They've just started importing them to Australia, and I can't see them being a hit here or in the US. Even the base model costs more than a specced-up Civic. For that you get a vehicle that holds two people and bugger-all luggage, struggles to keep up with traffic, struggles to overtake, and rides like a rock. The cost-of-fuel advantages are real, but marginal in places which don't have the huge taxation on fuel that most of Europe has, and the advantages of its small size really aren't that important on the wider streets of most American (or Australian) cities.
Unless you're sure never to take your vehicle outside city limits, the Smart's not your thing.
Back in the 1960's and 1970's they built some astounding family sedans, like the 504. As well as being built like brick outhouses - a lot of them are still running, and are gradually being shipped to Nigeria where their simplicity and reliability makes them really popular - they handed better than any other affordable sedan available at the time, and most since.
As to current Peugeots, their petrol engines are notoriously bad, because much of the French new car market buys diesel - it's half the price.
They're still better designed and built than any American passenger car I saw when I was over there...
Back in the 1980's, it was actually far more technically advanced than the small 4wd (SUV) competition (Suzuki Sierra, Daihatsu Rocky) - independent suspension, better steering, and so on. There was nothing basically wrong with the design.
However, the build quality was terrible - the paint doesn't last, and the plastics fall to bits. At one stage, the Australian importer even set up a factory in what was Czechoslovakia to fix them before finally exporting them to their final destination.
Time marches on, and the Niva is now very outdated compared to more modern small 4x4's on the market.
What do you want a 4x4 for? Do you actually want to drive off-road, or do you just like posing? If it's the former, you might check out something like the small Suzuki 4x4's. If you want to pose, there are innumerable small soft-roaders out there.
Patents are different to copyrights. You can independently reimplement the same functionality, in pretty much the same way, as code somebody's copyrighted, just as you don't copy the code itself. This is why Samba, and Linux itself, are legal (notwithstanding BS from SCO).
However, if you get a patent for "encoding sound into this bit sequence", like Fraunhofer has, you can't get around that by doing an independent reimplementation.
In essence, copyright protects the specific expression of an idea. Patents protect the idea.
In some situations, this kind of number-crunching is done with a custom program that is only run a few times. In such situations hacking something together in Matlab is quicker to get up and running than a full-blown C++ or, god forbid, FORTRAN program.
Programmer time is much more expensive than faster machines.
You think thats tough, try being a democrat who is against abortion and against gun control. It gets bad enough that I end up voting for Bush.
Well, gee, you've picked the two issues on which pretty much the entire Democratic movement are united on the opposite side of the issue to you. You might as well try being a Republican who supports fiscal responsibility;)
It would seem that with standard deuterium and tritium fusion, involving only plentiful isotopes of hydrogen found on Earth, there's utterly no need to get helium from the moon.
D-He3 has two advantages, as I understand it (ie poorly). One, the number of neutrons emitted is much, much lower, so your plant is much less radioactive - as well as environmental benefits it means the reactor components last a lot longer. Secondly, apparently you don't need to run a steam turbine to extract electricity from the reaction - you can do so directly and at much higher efficiencies. I don't really get how this is supposed to work, though.
ISS zero-g, not partial-G
on
Mice In Space
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· Score: 1
It would probably have been a very useful (if very expensive) thing to do, to put a carousel on the ISS to monitor how humans cope with long-term partial gravity.
Unfortunately that would get in the way of the ISS's primary role - to soak up cash that could otherwise be directed towards more useful projects.
It's the process by which pedophiles hang around in chatrooms and con children into meeting and having sex with them.
Like all horror stories related to children, the actual number of reported cases is small. However, it does actually occur from time to time according to news reports of specific incidents.
Even to provide light for a large greenhouse during the lunar nights (not to mention maintain a constant temperature during this cycle that ranges from -180 C to 110 C would be an enormous amount.
Solar radiation in the tropics is something like 1000 watts per square metre. Say you need 30% of that (we'll be generous), and because you'd only need to illuminate for half the time we'll halve it again. So we could work on a constant 150 watts per square metre. Over one year, that works out to 1314 kW/h. We have to add in an allowance for the less-than-perfect efficiency of the lights, but I have no idea what that factor might be. But, ignoring that, at 10c per kW/h, which is a ballpark figure for power generation on Earth (rather than the moon, where it's likely to be much more expensive), we're up to $131.40 to illuminate our crop for a year.
