There's 18 inches of fresh snow on the ground outside, and more of it falling as i type this. I'm fed up with all these promises of global warming. Would you folks kindly quit with the talk, and get on with it, you've been promising global warming for years now, and it's all just empty talk promises. I'm getting tired of waiting, so please, just hurry up and deliver on that promise, i'm tired of shovelling snow....
If some other unnamed countries actually enforced thier laws against vanadalism, you would be able to drive down the streets without a constant bombardment of filth spray painted on everything. You never know, it might actually end up safe to actually walk down those streets. But, it's probably a lot easier to sit back and criticize the way others do things than it is to actually fix the issues at home. FWIW, I believe we have read here on/. about folks in florida and another state being charged for just this offence, but, then again, that's probably different, it's 'think of the children' when it happens at home....
It would be more impressive if it didn't require the water to be pre-heated to 100C. I think it's safe to say, pour boiling seawater into just about anything with some condenser tubes setup, and you'll get fresh water out of the condenser. It appears to be insulated with Impossiblium, you know, the stuff that'll allow it to maintain internal temperature for a month while it works, with no heat input. I'm willing to bet, read the fine print in the marketing manuals, and you will find the Mark II version will have double the production if you power it with snake oil too....
Hmm, I guess this 'expert' doesn't realize that virtualization in hardware has been with us since the 80386 first came around. It handled a virtual 8088 quite nicely....
When are you americans gonna finally get it ? Why do you think so much effort goes into fund raising for a campaign, and, the press virtually declares the one with the most funds a winner, months in advance. Elections are not won on the campaign trail in the usa, they are BOUGHT on the campaign trail.
Raising funds / winning elections. There is a cause/effect relationship here folks. Wake up, smell the roses, elections are just like anything else in america, sold to the highest offer. If that wasn't the case, then fund raising wouldn't be the most critical part of an election campaign.
Changing history is good for the economy. First you employ folks to cut down the trees, then you employ more to turn them into paper. Later, you employ folks to print the books, and finally, you employ even more folks to sell those books to students.
Ok, cue up all the shuttle enthusiasts to pipe in now with the 'drastic need for a hubble service mission'.
When you do though, ask a simple reality check question. With shuttle trips running on the order of a billion dollars these days, what will generate more actual scientific data? Squander those kind of funds on a rocket ride to fix the aging hubble, or, invest half of it in modern ground based observing infrastructure, then take the other half and feed it into the scientific welfare system known as grants over a period of 20 years.
That doesn't mean they actually accomplished much, except maybe for pissing billions of dollars into a shuttle prgram doing nothing except making excuses to not fly the thing.
go back to basic high school physics, learn the difference between weight and mass. The ISS may have lots of mass, but, the gravitational forces on it are pretty much zero, resulting in zero weight.
If it costs $10000/lb to send something to orbit, the ISS is worth its weight in gold.
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Nope. A thing is only worth what someone is willing to pay, it's costs are irrelevant. There's no such thing as intrinsic value.
Straw man arguement. ISS is worth it's weight in gold, or platimum, or whatever else you want to barter. Remember, it's in orbit, weighs nothing....
Bigelow is in the hospitality business, in a 'not small' way, I'm sure he understands a few fundamentals about building and running a hotel. There are 2 types of hotels in this world, first you have the 'roadside', a place to stop overnite on the way to the destination, the second is a resort complex where the hotel IS the destination. Since there is no traffic regularily going beyond low orbit already, it's a safe assumption the initial hotel plans include a style where the resort IS the destination.
The destination resort has a few infrastructure issues to deal with, the biggest is transportation. Use the las vegas example, a well built air transport system in and out of the city, with high volumes (hence reduced prices), and the resorts on the strip thrive. Look a little farther, there's plenty of offbeat destinations with high end 'purpose build' resorts. Micronesia has a bunch of them, and they all have one thing in common, located on an island big enough to build a runway (and in some cases, not much else). It's not high volume like vegas, but, there's plenty of demand to support a few flights a week into places like Truk, which caters almost exclusively to scuba divers. It's all about marketing, and logistics of transportation. In this case, bigelow also realizes the transportation problem needs to be solved, and has sponsored a rather large contest to try stimulate interest.
