Ask the corn industry what fuel technology will succeed, and you'll likely hear ethanol.
You might try reading TFA next time. From TFA:
Instead of coming exclusively from corn or sugar cane as it has up to now, thanks to biotech breakthroughs, the fuel can be made out of everything from prairie switchgrass and wood chips to corn husks and other agricultural waste.
You're criticizing ethanol based upon old technology. Cellulosic ethanol doesn't depend upon corn, and is more cost-effective in the bargain.
..."Hmm, this is frozen liquid, if it were water, I might melt some, and have a drink...
This shows you've missed my point entirely. While the surface of this recently discovered planet may in fact be composed partially of water ice, there is most probably a significant collection of other solids such as nitrogen, oxygen, and methane (to name a few). Calling such a surface 'frozen liquid' is wore than useless, because accouding to your 'geoentric' view, the term 'frozen liquid' evokes images of water ice, which is quite innacurate in this situation.
It's plain poor language, just like substituting 'earthlike' for 'terrestrial'.
Sorry to carp, but it's stuff like this, especially in 'science' articles, that drives me to distraction.
From TFA (boldface mine):
Predicted surface temperatures are minus 220 degrees Celcius (-364F), meaning that its surface is likely to be layer of frozen liquid.
Umm...wouldn't that be the textbook definition of solid ? In the absence of any information as to the composition of the 'frozen liquid, the term 'frozen liquid' could apply equally well to any terrestrial planet.
<snarky>Well, I hope this genius also taxes other things that could hurt you...like coffee, fast food, and city buses. I'd hate to be exposed to anything that could damage me in any way.</snarky>
Nearly right : The theory posits that gravitons are created by all (massive) matter, it's just that near densely packed stars the effect is more significant.
Actually, no. The point the atricle is making is that the effect increases near large concentrations of mass at a rate greater the simple total mass would predict.From TFA:
In this case, a hypothetical particle called a graviton - which mediates gravity - appears in large numbers out of the vacuum of space in regions crowded with massive objects such as stars. "It's as if gravity is stronger" near the centres of galaxies, Brownstein told New Scientist. "Then, at a certain distance, the stars become sparse, and the gravitons don't contribute that much." So at larger distances, gravity returns to the behaviour described by Newton.
Plain wrong : From TFA "critics point out that MOND cannot explain the observed masses of clusters of galaxies without invoking dark matter"
The article isn't about MOND, it's about the scalar-tensor-vector gravity (STVG) theory. MOND was just mentioned as a competing theory...a theory that couldn't adequately explain the behavior of galatic clusters or the Pioneer spacecraft.
If it is determined impossible to boot Windows on the Mac by March 23, 2006, all donations will be donated to a charitable cause (please send suggestions to charity@pintmaster.com).
Here's a suggestion for a charity...how about a charity for all the poor saps who've hosed their iMacs trying this stunt? ^_^
Reminds me of a situation I faced back in the day when I was a tech at a small mom-and-pop computer repair establishment. We received a shipment of motherboards, and found out that the BIOS on every single one of them was corrupt. Since the boards wouldn't even post, the traditional remedy of flashing the BIOS via a bootable floppy was not available. Normally, we would have just boxed up the boards again and returned them for replacements, but we desperately needed those boards to fill orders.
Well, desperate times call for desperate measures...
I got to thinking, "you know...once you've started booting to an OS, that BIOS chip isn't even being used anymore....hmmm". With this in mind, I pulled a working BIOS from another board, swapped it out with the bad BIOS, and powered the system on, booting from the BIOS flash floppy. Once the board had booted to the flash program, I carefully pulled the good chip back out, and put in the bad chip. I then ran the flash program to overwrite the bad BIOS.
Long story short, it worked like a charm. I managed to revive every board in the bad shipment without incident using this unorthodox technique.
Anyway, it should be possible to rig up a similar arrangement here, although as I am unfamilliar with EFI, I'll leave the details up to someone else.
The summary is a bit brief (as well as being plagarized verbatim from OSNews.com, but a brief perusal of the cited Microsoft article is rather illuminating:
Drivers must be signed for devices that stream protected content. This includes audio drivers that use Protected User Mode Audio (PUMA) and Protected Audio Path (PAP), and video device drivers that handle protected video path-output protection management (PVP-OPM) commands.
Unsigned kernel-mode software will not load and will not run on x64-based systems.
Note: Even users with administrator privileges cannot load unsigned kernel-mode code on x64-based systems. This applies for any software module that loads in kernel mode, including device drivers, filter drivers, and kernel services.
(Boldface mine.)
