Don't blame this boomer for their problems. My children are doing just fine -- good-paying jobs, nice houses, and new cars. Of course, they chose career paths and degrees that would result in good jobs, not some worthless degree that would lead nowhere.
My son posts here on a regular basis. He can tell you the same thing.
Hey, that's great and resembles me and my father, however, it's just a case of selection bias. My father says things like you did but only because his company didn't outsource his department till he hit retirement age unlike the other competing companies. He has this conflicting dialogs of "only dead wood ever get laid off and real workers will have careers" along with "I was lucky my company didn't outsource or I would have had to find a new job at an old age for less money and be forced to relocate to take it". If you really want to find anything out, you can't just look at one set of data, you need to actually to look at impartial studies and see what they actually say.
Alternatively, this is a bunch of script kiddies who managed to guess the password to a handful of accounts, and are now trying to make a name for themselves.
He is cutting NASA's budget for this year (from $19.5B to $19.1B) but is expressing support for a goal that will cost WAY more than that AFTER HE LEAVES OFFICE, so paying for it will be somebody else's problem.
Just like Bush and Obama who also promised Mars missions. (Actually, I think they both increased the NASA budget just enough so it kept up to date with inflation.)
"Some of us are competent and just want a job and not worry about the other external bullshit."
You've presumably never worked in a unionized workplace. You'd just swap one kind of BS for another.
There's a lot of internal busllshit also. A friend of mine that helps organize unions says 'bad management is the cuse of unions'. What drove part of my workplace to unionize was bad management. People who don't like unions suddenly change when their long planned vacation is cancelled by the manager because somebody else was fired and then expect that person to pick up slack. This leads to constant arguments, combative workplace, and hostility. Union was brought in and now both sides have certain and strict rules. Now even the managers that were originally part of the problem admit they would never go back to a non-unionized environment because things work so much easier now. My own IT group tried to unionize when some people were told they had to come in early and stay late for no other reason than the boss thought that would be nice. The charge for us to unionize was led by two Rush Limbaugh listening, retired military guys. Everybody else joined in because he was an incompetent manager who had yelled at everybody for things that were mostly likely his own fault, had multiple harrassment, including sexual, issues brought up with HR, but HR has stated openly "we're here to help the managers solve their problems".
Seattle may be affordable for Amazon/MSFT employees, but that's only because Seattle is about 5 years behind SF. Housing prices, traffic are skyrocketing and if you have a job where you don't get options (teacher/fire fighter for example)... it's time to leave.
It seems that is because, unlike SF, Seattle is tearing everything down and building new housing. Luckily, most all of our historic old buildings are in Pioneer Square. Old housing and commercial spots though most of the city are being replaced with giganormous dual use complexes. However, while this does provide lost of new housing, it's all expensive because it's brand new. All the cheap housing of Seattle have disappeared.
It's all relative to how much you make. I pay $1600 rent to live 15 minute walk from work (1 bedroom) and still manage to have 20K left over every year in my entry level job (that includes generous contributions to retirement). If I had a family, I probably would take that $1000 house rental that is an hour drive away.
Sounds like me and I was living right on Capitol Hill. Still, I realized my rent would only go up and $1600 is a mortgage. Now I have a 30 minute commute but have the $1600/month locked in, and extra rooms for hobbies, guests, parties, etc. I was tempted by condos closer to work, but HOAs scare me and I wanted that extra room for hobbies.
= = = Seattle: Together with abusive companies and bad city management, Seattle is a miserable place.
