The other poster gave some enlightening information on boosters and propellants please give us more details.
I was not addressing boosters or propellants. I was addressing a single point, that "the shear amount of energy" is the problem. There are indeed reasons that getting into orbit is expensive. But the amount of energy, in itself, is not a major cost.
In other words, you can't cheat gravity or the laws of thermodynamics. No one seems to listen, but my initial assessment is that the shear amount of energy required to launch a viable space colony is going to be prohibitive.
Orbital velocity is about 7.8 km/sec, so the energy cost of getting into orbit is 1/2mv^2 = 30 MJ/kg, or about 8.5 kW-hr/kg. At an energy cost of 10 cents per kilowatt hour, that would be an energy cost slightly under a dollar a kilogram.
Energy cost, in and of itself, is not the problem.
And the Polynesian Islands were populated before Europe had boats.
No, they weren't.
"Polynesian ancestors settled in Samoa around 800 BC, colonized the central Society Islands between AD 1025 and 1120 and dispersed to New Zealand, Hawaii and Rapa Nui and other locations between AD 1190 and 1290." http://pvs.kcc.hawaii.edu/ike/...
Your Eurocentric view is blocking you from seeing that explorers predate Columbus and made ocean crossings long before
Right now, the barrier to increasing use of space is the cost of launch. It's indeed true that, with launch costs at their current levels, utilization of space resources isn't likely to be commercially viable (at least, not for applications other than the ones already being done, such as observation and communication.) The critical question is, can the cost of getting to space be reduced? And if so, by how much?
Oops, good point, that should have been mentioned indeed. In my defense, I'll say that this was a quote I pulled from the Geekwire article (which has since, to their credit, been revised) http://www.geekwire.com/2015/w... SpaceShipOne re-used everything except the actual rocket engine (that is, the combustion chamber and ablative nozzle) which was replaced for each flight (much like a model rocket, now that I think of it).
Do you have a source for this? I do like the fact that they are trying to close the loophole before it is implemented but I can find little to back up your claim.
You might try to do your own homework at thomas.loc.gov, where everything is published for all to see.
No, when you cite an alleged fact, you should give the citation.
Presumably you have a citation, if it's a real fact and not something you made up. When you don't provide it, a pretty good guess is that either (1) it's something you just made up, and hence I shouldn't waste my time to try to track the non-existent fact down with an internet search, or (2) it was too much trouble for you to do the internet search to find-- and if it was too hard for you to find, being sarcastic about why I won't spend my time finding it is completely hypocritical.
Executive summary: when you cite a fact, it is your burden of proof to provide the citation.
Mars, being half the diameter of Earth, has a higher surface to volume ratio. Thus, it cooled faster. Presumably the liquid core froze, or at least, enough of it froze to stop the dynamo of molten metal that creates the magnetic field
The U.S, Constitution-- heard of it?-- demands that the government cannot deprive citizens of life without due process of law.
It is possible that the people hit by the drone strikes have had some legal process applied to who gets targeted... but due to the secrecy, we don't know that. From all the evidence I can see, the "due process" is that one CIA guy says "I think this person should be on the list."
When I was a kid, you could tell which countries were dictatorships: those were the ones who had secret courts and secret police with secret powers with no limits and no oversight. In German, there is even a word for such secret police-- "Geheime Staatspolizei", literally "secret state police." More commonly called the Gestapo.
Now I live in a country with secret courts and secret police. I don't like it.
What is that due process, how is it implemented, and by whom? Without that question answered, we live in a dictatorship, and simply don't know it.
No US citizen was murdered by a drone, they were killed, legally. The law of war permits that. When you fight with the enemy in an armed conflict against the US you are part of the enemy and can be killed just like any other enemy combatant. That is what those US citizens had done, and it cost them.
Wrong.
Some of the Americans killed were fighting with the enemy. "Some" is not the same as "all".
