When I read the title, I assumed immediately that the intent was to use the word, 'queue' in appropriate context: Line'em up. Sorry, you blew it.

Boy, ain't that the truth. Ad, having a GS-5 doing the keyword reviews doesn't work well either.

Beat me to it...

There's a tendency now to try to use more common components in new satellites, especially for meteorology birds, while there's always new science, adapting existing hardware to do the work means you might get a couple of instruments on different spaceframes, and not cost as much as the gee-whiz one-offs. Someone already mentioned that R&D, testing, SRM&QA and launch services cost a bunch. If we COULD accomplish this, then restoring capabilities on-orbit would be great.

NASA had a "Flight Telerobotic Servicer" project in the early 90's. Don't know where it went but it did get a fair bit of support and a lot of good engineering talent was pointed at it. From my interactions with DARPA projects in the past, there's a fair chance that something useful will come out of this, even if the whole program is over-ambitious.

Then there's the problem of shadowing/shading you pointed out. In a pure ray tracer, everything has that unnatural shiny/bright look. This is because you trace rays from the screen back to the light source. Works fine for direct illumination but the real world has lots of indirect illumination that gives the richness of shadows we see. For that you need something else like radiosity or photon mapping, and that has different costs.

Forgive my ignorance, but I don't quite understand why ray tracing can't handle indirect illumination. Wouldn't the traced ray modify the intensity and color of the (eventually found) light source with each bounce? Or is the problem that when you cast one ray per pixel you only get the contribution from a single light source in the end?

Well, considering that the critical mass of pure plutonium-239 is about 10kg, I would say the risk of 8g of thorium going critical is fairly small. That's not to say I believe this will ever work though.

The quoted statement doesn't make sense either. Subcritical only means that there is no self-sustaining nuclear reaction, not that there are no reactions taking place. I haven't RTFA but it sounds like whoever wrote it didn't understand what was going on.

This feature alone makes it way better than facebook for me. It's so easy to send messages only to close friends, or colleagues, etc. And I can easily choose to only view messages from specific groups as well. With facebook it always feels like everything you write or do is visible to everyone. And everything someone else does is visible to me, which is not optimal either.

Yep, same here. I pay a high price for premium channels and yet I can't see much of what I want to see. And when / if they finally do air it here, it's not in HD. While I can get an HD version of it the same day it airs in the US. A case of the pirated alternative being a better product. I still keep paying for the channels though, even if I rarely use them. Maybe I shouldn't though (the whole "vote with your wallet" thing).

Do you need consent in a public location? Honest question, I'm not from the US. In Sweden you can film, record audio and take as many pictures as you like in any public place including inside buildings.

When the limit is reached, there will still be coin to be made from mining (though it wouldn't really be mining) from transaction fees. When mining become prohibitively expensive people will stop mining, which will decrease the difficulty and make it (slightly) profitable again. Either that or people don't stop mining and operate at a loss. Neither scenario has any impact on the usability of bitcoin.

Yup, agreed. Doesn't mean it doesn't have a future though. Might not be likely, but not impossible either.

got it, thanks!

If anyone has an invite I'd gladly accept it at wallin.gustav at gmaildotcom. Thanks!

If not the exact technology, the concept was first bandied about in the early days of Space Station Freedom design and development. Among other things, Space Station was supposed to lead to a Closed Environmental Life Support System that included reprocessing urine, atmospheric condensate and, well, yeah, fecal water into water of sufficient quality for drinking and even medical uses. A lot of work, by quality scientists and engineers went into this. In 1992, an experiment flew in SpaceLab on STS-47 that demonstrated taking Kennedy Space Center tap water, storing it in a closed container for 90 days, and running it through a process/apparatus called SWIS (Sterile Water for Injection System) to create water that was demonstrably "ultra-pure water for injection" per the US Pharmacopaea. Oh, and it worked, too. Making waste water into something drinkable is considerably simpler.

A poster commented on the potential for cross-transfer of large molecular weight compounds across the ultrafiltration membrane... Unlikely unless it's got holes, and they'd become obvious by the "filtration" rate.

Hm, my bank never took a cut from my debit card. The credit cards I have don't either, unless I don't pay the bills the same month I made the purchases. Where do banks do this?

Here in Sweden, there have actually been plans (don't know the status) to add a fee to cash withdrawals. This is to reduce cash circulation, in an attempt to minimize robberies (no cash in stores, not much to rob).