Assuming the transportation problem gets solved, in the worst case, it's gonna be 20 to 50 million a head arriving on soyuz capsules, best case, it'll be a lot cheaper in higher volume farther down the road. The key then becomes marketing. Everybody here on/. seems to think it's a case of 'selling to idle millionaires', but, that's not going to make the business viable. You'll get a few joyriders, but, it's a very limited market. The thing you have to remember, the golden rule of sales, it's all about location location location, and, the orbiting hotel has a unique location, with a view.
Now, that's where the marketing comes in. Consider the following 'special'. November 15 to 22, 1 week stay, room 22a, on special for $xxxx. Included free of charge, full use of the camera mount located on the exterior visible from the window of unit 22a. During your week long stay, there will be 7 passes overhead bahgdad, 3of which are directly overhead (within 10 degrees). 3 passes with a 30 degree angle view of moscow, and 9 overhead passes of the pentagon. Bring 2 camera operators, and one camera (mounting details and mass limits attached) and take advantage of our unique orbital parameters for this week. Also included at no extra charge, 2 EVA excursions by qualified hotel staff to mount and retrieve your camera equipment.
Assuming they do achieve a substantial reduction in the travel cost to/from the hotel, this is but one example of how it can be effectively marketed. Imagine now, how many astronomers are going to be going begging at the public trough for a grant so they can head on up to his unique location, but use the mount on the other side of the module, the one pointed out into open space. Man, if you think the lineup for hubble time is competetive, just imagine the stampede if theres grant money available to do 'observations' from orbit with a stay in the orbiting hotel.
It's all about marketing, and, identifying your market. The big bucks today is in geo-stationary communications sats, but, low orbit photography is not _that_ far behind. If they can achieve a marginal cost of keeping one 'room' occupied to be less than the cost of keeping an unmanned sat in orbit, well, I'd expe
Well, I fail to see the difference. The ultimate objective is geostationary in both cases, so there's no reason the trajectory wont be 'strait up' in both cases. The reason it's not today is simply because 'strait up' is far from the most energy efficient trajectory. The economics of the whole thing basically then trade off the ability to aim, vs the efficiency of the trajectory. Since the ladder climbers are going to go 'strait up', then there's no reason the alternative vehicle couldn't follow the same course. Ultimately, once they arrive, the same amount of energy is going to be passed onto the object, enough to keep it in a geostationary orbit.
The bottom line, once you have solved all the technical challenges required to power the climbers, and guide them up, and you realize the elevator cable itself isn't going to be able to take the stress of a climber 'gripping' it in some way, you will also realize, the cable hanging out of orbit becomes rather moot. There's much better and cheaper ways to build 'guidance' for the ascending vehicles. The real trick, get the energy up to the ascending vehicle, and figure out a way to convert that energy to thrust, without using up reaction mass. That problem exists with and without the cable hanging down, but once solved, it renders the cable as 'not required'.
By the time we have the technology for space elevators, far superior modes of lift and orbital flight will exist.
Name them.
To make a 'space elevator' viable requires 2 new technologies to be developed to a 'deployable' form. The first is the materials side of the equation, currently nanotubes are the focus. The second is propulsion, and it's generally acknowledged that propulsion will consist of some sort of ground based power source that 'beams' the required energy up to the climbers.
Therein lies the key so few understand. Currently, the biggest thing holding back launch vehicles is the mass of fuel they must carry as an energy source, it's the vast majority of the launch mass. If you can 'beam' energy up to the climbers, then you can 'beam' it up to a traditional launch vehicle too. Since the energy supply becomes 'endless' with this method, trajectories can be chosen that actually keep the vehicle within 'view' of the ground based energy source. Voila, you now have ground to orbit capability, without the need for that big cumbersome cable.
When you take a step back, and look at the big picture, the technology required to deploy a space elevator actually depricates the need for the space elevator. There are better ways to deploy that technology, without some massive big fragile cable hanging down from orbit waiting to be hit by the first meteorite to come passing thru the neigborhood, or some old leftover junk dropped out of a space shuttle cargo bay...