Now, how much are you going to produce out of that one square metre of land? According to
this article, efficient rice farmers get about 8 (presumably metric) tons per hectare. Maybe you could double this in a moon farming situation - no pests, optimal watering, custom-built soil, etc. etc. etc., so we'll say 16 tons per hectare. That works out to 1.6 kilograms per square meter.
So our rice costs at least 80 USD per kilogram, just for the power to keep it lit!
That's just the beginnings of our problems, however. We need water and soil for our plants. Water doesn't seem to be exactly abundant on the moon - at best, there's water on the poles but it's going to be a PITA to get at it (if it's there, it'll be in a crater that never sees the sun and is consequently under about -200 Celsius). We could potentially cheat and make water by bringing hydrogen from somewhere else and mixing it with the much heavier oxygen we could get by melting lunar rocks. What else do we need? Carbon, for one. Even the Artemis Project, a bunch of people trying advocating lunar colonization, doubt that there's much carbon available. Carbon will have to be either a) imported from Earth, or possibly b) obtained from the asteroid belt (which, longer term, is actually likely to be easier than from Earth).
All in all, therefore, lunar agriculture is looking dodgy until the cost of energy drops dramatically.
Your post is full of either extremely debatable points, or outright nonsense, but this cuts to the crux of the matter:
If we have a moon base, if we have a Mars base, and if we have warships in orbit, missiles on the moon, and such, ready to launch death against any threat in space, the skies, or below, China and North Korea and Iran are going to be that much more likely to meet us at the discussion table and reexamine their core beliefs like the Soviet Union did.
None of those things make a lick of difference to the current military situation, which is, essentially, the US can destroy any nation on Earth with ICBM's if it feels the need - with the proviso that a few of them could strike crippling blows on the US. Moon bases, Mars bases, ASAT weapons - none of those changes that essential fact. The only thing that could potentially do so is a working anti-missile system on one side or the other.
How do I know? Simple. I took it with my digicam, a Pentax Optio 550.
I fully realize that high-quality fixed-length telephotos can take nicer shots than a zoom. All I need is somebody to volunteer to lug the gear around three countries on two continents - not to mention donate me the thousands of dollars those kind of lenses cost.
Yes, I'm sure your old Yashica can take some great pictures, but the versatility you get with a zoom lens is hard to beat in many applications.
For instance, this shot of the White House, as I said on the caption, is pretty much impossible without a telephoto lens. I found that kind of situation comes up very regularly on the trip I took that photo on.
So? Not everybody likes Disney because of the morality of the company or promoted its products. I could care less if Disney makes porn - though if you think the programs you list there are pornography you need to get out more.
Some people, me included, just happen to like some of the movies it has produced and distributed under its own name- from Snow White, through Tron and Aladdin, through Finding Nemo, as well as under the Miramax label. And as for Miramax, Harvey Weinstein might be an ass, but under his management they've produced and distributed some of the best movies of the past decade - everything from Chicago to Italian for Beginners.
If Microsoft's system works, there's nothing wrong with imitating the good parts of it. Just because it's Microsoft doesn't automatically make it a dumb idea - just most of the time...
Innovation for innovation's sake is a waste of time.
I wouldn't get too excited about final-year student projects.
They are usually evaluated according to their adherence to software development methodologies, rather than the actual quality of the end product. To that end, students spend more time making the paperwork good rather than the code good. Whilst this is a necessary part of building really big projects, it's not an optimal method of building small projects by inexperienced part-timers who often have only a very partial understanding of the problem domain.
I do consider ESR and RMS to be grossly overrated. They have accomplished things, but they're both too much in love with their own ideas, and too short on followthrough.
Yes, their programming efforts are probably overrated, particularly ESR, but that's not what they should be rated upon. In both cases, they are better at writing and philosophizing than they are at coding. There's no shame in that. Plenty of great coachers were lousy players.
As I've posted elsewhere in these comments, Dean has explicitly support manned Mars exploration, and its reasonable to suppose Wesley Clark will too though he hasn't explicitly commented one way or the other. I'm not sure about the others, but judging by the way things are going in the Democratic primaries that's not likely to be an issue...
There are no certainties in politics. Everybody thought Bush I was a dead certainty to win again, but he lost. There are any number of things that might help to bring Bush II down - foreseeable possibilities include continued body bags home from Iraq, some of his subordinates going to jail for leaking Valerie Plame's real job, and a decent campaign from the Democratic contender, whoever that turns out to be. And fate has a funny way of throwing up other things.
Even without such factors, the way I read it, the election looks a lot closer than you think.
