of the reasons it is banned in aircrafts is you can hit so many base stations from air and create havoc on the infrastructure. Telecommunication companies don't like you messing with their hardware.
Most of the cell phones are pretty low powered devices, max. 5W to my knowledge. 5W is nothing compared to what other in-flight equipment radiate.
A 144-146MHz (in US 144-148MHz) amateur radio handheld can hit over 100 miles with 1W. As long as your receiver is sensitive enough and you are line-of-sight with the transmitter, you will hear it. It is common to bounce radio signals off the moon and receive them back (called EME - Earth moon Earth) and there are guys who do this with 5W hand held transmitters (and lots of pre-amps on the receiver side and huge antennas but I hope you get my point).
In many countries (including UK), using amateur radio transmitters on aircrafts is banned. Not because it is dangerous - it isn't. It is because you can create havoc with the repeaters.
This morning there was a nice lift and I could hear french stations calling on 145.5. Unfortunately I had a low power radio in the car so I couldn't get them hear me. I live in Cambridge, UK. France is quite a distance away.
Galileo was supposed to be launched from the shuttle. When Challenger happened, it delayed Galileo for years. It's design phase started in late seventies, building took the early eighties but it had to be put to storage until they could find the launch equipment. This delay is also one of the reasons why Galileo cost this much. It isn't cheap to build one of these babies, let alone the clean room storage area.
Because it doesn't exist a lot in the nature. It is a man-made substance. You get it by fissioning uranium and also plutonium has an short half-life (only 24 thousand years). Compare it to Uranium (uranium-235: 713,000,000 years, uranium-238: 4500,000,000 years.).
Re:Building them like they used to
on
Goodbye, Galileo
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· Score: 1
2010? In their dreams. It won't last that long. Not without major refits and probably it won't survive the shuttle fleet's recovery.
I wonder what will the astronomers of our generation think. A life without Hubble? Unimaginable!
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Phones are for talking and PDA's are digital assistans (note taking, document reading/writing/e-mail composition. Why would I like to use a combined device?
I think these phone-pda devices are for people who can't walk while chewing a gum. :) I can and I need two of these separated.
On the other hand, I can always buy a wireless/wired headset for the phone but what's the point of walking around looking like a badly-puttogether-cyborg?
The same way as Pigs In Space...
Firefly also predicts that you will have cows and cowboys in space. How stupid can a show get? Transporting cows in a spaceship... Come on...
America's Space Station Alpha was supposed to accomodate around 20 people. Since 80s it is getting smaller and smaller. ISS is nothing but a glorified Mir Mk2.
:-) Well, you have to get there first. Once you have infinite amount of money to spend on these things, everything gets just easier. Most of the writers just ignore that aspect of the whole thing, especially KSR. Red Mars is one of the best books about Mars I have ever read, compared to this book, the rest of the books are just crap. KSR has his problems as well, an scientific-utopian community is not really possible. He just tells about a dream in Red Mars and the following books of the trilogy are just not good as the first one.
I seem to remember a app to play a song using the floppy head. Talk about abusing hardware...
From Clarke's orbit, it is quite a way down here, 36 thousands kilometers. Still the amount of mass to generate a 100m thick elevator is not that much.
Do you think MSBs were created out of thin air? Everything in engineering starts small. The family tree of MSBs can be traced back to V2's engines. It is perfectly reasonable to start with something small.
Poor population head count: 132 million.
For a annual cost of 10 cent per head, I think it is worth the science they are going to get out of it, never mind the publicity and feel-good factor.
Woww.. Think about all the things you can get for an extra 10 cent. It will definitely save the poor's problem.
LOAD "*",8,1
Sadly I no longer remember the load syntax of my lovely Spectrum. :(
I can't think of anything I couldn't do on my HP48S/G. Write games? Check. Write complicated programs that would handle the requirements of my engineering courses? Check. RPN? Check. Why would I ever need anything else (except if I slip on ice, break the LCD and couldn't get a replacement. Meanwhile HP would discontinue the product and leave me out in the cold. Where was that Sharp Zaurus deal? Check.)
You read Baxter for technical mumbo jumbo... So far I didn't realise any of his characters had actually a character.
I really wonder from where you get your numbers, the last time I looked at it, it was much cheaper (circa 1994), even with the inflation taken into account.
Now I have a even bigger mass of Volvo 940. :) Still I paid a lot less than what you offer.
I bet there will be some case-mods using this metal pretty soon!
IC's are not easy things to produce but they are cheap enough to put in anything, including 50p digital watches.
The shuttle tiles aren't cheap because they are not manufactured in a line, in huge quantities. Once you start producing in those quantities, you tend to solve any problem you encounter. Soon enough the initial cost is so low compared to the quantities you manufacture, the total cost of an individual product gets dirt cheap. At this stage the only thing that limits the price is profitibility.
There are quite a lot of hard-to-produce technologies in large quantities. Lasers deemed to be impossible and very expensive to generate for a long time. When I was a child the articles I read were referring to rubies! Now I have CD-ROM players/writers all around me using miliwatt lasers. Coool!
Not only that, a CPU is not easy to design, not easy to produce but I can still buy a fast enough Athlon under 50 pounds.
Total material cost of a typical car is 50 pounds for the metal, 200 pounds for the energy spent. The average cost of a new car in England is around 10k pounds.
It's all about market drive.
Oh come on... It's because they listen to Pink Floyd a lot.
You mean they actually never landed on England??
Still, only a fraction of these are controlled by NASA and there are still a couple of amateurs who manage to find comets themselves, using telescopes.
The heyday of amateur astronomers in comet finding is over but it is definitely not under NASA's control.
Amateurs and hobbyists like radio amateurs are valuable tools to the society.
I believe one of the reasons it is banned in aircrafts is you can hit so many base stations from air and create havoc on the infrastructure. Telecommunication companies don't like you messing with their hardware. Most of the cell phones are pretty low powered devices, max. 5W to my knowledge. 5W is nothing compared to what other in-flight equipment radiate. A 144-146MHz (in US 144-148MHz) amateur radio handheld can hit over 100 miles with 1W. As long as your receiver is sensitive enough and you are line-of-sight with the transmitter, you will hear it. It is common to bounce radio signals off the moon and receive them back (called EME - Earth moon Earth) and there are guys who do this with 5W hand held transmitters (and lots of pre-amps on the receiver side and huge antennas but I hope you get my point). In many countries (including UK), using amateur radio transmitters on aircrafts is banned. Not because it is dangerous - it isn't. It is because you can create havoc with the repeaters. This morning there was a nice lift and I could hear french stations calling on 145.5. Unfortunately I had a low power radio in the car so I couldn't get them hear me. I live in Cambridge, UK. France is quite a distance away.
Isn't it interesting that radio amateurs were one of the first groups noticed there was something strange going on?
because it works, fast and beats everything else?
Never had any hardware problems with Knoppix, from obsolete pentiums to state of the art AMD MP's...
Galileo was supposed to be launched from the shuttle. When Challenger happened, it delayed Galileo for years. It's design phase started in late seventies, building took the early eighties but it had to be put to storage until they could find the launch equipment. This delay is also one of the reasons why Galileo cost this much. It isn't cheap to build one of these babies, let alone the clean room storage area.
Because it doesn't exist a lot in the nature. It is a man-made substance. You get it by fissioning uranium and also plutonium has an short half-life (only 24 thousand years). Compare it to Uranium (uranium-235: 713,000,000 years, uranium-238: 4500,000,000 years.).
I wonder what will the astronomers of our generation think. A life without Hubble? Unimaginable!