Links to the actual case, from the Associated Press, on the Boston Globe site: "American can't sue FBI over abuse claims, federal appeals court says", https://www.bostonglobe.com/ne...
On the other hand, I don't want the government in it. Not because I don't want people to get "free" medicine, but because I think the government will screw it up, or worse, obtain control over the lives of the people who are supposed to be keeping it in check....
Unfortunately, the one thing worse than having government involved is having the government not involved.
Health care is an economic case where the assumptions that make a free market efficient don't apply. When providers have the ability to literally say "pay what we ask or die... and decide right now," there's not a lot of economic leverage available. And, worse, people making these decisions are often sick, in pain, unconscious, woozy from painkillers, or in the grips of Alzheimer's disease, and can't shop around. Unless they have insurance. But the insurance company's profit comes from kicking people off of the insurance if they get sick. The insurance companies that are most successful in figuring out ways to terminate coverage of people who are sick out-compete the ones who don't. After a while, all of the insurance companies do this-- the ones who don't go out of business.
As a society, we have made a decision that we don't think it's right to turn people back at the emergency room just because they can't pay. So, one way or another we are paying for the health care of people who can't pay. The only question is, are we going to do this in a thought-out way? Or in a makeshift, not-thought-out way?
First, because that's not actually what he said, and second, because this is a news site, and that is not news, it's just repeating what he said in 2007.
Rules and Regulations dictated from on high by some collection of bureaucrats—whose greatest achievement was to convince even dumber people to cast "votes" for their election to office—are always going to be a fantasy.
I like to breathe. It's something I do every day. I'd like to breathe clean air, thank you. If you want to pollute, don't do it in my air
Volkswagen's problem was not that there wasn't technology available to clean the NOx out of the diesel emissions. Their problem was after deciding to license the clean diesel technology ("BlueTec") from Daimler, the CEO got pushed out and replaced by a new CEO who cancelled the deal and made a deliberate decision not to license BlueTec. This was because their engineers claimed that they could solve the problem using their own technology, turbocharged direct injection (TDI). http://www.wsj.com/articles/vw...
They were wrong.
So, the answer is that the technology was there, but Volkswagen had made a decision not to use it.
So VW decides to "fix" a problem that (technically) is a US only issue by greenwashing up a car they don't sell in the US.
The irony...
From the press release: It was decided to switch over to installing only diesel drives with SCR and AdBlue technology in Europe and North America as soon as possible. Diesel vehicles will only be equipped with exhaust emissions systems that use the best environmental technology.
They are fixing the problem by putting in the exhaust cleaning diesel technologies that they had previously not put on their diesels (in the apparently mistaken belief that they would by able to solve the emissions problem without them.)
Accurate analysis from the very first post. This is a classic economics problem, overuse of a good that is given away for free
Providing a parking space probably costs a couple of orders of magnitude more than the additional cost of adding a charging point to one, given that firms give away parking for free your economic justification is already being ignored in most cases.
The stated problem is that people fight over the free electric-charging outlets, and unplug cars to plug their own cars in. If people fought over parking spaces and moved cars out of parking spaces so they could park their own cars, then charging for the parking spaces would be the economics solution.
So let them pay for the charging spot. Running wire is pretty cheap.
Accurate analysis from the very first post. This is a classic economics problem, overuse of a good that is given away for free; and has a classic economic solution: put a price on it.
This is silicon valley. Make an ap for them them to sign up for their spot online.
But yet the Russians didn't develop the Buran under the idea that it would be some sort of cost effective space taxi like the shuttle was sold to the American people as. The Buran (as revealed in the 2000s from soviet archives) was developed solely to avoid a "missile gap" situation with the US.
When the shuttle was announced the Soviets shrugged their shoulders, they already had something cost effective and didn't see the benefit of such a vehicle for them. When the size of the cargo hold was announced they raised an eyebrow. But when the wing specs where revealed there was no longer any question that the shuttle was also intended for some very dangerous military applications, up to and probably including the covert testing of weapons in space in such a way that the Soviets wouldn't know the Outer Space Treaty was being broken until it was too late and there was a proven killsat over Moscow.
