The reason why the Russians are able to run rings around us is that their efforts are bweing run by private companies, while NASA is a huge stupid and typically inefficient beaurocracy.
NASA spent 2 billion dollars on their next shuttle vehicle, X33, and got nowhere. By the time the money ran out, they were basically back at square one, because their design was based on like eight different new and unproven technologies.
The Russian company is spending a total of 60 million to develop this.
All I know is that most of the people I know that buy anime started with fansubs. Then again, this was before the current wave of anime on Cartoon Network, etc.
And if you don't want to buy blind, go read reveiws. Check my sig for the single best anime dvd review site.
Been there. Reviews really aren't worth much to me, except to comment on things like extras and video and sound quality. Whether I will like the show or not is an extremely subjective matter that I can only prove by watching a few episodes, or by talking to friends who have similar tastes to mine.
Actually, this sounds like a typical example of someone who actually buys anime. I know I can't afford to buy DVDs on speculation, and I generally can't rent anime from stores in my area. I have bought many many laserdiscs and DVDs that I found out about through the fansub networks, or saw at a convention. In fact, virtually all of my purchases happen that way, and I have spent kilobucks on the stuff.
90% of those who download Anime have no intention of buying it, and usually get pissy when you suggest they do.
Source, please.
Downloading anime actually hurts US companies a lot more than it hurts the MPAA because they don't have many (if any) theater runs, and it's really hard to get it on TV. And having it up for download does piss off the Japanese companies who then take it out on the US licensors.
It does piss off the Japanese companies, but I have seen no proof that it hurts the US companies. In fact, the hightest-selling US titles tend to be the ones that were previously most-traded as fansubs. Fans will fall in love with the show and want the high-quality legit version. Unless the US company completely FUBARs it, in which case a smaller number of the fans will get the Japanese legit version.
Also, don't buy at Suncoast if you can avoid it, they're really expensive.
Here we agree. Though my local indie bookstore's prices are worse:(
Ford does sound grumpy, maybe like he doesn't want to be there, but that actually dovetails with Deckert's situation, and intentionally or not, really sells the character.
I'm glad the Anchorage Daily News has some standards. The article was junk, basically just a diatribe and an illustration that Marty has some major issues to work out. Frankly, it's one of the most slanted, juvenile pieces of "journalism" I've ever read.
Just what "award" has Marty's writing won, anyway? "Best Yellow Journalist, Mrs. Freckam's Third Period English Class?"
Though, I'd have been more impressed if the Daily News had actually run his article through an editor before publishing it, and sent it to the circular file then.
They had a GBA-like device called the Wonderswan that could interface with PSX games like GBA will be able to with GameCube games (and the Sega Dreamcast VMUs could with the Dreamcast).
As far as I know, it realy hasn't set the world on fire.
This reminded me of Clifford Stoll's second book, Silicon Snake Oil. Just one long one-sided gripe about how computers are bad, using straw man arguments to back up very questionable conclusions.
From a modern journalist's standpoint, this might count as "having an angle on the story" or some such crap, but it really only makes the argument presented shallow and, since it is not based on facts, futile.
We won't get into space in any meaningful way as long as a government employment program is sucking up and destroying the engineers who could make it happen. Gut NASA like the beached whale it is before the corpse explodes from the pressure of its own decomposition.
Amen! In the last 10 years, NASA has done more to delay practical spaceflight then to move it forward. Like the way they drove Beal Aerospace out of business, by offering their competition government subsidies. Or like the way they took over the DC-X program, which had achieved impressive results on a relatively tiny budget while under DOD control, promptly crashed the test vehicle through their own error, and then dropped it for X-33, a fiasco-by-committee that spent two billion dollars and produced nothing but a hanger full of variegated parts.
I think an argument could be made that even the Shuttle program was a mistake that set NASA back two decades. Shuttle never made good on any of its promises, from lower launch costs (it's the most expensive thing that flies by a wide margin) to frequency of flights (it takes months to turn a shuttle around) to landing on existing airstrips. If they'd kept the Saturn V in production they might have been able to cut launch costs far more, and maybe they'd have been able to stick to their original timelines for exploration (in which case we'd have a permanent moonbase by now).
The Wright Brothers (or pick your own early aviation pioneers)did not require a 15,000 man ground support crew to fly.
Good example: the Wrights were a model of sensible scientific experimentation, achieving success on a fraction of their competitors' budgets.
If Bush really wants to get into space (and yes, the military does - they are not really stupid) he should get Congress to set up a series of prizes. Five billion tax free for the first resuseable spacecraft to make three round trips to the vicinity of the ISS in a thirty day period carrying say three people and two tons of cargo on each trip.
