Because we could put something much larger, more powerful, and decades newer than the Hubble on it. A telescope array on the Moon could accomplish orders of magnitudes more than the Hubble plus our land based observatories. You could place a large radio telescope array - more powerful than a satellite telescope - like you have on Earth, but without the atmospheric and EM interference you get down here.
The moon is also an astoundingly good - and close- source of Helium-3. Helium-3 is a particularly good potential fusion fuel. A good way to consider how much energy this could mean is to understand that there is more energy in the He-3 on the Moon than there ever has been in all fossil fuels on the Earth. The problem with He-3 though is that, on Earth at least, it's pretty rare stuff.
The moon has effectively zero atmosphere, no water (frozen or otherwise), highly abbrassive surface dust, and offers practically no protection from solar radiation. It has little in the ways of mineral wealth or useful building materials. This things (mostly the lack of water) combine to make a truly self-sustaining colony on the moon effectively impossible. Even with the best recycling technologies, you would still need water, oxygen/replacement atmosphere every now and then. There would be some leakage, especially whenever airlocks are cycled- even once depressurized they will still release some atmosphere every time they're opened.
The moon would still be ideal for some things. If we ever figure out the nuts and bolts of profitable fusion, the He-3 on the moon could power us for a century or two. Yes it's close, so it's a good first place to put some permanent structures. It would be a great location for a science station and telescope array. So I'm all for putting an externally-sustained helium-3 mine and telescope base, but I don't think it's the place to try a truly self-sustaining colony.
Mars has dry and water ices. That alone provides a major component required for a self-sustained colony. There's also large amounts of metals and metal oxides in the soil. These can provide both building materials and oxygen. Sodium, Aluminum, Sulfur, Titanium, Iron, Magnesium, and Calcium can be found readily in the soil in various oxides.
The obvious challenges Mars presents are the distance from the earth and the distance from the sun. Solar power may not be practical since solar cells sufficient for any large colonization effort would weight quite a lot. A self sustaining colony would likely have to be nuclear powered. The challenges posed by landing a nuclear reactor on mars would make an orbital power station and microwave power transmission attractive - at least until and unless manufacturing on the surface could eventually locally produce solar and nuclear power systems.
It's kind of paternalistic to condemn manned spaceflight as risky when the risk is something that many astronauts assume gladly for the chance to experience space.
The inherent risk of manned spaceflight is an argument that people tend to throw in to give their otherwise self-serving cost arguments a false feeling of moral weight.
If we spent as much on space exploration as we did on the military or on bank bailouts for just one year we would have an endowment capable of funding permanent bases on the moon and robotic development of Mars.
Re:Brazilian Ethanol [Re:Don't blame me]
on
The Great Ethanol Scam
·
· Score: 5, Informative
None of the 4 cars I've owned that have been built in the years 1998, 2000, 2001, and 2004 respectively are built to run on E85. These cars aren't exactly unpopular models as they include 2 corollas, 1 Taurus, and one accord. You are very much wrong if you think that "basically all" US market cars sold in the last decade have been made for E85.
GM has comitted to, by 2012, having it so 50% of the vehicles they sell can accept E85. They haven't reached anywhere near that goal. Honda does not even offer ANY flex fuel vehicles for the US market. The other automakers do, but its still a small minority. Only about 7 million (wikipedia article) out of the what... 100 million or so cars in the US are flex fuel capable.
So it's not even that the "basically all" part of your statement is wrong. It's almost the opposite of the truth. I'd say it's more like "basically none" of the US market cars sold in the last decade are flex fuel vehicles. Only even a minority of those sold this year are.
The problem is not just fitting a high quality HUD into your sunglasses, it's also a lot of the software that would be required to make any sort of useful "altered reality." In particular I'm thinking of the current deficiency in image recognition software.
While I absolutely love the idea of having google, wikipedia, wolfram alpha, and a host of other information tools and search engines at my eyes' disposal, they are nearly entirely useless if the system can't readily recognize what I'm looking at. Imagine plugging in current face recognition software into some sort of facebook/google search. It would just as likely confuse your friend "Todd" from Albany for "Paul" from San Diego or even "Raul" from the cover of "Rise of Endymion" - or "The Shrike" for that matter.