No it wasn't. The wing specs were because the DoD spec was to be able to launch into polar orbit, deploy a satellite, and land at the launch site on the same orbit. The Earth will have rotated about ~1500 miles in that time, so it needed 1500 miles of cross-range to get back to the launch site. That set the size of the wings.
Of course most of their suspicions where true.
If those really were their suspicions, none of them were true.
Frankly, the shuttle would have made a lousy weapons platform-- too big, too fragile, too visible. Really a weapon isn't useful when there are only two places it can launch from, and any launch is telegraphed weeks in advance and is visible from hundreds of miles away.
It has everything to do with copyright law. It's what the company is using in order to claim that they have a right to keep information from the court.
No, even if they would show the code, it wouldn't become magically free software or public domain. What they claim here is that they want to keep a trade secret.
Correct. It has nothing to do with copyright law. The intellectual property law here is trade secret law.
So, VW hired a top engineer away from Daimler to revamp the VW line. He brought in clean-diesel technology ("BlueTec") licensed from Daimler, but the engineers at VW hated the idea of licensing technology from a rival, because they said they could do just as good with the turbocharged direct injection designs that they'd been working on for years. Nevertheless, VW went through with an engine design with the licensed BlueTec, made a prototype engine... and then the CEO got pushed out, the chief engineer got pushed out a month later, and the new CEO put the engineers who'd opposed licensing outside technology in charge of making a new VW clean-diesel engine and cancelled the license from Daimler. So, they had essentially doubled down on the bet that they could do just as good on efficiency and NOx emissions without licensing the Daimler BlueTec, And right as they did that, the new CEO announced ambitious targets for selling clean diesels in the US.
The story is beginning to make a bit more sense now.
More likely: Manager: "Hey, you promised a year ago that you could hit both NOx and MPG targets by Oct. 1. It's September already. How close are you to done?" Engineers: "We promised what? You're sure? We said it would be a software fix? Really? OK, software guys- what's the hold up?" Software engineers: "The guy who promised that left to join Facebook a year ago." Manager: "Tough. Will you have the problem solved by Friday, or do I have to ask headquarters for another week?" Software engineers: "This is a tough problem. I'm not sure it can even be done, but even if it can, it will take a year to do it right." Manager: "I don't care about doing it right. Bash something together to make it pass the damn tests. Just do it." Software: "It's really hard... Manager: "OK, you have until Monday. Or you're all fired." Software: "Uh, you said anything? As long as it makes the problem go away?" Manager: "I'm giving you carte blanche. Don't worry about documentation, total quality, all that ISO s@#!t, I'll cover for you. Just make it pass the test." Software: "Anything, huh? OK, we're on it."
For example, I have had a couple of occasions of fraud on my account - they both happened when the "accounts got out" (massive breach of the credit union's credit card file). The first racked up three charges for $900.00 in Japan The next was a flight in India (in rupees) that came to well over $1,000 plus the foreign currency conversion fee. However, I have had the same card processor block the card and deny the purchases when I made two orders Newegg.com in the same day. The "fraud detection" is completely broken.
Isn't it likely that they blocked the new egg purchases because the account was hacked and previous purchases that day were fraudulent?
Closing the barn door after the horse got out-- but there may have been other horses in the barn that could get out.
Slashdot Mirror
Where are you getting $0.10 per KWH?
http://www.eia.gov/electricity...
The other poster gave some enlightening information on boosters and propellants please give us more details.
I was not addressing boosters or propellants. I was addressing a single point, that "the shear amount of energy" is the problem. There are indeed reasons that getting into orbit is expensive. But the amount of energy, in itself, is not a major cost.
In other words, you can't cheat gravity or the laws of thermodynamics. No one seems to listen, but my initial assessment is that the shear amount of energy required to launch a viable space colony is going to be prohibitive.