I'd prefer a slightly different approach.
We should just say: if anyone can get payload x to orbit y for z dollars, we'll buy 10 launches. That's enough guaranteed return on investment to let the market take over from there. Don't specify reusibility, number of stages, or anything else that you don't have to: let the market try out the variations and wild ideas, and see what shakes out. Even if you have to pay for 5 different working systems, it'll still be cheaper than the 2 billion that was spent on X-33, and you'll have five working launch systems.
Rather than controlling the development of spacecraft, the government should just promise to buy a bunch of them that meet a certain price performance criteria.
Yet, there aren't many, if any, OEMs pushing this application for fear of making the Movie/TV cartel angry. But hey, on a X-Box that is secure against users using it, I'm sure this will just explode.
Apple has at least one Mac/Imac which is set up to do video capture/editing out of the box and now I think they even bundle it with a DVD burner. If you like Macs. There are probably people doing bundles on the PC side if you know where to look.
You need at least five-ten hours of ontime on a PDA, just to keep the silly thing from losing your data while you're away from your desk. If it goes dead on you more than a few times, guarantee it's going into the junk drawer or onto eBay. Battery needs will go up even more as people start surfing the net more from their PDAs.
The weeks/months of uptime you get on AAAs is one of the big advantages of the Palm platform, and a major factor in their dominance.
The same is valid for PDAs or else they wouldnt sell so many ipaqs.
I hate to tell you, but they don't sell that many iPaqs. Palm has gained back the market share they lost early last year.
Wikipedia seems to favor volume over accuracy. The pages I looked at all tended to display the writer's agendas fairly plainly. Some are very misleading, either by omission, or by stating opinions as facts.
Writing factual articles is difficult. It requires research and responsibility on the part of the writer, and dedicated, professional peer review from above to weed out the writer's personal agendas, or point out missing information that was overlooked. That's what you get when you look at a dictionary, or a professional encyclopedia, and I just don't see it there in Wikipedia.
It's not enough to have lots of people's opinions on a subject, or only some of the facts, or a collection of truths and untruths. If a source of information isn't dependable, it's useless to me.
We have the plans for the B-52, just like we have the plans for the Saturn V. We could resume production of either, but it would cost millions to billions to set up the manufacturing lines, and for how many units produced?
With the B-52, we seem to have enough planes to do the job already.
With the Saturn V, we'd probably want to just start over with a new design and lighter materials. It would probably have been more cost-efficient to have kept the Saturn V in production than to have spent what we did in money and time on the Shuttle, though. The shuttle was supposed to have been cheaper to fly, but it ended up being much more expensive.
I don't know where people get this braindead idea that larger mass is what will protect them in a crash. It doesn't matter if the vehicle survives unscathed. Your internal organs can only withstand a certain amount of acceleration. Would you rather be hit by an 18-wheeler strapped inside an indestructible steel box or a 3-foot thick ball of bubble-wrap. Case in point, the only thing that's going to truly protect you in a high energy collision is technology that absorbs the impact and slows the acceleration enough for you to survive. Mass can help a little, but it's by no means the most effective solution and does virtually nothing in a head-on collision with a fixed object or much larger vehicle.
Is your electric reclined bike going to be a 3-foot sphere of bubble wrap? No, it's going to be a hard plastic shell, and its only padding will be on the seat, so how is this relevant?
To answer your question, though, I'd MUCH rather be in the indestructible steel box, because if I'm in the bubble wrap, I'm going to be either crushed under the semi or subjected to far higher acceleration, because the bubble wrap and I together have only a tiny fraction of the mass of the steel box and I together. When the same amount of force is applied to a much lighter object, it gets accelerated proportionately more.
In ANY head-on collision, mass DOES help, because the lighter object will tend to get knocked backwards, while the heavier object is only slowed down. The lighter object undergoes much higher acceleration. To use your example, would you rather be in the bubble wrap, or the 18-wheeler?
Now, in a head-on collision with an 18-wheeler, a bridge abutment, or some other very massive object , it may not make as much of a difference what you're driving, because the super-massive object isn't really going to yield. But, in a collision with anything else, yes, size does matter. And most collisions are with other cars.
As a real-world example, my aunt was sideswiped by a big truck, which mashed her and her car into a guard rail. She came out of it without serious injury, because she was driving her company's full-sized Caprice station wagon, and it had enough mass, structural strength and crush room to absorb the impact before it got to her. They told her that if she had been in an economy car, there is no question that she would have been killed.
All other things being equal, bigger cars ARE safer.