It would seem that Microsoft cares more about the profits of the record companies than it does about the ability of its users to be able to use its software. Just one more reason to switch to Linux.
A tragedy quietly perpetrated and pulled apart online.
I wouldn't say it's quiet by any means...just because the aging 'conventional' news outlets haven't pounced on it. All this serves to do is point out their increasing irrelevance.
Most people concerned with this story get the majority of their current events online...it's not surprising that that's where the coverage occured.
In a November Business Week story, AT&T Chairman Edward E. Whitacre Jr. complained that Internet content providers were getting a free ride: "They don't have any fiber out there. They don't have any wires. . . . They use my lines for free -- and that's bull," he said. "For a Google or a Yahoo or a Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes for free is nuts!''
Perhaps I'm missing the point here, but aren't the end users paying for these pipes? I know I'm certainly paying enough for mine...
I know you RTFA, because you quoted from it, but you left out the explanation of how the machine works
The explanation of how the machine works isn't germane to the discussion at hand: whether or not the machine actually improves the taste of wine.
You took a piece of the article entirely out of context. My reading of your quote is that the author does not have a trained palate, but the wine tasted better to him.
Perhaps you feel that because you didn't really understand the 'context' of my post. Here's the relevant part again:
Unfortunately, it seems that every 'study' done on the subject that bears out the magnet treatment theory has not been done in a properly rigorous scientific fashion, while any study done in such a fashion fails to find any correlation between treatment by magnetic field and improvement of taste.
Specifically, all the 'tests' mentioned on the product websites consist of something like 'here, now try the wine that's been treated by the $MAGNETDEVICE'. And lo and behold, the treated wine does taste better, because that what the testers were expecting. Past a certain point very early on, all perceived differences in wine taste are totally subjective anyway (as mentioned several other times in this discussion), so it doesn't take much to sway tasters' opinions, especially if the study isn't done in a properly rigorous fashion. The passage I quoted from TFA falls squarely into this context.
The fact that wine run through this machine can have the anti-oxidizing agents left out of it should be great news to the industry.
Again, even if this claim is true, it's entirely outside of the central claim of better taste. Hiroshi Tanaka isn't trying to market a device that eliminates the need for anti-oxidizing agents, he's trying to market a device that improves the taste of wine. This is the claim I addrressed in my OP. Quit trying to change the subject.
Only a someone with a closed mind would find something not to like.
Only a someone completely lacking the ability to think critically would blindly accept Hiroshi's claims at face value.
Being, as I am, an aficionado of cheap wine, this has been a subject of interest for me. Unfortunately, it seems that every 'study' done on the subject that bears out the magnet treatment theory has not been done in a properly rigorous scientific fashion, while any study done in such a fashion fails to find any correlation between treatment by magnetic field and improvement of taste.
Speaking of properly rigorous scientific studies (or lack therof), from TFA:
To the untrained palate, a bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau 2005 strained through the machine became a more full-bodied, complex wine. Similar treatment to a Sauvignon Blanc 2004 resulted in a drier aftertaste.
No mention of any scientific-ish study to determine objectively whether or not the machine has any positive effects. I fear this may just be the same old snake oil all over again.
Until I see the results of a few double-blind studies on the effects of this device, I'm suspending judgement.
If it costs $10,000/kg to lift something to LEO, then how are you going to make any money off of salvaging this stuff?
I think you just answered your own question.
How many substances can you name that are worth the $10,000/kg needed to offset the cost of lifting a salvage collector into orbit?
Here's the short and inaccurate answer: if your salvage collector collects its own weight in junk, it just paid for itself.
Here's the reason the above short answer is inaccurate: First, the salvage collector will need to use energy to capture pieces of debris and alter their orbit. If this energy is free (solar), then all we have to worry about is the collector wearing out. If not, we'll have to either get more energy up to it (incurring more cost) or accept that our salvage collector will itself be salvage when the fuel runs out. Either way, the last thing it will do is park itself in our junkyard, so we don't have to salvage it. Second, we'll need a manufacturing facility to transform this salvage into something useful, and building and maintaining that will also cost. Between the two, I agree that it will take a while before any such endeavor starts to show a profit, but since the junk has to be taken care of anyway, the true profit line is much lower.
How is the collector supposed to do its thing up there without having a mishap that will cause even more orbiting debris?
Oh, I don't know....possibly good design and careful planning?
You can't use magnets to collect everything, it's not all magnetic debris. You can't physically catch stuff, it's too tiny and matching velocities with every little speck in order to capture them is unfeasible.
Who says one type of collector needs to catch everything?