What you need is to get someone who has a good idea for a better way to write image recognition software in bed with someone who has a hand in flexible/small display technology. They'll do a little dance, make some mess, and 9-30 months later the baby will be a pair of sunglasses granting your very cool wish for altered reality.
-1? This seems to be somewhat interesting and insightful, even if it might not be what I think. Why must people use negative mod points as "-1 I Disagree"?
That would be ridiculous. Assuming the seller didn't have any other Alienware computers, it would still be asinine to expect them to give the purchaser access to their private account. As this experience shows, access to that account is the primary way that Alienware employees assure themselves that they are talking to YOU. It is, unless they have changed it recently, the same account you use to make and track purchases.
Now if the seller does still own Alienware machines then this suggestion is even more ridiculous since they would still need their account for their own very probably hardware failures. Then there wouldn't really even be a possibility of them removing personal information from the account before giving access to the new owner.
This is nothing like transferring the title to a car, since there is a mechanism to do that. This is like demanding someone who sold you a used but unlocked cell phone put you on their plan. You should not have to create joint access to your private support and billing logins in order to resell a used computer.
You could vent water vapor in the path of denser groupings of debris. This would allow you to sap kinetic energy from clouds of debris without incredibly fancy or expensive lasers. Still, getting large volumes of water up into space is itself a costly endeavor and might only be cost effective in bringing down denser debris clouds or groupings. Add that to the fact that water vapor will disperse and descend rather quickly and this might only be viable as a way to clean up right after a debris creating event occurs.
Aerogels are a possible means of collecting and de-orbiting debris. Unlike water vapor, these materials would not disperse as rapidly and could be used to sweep out regions of debris by providing enough resistance to slow them down and drop them out of orbit. The problem here is that the materials with the requsite properties don't nescessarily exist yet- if you consider mass production and low cost to be requisite properties. Ideally the aerogel would be one that could be produced on-site; meaning it could be carried in a dense component form and sprayed out into space. Carrying fully formed areogel into space for the purpose of debris collection would prove impractical due to the large volumes required- though the low mass required makes the idea of on-site production appealing.
There are several promising aerogels - particularly alumina based compounds - that are already used for capturing high velocity particles. The trick would be creating a mechanism capable of generating them in orbit.
You've missed the point. They are only saying they will filter content from their services and products. While chrome itself is a google product/service, the content it displays is not necessarily "from any of Google's products, services or websites." That is to say- simply displaying the content does not make it theirs and therefore they are not claiming the right to filter it automatically.
While it may seem like arguing semantics, that's what discussing contract law boils down to. If they were to have said "any or all content through" or "any or all content delivered through" their products and services then you would have reason to complain. There is a huge difference between content from a source and content served through a source. It's the difference between ownership and distribution.
Yes, humorless reactionaries are the cause of much grief. They and people who react poorly to humor.
BadAnalogyGuy's got it right though. It's that and to cover their features that, for your own security, may filter what you see. Anti-phishing and anti-scamming tools do effectively limit and/or alter what you might normally see on the web. They're just trying to protect themselves from buffoonery. The intent is even clearer when you see how they lead into the possibility of third party software doing the same or more.
This has already been torn down by order of local authorities as of Jan 30th. They didn't even care that it was built with the help of orphans- although maybe they were taking a tough stance against child labor.
So does this mean those ps3's sitting around at full CPU utilization for days and days add up to give Folding@Home one of the largest carbon footprints of any non-profit?
Of course I'm not being serious with my title, but how's that compare to the energy costs, efficiency, and carbon foot print of an equivalent blue-gene/L supercomputer?
Excuse the double post. I think a more pertinent example of why I find Sage's usability to be lacking is that the times I have tried to use it I have usually ended up writing my own tool in visual fortran in less time than it took to do in Sage.
For what it does, Maxima is pretty good. It's fairly easy to use compared to the other big free alternative. That being said, it is fairly limited compared to Mathematica, Maple or Sage. If you need it to be free and need more features, check out sage (www.sagemath.org) but don't expect to produce anything useful in the first minute.
If you're looking for a basic accessible CAS, then Sage wouldn't be the answer. In that case, Maxima might do it for you. Sage is more useful for people who need a more robust system, but I have often found I can write my own tools faster than I can do it in some of the free alternatives.