Take a look at programs where governments (pick your favorite, or not so favorite one) spend billions of dollars a day and have little chance of positive impact on poor kids in remote locations.
for a measly hundred million a day, you can invade thier country, kill thier uncles and aunts, maim thier parents, and have plenty left over to blow up all the bridges, destroy the power plants and replace thier government with a set of puppets whose main purpose in life is to try stay alive. When it's all said and done, you can tell those kids just how much you have improved thier lives....
The reality is the price of the machine isn't really going up, but, the value of the us dollar has taken a beating. In most any other currency, the price remains fixed relative to 2 or 3 years ago, it's only in $US it appears to be rising. This is what happens to the currency of debtor nations, and it turns into an endless spiral, till eventually, no americans can afford the '$100 laptop', simply because thier peso's are worthless.
The first step is to go back and re-visit your overall design. You only need sensors in the freezer, you dont need to put the computers in there. What you really want to do is go shop around in the industrial supply channels, and you will find all sorts of sensor equipment ideal for the job. You probably want temp sensors that speak ethernet out the other side, then either wire the place with ethernet, or use some wireless gadgets to further bring that data out of the freezer. For the life of me, I cannot fathom a system that needs a dozen computers to handle the sensors in a freezer. How many thousands of sensors are you putting in ? One computer (in an office outside the freezer) should easily be able to process the data from a few hundred sensors, all arriving in real time over a dedicated ethernet run.
I've done lots of industrial installations, in places where -14 would be considered 'toasty warm' compared to outside temps in the middle of winter. If I saw a proposal that includes putting full blown computers in the freezer, the first thing I'd do, find another vendor, this one obviously has no clue when it comes to embedded industrial equipment. Mil grade sensors that are good to -40, may not be a dime a dozen, but, there's lots of them out there that you can just buy and install, which will happily feed the data back to a computer sitting in an office somewhere.
The bottom line, if you are going to put rack mount pc's inside the freezer, do your customer a huge favour, and reccommend they find an expert in the field. You will be saving yourself a long term support nightmare, and your customer a whole big pile of money, because the proposed solution is kind of like taking money and flushing it down the toilet.
Actually, this has been a problem since the first launch. Maybe you are to young to remember, but there was a lot of tension for the first shuttle re-entry, because there were tiles missing, apparently lost/damaged during launch. It all worked out ok, so, the attitude became 'oh, lose a few is no big deal'. Eventually it became a big deal.
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Hillary did fine the first time around, the public will be happy to elect her directly instead of by proxy this time around...
There's 18 inches of fresh snow on the ground outside, and more of it falling as i type this. I'm fed up with all these promises of global warming. Would you folks kindly quit with the talk, and get on with it, you've been promising global warming for years now, and it's all just empty talk promises. I'm getting tired of waiting, so please, just hurry up and deliver on that promise, i'm tired of shovelling snow....
If some other unnamed countries actually enforced thier laws against vanadalism, you would be able to drive down the streets without a constant bombardment of filth spray painted on everything. You never know, it might actually end up safe to actually walk down those streets. But, it's probably a lot easier to sit back and criticize the way others do things than it is to actually fix the issues at home. FWIW, I believe we have read here on /. about folks in florida and another state being charged for just this offence, but, then again, that's probably different, it's 'think of the children' when it happens at home....
It would be more impressive if it didn't require the water to be pre-heated to 100C. I think it's safe to say, pour boiling seawater into just about anything with some condenser tubes setup, and you'll get fresh water out of the condenser. It appears to be insulated with Impossiblium, you know, the stuff that'll allow it to maintain internal temperature for a month while it works, with no heat input. I'm willing to bet, read the fine print in the marketing manuals, and you will find the Mark II version will have double the production if you power it with snake oil too....
Hmm, I guess this 'expert' doesn't realize that virtualization in hardware has been with us since the 80386 first came around. It handled a virtual 8088 quite nicely....
Another slashdotter not quite clear on the concept of 'science'.
Raising funds / winning elections. There is a cause/effect relationship here folks. Wake up, smell the roses, elections are just like anything else in america, sold to the highest offer. If that wasn't the case, then fund raising wouldn't be the most critical part of an election campaign.