Orbital velocity is about 7.8 km/sec, so the energy cost of getting into orbit is 1/2mv^2 = 30 MJ/kg, or about 8.5 kW-hr/kg. At an energy cost of 10 cents per kilowatt hour, that would be an energy cost slightly under a dollar a kilogram.
Energy cost, in and of itself, is not the problem.
And the Polynesian Islands were populated before Europe had boats.
No, they weren't.
"Polynesian ancestors settled in Samoa around 800 BC, colonized the central Society Islands between AD 1025 and 1120 and dispersed to New Zealand, Hawaii and Rapa Nui and other locations between AD 1190 and 1290."
http://pvs.kcc.hawaii.edu/ike/...
Your Eurocentric view is blocking you from seeing that explorers predate Columbus and made ocean crossings long before
Yes, that part is right.
Right now, the barrier to increasing use of space is the cost of launch. It's indeed true that, with launch costs at their current levels, utilization of space resources isn't likely to be commercially viable (at least, not for applications other than the ones already being done, such as observation and communication.)
The critical question is, can the cost of getting to space be reduced? And if so, by how much?
Oops, good point, that should have been mentioned indeed. In my defense, I'll say that this was a quote I pulled from the Geekwire article (which has since, to their credit, been revised) http://www.geekwire.com/2015/w...
SpaceShipOne re-used everything except the actual rocket engine (that is, the combustion chamber and ablative nozzle) which was replaced for each flight (much like a model rocket, now that I think of it).
The school certainly overreacted, but...
1) the kid was not arrested
Yes, he was. He was taken away from the school by the police in handcuffs. That's an arrest.
I think what you meant to say was, the kid was not charged. That's correct. He was arrested, but released without charges.
Do you have a source for this? I do like the fact that they are trying to close the loophole before it is implemented but I can find little to back up your claim.
You might try to do your own homework at thomas.loc.gov, where everything is published for all to see.
No, when you cite an alleged fact, you should give the citation.
Presumably you have a citation, if it's a real fact and not something you made up. When you don't provide it, a pretty good guess is that either
(1) it's something you just made up, and hence I shouldn't waste my time to try to track the non-existent fact down with an internet search, or
(2) it was too much trouble for you to do the internet search to find-- and if it was too hard for you to find, being sarcastic about why I won't spend my time finding it is completely hypocritical.
Executive summary: when you cite a fact, it is your burden of proof to provide the citation.
Try the NASA site, here:
http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/...
And the magnetic field stopped why?
Mars, being half the diameter of Earth, has a higher surface to volume ratio. Thus, it cooled faster. Presumably the liquid core froze, or at least, enough of it froze to stop the dynamo of molten metal that creates the magnetic field
Wrong? Not really, no.
The U.S, Constitution-- heard of it?-- demands that the government cannot deprive citizens of life without due process of law.
It is possible that the people hit by the drone strikes have had some legal process applied to who gets targeted... but due to the secrecy, we don't know that. From all the evidence I can see, the "due process" is that one CIA guy says "I think this person should be on the list."
When I was a kid, you could tell which countries were dictatorships: those were the ones who had secret courts and secret police with secret powers with no limits and no oversight. In German, there is even a word for such secret police-- "Geheime Staatspolizei", literally "secret state police." More commonly called the Gestapo.
Now I live in a country with secret courts and secret police. I don't like it.
What is that due process, how is it implemented, and by whom? Without that question answered, we live in a dictatorship, and simply don't know it.
No US citizen was murdered by a drone, they were killed, legally. The law of war permits that. When you fight with the enemy in an armed conflict against the US you are part of the enemy and can be killed just like any other enemy combatant. That is what those US citizens had done, and it cost them.
Wrong.
Some of the Americans killed were fighting with the enemy. "Some" is not the same as "all".
http://www.motherjones.com/kev...
http://content.time.com/time/w...
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
https://www.aclu.org/video/acl...
