In Utah, current state law allows an electricity consumer to have electric utilities "buy back" power at least equal in value to any electricity you consume. Basically, you can get your power bill down to $0 for direct power rates, although you still have to pay the fixed monthly connection fees and taxes.
Not as good as New Jersey, but at least an incentive to be as self-sufficient as possible, and making it reasonable to put small wind-power generators onto the grid as well, or even solar-electric generators where you supply power during the day and draw from the grid at night.
There are some states that don't permit the power meter to go backward, in which case alternate power sources have to have a more complicated interface with the electric utility input.
Like anybody will really take the Moon treaty seriously when major natural resources are in production for extraction from the Moon's surface.
Read the section on withdrawl from the treaty, and you will see just how much weight current space law really has from the 1960's idealism. Basically, not much. These treaties are just a speed bump to a full militarization and nationalization of space. Sorry to be pessimistic.
America is a very competitive country, and one of the problems about the "race for the moon" in the 1960's was that Russia wimped out. Russia didn't follow on to the moon dispite having a lunar lander and cosmonauts that could have duplicated the American effort.
This time there is more than merely two different nations going into space. I would count on China, Japan, India, and possibly Iran and Brazil as a couple of dark horse candidates. If the EU gets involved, somehow I think it will be more of a private industry effort, more along the lines of Boeing vs. Airbus. The EU has the financial resources, but generally there is a lack of decent launch facilities in Europe due mainly to geography. This is primarily why the ESA has their launch facilities in South America (really not that far from Florida for that matter).
The issues of world hunger are primarily divided into two issues: Logistics (distributing the food) and Politics.
Logistical issues are indeed huge, and trying to get food from where it is abundant to where it is needed can often be a huge problem. In many of the "traditional" areas of the world that seem to have a perpetual food shortage, it is also where you find the transportation infrastructure almost non-existant. That is no reliable paved highways, railroads, or seaports. In order to be able to feed a major populations (even in a 1st world country like London, Paris, or New York City), you have to have an incredible bulk goods transportation infrastructure just to get the food to the people that need it. Often famine relief efforts are able to get litterally a mountain of food donated to help out, but that mountain gets stopped at a transportation hub because it simply can't get any further.
Much of this lack of transportation is in part due to poverty, and even more a result of politics as I'll explain below.
The other major issue is pure political issues. Many areas of the world that have famine are also in war or war-like situations. Eastern Africa in particular has had a series of wars that have ravaged the landscape, and there are competing factions that are deliberately trying to keep food and other basic "humanitarian" supplies from getting to their "enemy". Also, relief convoys have to spend unnecessary resources trying to "bribe" the officials to get the supplies through, often so bad that only a very small faction, if any, even gets through.
And with this political upheaval and war-like actions, supply lines get cut. While you can point to some embargo efforts of many nations, there are also deliberate attempts to destroy infrastructure, including derailing railroads and removing track, blowing up bridges, and tearing up roads. In addition, roving "gangs" of "protection guards" cover many highways, asking for their own "toll" along the way. In short, even if you had all the money in the world, you would never be able to get some food to some people.
None of these issues are unsolvable, and it is surprising that some previously very unstable areas of the world are now rejoining the rest of humanity where the food is plentiful. And not all of these regions are necessarily 1st world nations either, yet have an abundance of food for their people.
Money won't solve world hunger, but being spent on the development of space will not only help resolve some of the resource management issues (where mineral and energy resources can be obtained from extra-terrestrial sources), but it also offers a way to expand the realm of human experience. Wouldn't it be amazing if relief convoys of food came not only from North America and Europe, but also from Mars and Ceres? In other words, even more resources could be used to help solve these problems, not less.
Development of space can be an enabler of these resources, and experiences like the Indian Ocean Tsuami Relief efforts would be typical rather than the exception. Relief efforts would have more resources than they comfortably know what to do with it.
In addition to the pressure and temperature requirements that are very difficult to maintain, one other huge issue that revolves around water is isotopic purity. The definition says nothing about the makeup of the water, the purity of the water (it might as well be seawater as far as the definition is concerned).
Even assuming super distilled water (it has gone through a distillation process multiple times to reduce mineral content to a near minimum possible with current technology), you still have variations in weight based on the elemental composition of the water itself. If the hydrogen in the water is made up of deuterium or tritium, or the oxygen is something other than the standard O-16, you will begin to have some variations in the density of the water, and an imprecise definition. BTW, water that is made up of heavier isotopes than simple hydrogen and ordinary stable O-16 is called "heavy water", and for a reason.... the water is measureably heavier than ordinary water, even though chemically it is totally identical in composition.
So do you define a kilogram as a liter of heavy water?
I'm sorry that you feel that I lack an understanding of patent law.
I have indeed studied the issues, and I feel that there may have been a legitimate purpose to patents in the past, but as a citizen and as an engineer I really don't see a pragmatic reason to even have patents in today's society.
To quote the United States Constitution that is the granting authority of patent law:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries; - Article I, Section 8, Paragraph 8
The point I'm making is that I fail to see how patent law, in its current incarnation, is promoting the progress of science or useful arts. As it fails that very critical test, I am advocating as a citizen that the entire system of patent law be abolished. Patent law merely serves to enrich attorneys and the judicial class at the expense of ordinary citizens, and is a tool to establish a facist government in the United States. I know those are harsh words, but it is my political opinion. BTW, I mean facist by definition of being a government of corporations rather than a government of citizens, not necessarily a bunch of wacked out skin-heads from northern Idaho or people who "worship" Adolph Hitler.
As an engineer who has invented many rather novel approaches to software development, I will flatly refuse to patent any of my ideas because I see how corrupt the system has become. I also resent the restrictions that have been placed on me by the patent system, and largely I completely ignore patents as they apply to the work that I do. Mainly I try to avoid the big squakers of patent law, and try to keep a "clean room" approach to software development (avoiding cross-contamination with other sources of software that potential could challenge ownership of what I do).
Besides the classic protection of supposedly defending the small entrepreneurial inventor from big companies, another potential value to the patent system would be to deal with the archival of the state of the industry. In other words, instead of having companies that keep "trade secrets" and lock up their ideas, the processes and technologies are in an open database that can be explored to find out how people were able to build stuff in the past. Again the problem is that the formalization process of applying for a patent totally ignores this aspect of patent law. Instead, and particularly in the case of software patents and process patents, the description is so thouroughally vague that it would be litterally impossible to create anything from the basis of the description in the patent. If in the process of applying for a patent you had to prove that you had an actual working implementation or application of the patent description, this aspect of patent law would make the whole system seem more legitimate. As it stands now, because of how sloppy the USPTO has been, this isn't a requirement any more, even though it was a requirement throughout most of the 19th Century.