Changing history is good for the economy. First you employ folks to cut down the trees, then you employ more to turn them into paper. Later, you employ folks to print the books, and finally, you employ even more folks to sell those books to students.
When you do though, ask a simple reality check question. With shuttle trips running on the order of a billion dollars these days, what will generate more actual scientific data? Squander those kind of funds on a rocket ride to fix the aging hubble, or, invest half of it in modern ground based observing infrastructure, then take the other half and feed it into the scientific welfare system known as grants over a period of 20 years.
That doesn't mean they actually accomplished much, except maybe for pissing billions of dollars into a shuttle prgram doing nothing except making excuses to not fly the thing.
not likely, all that place serves is links to ad servers...
if it's a hardware implementation, well, guess it's not a virtual anymore then is it .....
go back to basic high school physics, learn the difference between weight and mass. The ISS may have lots of mass, but, the gravitational forces on it are pretty much zero, resulting in zero weight.
Straw man arguement. ISS is worth it's weight in gold, or platimum, or whatever else you want to barter. Remember, it's in orbit, weighs nothing....
Bigelow is in the hospitality business, in a 'not small' way, I'm sure he understands a few fundamentals about building and running a hotel. There are 2 types of hotels in this world, first you have the 'roadside', a place to stop overnite on the way to the destination, the second is a resort complex where the hotel IS the destination. Since there is no traffic regularily going beyond low orbit already, it's a safe assumption the initial hotel plans include a style where the resort IS the destination.
The destination resort has a few infrastructure issues to deal with, the biggest is transportation. Use the las vegas example, a well built air transport system in and out of the city, with high volumes (hence reduced prices), and the resorts on the strip thrive. Look a little farther, there's plenty of offbeat destinations with high end 'purpose build' resorts. Micronesia has a bunch of them, and they all have one thing in common, located on an island big enough to build a runway (and in some cases, not much else). It's not high volume like vegas, but, there's plenty of demand to support a few flights a week into places like Truk, which caters almost exclusively to scuba divers. It's all about marketing, and logistics of transportation. In this case, bigelow also realizes the transportation problem needs to be solved, and has sponsored a rather large contest to try stimulate interest.
Assuming the transportation problem gets solved, in the worst case, it's gonna be 20 to 50 million a head arriving on soyuz capsules, best case, it'll be a lot cheaper in higher volume farther down the road. The key then becomes marketing. Everybody here on /. seems to think it's a case of 'selling to idle millionaires', but, that's not going to make the business viable. You'll get a few joyriders, but, it's a very limited market. The thing you have to remember, the golden rule of sales, it's all about location location location, and, the orbiting hotel has a unique location, with a view.
Now, that's where the marketing comes in. Consider the following 'special'. November 15 to 22, 1 week stay, room 22a, on special for $xxxx. Included free of charge, full use of the camera mount located on the exterior visible from the window of unit 22a. During your week long stay, there will be 7 passes overhead bahgdad, 3of which are directly overhead (within 10 degrees). 3 passes with a 30 degree angle view of moscow, and 9 overhead passes of the pentagon. Bring 2 camera operators, and one camera (mounting details and mass limits attached) and take advantage of our unique orbital parameters for this week. Also included at no extra charge, 2 EVA excursions by qualified hotel staff to mount and retrieve your camera equipment.
Assuming they do achieve a substantial reduction in the travel cost to/from the hotel, this is but one example of how it can be effectively marketed. Imagine now, how many astronomers are going to be going begging at the public trough for a grant so they can head on up to his unique location, but use the mount on the other side of the module, the one pointed out into open space. Man, if you think the lineup for hubble time is competetive, just imagine the stampede if theres grant money available to do 'observations' from orbit with a stay in the orbiting hotel.
It's all about marketing, and, identifying your market. The big bucks today is in geo-stationary communications sats, but, low orbit photography is not _that_ far behind. If they can achieve a marginal cost of keeping one 'room' occupied to be less than the cost of keeping an unmanned sat in orbit, well, I'd expe
Virgin Galactics ships exist only as a figment of the imagination. _If_ they actually do get built, they are intended to be a simple up/down event.