Houses in Seattle are expensive: Seattle bumps Boston as the most expensive U.S. housing market that's not in California. [geekwire.com]
Rent is expensive: Seattle rent is 5th most expensive in U.S. [curbed.com] = = =
Your points 2 and 3 and difficult to reconcile with point 1, at least from a microeconomic point of view. And all techies are good free market purists, right?
sPh
I've been in Seattle for the last 20+ years. I don't find it miserable and neither do my friends. Housing has exploded in the last couple of years and rents are increasing but remember that WA has no income tax and gets taxes through property taxes which is included in rent, so when comparing, you need to compare WA rents to other places rent plus stat income tax. People are having to move out of Cap Hill and central Seattle and many are buying houses. Two years ago I was looking at $200k houses five miles away from downtown that hit all my bullet points, half a year ago when I finally got serious, that had become ten miles for $350k and a high chance of getting out bid anyway. Traffic is horrible, mostly because of geography since Seattle is a penninsula with lots of hills and the main highway goes through the middle of town, was built in the 60's, and has no room to be expanded. Most of the people I've known that have worked for Microsoft have liked working there, but the past constant re-orgs make that difficult and some groups do suck. Amazon also sucks but you have to understand that both the company and the workers with a clue are gaming the system by having unexperienced employees work to death for 18 months when they leave with their padded resume for a better job.
Not to say that parts of Seattle are no longer there as the population has doubled since the.com boom. The small venue new music aspect of Seattle was killed in the late 90's. Cheap dive bars are hard to find in Seattle proper if any still exist. Things are too expensive for a good art culture which has been moving out to places like Georgetown since the.com boom also, and now they are being forced out of there. Not sure where it will be moving next. Tacoma is cheap (houses were a quarter of what they are in Settle 30 miles away) but the commute is an hour and half one way and apparently art and culture are controlled by entrenched locals who drive off new people. Olympia seems to be the new place to go.
... This is irrespective of whether there is such thing as a soul.... That would depend on whether there is or is not a soul....
I don't quite think that is the case. Even where spirituality is abandoned for science, the base needs of the human condition that cause religions will still be there. I'm sure that there are ancient philosophers that have said "there are no gods." and made a good case, yet still, religion and spirituality survives and dominates because it is not just tied to belief in a god, but rather the need for a philosophy, community, and participation in something greater than ones self for the average person. Given acceptance of a harsh reality of no spiritual afterlife, especially one of data dominated world, the "soul" will not disappear but will instead be described to be the data. Even in the past it will be that which was passed on to children, friends, and the people you meet and affect in life. The human condition requires a 'soul' (as well as other requirements), what the soul is will be described in current beliefs. Those descriptions have changed before, they will change again.
That was one of the few significant flaws that came out in Roddenberry-controlled Star Trek, it's not really possible to meet the needs, wants, and desires of everyone because some people cannot be satisfied at any cost.
Well, the thing with Star Trek as well as other post scarcity civs like the Culture, is that they say that people get all their needs wants and desires met, they don't mean the ones people decide for themselves, but rather what society determine are reasonable. Furthermore, although there is no money, there is usually a system of getting more than somebody else by doing more than that somebody else. In the Culture stories this was pointed out by many people, but most just didn't care. Star Trek it was baked into the mores of their society that people would contribute to society as a whole. Anybody who wants to be lazy would be looked at as being mentally disturbed or at least abnormal, like somebody today who wanted to be poor and destitute. It wasn't that they were capable of satifying everybody, but rather they could satisfy the needs, wants, and desires of most people. The few that aren't but aren't willing to meet societies standards to get what they want are still seen as deviants, but they are sufficiently few to ignore except by those not-police and judges who are calling themselves security and councilors.
Eh, I'll give you 2, but 3 wasn't bad for a Matrix movie. When they made the Matrix, the Wachowski brothers (at the time) admitted they just wanted to make movies that looked great and push the limits of cinematography. Matrix did that but really had a plot that trucks could be driven through and mediocre acting. 3 had some good points with the twins jumping the ceiling while shooting guns and the entire Neo/Smith fight scene which I figured would form the technical basis of future of superhero movies. 2 however, just fell flat on pushing the limits of cinematography and had sloppy plot and acting. Look at the big fight scene on top of the moving semi. That would have been a great thing to do with a long spiraling shot as the truck went down the road, or some other long shot so you had to sit there and wonder "did they really film that in one take on top of a moving truck?" Give me a really awesome fight scenes and everything would have been forgiven like in the first movie. Instead it was a lot of close ups with lots of convenient cuts and looked like any other movie.