Jon Acheson
True, but the poles might get 24x7.
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Lunar Lasers
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· Score: 2
True, but I remember reading that there are areas at at least one of the lunar poles that get 24x7 sunlight.
The Sinclair C5 was a plastic-bodied electric trike with pedal assist, and was supposed to be the Next Big Thing at one point. But, nobody bought it. It was about an order of magnitude cheaper than what you're suggesting, too.
Basically, a car has to be a certain minimum size to be useful to people. Even the existing subcompact cars are too small for 99% of the public. For most Americans, it has to hold 4 people and their luggage. A trike has no chance in the market whatsoever.
The costs were based on the total mission cost from a '67 contractor memo I googled off of NASA's web site (sorry, don't remember the exact search). It was a starting point for some very vague back of the envelope estimations, some of which were wildly optimistic, a few somewhat pessimistic. It tells me that we have to be about a thousand times more efficient (which may well be possible) to justify going there to pick up already processed material (which won't be waiting for us;-).
No offense, but it seems to me your numbers are at best somewhat suspect. : (
However, you really have the same problem: you've got a huge amount of dust to process, and that takes very large machines and lots of energy to run them.
Wrong, since the dust is already ground up finely, most of the work is already done. The next stage might be to sift, maybe separate magnetically, and then to heat up batches of the dust and melt out the metals. Not a lot of machinery needed. And, you have lots of free solar energy to work with, assuming you base near the poles, so that you can gather solar energy all the time. Particularly good when you just need to melt stuff: you can focus the sun on it using big mylar mirrors.
Well, on earth, you find concentrations of valuable commodidites in various rocks; even in common seawater. However, most sources of valuable metals that are economically feasible to exploit have been conveniently concentrated into seams by geologic processes that do not exist on the moon. As you point out there may be concentrations of materials on the moon formed by other processes, we just don't know.
As I pointed out before, mankind has spent a total of, what, a week and a half on the moon, in scattered areas, getting at best an initial sampling of data. We don't KNOW whether minerals are concentrated anywhere on the moon or not. Detailed surveys have not been done yet.
It's an interesting point, but I suspect that the cost of fabricating hardware is going to be much higher on the moon than the cost of launching earthmade hardware, until the initial cost of the lunar facilities has been amortized over LOTS of orbital projects. In other words, to help build a relatively small project in Earth orbit, you'd have to build a much larger and more complex project on the moon first -- it just isn't an immediate help. However, if you were building a VERY large orbital structure or a large number of structures then lunar or asteroid mining might be a sensible option to pursue.
You suspect, but do you have numbers?
Fabricating parts remotely is getting very easy to do, if you use 3D printing/sintering technology. They're used in rapid prototyping now. They can literally print out a metal part one layer at a time, with very good tolerances. This is a machine the size of an office photocopier. Sending one to the moon would be very feasible. They require metallic powder to work with, which is coincidentally what you might expect to get out of your dust-mining operations.
Building electronics would be more difficult, but you would have lots of good clean vacuum and power, and raw materials.
I am sure, though, that there would be dividing line at which it would be cheaper to ship some components from Earth than manufacture them locally. If it's only some parts, though, and they're electronics and gaskets, you could carry lots of them for not too much weight.
Would it actually be commercially feasible? I honestly don't know. I admit I want to see it tried, though, because I'm a hopeless space fanatic. One thing is certain: it IS getting easier all the time.
On the other hand, getting the amount of nuclear fuel to the moon you'd need to power a major mining operation would be a huge political and legal mess.
Firstly, most of your power could be solar, if you're close enough to the poles to have power plants in sunlight all the time. Secondly, one of the major promising finds on the moon is large amounts of Helium-3 in the lunar dust and everywhere else, which may prove to be an excellent nuclear fuel. There is still a lot of research on fusion power that needs to be done on that, I admit, and there is a possiblity that it might not come to fruition in our lifetimes, but it is promising.
Let me say I respect the fact that you're trying to stick to facts. But, there is a lot of work that has been done on this subject, much of which is very encouraging. I'm sorry I don't have links at hand, but you might check in on the sci.space newsgroups to find more detailed info.
Jon Acheson
Re:Pt and Ti not interesting at nearly 70K$/troy o
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Mining On The Moon
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The cost in 1960s dollars to return 1500 pounds of cargo was 340 million, or about a quarter of a million dollars per pound (in Y2K dollars, about 1.7B, and a bit over a million dollars/lb).