In short, current United States Patent Law does not live up to its promise and IMHO should be abolished. I'm sorry if that would put people like you out of business, but I'm sure there are other areas of law you could work in instead anyway. Patent Law is a scam from my viewpoint.
if you are against software patents, then you must be against any type of patents because it would not be fair to have a special exemption for one type of invention and not another.
As most software patents can be expressed as a mathmatical formula, and since by law mathmatical formulas are specifically excempt from patent law, I don't see where this is necessarily the case.
It is also very easy to come up with software that violates a patent simply because some idiot in the USPTO decided to permit the patent. In other words, the non-obvious standard is set so low that most software that is patented usually is duplicated elsewhere. From my experience in the software industry, if they followed a similar standard of non-obviousness that is applied to mechanical engineering, you would only have about 5-10 software patents granted in the USA per year, if even that. It would be something very rare indeed.
As a matter of course, I do think all patents are a bunch of waste paper tying up courts when judges could and should be worrying about many other much more important things. Basically patents are a major scam that should be eliminated altogether, and I would like to find a good example of an independent developer making money off of a patent when pure innovation and competing in a fair market would not have made them more money.
I can name many inventions where the inventor was totally ripped off instead and the patent system failed, even when the idea was totally novel and the patent was properly filed. Philo T. Farnsworth and his television patents come to mind as a classic example. The patent system basically killed this poor man. Patent law cases for the rachet socket driver and the weed eater are also legendary in the time it took to get the patents enforced, and companies that blatently ignored that the inventions even existed. And in all three of these cases the courts eventually ruled that the inventors did have patent claims with punative damages against major corporations for patent violations. Even here, they were at the mercy of a judge providing an arbitrary decision, and had to be won on appeal as well. Too often these patent disputes had to go all the way to SCOTUS. That is just plain wrong.
I would like to see a single patent that was "invented" by an independent software developer where the patent developer actually made money from patent licenses. Especially where it could be documented that the concept really was original, novel, and no prior art could be demonstrated (as patents supposedly should be but software patents rarely are).
Indeed, with only a very few exceptions, I don't see many independent inventors making money from a device of any sort (mechanical, biological, or whatever) that they have patented. For the most part, the entire patent attorney industry (if you can call it that) is a major scam business that is unfortunately tolerated in legal circles.
Case in point: My poor grandfather has about 15 patents to his name. He spent thousands of dollars just trying to get the ideas through the patenting process, but didn't sell a single concept to any groups nor did any of the products ever become reality. The only "inheritance" I got from him was a bunch of expired patents that is more a tribute to his creative thinking in a historical context than anything pragmatic.
The only reason why I would even recommend that businesses persue a patent on any product is for purely defensive reasons alone: If another company comes along and tries to sue you for patent infringement, you can in turn do a counter suite for patent infringement based on patents that you possess, or using your patents as evidence of prior art, thus invalidating the patent claim. Essentially, a way for you to tell patent attorneys to "Go To Hell".
Basically, if the entire patent system went away, I don't see how it would affect any industries in the USA in any substantial manner. I certainly wouldn't cry nor would it change the way that I do my engineering designs.
Copyright, on the other hand, when done reasonably does have some valid merit. Originality is also considerably more obvious and rarely an issue. Copyright term length on the otherhand....
The warheads "lost in the warehouse" are going to be quite unlikely, as any detonation of a nuclear warhead is going to be traceable for the most part to the nation of origin.
There are a variety of ways this can be done, but the point is that if a nuke is used, the nation that manufactured the warhead or at least the processed uranium used in the bomb can be directly identified, and held liable in a diplomatic sense for the results of that bomb being used.
This is primarily why it will be very unlikely IMHO for nukes to be developed by terrorist groups, and why warhead security is annaly tight: No nation wants to be held responsible for a major act of war unless they are willing to do it with the flag flying proudly and a P.R. release by the head of state ahead of time. Just like President Truman did when the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki. There was no doubt where the country of origin for those bomb were at, and where the retalitory strike could be directed at.
If North Korea or Iran want to build nukes, go ahead. If they get used, they will cease to exist as a country. That the leader of those countries directly has their hind end on the line if they are used will prevent their misappropriation.
This is pretty much the military doctrine of the USA for the past 40 years: Go ahead and nuke us if you dare. You will cease to exist afterward. We guarentee it.
Conventional TNT bombs or other chemical-based weaponry on the other hand are a lot more anonymous. On the other hand, they don't do nearly so much damage either.
EULAs haven't even been legally enforced in a court-tested environment. It is very doubtful that it is even legal at all. All EULA statements assume rights that a copyright holder simply doesn't have (as opposed to the GPL which simply states that if you don't abide by the terms of the GPL, then normal copyright laws and precedence apply).
Because of the untested nature of the EULA, there are no court judgements to even compare against, hence the wide variety of legal speak over what goes into these. Heck, even shrink-wrap licenses have yet to be really enforced on a wide-spread basis of any kind. In every case where the EULA might even be involved, there were other statutory violations that were invoked where the EULA was never even an issue.
If you want to compare this to credit card, loan applications, or even a housing contract, enough of those have gone to court that a reasonably good attorney can review the case history and see what has been enforced and what has not. That still doesn't stop contracts with illegal provisions, but that is an issue you have to decide upon yourself before you sign.
And who says that digital TV is any better than analog television?
Frankly, from what I've been seeing lately (and I'm a multimedia software engineer very familiar with digital media formats), there has been a very serious degradation of television reception due to the conversion to digital formats rather than an all analog system.
If you have a high-end cable TV system you don't see it all the time, but try some time to get ordinary broadcast television. When analog systems are used, they degrade gracefully, where the signal gets weaker and weaker depending on the environmental conditions. Yes, you get some snow and static, but the human brain can filter out a surprisingly large amount of that.
With digital broadcasts, on the other hand, it either works or it doesn't. When the signal starts to go bad you start losing packets or even entire groups of frames. Personally, I hate the "Max Headroom" effect where the video image is "frozen" for about 1-2 seconds while the video equipment is trying to reacquire a new frame. Worse yet when the MPEG-Video frame is incompletely sent, or has a bunch of data errors you see these weird-looking pixel blocks and bizzare colors show up. You would never see this with analog systems. MPEG is particularly awful with this, especially when you have a corrupted I-frame that propogates through the whole GOP.
The fact that the FCC is playing games with the conversion deadline also shows that the industry is not ready for the switch. I will have to agree that if the FCC forced the switch to digital TV, it would simply happen.