Well, I fail to see the difference. The ultimate objective is geostationary in both cases, so there's no reason the trajectory wont be 'strait up' in both cases. The reason it's not today is simply because 'strait up' is far from the most energy efficient trajectory. The economics of the whole thing basically then trade off the ability to aim, vs the efficiency of the trajectory. Since the ladder climbers are going to go 'strait up', then there's no reason the alternative vehicle couldn't follow the same course. Ultimately, once they arrive, the same amount of energy is going to be passed onto the object, enough to keep it in a geostationary orbit. The bottom line, once you have solved all the technical challenges required to power the climbers, and guide them up, and you realize the elevator cable itself isn't going to be able to take the stress of a climber 'gripping' it in some way, you will also realize, the cable hanging out of orbit becomes rather moot. There's much better and cheaper ways to build 'guidance' for the ascending vehicles. The real trick, get the energy up to the ascending vehicle, and figure out a way to convert that energy to thrust, without using up reaction mass. That problem exists with and without the cable hanging down, but once solved, it renders the cable as 'not required'.
Name them.
To make a 'space elevator' viable requires 2 new technologies to be developed to a 'deployable' form. The first is the materials side of the equation, currently nanotubes are the focus. The second is propulsion, and it's generally acknowledged that propulsion will consist of some sort of ground based power source that 'beams' the required energy up to the climbers.
Therein lies the key so few understand. Currently, the biggest thing holding back launch vehicles is the mass of fuel they must carry as an energy source, it's the vast majority of the launch mass. If you can 'beam' energy up to the climbers, then you can 'beam' it up to a traditional launch vehicle too. Since the energy supply becomes 'endless' with this method, trajectories can be chosen that actually keep the vehicle within 'view' of the ground based energy source. Voila, you now have ground to orbit capability, without the need for that big cumbersome cable.
When you take a step back, and look at the big picture, the technology required to deploy a space elevator actually depricates the need for the space elevator. There are better ways to deploy that technology, without some massive big fragile cable hanging down from orbit waiting to be hit by the first meteorite to come passing thru the neigborhood, or some old leftover junk dropped out of a space shuttle cargo bay...
If the business is all online (ebay) and it cant afford $100 a month for a net connection on satellite, then it's not a viable business anyways.
And that is different from the NYT taking british folks money in what way ?????
for a measly hundred million a day, you can invade thier country, kill thier uncles and aunts, maim thier parents, and have plenty left over to blow up all the bridges, destroy the power plants and replace thier government with a set of puppets whose main purpose in life is to try stay alive. When it's all said and done, you can tell those kids just how much you have improved thier lives....
The reality is the price of the machine isn't really going up, but, the value of the us dollar has taken a beating. In most any other currency, the price remains fixed relative to 2 or 3 years ago, it's only in $US it appears to be rising. This is what happens to the currency of debtor nations, and it turns into an endless spiral, till eventually, no americans can afford the '$100 laptop', simply because thier peso's are worthless.
I've done lots of industrial installations, in places where -14 would be considered 'toasty warm' compared to outside temps in the middle of winter. If I saw a proposal that includes putting full blown computers in the freezer, the first thing I'd do, find another vendor, this one obviously has no clue when it comes to embedded industrial equipment. Mil grade sensors that are good to -40, may not be a dime a dozen, but, there's lots of them out there that you can just buy and install, which will happily feed the data back to a computer sitting in an office somewhere.
The bottom line, if you are going to put rack mount pc's inside the freezer, do your customer a huge favour, and reccommend they find an expert in the field. You will be saving yourself a long term support nightmare, and your customer a whole big pile of money, because the proposed solution is kind of like taking money and flushing it down the toilet.
Thats what monica said too...
Ahh, it's that metric mix up again. They guys are mixing up inches and centimeters again...
Actually, this has been a problem since the first launch. Maybe you are to young to remember, but there was a lot of tension for the first shuttle re-entry, because there were tiles missing, apparently lost/damaged during launch. It all worked out ok, so, the attitude became 'oh, lose a few is no big deal'. Eventually it became a big deal.