Where did you get these numbers from? Is this the cost of a moon mission and the amount of rocks we got back? Since returning lunar material in bulk was never a goal of the moon missions, I would find those kinds of numbers to be relatively meaningless. Kind of like weighing the seashells from a vacation to Hawaii and calculating cargo shipping costs to there based on the cost of the vacation.
As an optimist, you might think that if Pt doubled in price, and we could achieve hundred fold increases in monetary efficiency for retrieving it, then we could go to the moon to get it. This is true, but only if we could just go there and pick it up lying around. However, as the article points out, there is no volcanic activity to concentrate metals in veins, and no erosion to break it up into convenient nuggets to find. So, you're going to have to mine it, and you'd have to process a huge amount of material at that because you aren't going to find many rich veins.
Actually, the surface of the moon is already covered with lunar material that has been broken up for you: it's called "dust." Smashed up by millennia of impacts from meteors, asteroids, and the like. Look anywhere on the moon and you will find many tons of it. I'm not sure what the depth is, though, and it may vary.
Moreover, the astronauts did in fact find concentrations of minerals in the moon rocks they sampled, and this was found while moving at a five-minute-shopping-spree pace, mind you: their time on the moon was extremely valuable, and they were constantly hurrying to get everything done.
I'm very skeptical of the person from ASR making proclamations about the geological details of the moon. Experts get paid to voice opinions, but the truth is that we've literally only scratched the surface of the moon. We know some facts from the observations of the astronauts and the samples they brought back. But the astronauts didn't go everywhere, and they didn't get to concentrate on anything for very long. What we did find ruined a great many of the existing theories about the moon, and it seems likely that there are just as many bombshells up there remaining to be discovered. All we have right now are theories, based on a very incomplete sampling of facts.
One other big point you're missing is that the minerals and raw materials mined on the moon would have a far greater value in Earth orbit than they would on earth. In orbit, the $10,000 per pound you mentioned is ADDED to their value. How much would NASA pay for aluminum girders and panels that are already AT ISS? Sending them to Earth orbit from the moon is also far cheaper than returning them all the way to Earth.
There are also far less environmental problems with mining the moon. By any reasonable definition, the moon doesn't HAVE an environment to spoil. On the Earth, there are profound cleanup-related issues that are only now beginning to be reflected in the costs of things.
I will say that as far as the amount of legal objections you have to put up with goes, mining on the moon could be as bad as mining on Earth. I'm sure the far left will come up with some reason to sue endlessly.
I think you'll find that many industrial concerns would be very receptive to the idea of shipping tree-hugging nature-loving seperatists like yourself to the moon.;)
Bush has done nothing but slowly kill NASA with its budget cuts.
No, Bush has begun reigning in a beaurocracy that was out of control, even their own, and is reintroducing the concepts of fiscal responsibility and sensible management.
The current issues with ISS are due to their own mismanagement and setting of unrealistic goals. When someone blows their budget again and again and again, the last thing you should do is give them more money! Yes, it will be harder in the short term, but if you don't, the waste and corruption will kill you in the long term.
Bush is, typically, going in and actually fixing the problem, instead of boasting about "reinventing government" then covering things up.
The amazing thing about Clinton/Gore is that their ethical lapses, bad as they were, were completely overshadowed by their utter incompetance as leaders and managers.
The same document should NEVER be stored in more than one place, or else how do you know which copy is the most up to date?
Yes, but remember, there is a huge difference between "Should" and "Is".
This is a good point. One particular example that occurs to me now that I think about it is when you have the "published" version of a document and an internal version that's still changing. You want them to be separate, so that the carefully-prepared and boss-approved public version doesn't get changed on a whim. You could argue that the different versions are really different documents, though.
I realise that there are going to be lots of copies floating around, but I would want there to be only one "true" copy of a particular doc.
As far as accessing the one document through multiple methods goes, the sticky point is that as you add methods of finding it, the amount of work needed for the creator to categorize the doc goes up and up. I've seen systems that required six pages of forms to be filled out for each document, which is enough that people aren't going to do it. (And, I could never find anything in that system anyway: every search gave you hundreds of redundant hits) There is also the problem that categorizing a doc for multiple access schemes requires you to switch your mental gears when you go from entering the data for one access scheme to entering the data for the next. Users don't like switching gears, and it's hard to teach them even one scheme and make it work.
Like democracy, hierarchies are the worst form of organization... except for everything else.
OK, maybe it's my inner German getting out, but really in situations like this what you need is to set some basic ground rules in place at the beginning and make people stick by them.
This is especially obvious to anyone who's worked in teams of more than, ooh, one person who have had to share a single file structure. What one person perceives as a logical structure (/docs/reports/outgoing/date) another would view as being totally redundant (/docs/date/out/reports). You end up with a compromise that suits neither party, and by the time you move up to >100 people sharing a file structure you're in real trouble...