I don't think so. If it has energy, then that energy can be transferred, and heat is the transfer of energy. Absolute zero is an energy-less state....
I think that's sort of the point, you can't have a energy-less atom. Otherwise the electrons would merge with the protons and you end up with neutrons. You could take a lone neutron and declare it at absolute zero compared to the rest of the universe, but that would be trivial. I'm sure trying to cool a hypothetical neutronium substance would also have difficulties. You can say that heat just deals with systems but the system will be the sumation of the energy of the system will be at least that of one atom. Still, that there are electrons around the nucleus of an atom indicates energy in the system and some minimum amount of energy and wobble and therefore heat. I seem to remember calculating such for a hydrogen atom early in undergrad quantum mechanics class. I seem to remember it being 5/3K or some nice fraction like that, but that was 30 years ago and I may just be imagining things.
I would rather have a real keyboard added to my Android...
You should get some hardware guys together and do a Kickstarter. The idea is probably not being done by a large company simply because there is not enough of a market for it. I love Kickstarter because it allows for an outlet for small production niche items like your keyboard. You could probably find a decent amount of people willing to spent a bit extra for that idea, but not enough to tempt a large corporation. If you want it, build it yourself and get other people who want the same thing to help you do it. Still, that still leaves the questions of if it is possible, economical, and if the people doing it are capable enough to get it done.
That's blatantly discriminatory and bigoted. I'm an older worker, I stay late and have a flexible schedule. I'm tired of being denied job opportunities. I should be paid fairly, but I can't get access to jobs I can do really well.
You see the trouble is that you and people like you may retire in 3-5 years and they'd much rather play the long game have the the young guy who will most likely jump ship for a different job in 18 months.
Now here's an article talking entirely about the submersible without mentioning the ship at all. I think there are reasonable odds that happened because the submersible ended up with the "cool" name, while the ship got the "good" name. In fact i think if they hadn't at least named the submersible Boaty McBoatface there's at least a 50% chance this article never would have gotten posted to Slashdot at all.
Hell, without the submersible and the cool name, I wouldn't have given it a 50% chance the Guardian would have even written an article. Similarly, if they had given the ship the cool name, this would just be yet another article about Boaty McBoatface's adventures that would be coming out weekly and we wouldn't even know that the submersible even had a name.
Industrial control systems typically run on Windows. WTF is gonna happen when they're running Windows 10 and the IT management people can't lock it down? Engineers and scientists use Windows.. and now they also get Candy Crush. Medical equipment and hospitals run on Windows.. and now Windows needs to update right now "FUCK YOU, I'M UPDATING."
The same thing that happened back under Win7 (and probably earlier) which had similar but fewer such issues. Microsoft will just direct you to a KB article that will begin with "If you wish to turn off these features, have your Active Directory Administrator make the following changes in your Domain tree:..."
There should be a final class that is mandatory before you graduate were they tell people that life isn't going to be handed to you on a silver platter, and that some degree of struggle is par for the course.
Secondly, evacuating 2.2m cubic meters at sea level takes a minimum of 223 GJ. Operating on the pessimistic assumption that the tube has to be pressure normalized once annually and zero energy is recovered in the process, divided by six million passenger-trips per year, is 37kJ, or 10,3Wh (note: *not* kWh, just Wh), or about 0.05 cents at industrial rates.
Hrrrm. Remembering my time working with vacuum chambers and having to evacuating them, this offers some interesting opportunities. Having a long tube with a transport vehicle would basically turn the entire system into a large mechanical pump above a certain pressure. Transport vehicle creating some pressure ahead of it as it acts like a piston which could be vented off to to other pumps needed during operation. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like the pressures desired would be low enough to need anything exciting like a diffusion or ion pump.