Even if we managed to put up a space elevator to bring down the cost-to-orbit of a salvage collector, you still have a problem of matching vectors with every little piece of debris you want to capture.
Space elevators aside, the solution is simple. Initially, only go after the chuncks that are profitable. At the outset, you'll be investing heavily in collectors and a manufcturing base to collect and process this stuff anyway, so naturally, you go after the prime pieces first. It's like drilling for oil here on earth...you go after the easy deposits first, to maximize your ROI. Later, as deposits become depleted, you're forced to drill deeper and in less advantageous areas, but advances in technology allow you to continue reaching for deposits that were previosly fiscally unfeasable to tap, and the fact that your infrastructure is already in place makes things much easier.
There might be solutions for this problem, but salvaging it is not going to be economically feasible.
the real value will be in clearing out a safe launch corridor, or providing that as a service
While I disagree that this will be the only real value, there's no doubt that it is one of the values, and while some salvage concerns will be concerned about the salvage itself as a business model, the busines model of providing clear space as a service is certainly valid as well.
What sort of reclamation do you expect to do in orbit, without any sort of manufacturing capability to process the materials?
This is possibly the most retarded thing I've read here all week. This is akin to saying 'how am I gonna get all these apples across this river without a bridge'? Solution: build a bridge. Yes, it will require a capital investment, but it will have to be built anyway, so rather than ship up raw materials at 10K/kg, why not use what's at hand. (Slight flaw in my analogy - space debris, unlike apples, do not go bad, so one collect it and stockpile it long before the manufacturing capability was in place.)
How much of this stuff is even worth anything if you could somehow find a cheap way of bringing it back to earth un-damaged?
You're misunderstanding me. Currently it costs something on the order of $10,000 per kilogram to get an object into orbit. Even the lowliest of space junk is worth quite a bit, as this cost has already been paid. Bringing it back to earth, even if you could do it for free, would be a monumental waste of money.
Yeah, dude, I'm going to spend $10,000/kg to lift myself up to orbit to go and collect paint chips.
Well...that's certainly a stupid proposition...is that truly the limit of your imagination? "Lift myself up to orbit to go and collect paint chips"? It's fortunate we're not counting on you for a solution here.
The key to solving this problem is to not look on it as a problem at all, but rather, as an opportunity. 'Space junk' is a bit of a misnomer....the only reason it's considered 'junk' is because no one has figured out a way to collect and reuse it. When they do, the name will change to something more along the lines of 'space salvage'.
Certainly, some types of space salvage (derelict rockets, satellite fragments, etc.) will have a higher value than others (paint flecks, rocket slag, etc.), but even the lowliest dist speck will have value, for the simple reason that it is there. Considerable time, money, and energy was invested is putting all this 'junk' into orbit, and before we blithely start to squander more time, money, and energy deorbiting them, perhaps we should consider the possibility of putting them to use where they are now.
Slashdot Mirror
Ask the corn industry what fuel technology will succeed, and you'll likely hear ethanol.
You might try reading TFA next time. From TFA:You're criticizing ethanol based upon old technology. Cellulosic ethanol doesn't depend upon corn, and is more cost-effective in the bargain.
Where will the money come from?
Here, among other sources...
This shows you've missed my point entirely. While the surface of this recently discovered planet may in fact be composed partially of water ice, there is most probably a significant collection of other solids such as nitrogen, oxygen, and methane (to name a few). Calling such a surface 'frozen liquid' is wore than useless, because accouding to your 'geoentric' view, the term 'frozen liquid' evokes images of water ice, which is quite innacurate in this situation.
It's plain poor language, just like substituting 'earthlike' for 'terrestrial'.
Some more information about this endeavor can be found here.
Sorry to carp, but it's stuff like this, especially in 'science' articles, that drives me to distraction.
From TFA (boldface mine):Umm...wouldn't that be the textbook definition of solid ? In the absence of any information as to the composition of the 'frozen liquid, the term 'frozen liquid' could apply equally well to any terrestrial planet.
Here's a working link, courtesy of Digg. ^_^
<snarky>Well, I hope this genius also taxes other things that could hurt you...like coffee, fast food, and city buses. I'd hate to be exposed to anything that could damage me in any way.</snarky>
Nearly right : The theory posits that gravitons are created by all (massive) matter, it's just that near densely packed stars the effect is more significant.
Actually, no. The point the atricle is making is that the effect increases near large concentrations of mass at a rate greater the simple total mass would predict.From TFA: Plain wrong : From TFA "critics point out that MOND cannot explain the observed masses of clusters of galaxies without invoking dark matter"
The article isn't about MOND, it's about the scalar-tensor-vector gravity (STVG) theory. MOND was just mentioned as a competing theory...a theory that couldn't adequately explain the behavior of galatic clusters or the Pioneer spacecraft.