So you decide on a few basic rules and STICK TO THEM. Ex: doc directories organized by workgroup, project, release version, type of document, and containing the date in the file name. Otherwise, you quickly get chaos, which people try to fix with search engines, and you wind up with Microsoft.com.
For a search engine approach to ever work, you have to have the system of organization in place first BEFORE the documents are created, so that people can tag the docs with the right search terms so that people can find them later on.
This is why you can find things in libraries or, to a lesser extent, on USENET. There is a system in place that makes at least some sense, and forces people to categorize docs as they are created (or as they enter the system from outside).
You can't throw the docs in an unorganized pile and have your computer magically make sense of it, since your computer CANNOT READ FOR CONTENT. Word searches don't work if the keywords appear in every document (see microsoft.com). You can have people go in afterwards and read for content and tag for organization, but that's a losing battle, because the doc specialists are always outnumbered 10 to 1 or worse, and the docs are constantly changing and being replaced.
Putting everything into a database without figuring out a working system of organization only makes things worse, because not only are the docs still unorganized, they're also hidden away from the user and "owned" by whoever is maintaining the database, and that person is probably a DBA, not a librarian. Even if they are a librarian, you still have the problem that they're outnumbered 100 to 1 and didn't create the docs. Plus, this approach tends to give you lots of smaller databases that can't be searched globally. And, it's much more expensive and more prone to breakage than the original document directories were.
You also get into real trouble when a document has to exist in more than one place within the heirarchy. F'rinstance documents that need to be organised by Date or by Customer or by Author or by Cost code etc etc.
The same document should NEVER be stored in more than one place, or else how do you know which copy is the most up to date? I would accept having more than one way to find a document as being a good thing, though, as long as the underlying organizational structure is put in place first, and both ways to find the document actually WORK. Two broken search engines are not the equivalent of one good hierarchy, IMHO.
Slashdot Mirror
This basic layout has been proposed before.
The X-20 Dynasoar looked similar, as did a mini-shuttle the Europeans were developing back in the '80's.
The Farscape people were probably influenced by those designs.
Jon Acheson
You've kind of answered your own question.
The reason why the Russians are able to run rings around us is that their efforts are bweing run by private companies, while NASA is a huge stupid and typically inefficient beaurocracy.
NASA spent 2 billion dollars on their next shuttle vehicle, X33, and got nowhere. By the time the money ran out, they were basically back at square one, because their design was based on like eight different new and unproven technologies.
The Russian company is spending a total of 60 million to develop this.
It'll be beautiful if it works.
Jon Acheson
Been there. Reviews really aren't worth much to me, except to comment on things like extras and video and sound quality. Whether I will like the show or not is an extremely subjective matter that I can only prove by watching a few episodes, or by talking to friends who have similar tastes to mine.
Jon Acheson
Actually, this sounds like a typical example of someone who actually buys anime. I know I can't afford to buy DVDs on speculation, and I generally can't rent anime from stores in my area. I have bought many many laserdiscs and DVDs that I found out about through the fansub networks, or saw at a convention. In fact, virtually all of my purchases happen that way, and I have spent kilobucks on the stuff.
Source, please.
It does piss off the Japanese companies, but I have seen no proof that it hurts the US companies. In fact, the hightest-selling US titles tend to be the ones that were previously most-traded as fansubs. Fans will fall in love with the show and want the high-quality legit version. Unless the US company completely FUBARs it, in which case a smaller number of the fans will get the Japanese legit version.
Here we agree. Though my local indie bookstore's prices are worse
Jon Acheson
...because I still really like the voiceovers.
Ford does sound grumpy, maybe like he doesn't want to be there, but that actually dovetails with Deckert's situation, and intentionally or not, really sells the character.
Jon Acheson
For me, the voiceovers gave the movie its whole character. They were just so well done! Seeing the movie without them just leaves me cold.
I've tried to track down the laserdisc of the original, but it's long gone.
If they put the original version on the new DVD, I'll buy it. If they don't, it's no deal.
Jon Acheson
I'm glad the Anchorage Daily News has some standards. The article was junk, basically just a diatribe and an illustration that Marty has some major issues to work out. Frankly, it's one of the most slanted, juvenile pieces of "journalism" I've ever read.
Just what "award" has Marty's writing won, anyway? "Best Yellow Journalist, Mrs. Freckam's Third Period English Class?"
Though, I'd have been more impressed if the Daily News had actually run his article through an editor before publishing it, and sent it to the circular file then.