L1 is an unstable Lagrange point though, so this contraption would need constant tweaking to stay in the right spot.
It's going to need constant tweaking anyway considering it's going to be absorbing at least some of the energy that is enough to knock off a 100 grams of matter per second out of Mars' gravity well. Probably a lot as the solar wind gets caught in this stations own radiation belts (and will probably produce some wonderful lights at the poles). I'd bet they do something like a Bussard ramjet and use the field to knock some solar wind away, while collecting the opposite charge, and then use that as fuel for a ion drive that will keep the station in place.
Yes, but without this, you'll just immediately end up losing that atmosphere to space.
If that were true, Mars would have no atmosphere left. In fact, atmospheric loss rate is about 100 g/s, or about 3000 tons per year. The current Martian atmosphere is about 30 trillion tons of CO2. Let's say you increase that ten-fold, and let's say loss rates scale up not just proportionately, but 100 fold. You lose 3e5 tons of atmosphere a year from about 3e14 tons of total atmosphere. It would take geolotic time scales to have any appreciable atmospheric loss.
Heh. Well, we are sort of arguing about how big of paddles we need for the canoes needed to colonize the New World from Europe. things are bound to change anyway by time this is attempted. If terraforming of Mars was going on, they'd probably still build this or something similar just to try and stop radiation for endangering people on the surface. Plus, may well be that as the atmosphere grows, so will the loss and that the elements lost will be the most needed in the volatiles that seem to be in rare supply on Mars. Whatever loss that happens might well be cheaper for this than shipping in more from wherever they're getting it to begin with.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't blame this boomer for their problems. My children are doing just fine -- good-paying jobs, nice houses, and new cars. Of course, they chose career paths and degrees that would result in good jobs, not some worthless degree that would lead nowhere. My son posts here on a regular basis. He can tell you the same thing.
Hey, that's great and resembles me and my father, however, it's just a case of selection bias. My father says things like you did but only because his company didn't outsource his department till he hit retirement age unlike the other competing companies. He has this conflicting dialogs of "only dead wood ever get laid off and real workers will have careers" along with "I was lucky my company didn't outsource or I would have had to find a new job at an old age for less money and be forced to relocate to take it". If you really want to find anything out, you can't just look at one set of data, you need to actually to look at impartial studies and see what they actually say.
Why should city-dwellers subsidize your chosen lifestyle.
We want internet when we go on vacation.
Alternatively, this is a bunch of script kiddies who managed to guess the password to a handful of accounts, and are now trying to make a name for themselves.
I'm betting its a PR stunt for Ethereum
He is cutting NASA's budget for this year (from $19.5B to $19.1B) but is expressing support for a goal that will cost WAY more than that AFTER HE LEAVES OFFICE, so paying for it will be somebody else's problem.
Just like Bush and Obama who also promised Mars missions. (Actually, I think they both increased the NASA budget just enough so it kept up to date with inflation.)
(Someone had to say it. C'mon.. we were all thinking it!)
Have to get rid of all the aliens on Pluto first.
They have been there a lot longer than we have and prefer to use the name Yuggoth for that planet.
"Some of us are competent and just want a job and not worry about the other external bullshit."
You've presumably never worked in a unionized workplace. You'd just swap one kind of BS for another.
There's a lot of internal busllshit also. A friend of mine that helps organize unions says 'bad management is the cuse of unions'. What drove part of my workplace to unionize was bad management. People who don't like unions suddenly change when their long planned vacation is cancelled by the manager because somebody else was fired and then expect that person to pick up slack. This leads to constant arguments, combative workplace, and hostility. Union was brought in and now both sides have certain and strict rules. Now even the managers that were originally part of the problem admit they would never go back to a non-unionized environment because things work so much easier now. My own IT group tried to unionize when some people were told they had to come in early and stay late for no other reason than the boss thought that would be nice. The charge for us to unionize was led by two Rush Limbaugh listening, retired military guys. Everybody else joined in because he was an incompetent manager who had yelled at everybody for things that were mostly likely his own fault, had multiple harrassment, including sexual, issues brought up with HR, but HR has stated openly "we're here to help the managers solve their problems".