I'm not only referring to "clicketyclicking" as you put it, but also the richness and usefulness of the documentation and ease of actually using the software. Using Sage on a computer and then using any of the 3 big math software packages is like comparing swimming in molasses to swimming in water. This is not only in terms of performance and responsiveness, but steps to do the same task. Sage-installation is not exactly typical either.
If two software items are equally feature rich, then ease of use us a perfectly valid point of comparison.
I'm not entirely sure where your condescension comes from, but I do write a lot of my own tools and use plenty of _MATH_ in my graduate nuclear engineering and physics courses. Appreciating efficiency and ease of use does not preclude intelligence or curiosity.
The closest thing to a free alternative I've been able to find is Sage:
http://www.sagemath.org/
Compared to MatLab, Maple, and Mathematica (yes I know MatLAB is differently purposed than the other two) the usability of Sage blows. It's pretty powerful sure, but when even Maple is easier to use then you've got a problem.
I may give the new Mathematica a try. Integration with Word will make some of my lab writeups go a bit faster. Well, maybe as long as Mathematica doesn't take too long to figure out. Too bad our University doesn't sell it to students for $5 a pop anymore.
Haha, wow- I never expected my poorly worded sentence to spawn such a long list of amusing replies. There's something to be said for the misuse of the English language- unfortunately it's probably not said very well.
Your Athlon performs better than a 3.0ghz P4 in most benchmarks- particularly streaming. Perhaps you forget how bad the old net burst architecture was.
Also, yours is likely an X2 (dual core) while the pentium 4 I have is not. It's not even hyperthreading (not that that actually helped.)
Odd, I've been a Netflix user for about 2 years and my roommate has it running on his Mac right now. I'd call their customer service and ask.
Did you follow the link in the CNet article? Do you have silverlight installed?
Slashdot Mirror
Because we could put something much larger, more powerful, and decades newer than the Hubble on it. A telescope array on the Moon could accomplish orders of magnitudes more than the Hubble plus our land based observatories. You could place a large radio telescope array - more powerful than a satellite telescope - like you have on Earth, but without the atmospheric and EM interference you get down here.
The moon is also an astoundingly good - and close- source of Helium-3. Helium-3 is a particularly good potential fusion fuel. A good way to consider how much energy this could mean is to understand that there is more energy in the He-3 on the Moon than there ever has been in all fossil fuels on the Earth. The problem with He-3 though is that, on Earth at least, it's pretty rare stuff.
The moon has effectively zero atmosphere, no water (frozen or otherwise), highly abbrassive surface dust, and offers practically no protection from solar radiation. It has little in the ways of mineral wealth or useful building materials. This things (mostly the lack of water) combine to make a truly self-sustaining colony on the moon effectively impossible. Even with the best recycling technologies, you would still need water, oxygen/replacement atmosphere every now and then. There would be some leakage, especially whenever airlocks are cycled- even once depressurized they will still release some atmosphere every time they're opened.
The moon would still be ideal for some things. If we ever figure out the nuts and bolts of profitable fusion, the He-3 on the moon could power us for a century or two. Yes it's close, so it's a good first place to put some permanent structures. It would be a great location for a science station and telescope array. So I'm all for putting an externally-sustained helium-3 mine and telescope base, but I don't think it's the place to try a truly self-sustaining colony.
Mars has dry and water ices. That alone provides a major component required for a self-sustained colony. There's also large amounts of metals and metal oxides in the soil. These can provide both building materials and oxygen. Sodium, Aluminum, Sulfur, Titanium, Iron, Magnesium, and Calcium can be found readily in the soil in various oxides.
The obvious challenges Mars presents are the distance from the earth and the distance from the sun. Solar power may not be practical since solar cells sufficient for any large colonization effort would weight quite a lot. A self sustaining colony would likely have to be nuclear powered. The challenges posed by landing a nuclear reactor on mars would make an orbital power station and microwave power transmission attractive - at least until and unless manufacturing on the surface could eventually locally produce solar and nuclear power systems.
It's kind of paternalistic to condemn manned spaceflight as risky when the risk is something that many astronauts assume gladly for the chance to experience space.
The inherent risk of manned spaceflight is an argument that people tend to throw in to give their otherwise self-serving cost arguments a false feeling of moral weight.
