I have been thinking about this and have realized that I grew up with science and math being pushed. Today, it is legal, Liberal Arts, and business "real world" garbage that is pushed. Our society needs to go back to the 40's, 50's, and 60's when kids learned science/math in a real fashion.
I have also thought about the fact that we had real science kits. Over the last 8 years, we have been turned into a nation of cheerleaders and flag wavers (literally). We need to get past this fear garbage and bring back science kits. That includes chemistry, electronics, etc.
Yeah, you can always be sure that those chines builders of laptops and desktops will ALWAYS push MS. Why, they would never think to build something new and cheap and use Linux to lower their costs.
want to bet what the ORIGINAL google code that was developed PRIOR TO INVESTORS look like? THink that PRIVATE code from some students was commented, let alone heavily documented?
a mass of IT people not that capable of learning the system are going to crop up and potentially turn FOSS into an almost "Windows Admin" type of system.
Already happening. Remember a week or two ago, where somebody wanted a policy editor similar to how windows does it?
"Josh" is the kind of guy that develops Googles, Yahoo, etc. This idiot is obviously one of those guys who is jealous of any who show better skills then themselves. That does not mean that "Josh" should not be encouraged to change for the better, but a lot of that is simple maturity. OTH, this poster will never be a better coder.
And China is suppose to be working on one that will allow them to take out a LEO. If that works, then this would be nothing, though amazing what a mirror on the bottom could do.
The logic is that we have an environmental crisis and limited time and resources to put into fixing it. We have technologies that can help us get off of it now for far cheaper than CCS, while CCS is going to be a good decade before anything is viable.
Actually, as I read it, this idea IS a good one. It allows coal to be converted to something that we can feed the pipelines with right away. It lowers the costs. More importantly, we are likely to build many more power plants shortly. The question is, do you want normal coal plants or natural gas? You see, we do not have the ability to put in Nukes fast enough (we allowed our ability to do so die). Likewise, AE can NOT come up fast enough and be cheap. So, a slightly different idea is to do a Solar THERMAL plant (which is actually cheaper than coal is today ASSUMING NO STORAGE), and use natural gas on it during the cloudy or night-times. That means that natural gas does about 1/2 the powering.
So, which do you want? DIRTY straight coal plants, or cleaner natural gas, or better yet, partial solar/thermal and partial natural gas?
I just got done reading the Great Point stuff and frankly am shocked that W and team did not push this (hopefully Obama will fund this). It would still leave us CO2, which really sux. BUT, the amount of CO2 going into the atmosphere from a power plant would be less AND all the other pollutants(mercury, sulfur, nitroxs,etc) would be gone. Basically, this would allow a power plant to convert from Coal to Natural Gas. Now, take that a step further. In an ideal powerplant, they would use Solar Thermal to be the main drive and then use the natural gas to provide backup. That approach would allow for cheap power with a much lower output of CO2. But again what is missing in this picture is that right now, coal is transfered all over via trains (inefficient). Using natural gas, we have pipelines running all over, which is more efficient. But again, where would this take us? Why it would move us rapidly off oil based cars over to either natural gas cars or better electric cars.
The problem that you are having is that you think that something like this would be the end goal. This is a goal of getting us there. We will continue to burn fossil fuel for sometime. Even now, it is expensive to build a nuke. Likewise, we need our AE boosted, but it will happen SLOWLY (sadly). Great Point could get us off importing oil, clean up our coal emissions (which is not just dirty, but heavy CO2 emissions), and move us towards electric cars. This is a win-win-win. Sadly, China sees it and we do not. Whats more, I bet that china will insist on the IP behind it and will run away with the idea.
Clinton gave China MFN in 94(was it 94?). In return, China had to drop their trade barriers in 2002 AND allow their money to be freely traded. Neither has happened. Sadly, W wanted Chinas help and money so simply ignored it. In the mean time, that monitary policy has served to drain money and jobs rapidly from ALL OF the west. EU is now getting wise to it, as it Geithner/Obama.
In 2002, W/Neo-cons passed law that allowed no taxes to be paid on income UNTIL it was brought into the country. In essence, that solidified the jobs moving elsewhere.