Jon Acheson
Ebay, but it'll cost you around $100 US.
I bought mine during the brief period that you could order it from Sega's website for $60.
You might also check www.lik-sang.com, but good luck.
Jon Acheson
They had a GBA-like device called the Wonderswan that could interface with PSX games like GBA will be able to with GameCube games (and the Sega Dreamcast VMUs could with the Dreamcast).
As far as I know, it realy hasn't set the world on fire.
If anyone else has more details, please post!
Jon Acheson
This reminded me of Clifford Stoll's second book, Silicon Snake Oil. Just one long one-sided gripe about how computers are bad, using straw man arguments to back up very questionable conclusions.
From a modern journalist's standpoint, this might count as "having an angle on the story" or some such crap, but it really only makes the argument presented shallow and, since it is not based on facts, futile.
Jon Acheson
Amen! In the last 10 years, NASA has done more to delay practical spaceflight then to move it forward. Like the way they drove Beal Aerospace out of business, by offering their competition government subsidies. Or like the way they took over the DC-X program, which had achieved impressive results on a relatively tiny budget while under DOD control, promptly crashed the test vehicle through their own error, and then dropped it for X-33, a fiasco-by-committee that spent two billion dollars and produced nothing but a hanger full of variegated parts.
I think an argument could be made that even the Shuttle program was a mistake that set NASA back two decades. Shuttle never made good on any of its promises, from lower launch costs (it's the most expensive thing that flies by a wide margin) to frequency of flights (it takes months to turn a shuttle around) to landing on existing airstrips. If they'd kept the Saturn V in production they might have been able to cut launch costs far more, and maybe they'd have been able to stick to their original timelines for exploration (in which case we'd have a permanent moonbase by now).
Good example: the Wrights were a model of sensible scientific experimentation, achieving success on a fraction of their competitors' budgets.
I'd prefer a slightly different approach.
We should just say: if anyone can get payload x to orbit y for z dollars, we'll buy 10 launches. That's enough guaranteed return on investment to let the market take over from there. Don't specify reusibility, number of stages, or anything else that you don't have to: let the market try out the variations and wild ideas, and see what shakes out. Even if you have to pay for 5 different working systems, it'll still be cheaper than the 2 billion that was spent on X-33, and you'll have five working launch systems.
Bingo.
Jon Acheson
They just engaged the cloaking device!
Jon Acheson
Apple has at least one Mac/Imac which is set up to do video capture/editing out of the box and now I think they even bundle it with a DVD burner. If you like Macs. There are probably people doing bundles on the PC side if you know where to look.
Jon Acheson
The weeks/months of uptime you get on AAAs is one of the big advantages of the Palm platform, and a major factor in their dominance.
I hate to tell you, but they don't sell that many iPaqs. Palm has gained back the market share they lost early last year.
Jon Acheson
Wikipedia seems to favor volume over accuracy. The pages I looked at all tended to display the writer's agendas fairly plainly. Some are very misleading, either by omission, or by stating opinions as facts.
Writing factual articles is difficult. It requires research and responsibility on the part of the writer, and dedicated, professional peer review from above to weed out the writer's personal agendas, or point out missing information that was overlooked. That's what you get when you look at a dictionary, or a professional encyclopedia, and I just don't see it there in Wikipedia.
It's not enough to have lots of people's opinions on a subject, or only some of the facts, or a collection of truths and untruths. If a source of information isn't dependable, it's useless to me.
Jon Acheson
We have the plans for the B-52, just like we have the plans for the Saturn V. We could resume production of either, but it would cost millions to billions to set up the manufacturing lines, and for how many units produced?
With the B-52, we seem to have enough planes to do the job already.
With the Saturn V, we'd probably want to just start over with a new design and lighter materials. It would probably have been more cost-efficient to have kept the Saturn V in production than to have spent what we did in money and time on the Shuttle, though. The shuttle was supposed to have been cheaper to fly, but it ended up being much more expensive.
Jon Acheson
Is your electric reclined bike going to be a 3-foot sphere of bubble wrap? No, it's going to be a hard plastic shell, and its only padding will be on the seat, so how is this relevant?
To answer your question, though, I'd MUCH rather be in the indestructible steel box, because if I'm in the bubble wrap, I'm going to be either crushed under the semi or subjected to far higher acceleration, because the bubble wrap and I together have only a tiny fraction of the mass of the steel box and I together. When the same amount of force is applied to a much lighter object, it gets accelerated proportionately more.
In ANY head-on collision, mass DOES help, because the lighter object will tend to get knocked backwards, while the heavier object is only slowed down. The lighter object undergoes much higher acceleration. To use your example, would you rather be in the bubble wrap, or the 18-wheeler?