Seattle may be affordable for Amazon/MSFT employees, but that's only because Seattle is about 5 years behind SF. Housing prices, traffic are skyrocketing and if you have a job where you don't get options (teacher/fire fighter for example)... it's time to leave.
It seems that is because, unlike SF, Seattle is tearing everything down and building new housing. Luckily, most all of our historic old buildings are in Pioneer Square. Old housing and commercial spots though most of the city are being replaced with giganormous dual use complexes. However, while this does provide lost of new housing, it's all expensive because it's brand new. All the cheap housing of Seattle have disappeared.
It's all relative to how much you make. I pay $1600 rent to live 15 minute walk from work (1 bedroom) and still manage to have 20K left over every year in my entry level job (that includes generous contributions to retirement). If I had a family, I probably would take that $1000 house rental that is an hour drive away.
Sounds like me and I was living right on Capitol Hill. Still, I realized my rent would only go up and $1600 is a mortgage. Now I have a 30 minute commute but have the $1600/month locked in, and extra rooms for hobbies, guests, parties, etc. I was tempted by condos closer to work, but HOAs scare me and I wanted that extra room for hobbies.
Your points 2 and 3 and difficult to reconcile with point 1, at least from a microeconomic point of view. And all techies are good free market purists, right?
sPh
I've been in Seattle for the last 20+ years. I don't find it miserable and neither do my friends. Housing has exploded in the last couple of years and rents are increasing but remember that WA has no income tax and gets taxes through property taxes which is included in rent, so when comparing, you need to compare WA rents to other places rent plus stat income tax. People are having to move out of Cap Hill and central Seattle and many are buying houses. Two years ago I was looking at $200k houses five miles away from downtown that hit all my bullet points, half a year ago when I finally got serious, that had become ten miles for $350k and a high chance of getting out bid anyway. Traffic is horrible, mostly because of geography since Seattle is a penninsula with lots of hills and the main highway goes through the middle of town, was built in the 60's, and has no room to be expanded. Most of the people I've known that have worked for Microsoft have liked working there, but the past constant re-orgs make that difficult and some groups do suck. Amazon also sucks but you have to understand that both the company and the workers with a clue are gaming the system by having unexperienced employees work to death for 18 months when they leave with their padded resume for a better job.
Not to say that parts of Seattle are no longer there as the population has doubled since the .com boom. The small venue new music aspect of Seattle was killed in the late 90's. Cheap dive bars are hard to find in Seattle proper if any still exist. Things are too expensive for a good art culture which has been moving out to places like Georgetown since the .com boom also, and now they are being forced out of there. Not sure where it will be moving next. Tacoma is cheap (houses were a quarter of what they are in Settle 30 miles away) but the commute is an hour and half one way and apparently art and culture are controlled by entrenched locals who drive off new people. Olympia seems to be the new place to go.
... This is irrespective of whether there is such thing as a soul. ... That would depend on whether there is or is not a soul. ...
I don't quite think that is the case. Even where spirituality is abandoned for science, the base needs of the human condition that cause religions will still be there. I'm sure that there are ancient philosophers that have said "there are no gods." and made a good case, yet still, religion and spirituality survives and dominates because it is not just tied to belief in a god, but rather the need for a philosophy, community, and participation in something greater than ones self for the average person. Given acceptance of a harsh reality of no spiritual afterlife, especially one of data dominated world, the "soul" will not disappear but will instead be described to be the data. Even in the past it will be that which was passed on to children, friends, and the people you meet and affect in life. The human condition requires a 'soul' (as well as other requirements), what the soul is will be described in current beliefs. Those descriptions have changed before, they will change again.