I think you got your figures somewhat off. I get about 40% of the solar energy, but that is quibbling about details. (38.5% to be exact)
The point that I'm making is that current Mars probes are using solar energy, and while I'll admit that it isn't as effective of an energy source as even from the Earth, it still is a viable option and a proven technology that has already been used extensively for space exploration, even on Mars.
Fusion is largely an experimental technology, and fission reactors are likely to get a whole lot of protesters who don't have a clue about space or nuclear technology in general.
Personally, I think nuclear fission reactors as a part of the propulsion plant for a Mars-Earth spaceship would be quite intelligent, but again that is for the spaceship transit systems, not something that is dealing with what is happening on the ground on Mars.
When dealing with major human settlement of extra-terrestrial bodies (like Mars or the Moon), technolgies will have to be developed that take advantage of the local environment and don't require a huge technology base just to keep the technologies running.
The analogy that I've heard often is the steam locomotive, where it could operate indefinitely in relative wilderness areas on the Earth simply because when it ran out of coal the engineer and coalman could take a couple of saws out and cut down timber for fuel, and pull water out of nearby streams.
17th & 18th Century sailing ships are another situation where the ships were largely self-sufficient, even to the point of being able to do major repairs with resources at hand where they traveled.
I just don't see a similar infrastructure occuring with either a conventional fission reactor or even a tokamak-style fusion reactor. (Cold fusion or Farnsworth Fusors are slightly better for colonizing activities, however) Both of these reactor technologies requires a fairly substantial physical plant just to get them up and running, as well as some very hard-core specialists dedicated just to running the thing and watching over it 24/7.
I have no doubt that nuclear reactors will eventually be built on Mars, and if there is a substantial population the physical facility issues including having technicians available to maintain a reactor will be there. But that will happen only after a substantial infrastructure has already been put in place, not for a pioneering group. Filling up 30 to 40 acres with solar cells is not really that much of a problem when you are the first people to physically show up and there is that acreage available.
When ICANN got rid of their At-Large board members (like Karl Auerbach), they lost something even more important: Credibility. BTW, his web pages regarding his service at ICANN speak volumes over why this is even an issue.
I wish the U.S. Dept. of Commerce had insisted back elsewhen that the regional representive model for the At-Large ICANN board members would have been the actual structure of the organization. Instead it is made up of special interest groups and early internet corporations that have been able to maintain their current position in part due to having grabbed the concepts first, not because of technical competiance.
In this whole mess, it is the U.S. Department of Commerce that really deserves to get the blame for the whole thing being so screwed up. Particularly where money is involved (like registration fees) or the allocation of scarce resources (like IP addresses). Why the U.S. government getting blame? They were the ones who set up the mess in the first place as the original internet infrastructure was based in the USA and only later moved out elsewhere in the world.
The United Nations is only trying to do a "land grab" of their own, as this has the potential of being a rather influential governing structure of world commerce. It has the potential of being one of the few things that if directly under UN control would allow the UN to be more than a debate society of national diplomats. IMHO all the UN should be is a debate society, and any ambitions to go beyond that are doomed to cause more harm than good.
The point here is that all we need is just the desire and poltical will to go (getting the #%*)@#%*& FAA-AST off our backs now).
If you can get into high earth orbit from a manned space launch, getting to Mars isn't significantly more complicated.
The problem with doing stuff like interstellar travel is that significant theoretical discoveries need to be made just to prove that it is possible. Having people spend significant amounts of time in space has already been done, so the rest is simply trying to get the engineering down, and lowering the costs so that mere mortals can afford to go.
You don't really even need a fusion/fission plant. Simple silicon solar-electric panels grabbing sunlight would be all that you need. The window to launch would be a couple of years apart anyway, so it just has to be mildly efficient as it generates the fuel reserve. Astronauts can even wipe off the dust if the efficiency goes down (the current problem with the Mars Rover program).
Admittedly a fusion plant would provide a denser energy source, but that really isn't going to be a problem on Mars. Depending on the minerals in the area were a Mars colony was being established, you might even be able to manufacture solar-electric cells. They don't have to have the super efficiency that communication satellites are usually accustomed to, or even what you would buy to cover your roof if you were into alternative engergy sources. In other words, you would only need a small silicon smelter and a geologist who could identify good ore rocks to help bootstrap the process.
What is very interesting is that 5 million years is geologically (or is that arilogically? for Ares?) speaking very recent. I mean, you can actually find human remains and settlements that are 5 million years old. Not civilizations, but you would still be able to recognize them as people, and even be able to talk to them after establishing a common language if you had a time machine.
In other words, 5 million year old lakes are hardly ancient when you are looking at a bunch of rocks.
If this water were free-flowing, or at least liquid for a substantial period of time, I would say that it almost certainly would have some sort of life-forms if just from a metor impact that included a hunk of rock from the Earth (with microbes inside... just like the Antarctic fossil supposedly from Mars).
As a general rule of thumb, if you find liquid water, you will find life in the form of DNA-based chemical organisms... life as we know it here on the Earth. I wonder if the researchers who suggested this time estimate really thought through what they were saying.
I can also factually tell you that human activity to alter the Earth's atmosphere within our lifetimes has diminished substantially in many parts of the world, where people have indeed been reasonable stewards of the environment and cared about what they were breathing.
I won't deny that especially in emerging industrial nations (India, China, Brazil) there is an incredible amount of pollution occuring. But to deny that there hasn't been huge progress in older industrial nations to attempt to clean up the environment and have more energy efficient equipment, and low-emmissions devices, totally misses the mark. Los Angeles of today is substantially better in terms of overall air quality than it was even 20 years ago, and Pittsburgh of today isn't even recognizeable from what it was like 100 years ago. These are not isolated incidents either as you can point to other cities in both the USA as well as Europe. And this is not strictly due to outsourcing either.
The real questions are: What really are the sources of increased "greenhouse gasses"? What is the source of the increased heat? What really are the long-term (10,000+ year estimates, not 10 year estimates) climate changes we are seeing?
I don't buy that mankind is the answer to each of these questions 100%, or even > 50%.
That, to me, is the whole point as to why it is difficult or even impossible to come to a decent conclusion regarding this debate:
Politics have entered into the discussion so thourghally that it is even affecting what is being measured and how the raw data is being interpreted.
I have unfortunately been involved with some of the seamier side of climatology, and there is quite a bit of fraud involved on the part of scientists fudging the results and doing things that advance their particular idology. And that is for both sides of the debate.
There is some "hard" scientific data that can be used for the debate, but the interpretation of that data is still subject to political concerns. And the proponents tend to ignore natural causes (like the sun or increased volcanic activity) as the "ignore the environmentalists" group tends to follow the mantra "the solution to pollution is dilution".