Now, in a head-on collision with an 18-wheeler, a bridge abutment, or some other very massive object , it may not make as much of a difference what you're driving, because the super-massive object isn't really going to yield. But, in a collision with anything else, yes, size does matter. And most collisions are with other cars.
As a real-world example, my aunt was sideswiped by a big truck, which mashed her and her car into a guard rail. She came out of it without serious injury, because she was driving her company's full-sized Caprice station wagon, and it had enough mass, structural strength and crush room to absorb the impact before it got to her. They told her that if she had been in an economy car, there is no question that she would have been killed.
All other things being equal, bigger cars ARE safer.
Jon Acheson
True, but I remember reading that there are areas at at least one of the lunar poles that get 24x7 sunlight.
Jon Acheson
See here and here.
The Sinclair C5 was a plastic-bodied electric trike with pedal assist, and was supposed to be the Next Big Thing at one point. But, nobody bought it. It was about an order of magnitude cheaper than what you're suggesting, too.
Basically, a car has to be a certain minimum size to be useful to people. Even the existing subcompact cars are too small for 99% of the public. For most Americans, it has to hold 4 people and their luggage. A trike has no chance in the market whatsoever.
Jon Acheson
No offense, but it seems to me your numbers are at best somewhat suspect. : (
Wrong, since the dust is already ground up finely, most of the work is already done. The next stage might be to sift, maybe separate magnetically, and then to heat up batches of the dust and melt out the metals. Not a lot of machinery needed. And, you have lots of free solar energy to work with, assuming you base near the poles, so that you can gather solar energy all the time. Particularly good when you just need to melt stuff: you can focus the sun on it using big mylar mirrors.
As I pointed out before, mankind has spent a total of, what, a week and a half on the moon, in scattered areas, getting at best an initial sampling of data. We don't KNOW whether minerals are concentrated anywhere on the moon or not. Detailed surveys have not been done yet.
You suspect, but do you have numbers?
Fabricating parts remotely is getting very easy to do, if you use 3D printing/sintering technology. They're used in rapid prototyping now. They can literally print out a metal part one layer at a time, with very good tolerances. This is a machine the size of an office photocopier. Sending one to the moon would be very feasible. They require metallic powder to work with, which is coincidentally what you might expect to get out of your dust-mining operations.
Building electronics would be more difficult, but you would have lots of good clean vacuum and power, and raw materials.
I am sure, though, that there would be dividing line at which it would be cheaper to ship some components from Earth than manufacture them locally. If it's only some parts, though, and they're electronics and gaskets, you could carry lots of them for not too much weight.
Would it actually be commercially feasible? I honestly don't know. I admit I want to see it tried, though, because I'm a hopeless space fanatic. One thing is certain: it IS getting easier all the time.
Firstly, most of your power could be solar, if you're close enough to the poles to have power plants in sunlight all the time. Secondly, one of the major promising finds on the moon is large amounts of Helium-3 in the lunar dust and everywhere else, which may prove to be an excellent nuclear fuel. There is still a lot of research on fusion power that needs to be done on that, I admit, and there is a possiblity that it might not come to fruition in our lifetimes, but it is promising.
Let me say I respect the fact that you're trying to stick to facts. But, there is a lot of work that has been done on this subject, much of which is very encouraging. I'm sorry I don't have links at hand, but you might check in on the sci.space newsgroups to find more detailed info.
Jon Acheson
Where did you get these numbers from? Is this the cost of a moon mission and the amount of rocks we got back? Since returning lunar material in bulk was never a goal of the moon missions, I would find those kinds of numbers to be relatively meaningless. Kind of like weighing the seashells from a vacation to Hawaii and calculating cargo shipping costs to there based on the cost of the vacation.
Actually, the surface of the moon is already covered with lunar material that has been broken up for you: it's called "dust." Smashed up by millennia of impacts from meteors, asteroids, and the like. Look anywhere on the moon and you will find many tons of it. I'm not sure what the depth is, though, and it may vary.
Moreover, the astronauts did in fact find concentrations of minerals in the moon rocks they sampled, and this was found while moving at a five-minute-shopping-spree pace, mind you: their time on the moon was extremely valuable, and they were constantly hurrying to get everything done.
I'm very skeptical of the person from ASR making proclamations about the geological details of the moon. Experts get paid to voice opinions, but the truth is that we've literally only scratched the surface of the moon. We know some facts from the observations of the astronauts and the samples they brought back. But the astronauts didn't go everywhere, and they didn't get to concentrate on anything for very long. What we did find ruined a great many of the existing theories about the moon, and it seems likely that there are just as many bombshells up there remaining to be discovered. All we have right now are theories, based on a very incomplete sampling of facts.