That was one of the few significant flaws that came out in Roddenberry-controlled Star Trek, it's not really possible to meet the needs, wants, and desires of everyone because some people cannot be satisfied at any cost.
Well, the thing with Star Trek as well as other post scarcity civs like the Culture, is that they say that people get all their needs wants and desires met, they don't mean the ones people decide for themselves, but rather what society determine are reasonable. Furthermore, although there is no money, there is usually a system of getting more than somebody else by doing more than that somebody else. In the Culture stories this was pointed out by many people, but most just didn't care. Star Trek it was baked into the mores of their society that people would contribute to society as a whole. Anybody who wants to be lazy would be looked at as being mentally disturbed or at least abnormal, like somebody today who wanted to be poor and destitute. It wasn't that they were capable of satifying everybody, but rather they could satisfy the needs, wants, and desires of most people. The few that aren't but aren't willing to meet societies standards to get what they want are still seen as deviants, but they are sufficiently few to ignore except by those not-police and judges who are calling themselves security and councilors.
The Wizard of OZ (1939) - REMAKE (of a Remake)
I checked IMDB once and it was the fifth movie called Wizard of Oz to be made.
remake 2 & 3. They were garbage.
Eh, I'll give you 2, but 3 wasn't bad for a Matrix movie. When they made the Matrix, the Wachowski brothers (at the time) admitted they just wanted to make movies that looked great and push the limits of cinematography. Matrix did that but really had a plot that trucks could be driven through and mediocre acting. 3 had some good points with the twins jumping the ceiling while shooting guns and the entire Neo/Smith fight scene which I figured would form the technical basis of future of superhero movies. 2 however, just fell flat on pushing the limits of cinematography and had sloppy plot and acting. Look at the big fight scene on top of the moving semi. That would have been a great thing to do with a long spiraling shot as the truck went down the road, or some other long shot so you had to sit there and wonder "did they really film that in one take on top of a moving truck?" Give me a really awesome fight scenes and everything would have been forgiven like in the first movie. Instead it was a lot of close ups with lots of convenient cuts and looked like any other movie.
I don't think so. If it has energy, then that energy can be transferred, and heat is the transfer of energy. Absolute zero is an energy-less state....
I think that's sort of the point, you can't have a energy-less atom. Otherwise the electrons would merge with the protons and you end up with neutrons. You could take a lone neutron and declare it at absolute zero compared to the rest of the universe, but that would be trivial. I'm sure trying to cool a hypothetical neutronium substance would also have difficulties. You can say that heat just deals with systems but the system will be the sumation of the energy of the system will be at least that of one atom. Still, that there are electrons around the nucleus of an atom indicates energy in the system and some minimum amount of energy and wobble and therefore heat. I seem to remember calculating such for a hydrogen atom early in undergrad quantum mechanics class. I seem to remember it being 5/3K or some nice fraction like that, but that was 30 years ago and I may just be imagining things.
I would rather have a real keyboard added to my Android...
You should get some hardware guys together and do a Kickstarter. The idea is probably not being done by a large company simply because there is not enough of a market for it. I love Kickstarter because it allows for an outlet for small production niche items like your keyboard. You could probably find a decent amount of people willing to spent a bit extra for that idea, but not enough to tempt a large corporation. If you want it, build it yourself and get other people who want the same thing to help you do it. Still, that still leaves the questions of if it is possible, economical, and if the people doing it are capable enough to get it done.
If only it had been connected to the Internet...
Then it would be an AI.
That's blatantly discriminatory and bigoted. I'm an older worker, I stay late and have a flexible schedule. I'm tired of being denied job opportunities. I should be paid fairly, but I can't get access to jobs I can do really well.
You see the trouble is that you and people like you may retire in 3-5 years and they'd much rather play the long game have the the young guy who will most likely jump ship for a different job in 18 months.