India has their money fixed against ours (50 to 1 held in place by the banks). It is designed to flow jobs to India esp Hollywood and Software. Of course that means that items that we produce here in US is very expensive to them esp. drugs. India has threatened to produce their own versions of our PATENTED drugs because coming from here to there was expensive. What did neo-cons do? Nothing. They allowed the drug companies to deal with it.
Neo-cons passed one of the single largest give-aways in their senior drug program. BUT, it requires US to not negotiate the lowest rate on the drugs. In fact, it requires us to take what ever the drug company says.
Neo-cons passed lower taxes for themselves, but again pushed monster spending esp. with funny budgets.
I did not even touch the obvious crap of Iraq/Afghanistan/9-11/NASA/Education system/monster deficits/DHS/etc.
There is little doubt in my mind that the neo-cons were stealing the country blind, and treating us the same as another nation, rather than as united country.
The problem with Reagan and Bush is that they didn't really practice what they preached. There are two sides to "Lower taxes and smaller government" and they only did one of them.
Actually, both of them never kept a single promise. BOTH grew gov like there was no tomorrow. And as to lower taxes combined with no deficit, well, that is well known. Taxes actually ended up higher in total under reagan, just shifted off his buddies. Though W did lower taxes a bit ( more on his buddies), but made reagan's #1 deficit look amateurish.
Second, fixing the economy isn't really the government's job. They just shouldn't be screwing with it. In fact, it's probably only as bad as it is because the government was interfering with it so much in the first place. As a Libertarian, I agree with you. But the neo-cons pushed deregulations ONLY when it helped their friends. They left a great deal in place that was damaging, and worse backed their friends, rather than worry about the nation. In fact, the ONLY time that these neo-cons really stuck to doing the right thing with this gov/economy was only once they had totally F'ed things up and they saw the writing on the wall WRT voters.
The truth is that the economy will go back up despite the damage Bush and Obama have done with their stupid bail outs. Going up and down is just part of what economies do. Yeah. It worked great for us from 1929-1933, and for the Japanese all through the 90's till current. What I find interesting is that most of the top economists say that we are not spending enough on stimulus, but they believe that this is step in right direction. Otherwise, we will end up like the other 2 time periods.
It's really a bit disappointing that Obama is going to take all the credit when things start going back up because the coincidence is going to reinforce his plans for even bigger, more intrusive government.
And this is where we differ. IFF Obama focus on getting the economy GOING, and once going focuses on balancing the budget with a balanced budget amendment ( the anti-neo-con or anti-republican amendment), he will be one of my hero's. As it is, I noticed that the first spending bill was LOADED with pork (20B), and the new one that just passed is "LOADED" with 8Billion of "pork" of an ~.5 Trill bill. Of course, that compares to the neo-cons spending 25-30B/year on a 300B spending bill, but now calling this major pork. I really do not care as long as the budget gets balanced and we get back to paying off reagan's and W's insane debts.
LOL. That was as good when a hard core republican that I know who LOVED AND LIVED reagan claimed one month ago that reagan and W were "fucking pussy liberals". He acknowleges now, that both were bad for America. But he still thinks that Romney and Palin would be perfect (even though Palin is the total clone of reagan and W). I will be curious to hear what he says IFF Obama and his dems turn this economy in the first year.
Well, I voted for Ron the first time around. In fact, up until 2000, I had not voted dem or pub (save a couple of local pols). BUT, we could not afford to have another W get in. I had some issues with McCain, but somewhat considered him. That was gone once he picked the ultimate neo-con as running mate.
I am STILL hopeful that Obama is an honest pol. BUT as I look at all the ppl that he has put around himself, they appear to be as corrupt as any neo-con. The question is, are they more competent. That remains to be seen.
Hmmmm. I voted against the neo-cons because of their total corruption and incompetence, as well as a very visible desire to destroy America. At this time, the dems appear to be heading in the same way with corruption.
No. That is what THEY were looking at it. They also mentioned about car batteries. Chances are that the research is being funded by some Hi-tech company such as Hitachi.