From TFA:Here's a suggestion for a charity...how about a charity for all the poor saps who've hosed their iMacs trying this stunt? ^_^
Reminds me of a situation I faced back in the day when I was a tech at a small mom-and-pop computer repair establishment. We received a shipment of motherboards, and found out that the BIOS on every single one of them was corrupt. Since the boards wouldn't even post, the traditional remedy of flashing the BIOS via a bootable floppy was not available. Normally, we would have just boxed up the boards again and returned them for replacements, but we desperately needed those boards to fill orders.
Well, desperate times call for desperate measures...
I got to thinking, "you know...once you've started booting to an OS, that BIOS chip isn't even being used anymore....hmmm". With this in mind, I pulled a working BIOS from another board, swapped it out with the bad BIOS, and powered the system on, booting from the BIOS flash floppy. Once the board had booted to the flash program, I carefully pulled the good chip back out, and put in the bad chip. I then ran the flash program to overwrite the bad BIOS.
Long story short, it worked like a charm. I managed to revive every board in the bad shipment without incident using this unorthodox technique.
Anyway, it should be possible to rig up a similar arrangement here, although as I am unfamilliar with EFI, I'll leave the details up to someone else.
The summary is a bit brief (as well as being plagarized verbatim from OSNews.com, but a brief perusal of the cited Microsoft article is rather illuminating:
It would seem that Microsoft cares more about the profits of the record companies than it does about the ability of its users to be able to use its software. Just one more reason to switch to Linux.
I thought all this global warming was diluting the Gulf Stream, slowing it down and making Great Britain colder.
So which is it?
A tragedy quietly perpetrated and pulled apart online.
I wouldn't say it's quiet by any means...just because the aging 'conventional' news outlets haven't pounced on it. All this serves to do is point out their increasing irrelevance.
Most people concerned with this story get the majority of their current events online...it's not surprising that that's where the coverage occured.
From TFA: Perhaps I'm missing the point here, but aren't the end users paying for these pipes? I know I'm certainly paying enough for mine...
I know you RTFA, because you quoted from it, but you left out the explanation of how the machine works
The explanation of how the machine works isn't germane to the discussion at hand: whether or not the machine actually improves the taste of wine.
You took a piece of the article entirely out of context. My reading of your quote is that the author does not have a trained palate, but the wine tasted better to him.
Perhaps you feel that because you didn't really understand the 'context' of my post. Here's the relevant part again:Specifically, all the 'tests' mentioned on the product websites consist of something like 'here, now try the wine that's been treated by the $MAGNETDEVICE'. And lo and behold, the treated wine does taste better, because that what the testers were expecting. Past a certain point very early on, all perceived differences in wine taste are totally subjective anyway (as mentioned several other times in this discussion), so it doesn't take much to sway tasters' opinions, especially if the study isn't done in a properly rigorous fashion. The passage I quoted from TFA falls squarely into this context.
The fact that wine run through this machine can have the anti-oxidizing agents left out of it should be great news to the industry.
Again, even if this claim is true, it's entirely outside of the central claim of better taste. Hiroshi Tanaka isn't trying to market a device that eliminates the need for anti-oxidizing agents, he's trying to market a device that improves the taste of wine. This is the claim I addrressed in my OP. Quit trying to change the subject.
Only a someone with a closed mind would find something not to like.
Only a someone completely lacking the ability to think critically would blindly accept Hiroshi's claims at face value.
This seems to be a variation on the theme of enhancing wine tate through the use of magnetic fields, as exemplified by such products as The Wine Clip, Wine Cellar Express, The Perfect Sommelier, and others.
Being, as I am, an aficionado of cheap wine, this has been a subject of interest for me. Unfortunately, it seems that every 'study' done on the subject that bears out the magnet treatment theory has not been done in a properly rigorous scientific fashion, while any study done in such a fashion fails to find any correlation between treatment by magnetic field and improvement of taste.
Speaking of properly rigorous scientific studies (or lack therof), from TFA: No mention of any scientific-ish study to determine objectively whether or not the machine has any positive effects. I fear this may just be the same old snake oil all over again.
Until I see the results of a few double-blind studies on the effects of this device, I'm suspending judgement.
You can purchase Intellectual Trespassing as a Way of Life from bn.com.
What a coincidence...you can purchase John David Funge's Artificial Intelligence for Computer Games: An Introduction from bn.com as well.
