NASA probably would not be in the business of fixing satellites for other people, just their own. Once the technology is available, other people will likely take it up as a profit-making business. Not having to write off $300 million satellites when they break is worth billions a year. The most qualified "satellite repair dudes" will be the original satellite makers, since they know the most about them in the first place.

The satellite maintenance we have studied and performed (Hubble, and the Space Station) always assumed the satellite was designed for it. That means a "grapple fixture" (a hard point designed for grabbing), and provisions to change out equipment or refuel. Most satellites today are not designed for maintenance, because there is no way to do it. Hubble and the Station have access to robot arms, EVA humans with tools, etc. Satellites in GEO don't.

Once a service station is available (and an orbital tug to bring satellites to it), you can be sure the design of satellites will be changed to use it. Right now a single part breaking, or running out of fuel makes you write off a $300 million satellite. That's a hell of an incentive to make it fixable.

Messing with someone else's satellite is highly illegal, and sure to be noticed. Multiple nations can track satellites, so it's not like you can sneak up on it. Snagging an uncooperative or dead satellite is more like a salvage operation. You are likely to damage delicate parts like solar arrays or antennae. You might get some useful parts out of it, but not likely a fully functioning satellite, because it wasn't designed to be taken apart and put back together. Second-hand satellite parts, and reducing future orbital debris hazards might be enough reason to do it, with permission of the owners, if you can do it cheaply enough.

> The solar industry will continue to tout capacity rather than actual generation because most folks don't understand the difference.

The solar industry reports capacity because the whole electrical industry uses that to size their wires, from transmission lines to the wiring in your house. Every electrical device you plug into the wall outlet has peak power draw listed in Watts or Amps. That's so you don't overload the circuit (typically 20 Amps or 2400 Watts). In the same way, transmission lines that carry power from plants to cities have a maximum capacity, and the grid operator has to know what peak power level each source can provide.

What you are calling "actual generation" is just "energy", or power x time. For a power plant, it's typically listed as "Peak capacity (MW) x capacity factor (%) x 8766 hours (in a year) = Energy output (MWh)". The capacity factor is the average output divided by the peak output. It varies from 90% for nuclear, to as low as 15% for solar in a bad location like Seattle (not recommended). Every power plant, without exception, has less than 100% capacity factor, although the reasons vary. A hydroelectric dam might theoretically run nearly all the time, since individual turbines can be shut for maintenance. But that does not account for weather. During a drought, there may not be enough water behind the dam to keep running at full power.

The job of a grid operator is to have enough power sources and transmissions lines to meet demand every minute of every day. That demand varies all the time: daytime vs night and weekends, seasonal cycles, weather variations. They prefer to use generating plants with the lowest operating costs first. So solar, wind, hydro, etc. that don't burn fuels are the preferred choice when available. They also prefer to use long-running plants like nuclear for "base load", the demand at the lowest point of the day, because they are slow to start and stop. "Dispatchable" plants (like Hydro), which can be turned on and off quickly are preferred to adjust supply to match demand as it varies. It's not as simple as "X is better than Y"

The grid operator also has to have enough reserve capacity for when something unexpected happens. A severe storm could knock out a bunch of demand (by downing distribution lines, or people are snowed in and don't go to work, thus businesses stay closed). A power plant can shut down unexpectedly, and other sources have to fill in. A heat wave or cold snap could drastically affect demand.

> It will stop once they realize that all crypto currencies are in fact traceable via their block chain.

No, they are not. There are such things as "paper wallets" (containing the private key to a bitcoin address). You can hand over such a wallet to another person, without creating a transaction on the block chain. There are also services built on top of the block chain - ChangeTip ( https://www.changetip.com/ ) is an example. People can send tips to each other, and it is internal to ChangeTip's books until you want to withdraw. Finally, there are more than one cryptocurrency. If you privately exchange bitcoins for litecoins, you break the traceability, because there is nothing to show that the two transactions, which happen about the same time, are connected. On a single chain they are, because balances explicitly are sent from one address to another.

> because smart people do not seek government employ.

That's a simplification. Smart people are discouraged from government employ because the pay scale is low. The Federal general salary (GS) scale tops out at 100-130K per year. However, other factors, like job security, not having to work very hard, or power over other people's lives can compensate for the low pay. A really interesting job can also attract smart people. Civilian U.S. astronauts are on the GS scale, and thus they top out at the same salaries as other federal employees. But they have a *really* interesting job, and I think all of them are pretty smart (I've met and worked with half a dozen or so).

The human eye has a resolution of 1 arc-minute (1/60th of a degree), and so on a display that fills 90 degrees horizontally you can resolve 5400 pixels. The retina and brain do some fancy processing so that you can detect narrow linear features smaller than that. It's a kind of image sharpening, but it goes beyond the light sensing cells in the eye. For non-linear features like a checkerboard, 1 arc-minute is the limit.

So unless we are talking surround-screen, there isn't much reason to go past 4K, and no reason to go past 8K. In fact, you only see a small part of your field of view at full resolution. Stare at some icon or symbol on this page, and try to read anything else without moving your eyes. You can't. Your eyes have variable resolution away from the fovea, and make up for it by moving around.

The story is deeper than that. The Chinese liked to get paid in silver for their products (tea, porcelain, silk). Unfortunately silver is what the British money was made of (the pound sterling meant a pound of sterling silver = 92.5% pure). So it was creating a currency shortage. Britain thus wanted a product to balance trade and stop the silver outflow. Opium was that product.