Actually, meant to say Osama.
And Al Qaeda living in Pakistan DO speak Arabic.
Feds, as in FBI, were prohibited from doing this.
Yeah, live in a basement in Florida. Yeah. Hey, if you knew some of my old logins, you would find some of my old code from the 80's on the net. Cheers.
Radar/ Lidar/ etc. Matching the orbit is not the real problem. The Russians, and now Europeans, do auto docking (though they do have targets to work from which makes things easier).
The real problem is how to touch it and to grapple it? The sats were not made to be held. They have pieces that break off easily. In addition, many are cylindrical. Solve that, and the rest falls in place.
Ever wonder where all those dings on your truck and house windows are coming from? Not from the semi's driving in your front yard. Let a kid know that you have a BB Gun and are not afraid to use it, and they will be happy to show you theirs.
Let me see if I understand this right. We have for multiple generations had space crafts joining up together at 17500 mph (same orbit, same direction, ALMOST the same speed), and you think that something that is higher altitude, and moving slightly faster is a big deal???????? Really?
Odd.
I would have done it radically different for the items that I mentioned (10 cm's up to a set size).
Change your orbit to match that of the fragment
Rendezvous with fragment, then grab it
Then kick it out the back, with a greatly reduced speed (perhaps spring loaded? or behind an ion drive?), allowing gravity to pull it down.
Of course, I was picking particular sizes for a reason.
When it is a bigger systems, such as a Sat, then it might be nice to put a small disposable system together.
Finally, when it comes to smaller pieces such as the paint flecks, yeah, none of these are going to work. Of course, Lasers/ water bags, etc might work.
Could also do the cable idea. That would allow you to speed up/slow down so that you move in altitudes. Then use small ion drive (or even draco thrusters) to manuever around. Ideally, a company would build a larger system that can hook up to whole sats and de-orbit them, without having to go down themselves. Then use that as a tug to move other systems around including hooking up to a smaller system that is designed to capture or slow down increasingly smaller parts. As far as paying for it, simply take an estimate of parts and size, and then charge a price to those that want their items de-orbitted. Ideally, govs will start holding companies and themselves culpable for their garbage. This would also cause future companies to re-design launches as well as sats.
Now is the time for private investors to step forward with solutions. For example a small craft to grab and safely drop items (lower their speeds at the right time ) could take down items that are 30 CM and bigger. Perhaps, system for taking down whole sats. Keep in mind that working sats have to maneuver around them, which is a lose in energy. No doubt countries or even insurance companies would pay for this.
Slashdot Mirror
I have been thinking about this and have realized that I grew up with science and math being pushed. Today, it is legal, Liberal Arts, and business "real world" garbage that is pushed. Our society needs to go back to the 40's, 50's, and 60's when kids learned science/math in a real fashion.
I have also thought about the fact that we had real science kits. Over the last 8 years, we have been turned into a nation of cheerleaders and flag wavers (literally). We need to get past this fear garbage and bring back science kits. That includes chemistry, electronics, etc.
Should have allowed the Koichi Wakata (Japanese astronaut) to name it. He was on the shuttle the only other time there was a previous bat issue.
IBM will shut down the European and American operations and send all the work to China.
Yeah, you can always be sure that those chines builders of laptops and desktops will ALWAYS push MS. Why, they would never think to build something new and cheap and use Linux to lower their costs.
want to bet what the ORIGINAL google code that was developed PRIOR TO INVESTORS look like? THink that PRIVATE code from some students was commented, let alone heavily documented?
a mass of IT people not that capable of learning the system are going to crop up and potentially turn FOSS into an almost "Windows Admin" type of system.
Already happening. Remember a week or two ago, where somebody wanted a policy editor similar to how windows does it?
"Josh" is the kind of guy that develops Googles, Yahoo, etc. This idiot is obviously one of those guys who is jealous of any who show better skills then themselves. That does not mean that "Josh" should not be encouraged to change for the better, but a lot of that is simple maturity. OTH, this poster will never be a better coder.
And China is suppose to be working on one that will allow them to take out a LEO. If that works, then this would be nothing, though amazing what a mirror on the bottom could do.