The article linked is actually an editorial in the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11...
Links to the actual case, from the Associated Press, on the Boston Globe site:
"American can't sue FBI over abuse claims, federal appeals court says", https://www.bostonglobe.com/ne...
Link to the decision:
https://www.cadc.uscourts.gov/...
These asshats need to pick a new TLA... IAB is already taken.
Almost all the three letter acronyms, except the ones using very unusual combinations, have been taken. Multiple times.
On the other hand, I don't want the government in it. Not because I don't want people to get "free" medicine, but because I think the government will screw it up, or worse, obtain control over the lives of the people who are supposed to be keeping it in check. ...
Unfortunately, the one thing worse than having government involved is having the government not involved.
Health care is an economic case where the assumptions that make a free market efficient don't apply. When providers have the ability to literally say "pay what we ask or die... and decide right now," there's not a lot of economic leverage available. And, worse, people making these decisions are often sick, in pain, unconscious, woozy from painkillers, or in the grips of Alzheimer's disease, and can't shop around. Unless they have insurance. But the insurance company's profit comes from kicking people off of the insurance if they get sick. The insurance companies that are most successful in figuring out ways to terminate coverage of people who are sick out-compete the ones who don't. After a while, all of the insurance companies do this-- the ones who don't go out of business.
As a society, we have made a decision that we don't think it's right to turn people back at the emergency room just because they can't pay. So, one way or another we are paying for the health care of people who can't pay. The only question is, are we going to do this in a thought-out way? Or in a makeshift, not-thought-out way?
First, because that's not actually what he said, and second, because this is a news site, and that is not news, it's just repeating what he said in 2007.
Rules and Regulations dictated from on high by some collection of bureaucrats—whose greatest achievement was to convince even dumber people to cast "votes" for their election to office—are always going to be a fantasy.
I like to breathe. It's something I do every day. I'd like to breathe clean air, thank you. If you want to pollute, don't do it in my air
Volkswagen's problem was not that there wasn't technology available to clean the NOx out of the diesel emissions. Their problem was after deciding to license the clean diesel technology ("BlueTec") from Daimler, the CEO got pushed out and replaced by a new CEO who cancelled the deal and made a deliberate decision not to license BlueTec. This was because their engineers claimed that they could solve the problem using their own technology, turbocharged direct injection (TDI). http://www.wsj.com/articles/vw...
They were wrong.
So, the answer is that the technology was there, but Volkswagen had made a decision not to use it.
So VW decides to "fix" a problem that (technically) is a US only issue by greenwashing up a car they don't sell in the US.
The irony...
From the press release:
It was decided to switch over to installing only diesel drives with SCR and AdBlue technology in Europe and North America as soon as possible. Diesel vehicles will only be equipped with exhaust emissions systems that use the best environmental technology.
They are fixing the problem by putting in the exhaust cleaning diesel technologies that they had previously not put on their diesels (in the apparently mistaken belief that they would by able to solve the emissions problem without them.)
Providing a parking space probably costs a couple of orders of magnitude more than the additional cost of adding a charging point to one, given that firms give away parking for free your economic justification is already being ignored in most cases.
The stated problem is that people fight over the free electric-charging outlets, and unplug cars to plug their own cars in. If people fought over parking spaces and moved cars out of parking spaces so they could park their own cars, then charging for the parking spaces would be the economics solution.
So let them pay for the charging spot. Running wire is pretty cheap.
Accurate analysis from the very first post. This is a classic economics problem, overuse of a good that is given away for free; and has a classic economic solution: put a price on it.
This is silicon valley. Make an ap for them them to sign up for their spot online.
But yet the Russians didn't develop the Buran under the idea that it would be some sort of cost effective space taxi like the shuttle was sold to the American people as. The Buran (as revealed in the 2000s from soviet archives) was developed solely to avoid a "missile gap" situation with the US.