I believe that we need to be reasonable stewards of the environment, but that the hard-core environmentalists are totally out to lunch as well. I also resent forcing publicy policy decisions (Kyoto Treaty, EPA car emmissions regulations, etc.) that are based on faulty and politically charged scientific reasoning. This isn't to say that Los Angeles can go back to the 1960's environmental regulations, but if changes are made that it is based on real health hazards, not supposed future forecast models that don't have any real credibility.
Of course, asking most scientists to take a holistic approach to the debate is probabaly more than can be asked for.
Well, I'm the son of a nuclear engineer, and I've also had more than a year's worth of engineering-level college physics, so I have had to learn a little bit more about the subject than the average joe. I have also met and talked at length with people from the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory where they have done some very incredible research. This is also where the first nuclear power electric generating plant in the world was built (not the first nuclear reactor, however).
If you want to see something that is a terrible waste of fantastic technologies due to raw politics, try to research what happened to the Breeder Reactor program at INEL. They have effectively found a way to build a nuclear fision reactor that can actually consume radioactive waste from other reactors and turn it into something harmless. If this research was to continue, there would be absolutely no need for Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
The dark side of this research is that the same reactor can effectively make better than bomb-grade Plutonium using the same techniques, and there are some other national security issues that turns this into a political mess. Also, I think there are members of the United States Senate who really want to spread large quantities of radioactive waste all over America. It has to be deliberate, because the useful benefits to our country far outnumber the risks that this research could lead us to.
Of course the Farnsworth Fusor technology has been equally neglected, but that is another story.
No, it is very ordinary H2O. The same water that makes up 90% of your body.
You might be confused with "heavy water" that truly does weigh more, due to the fact that it is composed of deuterium and tritium, and for some nuclear research these heavier isotopes of hydrogen are used.
The problem with the water moderators of nuclear power plants is that water is a very corrosive substance, and will dissolve just about anything, including uranium and radioactive waste. Because of that, the water that is in containment areas of a nuclear power plant generally isn't flushed into the city sewer.
The water that is used in nuclear power plants is also of extraordinary purity, where it goes through a desalinzation process many time more exacting than what is needed for public drinking water or farming. Indeed, if you drink the water straight out of a power plant, it actually starts absorbing minerals from your body as you are drinking it... unhealthy because it is too pure to drink. This is done mainly to avoid calcification of the pipes and other mineral deposits, like what happens to the inside of a water heater in your home over time.
Every thing that I mentioned and more is possible with just ordinary water, and it does indeed have many uses in space. To see an interesting book that describes this in more detail check out "The Return"> written by none other than Buzz Aldrin, the second astronaut to step foot on the moon. While this is fiction, Mr. Aldrin's credentials for having experienced real spaceflight are undisputed. In this book he describes an interesting threat to manned spaceflight that before hand I never even thought about, and in it the space shuttle had to be modified with water radiation bags to do a rescue mission to the ISS.
Really, ordinary water does offer a bunch of neat advantages and really is used for radiation shielding.
Both items have problems of breaking down in a vacuum environment. They are using something like Kevlar, which in tests conduced by the FBI back in the 1970's (and continue to present) show that it is actually stronger than a plate of steel for stopping projectiles.
At very high velocities (like you find in space), the particles and paint chips don't just embed into the material, but rather vaporize so completely that it becomes a form of radiation.
As far as getting water into space, most water is a "waste" product from the fuel cells, and is a common supply item for resupplying the ISS. Basically, while expensive simply because getting anything up to space is expensive in general.
As far as water as a shield, it is very commonly used in nuclear reactors as well as for radioactive waste repositories. One really nice thing about water is that the secondary radiation issues are not nearly so much of an issue (gamma rays hitting water and then bumping parts of water molucules to become a collection of other stuff). The other nice thing here is that the water can be used for other things besides purely radiation shielding, like energy storage (doing electralisis to generate hydrogen and oxygen), temperature regulation, mass regulation (more important in a ship rather than an orbiting space station), and being able to simply drink the stuff (assuming it isn't too radioactive).
Regarding leaking bags, I take it you havn't seen a waterbed? Good storage bags can be made to withstand quite a bit of physical abuse, be plyable, and still keep water just where it needs to be. This is totally a non-issue, and besides, in space the water would just "ball up" instead of flowing to the "basement". Even a ball of free water outside of a bag would not be that big of an issue in space, and easily something to deal with by astronauts.
What is really sad is that the module was actually built and tested by NASA. The only real reason why it won't go on the ISS is because NASA doesn't want to send the Shuttle mission up to put it there. I would agree that there are other modules that need to be added first, but this would make a huge difference to the quality of life for the astronauts that are there trying to man the ISS, and looks like it could be used even now at the moment to the benefit of the folks who are up there right now.
Whenever I bring up environmentalists getting their panties in a bunch over people spoiling the environment on Mars or the Moon, I usually get blank stares from just about everybody I talk to.
This is an issue that will become a major item in the 21st Century, particularly if substantial commercial development occurs in space. IMHO, I think they are nuts, and let's worry about trying to help mankind out 1st. I would agree that it would be far better to strip-mine Mars than it would be to strip-mine Wyoming.
BTW, the property rights issues in space are going to be very interesting. International law denies UN member nations and signatories to the Outer Space Treaty (just about everybody who can get to space right now, including India, China, and France) from claiming extra-terrestrial territory. On the other hand, private ownership is allowed, and indeed the wording of the treaty is such that private companies can own pieces of extra-terrestrial real estate. Just who the registration authority is will be another story, however.
The problem with this is that it must be done in places where lotteries are legal. And throughout most of the USA (at least) it is illegal, or at least only legal if it is state-sponsored.
Now if it were done as a promotional sweepstakes (grand prize is a trip to orbit, lesser prizes include an Estes model rocket replica of the launch vehicle), it might be a little more acceptable. Since this is already being done with Virgin Galactic, I have no doubt you will see this for orbital travel in the future either.
BTW, this is far from a new idea. In the story "The Man who Sold The Moon" by Robert A. Heinlein this was proposed by D. Delos Harriman as a way to help raise funds for his private lunar flight company.
I think it was an old idea in SF even then. Sorry, you won't ever get a royalty check for this idea due to prior art. The only new thing is for somebody to actually do it now that private space flight is becoming something that can actually happen now.
1st, you shouldn't have used your karma bonus for such a lame comment.
2nd, not only have I kissed a girl, I'm married with six kids. You do the math regarding procreation.
BTW, if you think it is silly for the passion required to make movies or write books, try dealing with a spouse some time. The dedication and fanaticism required just to keep a wife barely happy is _FAR_ beyond anything I ever did with being a fan for the SciFi movies or good SF books and authors. The side benefits are nice, and besides, my wife is a good SF fan as well. Quite into Stargate and ST:Voyager.