As the alternative to more GWB is one of the Democratic candidates slugging it out, a quick survey of their attitudes to space exploration in general and Mars in particular seems appropriate.
Howard Dean is the only one I know of that has explicitly stated his support for a manned Mars program. He stated in a press conference that "we should agressively begin a program to have manned flights to Mars.", though he did hedge on the potential cost (a reasonable point, given how far down the toilet the US government's finances will be in a few years without radical spending cuts or tax rises).
As far as I can google, Wesley Clark hasn't expressed an opinion on the future of manned space exploration, but he did issue a press release heartily congratulating NASA on the Spirit rover. He seems to still be formulating his policy on NASA.
I dunno, but I gather that in all spacecraft up to the ISS there simply wasn't room to get any privacy, and in the spacecraft with two-person crews there simply isn't room, period.
I would have thought that the difference in cost in lots of 100,000 and 500,000 would be fairly small - but then, I'm not in the market for such things.
Does anybody have any figures on how price and quantity interrelate once you start getting to these sizes - or is there sufficiently few of these contracts and sufficiently many other complicating factors that the price trends are difficult to discern?
I questioned whether such motivation had ever happened before -- asserting that past undertakings had specific goals, most frequently commercial in nature, and so it is reasonable to ask what the commercial benefit there might be from new manned lunar missions.
That's not true. James Cook travelled half way round the world on the behest of the Royal Society with scientific goals, much vaguer than that of any space mission, and without the benefit of preliminary surveys by unmanned space probes. Along the way he and his crew did the first anthropological surveys by Europeans of many South Pacific cultures, expanded the number of known species of plants and animals by huge numbers.
Or, if you like, what about the voyage of HMS Beagle, which also explored the area to survey the wildlife, and whose resident naturalist's observations directly led to the theory of evolution?
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Unless you're sure never to take your vehicle outside city limits, the Smart's not your thing.
As to current Peugeots, their petrol engines are notoriously bad, because much of the French new car market buys diesel - it's half the price. They're still better designed and built than any American passenger car I saw when I was over there...
However, the build quality was terrible - the paint doesn't last, and the plastics fall to bits. At one stage, the Australian importer even set up a factory in what was Czechoslovakia to fix them before finally exporting them to their final destination.
Time marches on, and the Niva is now very outdated compared to more modern small 4x4's on the market.
What do you want a 4x4 for? Do you actually want to drive off-road, or do you just like posing? If it's the former, you might check out something like the small Suzuki 4x4's. If you want to pose, there are innumerable small soft-roaders out there.
However, if you get a patent for "encoding sound into this bit sequence", like Fraunhofer has, you can't get around that by doing an independent reimplementation.
In essence, copyright protects the specific expression of an idea. Patents protect the idea.
Programmer time is much more expensive than faster machines.
Well, gee, you've picked the two issues on which pretty much the entire Democratic movement are united on the opposite side of the issue to you. You might as well try being a Republican who supports fiscal responsibility ;)
D-He3 has two advantages, as I understand it (ie poorly). One, the number of neutrons emitted is much, much lower, so your plant is much less radioactive - as well as environmental benefits it means the reactor components last a lot longer. Secondly, apparently you don't need to run a steam turbine to extract electricity from the reaction - you can do so directly and at much higher efficiencies. I don't really get how this is supposed to work, though.
Unfortunately that would get in the way of the ISS's primary role - to soak up cash that could otherwise be directed towards more useful projects.
Like all horror stories related to children, the actual number of reported cases is small. However, it does actually occur from time to time according to news reports of specific incidents.
Solar radiation in the tropics is something like 1000 watts per square metre. Say you need 30% of that (we'll be generous), and because you'd only need to illuminate for half the time we'll halve it again. So we could work on a constant 150 watts per square metre. Over one year, that works out to 1314 kW/h. We have to add in an allowance for the less-than-perfect efficiency of the lights, but I have no idea what that factor might be. But, ignoring that, at 10c per kW/h, which is a ballpark figure for power generation on Earth (rather than the moon, where it's likely to be much more expensive), we're up to $131.40 to illuminate our crop for a year.
Now, how much are you going to produce out of that one square metre of land? According to this article, efficient rice farmers get about 8 (presumably metric) tons per hectare. Maybe you could double this in a moon farming situation - no pests, optimal watering, custom-built soil, etc. etc. etc., so we'll say 16 tons per hectare. That works out to 1.6 kilograms per square meter.
So our rice costs at least 80 USD per kilogram, just for the power to keep it lit!