Now here's an article talking entirely about the submersible without mentioning the ship at all. I think there are reasonable odds that happened because the submersible ended up with the "cool" name, while the ship got the "good" name. In fact i think if they hadn't at least named the submersible Boaty McBoatface there's at least a 50% chance this article never would have gotten posted to Slashdot at all.
Hell, without the submersible and the cool name, I wouldn't have given it a 50% chance the Guardian would have even written an article. Similarly, if they had given the ship the cool name, this would just be yet another article about Boaty McBoatface's adventures that would be coming out weekly and we wouldn't even know that the submersible even had a name.
Industrial control systems typically run on Windows. WTF is gonna happen when they're running Windows 10 and the IT management people can't lock it down? Engineers and scientists use Windows.. and now they also get Candy Crush. Medical equipment and hospitals run on Windows.. and now Windows needs to update right now "FUCK YOU, I'M UPDATING."
The same thing that happened back under Win7 (and probably earlier) which had similar but fewer such issues. Microsoft will just direct you to a KB article that will begin with "If you wish to turn off these features, have your Active Directory Administrator make the following changes in your Domain tree:..."
There should be a final class that is mandatory before you graduate were they tell people that life isn't going to be handed to you on a silver platter, and that some degree of struggle is par for the course.
Hell! That should be the first class.
Secondly, evacuating 2.2m cubic meters at sea level takes a minimum of 223 GJ. Operating on the pessimistic assumption that the tube has to be pressure normalized once annually and zero energy is recovered in the process, divided by six million passenger-trips per year, is 37kJ, or 10,3Wh (note: *not* kWh, just Wh), or about 0.05 cents at industrial rates.
Hrrrm. Remembering my time working with vacuum chambers and having to evacuating them, this offers some interesting opportunities. Having a long tube with a transport vehicle would basically turn the entire system into a large mechanical pump above a certain pressure. Transport vehicle creating some pressure ahead of it as it acts like a piston which could be vented off to to other pumps needed during operation. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like the pressures desired would be low enough to need anything exciting like a diffusion or ion pump.
Screw Mars, maybe we should be thinking about putting one at EARTH's L1 point.
Damn straight! Earth first! Make Mars our bitch!
L1 is an unstable Lagrange point though, so this contraption would need constant tweaking to stay in the right spot.
It's going to need constant tweaking anyway considering it's going to be absorbing at least some of the energy that is enough to knock off a 100 grams of matter per second out of Mars' gravity well. Probably a lot as the solar wind gets caught in this stations own radiation belts (and will probably produce some wonderful lights at the poles). I'd bet they do something like a Bussard ramjet and use the field to knock some solar wind away, while collecting the opposite charge, and then use that as fuel for a ion drive that will keep the station in place.
If that were true, Mars would have no atmosphere left. In fact, atmospheric loss rate is about 100 g/s, or about 3000 tons per year. The current Martian atmosphere is about 30 trillion tons of CO2. Let's say you increase that ten-fold, and let's say loss rates scale up not just proportionately, but 100 fold. You lose 3e5 tons of atmosphere a year from about 3e14 tons of total atmosphere. It would take geolotic time scales to have any appreciable atmospheric loss.
Heh. Well, we are sort of arguing about how big of paddles we need for the canoes needed to colonize the New World from Europe. things are bound to change anyway by time this is attempted. If terraforming of Mars was going on, they'd probably still build this or something similar just to try and stop radiation for endangering people on the surface. Plus, may well be that as the atmosphere grows, so will the loss and that the elements lost will be the most needed in the volatiles that seem to be in rare supply on Mars. Whatever loss that happens might well be cheaper for this than shipping in more from wherever they're getting it to begin with.
id absolutely dominated and totally redefined the 3d shooter genre during the period from 1990-1995.
Maybe on the PC, but I always liked Marathon the best. There was a reason MS bought Bungie to make Halo.