Now the REAL question is if you have ever kissed or been kissed by a girl? Or a boy for that matter?
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In Utah, current state law allows an electricity consumer to have electric utilities "buy back" power at least equal in value to any electricity you consume. Basically, you can get your power bill down to $0 for direct power rates, although you still have to pay the fixed monthly connection fees and taxes.
Not as good as New Jersey, but at least an incentive to be as self-sufficient as possible, and making it reasonable to put small wind-power generators onto the grid as well, or even solar-electric generators where you supply power during the day and draw from the grid at night.
There are some states that don't permit the power meter to go backward, in which case alternate power sources have to have a more complicated interface with the electric utility input.
Like anybody will really take the Moon treaty seriously when major natural resources are in production for extraction from the Moon's surface.
Read the section on withdrawl from the treaty, and you will see just how much weight current space law really has from the 1960's idealism. Basically, not much. These treaties are just a speed bump to a full militarization and nationalization of space. Sorry to be pessimistic.
America is a very competitive country, and one of the problems about the "race for the moon" in the 1960's was that Russia wimped out. Russia didn't follow on to the moon dispite having a lunar lander and cosmonauts that could have duplicated the American effort.
This time there is more than merely two different nations going into space. I would count on China, Japan, India, and possibly Iran and Brazil as a couple of dark horse candidates. If the EU gets involved, somehow I think it will be more of a private industry effort, more along the lines of Boeing vs. Airbus. The EU has the financial resources, but generally there is a lack of decent launch facilities in Europe due mainly to geography. This is primarily why the ESA has their launch facilities in South America (really not that far from Florida for that matter).
The issues of world hunger are primarily divided into two issues: Logistics (distributing the food) and Politics.
Logistical issues are indeed huge, and trying to get food from where it is abundant to where it is needed can often be a huge problem. In many of the "traditional" areas of the world that seem to have a perpetual food shortage, it is also where you find the transportation infrastructure almost non-existant. That is no reliable paved highways, railroads, or seaports. In order to be able to feed a major populations (even in a 1st world country like London, Paris, or New York City), you have to have an incredible bulk goods transportation infrastructure just to get the food to the people that need it. Often famine relief efforts are able to get litterally a mountain of food donated to help out, but that mountain gets stopped at a transportation hub because it simply can't get any further.
Much of this lack of transportation is in part due to poverty, and even more a result of politics as I'll explain below.
The other major issue is pure political issues. Many areas of the world that have famine are also in war or war-like situations. Eastern Africa in particular has had a series of wars that have ravaged the landscape, and there are competing factions that are deliberately trying to keep food and other basic "humanitarian" supplies from getting to their "enemy". Also, relief convoys have to spend unnecessary resources trying to "bribe" the officials to get the supplies through, often so bad that only a very small faction, if any, even gets through.
And with this political upheaval and war-like actions, supply lines get cut. While you can point to some embargo efforts of many nations, there are also deliberate attempts to destroy infrastructure, including derailing railroads and removing track, blowing up bridges, and tearing up roads. In addition, roving "gangs" of "protection guards" cover many highways, asking for their own "toll" along the way. In short, even if you had all the money in the world, you would never be able to get some food to some people.
None of these issues are unsolvable, and it is surprising that some previously very unstable areas of the world are now rejoining the rest of humanity where the food is plentiful. And not all of these regions are necessarily 1st world nations either, yet have an abundance of food for their people.
Money won't solve world hunger, but being spent on the development of space will not only help resolve some of the resource management issues (where mineral and energy resources can be obtained from extra-terrestrial sources), but it also offers a way to expand the realm of human experience. Wouldn't it be amazing if relief convoys of food came not only from North America and Europe, but also from Mars and Ceres? In other words, even more resources could be used to help solve these problems, not less.
Development of space can be an enabler of these resources, and experiences like the Indian Ocean Tsuami Relief efforts would be typical rather than the exception. Relief efforts would have more resources than they comfortably know what to do with it.
In addition to the pressure and temperature requirements that are very difficult to maintain, one other huge issue that revolves around water is isotopic purity. The definition says nothing about the makeup of the water, the purity of the water (it might as well be seawater as far as the definition is concerned).
Even assuming super distilled water (it has gone through a distillation process multiple times to reduce mineral content to a near minimum possible with current technology), you still have variations in weight based on the elemental composition of the water itself. If the hydrogen in the water is made up of deuterium or tritium, or the oxygen is something other than the standard O-16, you will begin to have some variations in the density of the water, and an imprecise definition. BTW, water that is made up of heavier isotopes than simple hydrogen and ordinary stable O-16 is called "heavy water", and for a reason.... the water is measureably heavier than ordinary water, even though chemically it is totally identical in composition.
So do you define a kilogram as a liter of heavy water?
I have indeed studied the issues, and I feel that there may have been a legitimate purpose to patents in the past, but as a citizen and as an engineer I really don't see a pragmatic reason to even have patents in today's society.
To quote the United States Constitution that is the granting authority of patent law:
The point I'm making is that I fail to see how patent law, in its current incarnation, is promoting the progress of science or useful arts. As it fails that very critical test, I am advocating as a citizen that the entire system of patent law be abolished. Patent law merely serves to enrich attorneys and the judicial class at the expense of ordinary citizens, and is a tool to establish a facist government in the United States. I know those are harsh words, but it is my political opinion. BTW, I mean facist by definition of being a government of corporations rather than a government of citizens, not necessarily a bunch of wacked out skin-heads from northern Idaho or people who "worship" Adolph Hitler.
As an engineer who has invented many rather novel approaches to software development, I will flatly refuse to patent any of my ideas because I see how corrupt the system has become. I also resent the restrictions that have been placed on me by the patent system, and largely I completely ignore patents as they apply to the work that I do. Mainly I try to avoid the big squakers of patent law, and try to keep a "clean room" approach to software development (avoiding cross-contamination with other sources of software that potential could challenge ownership of what I do).
Besides the classic protection of supposedly defending the small entrepreneurial inventor from big companies, another potential value to the patent system would be to deal with the archival of the state of the industry. In other words, instead of having companies that keep "trade secrets" and lock up their ideas, the processes and technologies are in an open database that can be explored to find out how people were able to build stuff in the past. Again the problem is that the formalization process of applying for a patent totally ignores this aspect of patent law. Instead, and particularly in the case of software patents and process patents, the description is so thouroughally vague that it would be litterally impossible to create anything from the basis of the description in the patent. If in the process of applying for a patent you had to prove that you had an actual working implementation or application of the patent description, this aspect of patent law would make the whole system seem more legitimate. As it stands now, because of how sloppy the USPTO has been, this isn't a requirement any more, even though it was a requirement throughout most of the 19th Century.