When the shuttle was announced the Soviets shrugged their shoulders, they already had something cost effective and didn't see the benefit of such a vehicle for them. When the size of the cargo hold was announced they raised an eyebrow. But when the wing specs where revealed there was no longer any question that the shuttle was also intended for some very dangerous military applications, up to and probably including the covert testing of weapons in space in such a way that the Soviets wouldn't know the Outer Space Treaty was being broken until it was too late and there was a proven killsat over Moscow.
No it wasn't. The wing specs were because the DoD spec was to be able to launch into polar orbit, deploy a satellite, and land at the launch site on the same orbit. The Earth will have rotated about ~1500 miles in that time, so it needed 1500 miles of cross-range to get back to the launch site. That set the size of the wings.
Of course most of their suspicions where true.
If those really were their suspicions, none of them were true.
Frankly, the shuttle would have made a lousy weapons platform-- too big, too fragile, too visible. Really a weapon isn't useful when there are only two places it can launch from, and any launch is telegraphed weeks in advance and is visible from hundreds of miles away.
Nothing to do with copyright law.
It has everything to do with copyright law. It's what the company is using in order to claim that they have a right to keep information from the court.
No, even if they would show the code, it wouldn't become magically free software or public domain. What they claim here is that they want to keep a trade secret.
Correct. It has nothing to do with copyright law. The intellectual property law here is trade secret law.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/vw...
That article explains a lot.
So, VW hired a top engineer away from Daimler to revamp the VW line. He brought in clean-diesel technology ("BlueTec") licensed from Daimler, but the engineers at VW hated the idea of licensing technology from a rival, because they said they could do just as good with the turbocharged direct injection designs that they'd been working on for years. Nevertheless, VW went through with an engine design with the licensed BlueTec, made a prototype engine... and then the CEO got pushed out, the chief engineer got pushed out a month later, and the new CEO put the engineers who'd opposed licensing outside technology in charge of making a new VW clean-diesel engine and cancelled the license from Daimler. So, they had essentially doubled down on the bet that they could do just as good on efficiency and NOx emissions without licensing the Daimler BlueTec, And right as they did that, the new CEO announced ambitious targets for selling clean diesels in the US.
The story is beginning to make a bit more sense now.
More likely:
Manager: "Hey, you promised a year ago that you could hit both NOx and MPG targets by Oct. 1. It's September already. How close are you to done?"
Engineers: "We promised what? You're sure? We said it would be a software fix? Really? OK, software guys- what's the hold up?"
Software engineers: "The guy who promised that left to join Facebook a year ago."
Manager: "Tough. Will you have the problem solved by Friday, or do I have to ask headquarters for another week?"
Software engineers: "This is a tough problem. I'm not sure it can even be done, but even if it can, it will take a year to do it right."
Manager: "I don't care about doing it right. Bash something together to make it pass the damn tests. Just do it."
Software: "It's really hard...
Manager: "OK, you have until Monday. Or you're all fired."
Software: "Uh, you said anything? As long as it makes the problem go away?"
Manager: "I'm giving you carte blanche. Don't worry about documentation, total quality, all that ISO s@#!t, I'll cover for you. Just make it pass the test."
Software: "Anything, huh? OK, we're on it."
The link does not go to the article. Could somebody post the actual link?
Here are some other sources:
http://www.newser.com/story/21...
http://www.theguardian.com/bus...
http://www.npr.org/sections/th...
For example, I have had a couple of occasions of fraud on my account - they both happened when the "accounts got out" (massive breach of the credit union's credit card file). The first racked up three charges for $900.00 in Japan The next was a flight in India (in rupees) that came to well over $1,000 plus the foreign currency conversion fee. However, I have had the same card processor block the card and deny the purchases when I made two orders Newegg.com in the same day. The "fraud detection" is completely broken.
Isn't it likely that they blocked the new egg purchases because the account was hacked and previous purchases that day were fraudulent?
Closing the barn door after the horse got out-- but there may have been other horses in the barn that could get out.