That's just the beginnings of our problems, however. We need water and soil for our plants. Water doesn't seem to be exactly abundant on the moon - at best, there's water on the poles but it's going to be a PITA to get at it (if it's there, it'll be in a crater that never sees the sun and is consequently under about -200 Celsius). We could potentially cheat and make water by bringing hydrogen from somewhere else and mixing it with the much heavier oxygen we could get by melting lunar rocks. What else do we need? Carbon, for one. Even the Artemis Project, a bunch of people trying advocating lunar colonization, doubt that there's much carbon available. Carbon will have to be either a) imported from Earth, or possibly b) obtained from the asteroid belt (which, longer term, is actually likely to be easier than from Earth).
All in all, therefore, lunar agriculture is looking dodgy until the cost of energy drops dramatically.
None of those things make a lick of difference to the current military situation, which is, essentially, the US can destroy any nation on Earth with ICBM's if it feels the need - with the proviso that a few of them could strike crippling blows on the US. Moon bases, Mars bases, ASAT weapons - none of those changes that essential fact. The only thing that could potentially do so is a working anti-missile system on one side or the other.
I fully realize that high-quality fixed-length telephotos can take nicer shots than a zoom. All I need is somebody to volunteer to lug the gear around three countries on two continents - not to mention donate me the thousands of dollars those kind of lenses cost.
Yes, I'm sure your old Yashica can take some great pictures, but the versatility you get with a zoom lens is hard to beat in many applications. For instance, this shot of the White House, as I said on the caption, is pretty much impossible without a telephoto lens. I found that kind of situation comes up very regularly on the trip I took that photo on.
Some people, me included, just happen to like some of the movies it has produced and distributed under its own name- from Snow White, through Tron and Aladdin, through Finding Nemo, as well as under the Miramax label. And as for Miramax, Harvey Weinstein might be an ass, but under his management they've produced and distributed some of the best movies of the past decade - everything from Chicago to Italian for Beginners.
Innovation for innovation's sake is a waste of time.
They are usually evaluated according to their adherence to software development methodologies, rather than the actual quality of the end product. To that end, students spend more time making the paperwork good rather than the code good. Whilst this is a necessary part of building really big projects, it's not an optimal method of building small projects by inexperienced part-timers who often have only a very partial understanding of the problem domain.
If I had a spare couple of grand (they'd have to cost at least that, given they're custom-modified mechanical watches), I'd seriously consider one.
Yes, their programming efforts are probably overrated, particularly ESR, but that's not what they should be rated upon. In both cases, they are better at writing and philosophizing than they are at coding. There's no shame in that. Plenty of great coachers were lousy players.
As I've posted elsewhere in these comments, Dean has explicitly support manned Mars exploration, and its reasonable to suppose Wesley Clark will too though he hasn't explicitly commented one way or the other. I'm not sure about the others, but judging by the way things are going in the Democratic primaries that's not likely to be an issue...
Even without such factors, the way I read it, the election looks a lot closer than you think.
As the alternative to more GWB is one of the Democratic candidates slugging it out, a quick survey of their attitudes to space exploration in general and Mars in particular seems appropriate.
Howard Dean is the only one I know of that has explicitly stated his support for a manned Mars program. He stated in a press conference that "we should agressively begin a program to have manned flights to Mars.", though he did hedge on the potential cost (a reasonable point, given how far down the toilet the US government's finances will be in a few years without radical spending cuts or tax rises).
As far as I can google, Wesley Clark hasn't expressed an opinion on the future of manned space exploration, but he did issue a press release heartily congratulating NASA on the Spirit rover. He seems to still be formulating his policy on NASA.
Dunno about the others..
Whilst the Visio clones take their time to develop, this should be a reasonable alternative.
I dunno, but I gather that in all spacecraft up to the ISS there simply wasn't room to get any privacy, and in the spacecraft with two-person crews there simply isn't room, period.
Does anybody have any figures on how price and quantity interrelate once you start getting to these sizes - or is there sufficiently few of these contracts and sufficiently many other complicating factors that the price trends are difficult to discern?
That's not true. James Cook travelled half way round the world on the behest of the Royal Society with scientific goals, much vaguer than that of any space mission, and without the benefit of preliminary surveys by unmanned space probes. Along the way he and his crew did the first anthropological surveys by Europeans of many South Pacific cultures, expanded the number of known species of plants and animals by huge numbers.
Or, if you like, what about the voyage of HMS Beagle, which also explored the area to survey the wildlife, and whose resident naturalist's observations directly led to the theory of evolution?