In short, current United States Patent Law does not live up to its promise and IMHO should be abolished. I'm sorry if that would put people like you out of business, but I'm sure there are other areas of law you could work in instead anyway. Patent Law is a scam from my viewpoint.
As most software patents can be expressed as a mathmatical formula, and since by law mathmatical formulas are specifically excempt from patent law, I don't see where this is necessarily the case.
It is also very easy to come up with software that violates a patent simply because some idiot in the USPTO decided to permit the patent. In other words, the non-obvious standard is set so low that most software that is patented usually is duplicated elsewhere. From my experience in the software industry, if they followed a similar standard of non-obviousness that is applied to mechanical engineering, you would only have about 5-10 software patents granted in the USA per year, if even that. It would be something very rare indeed.
As a matter of course, I do think all patents are a bunch of waste paper tying up courts when judges could and should be worrying about many other much more important things. Basically patents are a major scam that should be eliminated altogether, and I would like to find a good example of an independent developer making money off of a patent when pure innovation and competing in a fair market would not have made them more money.
I can name many inventions where the inventor was totally ripped off instead and the patent system failed, even when the idea was totally novel and the patent was properly filed. Philo T. Farnsworth and his television patents come to mind as a classic example. The patent system basically killed this poor man. Patent law cases for the rachet socket driver and the weed eater are also legendary in the time it took to get the patents enforced, and companies that blatently ignored that the inventions even existed. And in all three of these cases the courts eventually ruled that the inventors did have patent claims with punative damages against major corporations for patent violations. Even here, they were at the mercy of a judge providing an arbitrary decision, and had to be won on appeal as well. Too often these patent disputes had to go all the way to SCOTUS. That is just plain wrong.
I totally concurr here.
I would like to see a single patent that was "invented" by an independent software developer where the patent developer actually made money from patent licenses. Especially where it could be documented that the concept really was original, novel, and no prior art could be demonstrated (as patents supposedly should be but software patents rarely are).
Indeed, with only a very few exceptions, I don't see many independent inventors making money from a device of any sort (mechanical, biological, or whatever) that they have patented. For the most part, the entire patent attorney industry (if you can call it that) is a major scam business that is unfortunately tolerated in legal circles.
Case in point: My poor grandfather has about 15 patents to his name. He spent thousands of dollars just trying to get the ideas through the patenting process, but didn't sell a single concept to any groups nor did any of the products ever become reality. The only "inheritance" I got from him was a bunch of expired patents that is more a tribute to his creative thinking in a historical context than anything pragmatic.
The only reason why I would even recommend that businesses persue a patent on any product is for purely defensive reasons alone: If another company comes along and tries to sue you for patent infringement, you can in turn do a counter suite for patent infringement based on patents that you possess, or using your patents as evidence of prior art, thus invalidating the patent claim. Essentially, a way for you to tell patent attorneys to "Go To Hell".
Basically, if the entire patent system went away, I don't see how it would affect any industries in the USA in any substantial manner. I certainly wouldn't cry nor would it change the way that I do my engineering designs.
Copyright, on the other hand, when done reasonably does have some valid merit. Originality is also considerably more obvious and rarely an issue. Copyright term length on the otherhand....
The warheads "lost in the warehouse" are going to be quite unlikely, as any detonation of a nuclear warhead is going to be traceable for the most part to the nation of origin.
There are a variety of ways this can be done, but the point is that if a nuke is used, the nation that manufactured the warhead or at least the processed uranium used in the bomb can be directly identified, and held liable in a diplomatic sense for the results of that bomb being used.
This is primarily why it will be very unlikely IMHO for nukes to be developed by terrorist groups, and why warhead security is annaly tight: No nation wants to be held responsible for a major act of war unless they are willing to do it with the flag flying proudly and a P.R. release by the head of state ahead of time. Just like President Truman did when the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki. There was no doubt where the country of origin for those bomb were at, and where the retalitory strike could be directed at.
If North Korea or Iran want to build nukes, go ahead. If they get used, they will cease to exist as a country. That the leader of those countries directly has their hind end on the line if they are used will prevent their misappropriation.
This is pretty much the military doctrine of the USA for the past 40 years: Go ahead and nuke us if you dare. You will cease to exist afterward. We guarentee it.
Conventional TNT bombs or other chemical-based weaponry on the other hand are a lot more anonymous. On the other hand, they don't do nearly so much damage either.
EULAs haven't even been legally enforced in a court-tested environment. It is very doubtful that it is even legal at all. All EULA statements assume rights that a copyright holder simply doesn't have (as opposed to the GPL which simply states that if you don't abide by the terms of the GPL, then normal copyright laws and precedence apply).
Because of the untested nature of the EULA, there are no court judgements to even compare against, hence the wide variety of legal speak over what goes into these. Heck, even shrink-wrap licenses have yet to be really enforced on a wide-spread basis of any kind. In every case where the EULA might even be involved, there were other statutory violations that were invoked where the EULA was never even an issue.
If you want to compare this to credit card, loan applications, or even a housing contract, enough of those have gone to court that a reasonably good attorney can review the case history and see what has been enforced and what has not. That still doesn't stop contracts with illegal provisions, but that is an issue you have to decide upon yourself before you sign.
And who says that digital TV is any better than analog television?
Frankly, from what I've been seeing lately (and I'm a multimedia software engineer very familiar with digital media formats), there has been a very serious degradation of television reception due to the conversion to digital formats rather than an all analog system.
If you have a high-end cable TV system you don't see it all the time, but try some time to get ordinary broadcast television. When analog systems are used, they degrade gracefully, where the signal gets weaker and weaker depending on the environmental conditions. Yes, you get some snow and static, but the human brain can filter out a surprisingly large amount of that.
With digital broadcasts, on the other hand, it either works or it doesn't. When the signal starts to go bad you start losing packets or even entire groups of frames. Personally, I hate the "Max Headroom" effect where the video image is "frozen" for about 1-2 seconds while the video equipment is trying to reacquire a new frame. Worse yet when the MPEG-Video frame is incompletely sent, or has a bunch of data errors you see these weird-looking pixel blocks and bizzare colors show up. You would never see this with analog systems. MPEG is particularly awful with this, especially when you have a corrupted I-frame that propogates through the whole GOP.
The fact that the FCC is playing games with the conversion deadline also shows that the industry is not ready for the switch. I will have to agree that if the FCC forced the switch to digital TV, it would simply happen.
I think you got your figures somewhat off. I get about 40% of the solar energy, but that is quibbling about details. (38.5% to be exact)
The point that I'm making is that current Mars probes are using solar energy, and while I'll admit that it isn't as effective of an energy source as even from the Earth, it still is a viable option and a proven technology that has already been used extensively for space exploration, even on Mars.