The Chinese didn't want their people hooked on Opium, so they made it illegal. British trading companies that supplied the opium (it was grown in India at the time) formed a cartel to bring it in illegally, thus becoming the first drug cartel. When their people got arrested and goods seized, the British government forced China to submit in what is known as the Opium Wars. They acquired Hong Kong in the process. Later, the now legalized trading companies needed financing for the ships to deliver the expanded opium trade. So they founded the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Company. Now known as HSBC, one of the largest banks in the world, it is no stranger to laundering money for cartels, because it was*founded* by drug cartel members. To this day they print paper bank notes (currency) for Hong Kong. This makes money laundering really easy, because they can give you a suitcase of brand new money, with no traceable history.

> Modern heavy weaponry is not allowed to be owned and without it no citizenry could stand up against a government willing to use said heavy weaponry against their citizens.

This is a stupid argument. Anyone with an understanding of military doctrine knows you don't fight toe-to-toe with a well-armed force. You fight asymmetrically, and go for their weak spots. For example, infect some MRE's (field rations) with a deadly toxin, but don't announce which ones. They then waste a lot of time and energy figuring out how to feed the troops. You can similarly contaminate fuel supplies upstream of the supply depots. It's one thing to detect an IED in a dirt road, the metal parts stand out. It's quite another to detect one underneath a metal manhole cover. The list goes on.

They aren't, ever, for the same reason you have more than one kind of tool in a toolbox. 3D printers are very useful, but they can't wind electric motor coils or populate circuit boards with chips, both of which are needed in a decent machine. A collection of different machines, however, can collectively make the parts for each other, and they can all be controlled by shared software and parts files. Such a collection is called a "machine shop" or "factory", though, rather than a 3D printer.

> no way in hell I would have shelled out the $90 (+$10 for HD) they were charging for it.

I don't watch professional sports, but I do see my neighbor's house fill up with half a dozen cars at the appropriate times. I always assumed for PPV events, people would just pack in at whoever's house had the best TV and couches and split the cost. $16 a head is not too painful.

Just ask them how they feel about Elon Musk - his companies are manufacturing and installing solar panels, batteries, and electric cars, and he's worth billions personally.

> Why don't you show how the current climate changing has anything to do with mankind. The burden of proof of that is on you.

That the concentration of CO2 has risen by 40%, and that CO2 prevents heat from escaping the Earth, thus warming it, are facts that don't need proving. The issue is where is the CO2 coming from? Along with the total concentration going up, the ratio of Carbon-13 to Carbon-12 is changing. Plants slightly prefer the lighter isotope, because it diffuses and reacts faster. The only sources of enough plant-based carbon to account for the 120 ppm added added to the atmosphere are fossil fuels (which were plants once), and deforestation. Both of those are human caused changes. Inorganic sources of CO2, like volcanoes, don't care about isotopes. They don't cause a shift in the ratio, and thus are not the source.

Ice cores keep a record of volcanic eruptions (dust gets trapped), and CO2 levels (trapped bubbles), and the respective isotopes. The oxygen component also has isotopes, that let you measure temperature (water with Oxygen-16 evaporates faster than Oxygen-18). Trees record weather patterns in their growth rings, and solar activity in their Carbon-14 content. Combine all of these, and we have a good historical record going back about a million years and four ice ages. The current changes look nothing like the natual cycles in the past.

> These guys deny science because of greed.

Oh, the fossil fuel industry believes in science when it comes to geology and chemistry, that's where they make their money. I think deep in their hearts they believe in climate change too, but push the anti- view simply because it will give them a few more years to sell their product. The writing is already on the wall. India just raised their solar target to 8% of electric capacity in the next few years. China is installing 20 GW this year. Dubai for fuck's sake is installing massive amounts of solar panels, and they are a middle Eastern oil state. Courtesy of their sunny climate, the newest solar farms are coming in cheaper than fossil fuel. Renewable energy is being put in for the most unstoppable reason - it's becoming cheaper than the alternatives.

> Contrary to all the theories that – that they are expounding, there should have been warming over the last 15 years. It hasn't happened," said Cruz."

Being from a hot state, Cruz should know that a drink doesn't warm up while the ice is melting. Melting ice takes the equivalent of raising water temperature by 70C, that's why it is so effective in your cold drinks. Well, the world's ice is melting - the Arctic ocean, Greenland, northern permafrost, mountain glaciers, and in the last few years Antarctica. That's soaking up a lot of the heating. And what he's talking about is air temperature, while a 5000 times larger heat sink, the oceans, are being ignored. They are also warming, as evidenced by ocean temperature measurements, but also by global average sea level rise as the water warms and expands. Once the atmosphere warmed a few degrees, which it has, on balance heat is flowing from the air to the water and ice. But the atmosphere is the smallest heat sink. The heat is going elsewhere.

> I know, right? It wasn't aliens that built the pyramids, or anything supernatural. It's stupid to think that.

Exactly. A civil engineer wanted to figure out how the pyramids were built, so he went around asking the experts - Egyptian stonemasons (modern ones). The most plausible answer they came up with is the "shadouf" - the lever and water bag device for raising water from the Nile to irrigate fields. Pretty much everyone at the time would have been familiar with it. To raise stones for the pyramids, just build a bigger, sturdier version. A 5:1 leverage ratio makes a 2 ton block an 800 lb lift. A bunch of workers hanging their body weight on the lever end would raise the stone a foot or two. You prop the stone with some timbers, shorten the lifting rope, and repeat. When the stone gets to the next level of the pyramid, you rotate the lever arm horizontally and pivot the stone to the next step. A series of shadoufs like this could raise a stream of stones step by step up the pyramid.

In comparison to dragging the stones up a giant dirt ramp (which there is no evidence for), levering the stones up is immensely easier. You merely climb up one step, put your foot in a rope loop, and let gravity do the rest.