How about we stop trying to make one plane do everything? Build something small, fast, and minimal for dogfights. Build something with more range and capacity for when that's needed. Don't cripple the pilot's ability to use the tool, either.

And I always use a link on my menu bar, never a toolbar -- interesting how user method changes perception like that.

[goes to check]

Looks like IXQuick/Startpage has reverted to the old layout (that was quick) which would explain why today it again works fine without javascript. The 'upgraded' page quite definitely did not. Plus it was hard on aging eyes. Fucking pastels everyone has suddenly gotten into...

DDG used to require JS to work, but doesn't now.

Coast to coast still wouldn't be that big of a deal. The SR-71 Blackbird flew from LA to Washington DC in 64 minutes 20 seconds.

> I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people setting the Gobi Desert

Nomadic herders have lived there for a long time. Lately they are building a massive copper and gold mine:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

So I expect there is a pretty big mining town to support the mine. You believe in Mars colonies now?

> No one's mining asteroids or setting up camp on Mars.

Half a dozen billionaires are trying to prove you wrong. How many companies have you started?

You can't troll someone who spent a career in aerospace, and has written a book on space systems engineering [ http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/S... ] when it comes to space systems design. You especially can't troll me when you are
an anonymous coward, and I have the same user name here as on Wikibooks, and can thus prove I wrote that book. Now go away, or I
shall taunt you a second time.

> The problem with orbital mining is that it depends on the presence of orbital manufacturing.

I'm sorry, but that's a very confused statement. It is quite possible to build a space tug that mines rock from an asteroid, and delivers it to another orbit where it is needed. If the need is for radiation shielding, then no manufacturing steps are required. The more general flow of industry goes:

Extraction -> Raw Materials Processing -> Ready to Use Materials -> Parts Fabrication -> Assembly

Using steel as an example, iron ore, coal, and limestone are extracted at their respective mines. They are combined in a blast furnace to process them into iron. The iron is further processed into a particular alloy of steel, in a useful shape (sheet, bar, rod, etc). This is the ready to use material. The steel is fed to machine tools to make finished parts, which are then assembled into some kind of machine, like a car engine.

Parts fabrication and assembly are together called manufacturing, but they are not necessary if your space product is usable as a material. For example, some asteroids contain hydrated minerals. If you heat them to 200-400C, the hydrates will decompose to water + a different mineral. The water can then be used as water by human crew, or further processed to oxygen and hydrogen by electrolysis for rocket fuel. The dehydration furnace and electrolysis units can come from Earth, ready to use. In fact, the Space Shuttle used the reverse process in a fuel cell, combining H2 and O2 to make water and electricity.

Shielding, water, and fuel are commonly needed items in space, so it makes sense to bring up equipment to produce them, if you can produce more than their weight in products. The actual return ratios are in the range of 100:1, meaning for each 1 ton of asteroid tugs and furnaces, you eventually get 100 tons of products. When launch costs are high, it makes a lot of sense to do that. More complicated manufacturing, like turning metallic asteroids into parts and machines, will come later, if it makes economic sense.

...the biggest reason middle-class rentals are disappearing is because there's no money in it. At best, you might cover your costs, but more likely costs will exceed income, by as much as 50%. Who in their right mind would own middle-class rentals when they're so likely to be a financial loss??

It is far, far cheaper to rent. Yeah, you don't build equity, but you also just pay rent. You don't pay tax, insurance, and maintenance that exceeds the value of a middle-class home, and which can bring your total outlay to half again more than the mortgage payment.

Home buying benefits realtors and mortgage lenders a whole lot more than it does home buyers.

That's actually why I decided not to use Dropbox, Backblaze, etc -- because more often than not, the file I want back is on some HD not presently connected, and would therefore look "deleted" to the backup software... so it would be deleted from the remote backup as well. This is probably fine for a business box that doesn't have removeables come and go. Not so fine for my use.

The cycling orbit space habitat mentioned in the article is almost the answer. You add to it asteroid mining from nearby orbits. That gives you radiation shielding and a source of fuel, oxygen, food, etc. Now you can send lots of people to Mars without having to use a big rocket each time.

More details:

The Earth-Mars space is full of small asteroids. 12,750 have been found so far. Some of them will be a small delta-V (velocity change) from a transfer orbit that goes from Earth to Mars and back. So you send a space tug ahead of time to one of them, grab a few hundred tons of rock, and move it to the desired orbit. Later you launch a crew habitat surrounded by empty storage lockers. You stuff the rock into the lockers, and now you have radiation shielding for the crew.

On the repeating trip to Mars, your crew in transit can process the rock to extract water, oxygen, carbon, and other useful items. This is both supplies for the transit crew, and forward supplies to deliver to Phobos. If you run low on raw rock, you send your space tug out to fetch some more. Eventually they can install a greenhouse and start growing their own food too.

Eventually you carry a habitat module to Phobos, and repeat the mining operation, because Phobos is a great big asteroid. Build up enough fuel and supplies, and send a lander down to the surface. Compared to bringing everything from Earth with a Big Fucking Rocket, this is way way cheaper.

That's a problem, yeah. I think it would depend on whether "intent to defraud" could be demonstrated, and whether it gets prosecuted as "theft of services"... there's a fine can of worms, considering that Facebook users are the product being sold by Facebook. Are they thereby defrauding their advertisers??

(In the U.S., generally you can call yourself whatever you like so long as there's no intent to defraud.)

This was 2001. At the time there weren't all that many options in free FTP hosts, let alone with decent bandwidth. Walnut Creek's FTP.CDROM.COM had been THE main archive host for the whole world for a decade, and a lot of scenes depended on it. Mirrors that could handle its level of traffic were rare to nonexistent, and often limited to university use. Bandwidth/hosting was still expensive and even our puny 4GB archive was still a LOT of data (IIRC total data was about 300GB). So yeah, single point of failure wasn't a good thing, but you can't entirely blame facepalmworthy users here. We used what we had. And it failed us. Mirrors have since proliferated and hosting/bandwidth have become cheap, so today's self-appointed experts think the world was always that way and anyone who did different was too stupid to live.

And they fail to consider that anyone with a good printer and an editing program can whip up a convincing driver's license, certainly good enough to pass muster as a photocopy.

And yet there are over 500 Facebook users right now with the same rather unconvincing 'real name' as my own account.