Fusion is largely an experimental technology, and fission reactors are likely to get a whole lot of protesters who don't have a clue about space or nuclear technology in general.
Personally, I think nuclear fission reactors as a part of the propulsion plant for a Mars-Earth spaceship would be quite intelligent, but again that is for the spaceship transit systems, not something that is dealing with what is happening on the ground on Mars.
When dealing with major human settlement of extra-terrestrial bodies (like Mars or the Moon), technolgies will have to be developed that take advantage of the local environment and don't require a huge technology base just to keep the technologies running.
The analogy that I've heard often is the steam locomotive, where it could operate indefinitely in relative wilderness areas on the Earth simply because when it ran out of coal the engineer and coalman could take a couple of saws out and cut down timber for fuel, and pull water out of nearby streams.
17th & 18th Century sailing ships are another situation where the ships were largely self-sufficient, even to the point of being able to do major repairs with resources at hand where they traveled.
I just don't see a similar infrastructure occuring with either a conventional fission reactor or even a tokamak-style fusion reactor. (Cold fusion or Farnsworth Fusors are slightly better for colonizing activities, however) Both of these reactor technologies requires a fairly substantial physical plant just to get them up and running, as well as some very hard-core specialists dedicated just to running the thing and watching over it 24/7.
I have no doubt that nuclear reactors will eventually be built on Mars, and if there is a substantial population the physical facility issues including having technicians available to maintain a reactor will be there. But that will happen only after a substantial infrastructure has already been put in place, not for a pioneering group. Filling up 30 to 40 acres with solar cells is not really that much of a problem when you are the first people to physically show up and there is that acreage available.
When ICANN got rid of their At-Large board members (like Karl Auerbach), they lost something even more important: Credibility. BTW, his web pages regarding his service at ICANN speak volumes over why this is even an issue.
I wish the U.S. Dept. of Commerce had insisted back elsewhen that the regional representive model for the At-Large ICANN board members would have been the actual structure of the organization. Instead it is made up of special interest groups and early internet corporations that have been able to maintain their current position in part due to having grabbed the concepts first, not because of technical competiance.
In this whole mess, it is the U.S. Department of Commerce that really deserves to get the blame for the whole thing being so screwed up. Particularly where money is involved (like registration fees) or the allocation of scarce resources (like IP addresses). Why the U.S. government getting blame? They were the ones who set up the mess in the first place as the original internet infrastructure was based in the USA and only later moved out elsewhere in the world.
The United Nations is only trying to do a "land grab" of their own, as this has the potential of being a rather influential governing structure of world commerce. It has the potential of being one of the few things that if directly under UN control would allow the UN to be more than a debate society of national diplomats. IMHO all the UN should be is a debate society, and any ambitions to go beyond that are doomed to cause more harm than good.
The point here is that all we need is just the desire and poltical will to go (getting the #%*)@#%*& FAA-AST off our backs now).
If you can get into high earth orbit from a manned space launch, getting to Mars isn't significantly more complicated.
The problem with doing stuff like interstellar travel is that significant theoretical discoveries need to be made just to prove that it is possible. Having people spend significant amounts of time in space has already been done, so the rest is simply trying to get the engineering down, and lowering the costs so that mere mortals can afford to go.
You don't really even need a fusion/fission plant. Simple silicon solar-electric panels grabbing sunlight would be all that you need. The window to launch would be a couple of years apart anyway, so it just has to be mildly efficient as it generates the fuel reserve. Astronauts can even wipe off the dust if the efficiency goes down (the current problem with the Mars Rover program).
Admittedly a fusion plant would provide a denser energy source, but that really isn't going to be a problem on Mars. Depending on the minerals in the area were a Mars colony was being established, you might even be able to manufacture solar-electric cells. They don't have to have the super efficiency that communication satellites are usually accustomed to, or even what you would buy to cover your roof if you were into alternative engergy sources. In other words, you would only need a small silicon smelter and a geologist who could identify good ore rocks to help bootstrap the process.
What is very interesting is that 5 million years is geologically (or is that arilogically? for Ares?) speaking very recent. I mean, you can actually find human remains and settlements that are 5 million years old. Not civilizations, but you would still be able to recognize them as people, and even be able to talk to them after establishing a common language if you had a time machine.
In other words, 5 million year old lakes are hardly ancient when you are looking at a bunch of rocks.
If this water were free-flowing, or at least liquid for a substantial period of time, I would say that it almost certainly would have some sort of life-forms if just from a metor impact that included a hunk of rock from the Earth (with microbes inside... just like the Antarctic fossil supposedly from Mars).
As a general rule of thumb, if you find liquid water, you will find life in the form of DNA-based chemical organisms... life as we know it here on the Earth. I wonder if the researchers who suggested this time estimate really thought through what they were saying.
I can also factually tell you that human activity to alter the Earth's atmosphere within our lifetimes has diminished substantially in many parts of the world, where people have indeed been reasonable stewards of the environment and cared about what they were breathing.
I won't deny that especially in emerging industrial nations (India, China, Brazil) there is an incredible amount of pollution occuring. But to deny that there hasn't been huge progress in older industrial nations to attempt to clean up the environment and have more energy efficient equipment, and low-emmissions devices, totally misses the mark. Los Angeles of today is substantially better in terms of overall air quality than it was even 20 years ago, and Pittsburgh of today isn't even recognizeable from what it was like 100 years ago. These are not isolated incidents either as you can point to other cities in both the USA as well as Europe. And this is not strictly due to outsourcing either.
The real questions are: What really are the sources of increased "greenhouse gasses"? What is the source of the increased heat? What really are the long-term (10,000+ year estimates, not 10 year estimates) climate changes we are seeing?
I don't buy that mankind is the answer to each of these questions 100%, or even > 50%.
That, to me, is the whole point as to why it is difficult or even impossible to come to a decent conclusion regarding this debate:
Politics have entered into the discussion so thourghally that it is even affecting what is being measured and how the raw data is being interpreted.
I have unfortunately been involved with some of the seamier side of climatology, and there is quite a bit of fraud involved on the part of scientists fudging the results and doing things that advance their particular idology. And that is for both sides of the debate.
There is some "hard" scientific data that can be used for the debate, but the interpretation of that data is still subject to political concerns. And the proponents tend to ignore natural causes (like the sun or increased volcanic activity) as the "ignore the environmentalists" group tends to follow the mantra "the solution to pollution is dilution".
I believe that we need to be reasonable stewards of the environment, but that the hard-core environmentalists are totally out to lunch as well. I also resent forcing publicy policy decisions (Kyoto Treaty, EPA car emmissions regulations, etc.) that are based on faulty and politically charged scientific reasoning. This isn't to say that Los Angeles can go back to the 1960's environmental regulations, but if changes are made that it is based on real health hazards, not supposed future forecast models that don't have any real credibility.