One other big point you're missing is that the minerals and raw materials mined on the moon would have a far greater value in Earth orbit than they would on earth. In orbit, the $10,000 per pound you mentioned is ADDED to their value. How much would NASA pay for aluminum girders and panels that are already AT ISS? Sending them to Earth orbit from the moon is also far cheaper than returning them all the way to Earth.
There are also far less environmental problems with mining the moon. By any reasonable definition, the moon doesn't HAVE an environment to spoil. On the Earth, there are profound cleanup-related issues that are only now beginning to be reflected in the costs of things.
I will say that as far as the amount of legal objections you have to put up with goes, mining on the moon could be as bad as mining on Earth. I'm sure the far left will come up with some reason to sue endlessly.
Jon Acheson
I think you'll find that many industrial concerns would be very receptive to the idea of shipping tree-hugging nature-loving seperatists like yourself to the moon. ;)
Jon Acheson
No, Bush has begun reigning in a beaurocracy that was out of control, even their own, and is reintroducing the concepts of fiscal responsibility and sensible management.
The current issues with ISS are due to their own mismanagement and setting of unrealistic goals. When someone blows their budget again and again and again, the last thing you should do is give them more money! Yes, it will be harder in the short term, but if you don't, the waste and corruption will kill you in the long term.
Bush is, typically, going in and actually fixing the problem, instead of boasting about "reinventing government" then covering things up.
The amazing thing about Clinton/Gore is that their ethical lapses, bad as they were, were completely overshadowed by their utter incompetance as leaders and managers.
Jon Acheson
Yes, but remember, there is a huge difference between "Should" and "Is".
This is a good point. One particular example that occurs to me now that I think about it is when you have the "published" version of a document and an internal version that's still changing. You want them to be separate, so that the carefully-prepared and boss-approved public version doesn't get changed on a whim. You could argue that the different versions are really different documents, though.
I realise that there are going to be lots of copies floating around, but I would want there to be only one "true" copy of a particular doc.
As far as accessing the one document through multiple methods goes, the sticky point is that as you add methods of finding it, the amount of work needed for the creator to categorize the doc goes up and up. I've seen systems that required six pages of forms to be filled out for each document, which is enough that people aren't going to do it. (And, I could never find anything in that system anyway: every search gave you hundreds of redundant hits) There is also the problem that categorizing a doc for multiple access schemes requires you to switch your mental gears when you go from entering the data for one access scheme to entering the data for the next. Users don't like switching gears, and it's hard to teach them even one scheme and make it work.
Good luck, though!
Jon Acheson
OK, maybe it's my inner German getting out, but really in situations like this what you need is to set some basic ground rules in place at the beginning and make people stick by them.
So you decide on a few basic rules and STICK TO THEM. Ex: doc directories organized by workgroup, project, release version, type of document, and containing the date in the file name. Otherwise, you quickly get chaos, which people try to fix with search engines, and you wind up with Microsoft.com.
For a search engine approach to ever work, you have to have the system of organization in place first BEFORE the documents are created, so that people can tag the docs with the right search terms so that people can find them later on.
This is why you can find things in libraries or, to a lesser extent, on USENET. There is a system in place that makes at least some sense, and forces people to categorize docs as they are created (or as they enter the system from outside).
You can't throw the docs in an unorganized pile and have your computer magically make sense of it, since your computer CANNOT READ FOR CONTENT. Word searches don't work if the keywords appear in every document (see microsoft.com). You can have people go in afterwards and read for content and tag for organization, but that's a losing battle, because the doc specialists are always outnumbered 10 to 1 or worse, and the docs are constantly changing and being replaced.
Putting everything into a database without figuring out a working system of organization only makes things worse, because not only are the docs still unorganized, they're also hidden away from the user and "owned" by whoever is maintaining the database, and that person is probably a DBA, not a librarian. Even if they are a librarian, you still have the problem that they're outnumbered 100 to 1 and didn't create the docs. Plus, this approach tends to give you lots of smaller databases that can't be searched globally. And, it's much more expensive and more prone to breakage than the original document directories were.
The same document should NEVER be stored in more than one place, or else how do you know which copy is the most up to date? I would accept having more than one way to find a document as being a good thing, though, as long as the underlying organizational structure is put in place first, and both ways to find the document actually WORK. Two broken search engines are not the equivalent of one good hierarchy, IMHO.
Jon Acheson