True - the NASA budget is about 1/20th what our total military expenditures are if you leave out the ongoing operational costs that are not in the primary budget. http://throb.typepad.com/special/2004%20US%20Budget.jpg
Most Americans also believe we should increase spending on NASA.
http://www.spacepolitics.com/2007/01/10/bad-and-good-news-about-public-support-for-space/
If we spent as much on space exploration as we did on the military or on bank bailouts for just one year we would have an endowment capable of funding permanent bases on the moon and robotic development of Mars.
None of the 4 cars I've owned that have been built in the years 1998, 2000, 2001, and 2004 respectively are built to run on E85. These cars aren't exactly unpopular models as they include 2 corollas, 1 Taurus, and one accord. You are very much wrong if you think that "basically all" US market cars sold in the last decade have been made for E85.
GM has comitted to, by 2012, having it so 50% of the vehicles they sell can accept E85. They haven't reached anywhere near that goal. Honda does not even offer ANY flex fuel vehicles for the US market. The other automakers do, but its still a small minority. Only about 7 million (wikipedia article) out of the what... 100 million or so cars in the US are flex fuel capable.
So it's not even that the "basically all" part of your statement is wrong. It's almost the opposite of the truth. I'd say it's more like "basically none" of the US market cars sold in the last decade are flex fuel vehicles. Only even a minority of those sold this year are.
The problem is not just fitting a high quality HUD into your sunglasses, it's also a lot of the software that would be required to make any sort of useful "altered reality." In particular I'm thinking of the current deficiency in image recognition software.
While I absolutely love the idea of having google, wikipedia, wolfram alpha, and a host of other information tools and search engines at my eyes' disposal, they are nearly entirely useless if the system can't readily recognize what I'm looking at. Imagine plugging in current face recognition software into some sort of facebook/google search. It would just as likely confuse your friend "Todd" from Albany for "Paul" from San Diego or even "Raul" from the cover of "Rise of Endymion" - or "The Shrike" for that matter.
What you need is to get someone who has a good idea for a better way to write image recognition software in bed with someone who has a hand in flexible/small display technology. They'll do a little dance, make some mess, and 9-30 months later the baby will be a pair of sunglasses granting your very cool wish for altered reality.
-1? This seems to be somewhat interesting and insightful, even if it might not be what I think. Why must people use negative mod points as "-1 I Disagree"?
That would be ridiculous. Assuming the seller didn't have any other Alienware computers, it would still be asinine to expect them to give the purchaser access to their private account. As this experience shows, access to that account is the primary way that Alienware employees assure themselves that they are talking to YOU. It is, unless they have changed it recently, the same account you use to make and track purchases.
Now if the seller does still own Alienware machines then this suggestion is even more ridiculous since they would still need their account for their own very probably hardware failures. Then there wouldn't really even be a possibility of them removing personal information from the account before giving access to the new owner.
This is nothing like transferring the title to a car, since there is a mechanism to do that. This is like demanding someone who sold you a used but unlocked cell phone put you on their plan. You should not have to create joint access to your private support and billing logins in order to resell a used computer.
You could vent water vapor in the path of denser groupings of debris. This would allow you to sap kinetic energy from clouds of debris without incredibly fancy or expensive lasers. Still, getting large volumes of water up into space is itself a costly endeavor and might only be cost effective in bringing down denser debris clouds or groupings. Add that to the fact that water vapor will disperse and descend rather quickly and this might only be viable as a way to clean up right after a debris creating event occurs.
Aerogels are a possible means of collecting and de-orbiting debris. Unlike water vapor, these materials would not disperse as rapidly and could be used to sweep out regions of debris by providing enough resistance to slow them down and drop them out of orbit. The problem here is that the materials with the requsite properties don't nescessarily exist yet- if you consider mass production and low cost to be requisite properties. Ideally the aerogel would be one that could be produced on-site; meaning it could be carried in a dense component form and sprayed out into space. Carrying fully formed areogel into space for the purpose of debris collection would prove impractical due to the large volumes required- though the low mass required makes the idea of on-site production appealing.
There are several promising aerogels - particularly alumina based compounds - that are already used for capturing high velocity particles. The trick would be creating a mechanism capable of generating them in orbit.
