Posts by You're all dinosaurs

"lubricious"...best adjective for porn I have EVER heard

Smart phones?

Does anyone need work computers to do a bit of social slacking these days? Smart phones have surely made it easy to slack off anywhere, anytime.

Anthropocentric vs anthropomorphic

A good day for those in the anti-ACC camp, but are we supposed to believe that a rise in volcanism AND cloud-inducing cosmic rays has somehow caused global climate change at the same time as a massive rise in the human output of CO2 and other greenhouse gases, along with a sharp reduction in global forest cover? Isn't that an anthropocentric argument like believing the Earth is the centre of the universe?

That's quite a clusterfuck of coincidences, and seems to me more difficult to accept than that climate might be affected by 6billion+ people burning a billion years of stored hydrocarbons and ramping up industrialised and highly methanogenic agriculture.

PS - I generally favour the ACC argument on the precautionary priniciple. If we make the world a better place and ACC turns out to be wrong later, that's not the worst outcome.

Lack of development killed the Shuttle

The sad fact is that lack of development killed the Shuttle, and that's as much the US government's fault as it was NASA's. Instead of commissioning a lighter, safer, more powerful, and more efficient Shuttle for the mid-90s, first there was the adsurdly over-ambitious Freedom station, then an attempt to start from scratch and build over-ambitious SSTOs, then they panicked and tried to reinvent the Apollo programme with Constellation.

All the time, there was a platform that could have been incrementally developed and improved, but there was no policital capital in it, and the aerospace industry didn't really want Shuttle to become more efficient than expendables like Atlas V, so I'm sure they lobbied heavily to keep every NASA project in development hell, so the pork kept flowing with no results.

Space power

Could this be of use to the space industry? There must be huge amounts of radio energy washing out from the sun, through the Earth's radiation belts. Jupiter and Saturn are allegedly awash with radio energy - could probes use this to recharge their batteries instead of carrying radioisotopic power generators?

The poet Lewirate

Some classic LP hyperbolae here - it's not like the Spirit and Opportunity rovers haven't survived months of Martian winters, not as cold but much longer, on just batteries. A lunar night should be easygoing for 21st century batteries.

And before you start refuelling satellites from the moon, I'm not sure how you turn water into the hydrazine typically used for satellites. Not that most satellite operators want to keep them in orbit beyond 20 years - most satellites comfortably pay back their costs and quite a lot more by the time they're retired, and then it's time to replace them with something bigger and better. There's no evidence of a demand for on-orbit refuelling or life extension, except maybe for military sats or megastructures like the ISS.

And before we go poking around in lava tubes, hadn't we better check for Selenites, Clangers and Soup Dragons?

It's 'analogue', not 'analog'

FFS. I thought this was a British website?

And economics hasn't changed because of computers. In any content medium, scarcity equals value and quality equals loyalty. What the 'digital' economy does is to reduce both by producing lots of low-quality content (look at news), which is why content providers like Sky are now focussed on buying so-called 'quality' content and restricting it available because there's an awful lot of rubbish available for free.

Cheap underground wireless?

I've thought for a while that mesh might me a good way to get WiFi and voice on the underground or in buildings with poor mobile reception, with no need to install expensive WiFi hotspots (expensive for both users and the provider).

It might not work well at the edges of the transport network, but on a city like London, every stations in Zone 1 is often has thousands of people whose phones could form a daisy chain to the surface, and these are never turned off, even when they're out of cover. The actual cost per user would be tiny because there are lots of them and they're copnstantly moving. It might even work in the tunnels when trains are sufficiently close to each other during rush hour.

Far from being a money loser for the network operator, this could be a siginificant value-add for a low outlay - they might just need to put a bundle of WiFi hotspots in easy-to-reach places near the station entrance. In London, for instance, the Tube WiFi trials are being conducted by O2, leaving 3, Voda, Orange et al with no benefit.

I take no responsibility for the social consequences of filling every tube carriage with idiots barking into their phones.

Unnamed sources

Are worth about as much as the paper they're printed on, and this is the Daily Heil, which hates everything the BBC does - so a heart-threatening dose of salt is probably justified when considering the truth of the story.

Not to mention it's repeating a story from last November, when YouView chairman Kip Meek was pretty honest about the difficulty of meeting the Easter launch target.

So wrong it's hard to know where to start

As already pointed out, moving a satellite doesn't cause a massive drain in fuel, and many satellites have lived long and productive lives despite being shuffled about several times during their lives.

Terrestar-1 is intended for use with small, portable handheld terminals using an aerial, not a dish, because it uses S-band instead of C-band or Ku-band.

And is it useful? Well, if you think offering low-cost communications to the poor is a good idea, then duh! Africa is building cellphone networks fast, but for remote locations they're still expensive compared to satellite, especially a satellite that's already in orbit. Unless you;re as patronising as UBFusion, that is.

Tiles of death

I bought a second-hand original Roomba, but every time I set it on the kitchen floor, the edge detection that's supposed to stop it falling down stairs would get confused by the black-and-white floor tile pattern, and I'd find it hopelessly spinning around until its battery ran flat.

I accept that the state of the art has advanced a long way in four years.

BolBoldenly going where no-one's gone before

"Vision without resources is a hallucination."

Bolden isn't wrong, but it's a bitter pill. For decades the Senate and Congress gave NASA just enough money to keep people in their constituencies employed, but never enough to achieve its goals, whether they were a better Shuttle, a new launch vehicle, the original ISS design, or a chance of actually getting to the Moon or Mars in our lifetimes.

Obama and Bolden have called their bluff, and they don't like it. Earth orbit is going to be a private enterprise and NASA's goal should be travelling beyond that. What Bolden should do is define a clear set of goals for achieving that which will spur both commercial spaceflight and research into interplanetary flight

A space programme that might deliver something

It's refreshing to see an attempt to make NASA live within its means, instead of always funding projects which would only happen if Congress suddenly turned round and agreed to massively increase funding. Constellation was nothing but Bush-era flag-waving, politics to keep people in NASA-related industries in jobs, even though the Moon was an unachievable goal, let alone Mars.

What Obama has also done is push international cooperation in manned spaceflight, which is the only way humanity will ever get anywhere beyond Earth orbit for more than flag-waving exercises. International cooperation is anathema to the neocons, and to their counterparts in Russia and China. Fortunately, as the ISS has shown, once the ball is rolling the scientists and engineers tend to just get on with working out how to do the thing with what they've got, while the bullshitters and demagogues continue to spout their only real product, hot air.

It seems unwise?

You're not f**cking joking? The ISS may not be the super-research outpost we all hoped for, but it's already returned a lot of research on the long-term effects of human spaceflight, generated huge amounts of experience in spacecraft design, orbital construction and repair techniques, automated docking systems, and when it finally reaches a state where it can carry a minimally-reasonable crew size to do some real science, they want to can it?

Contracts with SpaceX demonstrate that the ISS is even starting to encourage the private space sector, which is the real hope for manned spaceflight.

For the money they've spent bailing out AIG and car industry we could all go the Moon, Mars and a few NEOs. Christ on a bike

Walk before you can run

Why do you morons always think the first one is going to be the finished product? It's obviously not going to be the Heinlein power armour, just a step in that direction. It's not even a field prototype, FFS