Of course, asking most scientists to take a holistic approach to the debate is probabaly more than can be asked for.
Well, I'm the son of a nuclear engineer, and I've also had more than a year's worth of engineering-level college physics, so I have had to learn a little bit more about the subject than the average joe. I have also met and talked at length with people from the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory where they have done some very incredible research. This is also where the first nuclear power electric generating plant in the world was built (not the first nuclear reactor, however).
If you want to see something that is a terrible waste of fantastic technologies due to raw politics, try to research what happened to the Breeder Reactor program at INEL. They have effectively found a way to build a nuclear fision reactor that can actually consume radioactive waste from other reactors and turn it into something harmless. If this research was to continue, there would be absolutely no need for Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
The dark side of this research is that the same reactor can effectively make better than bomb-grade Plutonium using the same techniques, and there are some other national security issues that turns this into a political mess. Also, I think there are members of the United States Senate who really want to spread large quantities of radioactive waste all over America. It has to be deliberate, because the useful benefits to our country far outnumber the risks that this research could lead us to.
Of course the Farnsworth Fusor technology has been equally neglected, but that is another story.
No, it is very ordinary H2O. The same water that makes up 90% of your body.
You might be confused with "heavy water" that truly does weigh more, due to the fact that it is composed of deuterium and tritium, and for some nuclear research these heavier isotopes of hydrogen are used.
The problem with the water moderators of nuclear power plants is that water is a very corrosive substance, and will dissolve just about anything, including uranium and radioactive waste. Because of that, the water that is in containment areas of a nuclear power plant generally isn't flushed into the city sewer.
The water that is used in nuclear power plants is also of extraordinary purity, where it goes through a desalinzation process many time more exacting than what is needed for public drinking water or farming. Indeed, if you drink the water straight out of a power plant, it actually starts absorbing minerals from your body as you are drinking it... unhealthy because it is too pure to drink. This is done mainly to avoid calcification of the pipes and other mineral deposits, like what happens to the inside of a water heater in your home over time.
Every thing that I mentioned and more is possible with just ordinary water, and it does indeed have many uses in space. To see an interesting book that describes this in more detail check out "The Return"> written by none other than Buzz Aldrin, the second astronaut to step foot on the moon. While this is fiction, Mr. Aldrin's credentials for having experienced real spaceflight are undisputed. In this book he describes an interesting threat to manned spaceflight that before hand I never even thought about, and in it the space shuttle had to be modified with water radiation bags to do a rescue mission to the ISS.
Really, ordinary water does offer a bunch of neat advantages and really is used for radiation shielding.
Both items have problems of breaking down in a vacuum environment. They are using something like Kevlar, which in tests conduced by the FBI back in the 1970's (and continue to present) show that it is actually stronger than a plate of steel for stopping projectiles.
At very high velocities (like you find in space), the particles and paint chips don't just embed into the material, but rather vaporize so completely that it becomes a form of radiation.
As far as getting water into space, most water is a "waste" product from the fuel cells, and is a common supply item for resupplying the ISS. Basically, while expensive simply because getting anything up to space is expensive in general.
As far as water as a shield, it is very commonly used in nuclear reactors as well as for radioactive waste repositories. One really nice thing about water is that the secondary radiation issues are not nearly so much of an issue (gamma rays hitting water and then bumping parts of water molucules to become a collection of other stuff). The other nice thing here is that the water can be used for other things besides purely radiation shielding, like energy storage (doing electralisis to generate hydrogen and oxygen), temperature regulation, mass regulation (more important in a ship rather than an orbiting space station), and being able to simply drink the stuff (assuming it isn't too radioactive).
Regarding leaking bags, I take it you havn't seen a waterbed? Good storage bags can be made to withstand quite a bit of physical abuse, be plyable, and still keep water just where it needs to be. This is totally a non-issue, and besides, in space the water would just "ball up" instead of flowing to the "basement". Even a ball of free water outside of a bag would not be that big of an issue in space, and easily something to deal with by astronauts.
What is really sad is that the module was actually built and tested by NASA. The only real reason why it won't go on the ISS is because NASA doesn't want to send the Shuttle mission up to put it there. I would agree that there are other modules that need to be added first, but this would make a huge difference to the quality of life for the astronauts that are there trying to man the ISS, and looks like it could be used even now at the moment to the benefit of the folks who are up there right now.
Whenever I bring up environmentalists getting their panties in a bunch over people spoiling the environment on Mars or the Moon, I usually get blank stares from just about everybody I talk to.
This is an issue that will become a major item in the 21st Century, particularly if substantial commercial development occurs in space. IMHO, I think they are nuts, and let's worry about trying to help mankind out 1st. I would agree that it would be far better to strip-mine Mars than it would be to strip-mine Wyoming.
BTW, the property rights issues in space are going to be very interesting. International law denies UN member nations and signatories to the Outer Space Treaty (just about everybody who can get to space right now, including India, China, and France) from claiming extra-terrestrial territory. On the other hand, private ownership is allowed, and indeed the wording of the treaty is such that private companies can own pieces of extra-terrestrial real estate. Just who the registration authority is will be another story, however.
Otherwise, ditto to your comment.
The problem with this is that it must be done in places where lotteries are legal. And throughout most of the USA (at least) it is illegal, or at least only legal if it is state-sponsored.
Now if it were done as a promotional sweepstakes (grand prize is a trip to orbit, lesser prizes include an Estes model rocket replica of the launch vehicle), it might be a little more acceptable. Since this is already being done with Virgin Galactic, I have no doubt you will see this for orbital travel in the future either.
BTW, this is far from a new idea. In the story "The Man who Sold The Moon" by Robert A. Heinlein this was proposed by D. Delos Harriman as a way to help raise funds for his private lunar flight company.
I think it was an old idea in SF even then. Sorry, you won't ever get a royalty check for this idea due to prior art. The only new thing is for somebody to actually do it now that private space flight is becoming something that can actually happen now.
1st, you shouldn't have used your karma bonus for such a lame comment.
2nd, not only have I kissed a girl, I'm married with six kids. You do the math regarding procreation.
BTW, if you think it is silly for the passion required to make movies or write books, try dealing with a spouse some time. The dedication and fanaticism required just to keep a wife barely happy is _FAR_ beyond anything I ever did with being a fan for the SciFi movies or good SF books and authors. The side benefits are nice, and besides, my wife is a good SF fan as well. Quite into Stargate and ST:Voyager.
Now the REAL question is if you have ever kissed or been kissed by a girl? Or a boy for that matter?