Transporting coal over train, or send natural gas via pipeline. Which is more efficient? Pipeline by a LONG SHOT.
The logic is that we have an environmental crisis and limited time and resources to put into fixing it. We have technologies that can help us get off of it now for far cheaper than CCS, while CCS is going to be a good decade before anything is viable.
Actually, as I read it, this idea IS a good one. It allows coal to be converted to something that we can feed the pipelines with right away. It lowers the costs. More importantly, we are likely to build many more power plants shortly. The question is, do you want normal coal plants or natural gas? You see, we do not have the ability to put in Nukes fast enough (we allowed our ability to do so die). Likewise, AE can NOT come up fast enough and be cheap. So, a slightly different idea is to do a Solar THERMAL plant (which is actually cheaper than coal is today ASSUMING NO STORAGE), and use natural gas on it during the cloudy or night-times. That means that natural gas does about 1/2 the powering.
So, which do you want? DIRTY straight coal plants, or cleaner natural gas, or better yet, partial solar/thermal and partial natural gas?
Less. Ch4 burns quite cleanly vs. coal or even oil. There are few if any byproducts.
Well, it is a clean bomb vs. dirty bomb.
I just got done reading the Great Point stuff and frankly am shocked that W and team did not push this (hopefully Obama will fund this). It would still leave us CO2, which really sux. BUT, the amount of CO2 going into the atmosphere from a power plant would be less AND all the other pollutants(mercury, sulfur, nitroxs,etc) would be gone. Basically, this would allow a power plant to convert from Coal to Natural Gas. Now, take that a step further. In an ideal powerplant, they would use Solar Thermal to be the main drive and then use the natural gas to provide backup. That approach would allow for cheap power with a much lower output of CO2. But again what is missing in this picture is that right now, coal is transfered all over via trains (inefficient). Using natural gas, we have pipelines running all over, which is more efficient. But again, where would this take us? Why it would move us rapidly off oil based cars over to either natural gas cars or better electric cars.
The problem that you are having is that you think that something like this would be the end goal. This is a goal of getting us there. We will continue to burn fossil fuel for sometime. Even now, it is expensive to build a nuke. Likewise, we need our AE boosted, but it will happen SLOWLY (sadly). Great Point could get us off importing oil, clean up our coal emissions (which is not just dirty, but heavy CO2 emissions), and move us towards electric cars. This is a win-win-win. Sadly, China sees it and we do not. Whats more, I bet that china will insist on the IP behind it and will run away with the idea.
I did not even touch the obvious crap of Iraq/Afghanistan/9-11/NASA/Education system/monster deficits/DHS/etc.
There is little doubt in my mind that the neo-cons were stealing the country blind, and treating us the same as another nation, rather than as united country.
The problem with Reagan and Bush is that they didn't really practice what they preached. There are two sides to "Lower taxes and smaller government" and they only did one of them.
Actually, both of them never kept a single promise. BOTH grew gov like there was no tomorrow. And as to lower taxes combined with no deficit, well, that is well known. Taxes actually ended up higher in total under reagan, just shifted off his buddies. Though W did lower taxes a bit ( more on his buddies), but made reagan's #1 deficit look amateurish.
Second, fixing the economy isn't really the government's job. They just shouldn't be screwing with it. In fact, it's probably only as bad as it is because the government was interfering with it so much in the first place.
As a Libertarian, I agree with you. But the neo-cons pushed deregulations ONLY when it helped their friends. They left a great deal in place that was damaging, and worse backed their friends, rather than worry about the nation. In fact, the ONLY time that these neo-cons really stuck to doing the right thing with this gov/economy was only once they had totally F'ed things up and they saw the writing on the wall WRT voters.
The truth is that the economy will go back up despite the damage Bush and Obama have done with their stupid bail outs. Going up and down is just part of what economies do.
Yeah. It worked great for us from 1929-1933, and for the Japanese all through the 90's till current. What I find interesting is that most of the top economists say that we are not spending enough on stimulus, but they believe that this is step in right direction. Otherwise, we will end up like the other 2 time periods.