You've missed the point. They are only saying they will filter content from their services and products. While chrome itself is a google product/service, the content it displays is not necessarily "from any of Google's products, services or websites." That is to say- simply displaying the content does not make it theirs and therefore they are not claiming the right to filter it automatically.
While it may seem like arguing semantics, that's what discussing contract law boils down to. If they were to have said "any or all content through" or "any or all content delivered through" their products and services then you would have reason to complain. There is a huge difference between content from a source and content served through a source. It's the difference between ownership and distribution.
Yes, humorless reactionaries are the cause of much grief. They and people who react poorly to humor. BadAnalogyGuy's got it right though. It's that and to cover their features that, for your own security, may filter what you see. Anti-phishing and anti-scamming tools do effectively limit and/or alter what you might normally see on the web. They're just trying to protect themselves from buffoonery. The intent is even clearer when you see how they lead into the possibility of third party software doing the same or more.
This has already been torn down by order of local authorities as of Jan 30th. They didn't even care that it was built with the help of orphans- although maybe they were taking a tough stance against child labor.
Aids and superaids? They're showing up as the top two tags, so is the implication that coffee prevents aids or causes superaids?
Entropy's a bitch, but I'll be damned if she isn't a faithful one.
So does this mean those ps3's sitting around at full CPU utilization for days and days add up to give Folding@Home one of the largest carbon footprints of any non-profit? Of course I'm not being serious with my title, but how's that compare to the energy costs, efficiency, and carbon foot print of an equivalent blue-gene/L supercomputer?
Excuse the double post. I think a more pertinent example of why I find Sage's usability to be lacking is that the times I have tried to use it I have usually ended up writing my own tool in visual fortran in less time than it took to do in Sage.
For what it does, Maxima is pretty good. It's fairly easy to use compared to the other big free alternative. That being said, it is fairly limited compared to Mathematica, Maple or Sage. If you need it to be free and need more features, check out sage (www.sagemath.org) but don't expect to produce anything useful in the first minute. If you're looking for a basic accessible CAS, then Sage wouldn't be the answer. In that case, Maxima might do it for you. Sage is more useful for people who need a more robust system, but I have often found I can write my own tools faster than I can do it in some of the free alternatives.
I'm not only referring to "clicketyclicking" as you put it, but also the richness and usefulness of the documentation and ease of actually using the software. Using Sage on a computer and then using any of the 3 big math software packages is like comparing swimming in molasses to swimming in water. This is not only in terms of performance and responsiveness, but steps to do the same task. Sage-installation is not exactly typical either. If two software items are equally feature rich, then ease of use us a perfectly valid point of comparison. I'm not entirely sure where your condescension comes from, but I do write a lot of my own tools and use plenty of _MATH_ in my graduate nuclear engineering and physics courses. Appreciating efficiency and ease of use does not preclude intelligence or curiosity.
The closest thing to a free alternative I've been able to find is Sage: http://www.sagemath.org/ Compared to MatLab, Maple, and Mathematica (yes I know MatLAB is differently purposed than the other two) the usability of Sage blows. It's pretty powerful sure, but when even Maple is easier to use then you've got a problem. I may give the new Mathematica a try. Integration with Word will make some of my lab writeups go a bit faster. Well, maybe as long as Mathematica doesn't take too long to figure out. Too bad our University doesn't sell it to students for $5 a pop anymore.
I also probably should have emphasized that I was doing it on a windows machine. If only MS would release silverlight for linux like they say they plan to. Silverlight for Linux Announced MS and Novell Collaberation
Haha, wow- I never expected my poorly worded sentence to spawn such a long list of amusing replies. There's something to be said for the misuse of the English language- unfortunately it's probably not said very well.
I was thinking I'd pull out my Tandy TSR-80 if I really wanted to suffer.
Your Athlon performs better than a 3.0ghz P4 in most benchmarks- particularly streaming. Perhaps you forget how bad the old net burst architecture was. Also, yours is likely an X2 (dual core) while the pentium 4 I have is not. It's not even hyperthreading (not that that actually helped.)
Yeah sorry, I was replying to the post above but clicked on the reply to article button instead of the reply to post one.
Odd, I've been a Netflix user for about 2 years and my roommate has it running on his Mac right now. I'd call their customer service and ask. Did you follow the link in the CNet article? Do you have silverlight installed?