Capitalism is alive and well on Slashdot.
If it costs $10,000/kg to lift something to LEO, then how are you going to make any money off of salvaging this stuff?
I think you just answered your own question.
How many substances can you name that are worth the $10,000/kg needed to offset the cost of lifting a salvage collector into orbit?
Here's the short and inaccurate answer: if your salvage collector collects its own weight in junk, it just paid for itself.
Here's the reason the above short answer is inaccurate: First, the salvage collector will need to use energy to capture pieces of debris and alter their orbit. If this energy is free (solar), then all we have to worry about is the collector wearing out. If not, we'll have to either get more energy up to it (incurring more cost) or accept that our salvage collector will itself be salvage when the fuel runs out. Either way, the last thing it will do is park itself in our junkyard, so we don't have to salvage it. Second, we'll need a manufacturing facility to transform this salvage into something useful, and building and maintaining that will also cost. Between the two, I agree that it will take a while before any such endeavor starts to show a profit, but since the junk has to be taken care of anyway, the true profit line is much lower.
How is the collector supposed to do its thing up there without having a mishap that will cause even more orbiting debris?
Oh, I don't know....possibly good design and careful planning?
You can't use magnets to collect everything, it's not all magnetic debris. You can't physically catch stuff, it's too tiny and matching velocities with every little speck in order to capture them is unfeasible.
Who says one type of collector needs to catch everything?
Even if we managed to put up a space elevator to bring down the cost-to-orbit of a salvage collector, you still have a problem of matching vectors with every little piece of debris you want to capture.
Space elevators aside, the solution is simple. Initially, only go after the chuncks that are profitable. At the outset, you'll be investing heavily in collectors and a manufcturing base to collect and process this stuff anyway, so naturally, you go after the prime pieces first. It's like drilling for oil here on earth...you go after the easy deposits first, to maximize your ROI. Later, as deposits become depleted, you're forced to drill deeper and in less advantageous areas, but advances in technology allow you to continue reaching for deposits that were previosly fiscally unfeasable to tap, and the fact that your infrastructure is already in place makes things much easier.
There might be solutions for this problem, but salvaging it is not going to be economically feasible.
Careful...you really ought to keep Clarke's first law in mind...
the real value will be in clearing out a safe launch corridor, or providing that as a service
While I disagree that this will be the only real value, there's no doubt that it is one of the values, and while some salvage concerns will be concerned about the salvage itself as a business model, the busines model of providing clear space as a service is certainly valid as well.
Junk in orbit is junk, just like junk on Earth is junk.
Uh oh....better not tell that to these people...
What sort of reclamation do you expect to do in orbit, without any sort of manufacturing capability to process the materials?
This is possibly the most retarded thing I've read here all week. This is akin to saying 'how am I gonna get all these apples across this river without a bridge'? Solution: build a bridge. Yes, it will require a capital investment, but it will have to be built anyway, so rather than ship up raw materials at 10K/kg, why not use what's at hand. (Slight flaw in my analogy - space debris, unlike apples, do not go bad, so one collect it and stockpile it long before the manufacturing capability was in place.)
How much of this stuff is even worth anything if you could somehow find a cheap way of bringing it back to earth un-damaged?
You're misunderstanding me. Currently it costs something on the order of $10,000 per kilogram to get an object into orbit. Even the lowliest of space junk is worth quite a bit, as this cost has already been paid. Bringing it back to earth, even if you could do it for free, would be a monumental waste of money.
Yeah, dude, I'm going to spend $10,000/kg to lift myself up to orbit to go and collect paint chips.
Well...that's certainly a stupid proposition...is that truly the limit of your imagination? "Lift myself up to orbit to go and collect paint chips"?
It's fortunate we're not counting on you for a solution here.
The key to solving this problem is to not look on it as a problem at all, but rather, as an opportunity. 'Space junk' is a bit of a misnomer....the only reason it's considered 'junk' is because no one has figured out a way to collect and reuse it. When they do, the name will change to something more along the lines of 'space salvage'.
Certainly, some types of space salvage (derelict rockets, satellite fragments, etc.) will have a higher value than others (paint flecks, rocket slag, etc.), but even the lowliest dist speck will have value, for the simple reason that it is there. Considerable time, money, and energy was invested is putting all this 'junk' into orbit, and before we blithely start to squander more time, money, and energy deorbiting them, perhaps we should consider the possibility of putting them to use where they are now.
I heard about this quite a while ago.
Besides which, didn't the Mythbusters find that the toilet seat is one of the cleanest surfaces in the house (Episode 39)?
Looks like EPIC is proceeding on schedule...