It's really a bit disappointing that Obama is going to take all the credit when things start going back up because the coincidence is going to reinforce his plans for even bigger, more intrusive government.
And this is where we differ. IFF Obama focus on getting the economy GOING, and once going focuses on balancing the budget with a balanced budget amendment ( the anti-neo-con or anti-republican amendment), he will be one of my hero's. As it is, I noticed that the first spending bill was LOADED with pork (20B), and the new one that just passed is "LOADED" with 8Billion of "pork" of an ~.5 Trill bill. Of course, that compares to the neo-cons spending 25-30B/year on a 300B spending bill, but now calling this major pork. I really do not care as long as the budget gets balanced and we get back to paying off reagan's and W's insane debts.
LOL. That was as good when a hard core republican that I know who LOVED AND LIVED reagan claimed one month ago that reagan and W were "fucking pussy liberals". He acknowleges now, that both were bad for America. But he still thinks that Romney and Palin would be perfect (even though Palin is the total clone of reagan and W). I will be curious to hear what he says IFF Obama and his dems turn this economy in the first year.
Well, I voted for Ron the first time around. In fact, up until 2000, I had not voted dem or pub (save a couple of local pols). BUT, we could not afford to have another W get in. I had some issues with McCain, but somewhat considered him. That was gone once he picked the ultimate neo-con as running mate.
I am STILL hopeful that Obama is an honest pol. BUT as I look at all the ppl that he has put around himself, they appear to be as corrupt as any neo-con. The question is, are they more competent. That remains to be seen.
Hmmmm. I voted against the neo-cons because of their total corruption and incompetence, as well as a very visible desire to destroy America. At this time, the dems appear to be heading in the same way with corruption.
No. That is what THEY were looking at it. They also mentioned about car batteries. Chances are that the research is being funded by some Hi-tech company such as Hitachi.
Actually, meant to say Osama.
And Al Qaeda living in Pakistan DO speak Arabic.
Feds, as in FBI, were prohibited from doing this.
Yeah, live in a basement in Florida. Yeah. Hey, if you knew some of my old logins, you would find some of my old code from the 80's on the net. Cheers.
Radar/ Lidar/ etc. Matching the orbit is not the real problem. The Russians, and now Europeans, do auto docking (though they do have targets to work from which makes things easier).
The real problem is how to touch it and to grapple it? The sats were not made to be held. They have pieces that break off easily. In addition, many are cylindrical. Solve that, and the rest falls in place.
Ever wonder where all those dings on your truck and house windows are coming from? Not from the semi's driving in your front yard. Let a kid know that you have a BB Gun and are not afraid to use it, and they will be happy to show you theirs.
Let me see if I understand this right. We have for multiple generations had space crafts joining up together at 17500 mph (same orbit, same direction, ALMOST the same speed), and you think that something that is higher altitude, and moving slightly faster is a big deal???????? Really?
I would have done it radically different for the items that I mentioned (10 cm's up to a set size).
Of course, I was picking particular sizes for a reason.
When it is a bigger systems, such as a Sat, then it might be nice to put a small disposable system together.
Finally, when it comes to smaller pieces such as the paint flecks, yeah, none of these are going to work. Of course, Lasers/ water bags, etc might work.
Could also do the cable idea. That would allow you to speed up/slow down so that you move in altitudes. Then use small ion drive (or even draco thrusters) to manuever around. Ideally, a company would build a larger system that can hook up to whole sats and de-orbit them, without having to go down themselves. Then use that as a tug to move other systems around including hooking up to a smaller system that is designed to capture or slow down increasingly smaller parts. As far as paying for it, simply take an estimate of parts and size, and then charge a price to those that want their items de-orbitted. Ideally, govs will start holding companies and themselves culpable for their garbage. This would also cause future companies to re-design launches as well as sats.
Now is the time for private investors to step forward with solutions. For example a small craft to grab and safely drop items (lower their speeds at the right time ) could take down items that are 30 CM and bigger. Perhaps, system for taking down whole sats. Keep in mind that working sats have to maneuver around them, which is a lose in energy. No doubt countries or even insurance companies would pay for this.