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Pipedot story.

I will keep a constant attention to your articles. Really good stuff!

Why are people so against the advertisers? I'm not a huge fan of most web ads, but fighting click fraud seems like a nobel goal. If I pay for advertising, I'd like to ensure that I'm paying for the right number of views.

On the otherside, if your ad is being distributed widely enough to enough sites, advertisers aren't being stolen from. They are just paying higher rates than they realized. Instead of paying 0.10 US per ad view they may actually be paying 1.00, if 1 out of every ten views is fraudulent. Like any kind of ads, they have to do their own calculations to see if they are getting enough return on their spending.

With almost everything the gov't does, they take the lowest bid, and it still comes out more expensive and half the quality it should have been...

What's the point of floating cities on Venus anyway?

From the article:

A new study by researchers at the Systems Analysis and Concepts Directorate, part of the NASA Langley Research Center, suggests astronauts could circle Venus in a helium-inflated dirigible -- conducting science experiments as they orbit.

So no cities to live in, but research platforms.

I know the difference between the energies of different ranges on the EM spectrum. I also know More than a little bit about oxidation and the effects of UV on plastics. The properties of the average plastics we use in daily life are usually a balance of desired performance and affordability. With this project being an important scientific endeavor, I don't think cost will be as important a factor. That's all I'm saying.

What's the point of floating cities on Venus anyway? I mean, if the population is going to be stuck in a tin-can anyway, you might as well do it in a tin-can that is /going/ somewhere or can do something useful. At least on a Mars colony you nominally have easier access to local resources, but - except for some highly polluted atmosphere - Venus doesn't even offer that. Focus on L-4 and -5 space platforms, asteroid mining, even interstellar generation ships; all would be more productive uses of our resources than bobbing about in Venus's atmosphere.

I've never been a fan of planetary colonization anyway; short of finding a 1-in-a-million life-bearing planet, we're probably better off remaining in space; we're going to be stuck in artificial habitats no matter where we go, and we can find the same resources in solar orbit.

Life has spent 2 billion years crawling out a deep gravity well; there's no reason we have to immediately dive right back in.

Different kind of radiation. Earth's atmosphere does a very good job to protect us from cosmic and gamma rays. That's great since those are the biggest problem. And that's were the real value of the protection of Venus' atmosphere lies. Earth's atmosphere also protects us from UV rays, but with less efficiency the lower their frequency is. According to the article Venus gets 40% more solar energy than Earth at the same height. So I just assume, that Venus also gets 40% more of hard UV light. When it comes to radiation exposure for the crew or instruments, this does not matter at all. Even hardest UV light is that easily blocked, that this aspect does not even require a special thought. However, UV radiation ages plastics. Sure, it won't be the everyday plastics, which make up our deck furniture. But with much stronger UV radiation, greater heat, and perhaps exposure to sulfuric acid it is not the everyday environment.

All I can think of (which are not correct, and TV shows) are the Jetsons, and the Oblongs. And also The Time Machine.

I didn't know that pipedot was chuck full of NASA scientists. You guys read the title and immediately started screaming ACID! ROBOT! didn't you?

If you read the fine article or even the fine summary you'll see that there are actual scientists doing this research who did an actual study about all your concerns and probably more, which you can't have considered in five seconds or maybe will never think of in a life time. Nobody is here to see how ignorant you are, please don't vandalize pipedot like this.

Anyway, does anyone remember that movie in which the elite lived on cities above the clouds and the mutated peasants on the ground?

If the atmosphere really does offer good protection from radiation at that altitude, there should be plastics that can handle the UV. These wouldn't be the everyday plastics that make up your deck furniture, but there are lots of plastic additives that can modify the UV stability of a polymer without changing its performance.

I guess you completely missed the point that the habitat is only a small part of the entire structure.

Correct; if pressure is the same (1.0 at 49.5 km), and temperature is essentially the same (20-37C at 52.5-54 km), then density is 1.5, since the composition is essentially pure carbon dioxide. The buoyancy of an air-filled aerostat is then 0.5, compared to about 0.9 for a helium-filled aerostat at sea level on earth.

That necessitates the structure of the aerostat being extremely lightweight.

I've never needed extra credit :P

Anyhow, a space suit with a nuclear battery and oxygen generation capabilities, it would only leave heat or pressure.. as I'm no space suit engineer, I'm pretty sure that the temp increasing to 460+ C or pressure approaching 93 bar would do some irreparable harm to the integrity of the space suit, allowing boiling hot sulfuric acid into your lungs.. yummy.

Fixed.

Same pressure. And only 75 instead of462 degrees celsius. Certainly not same composition. This does not make it 'the same as it is at sea level on Earth'. And it might not have the heavy concentration of sulfuric acid as on ground level, but is the atmosphere in 50km height totally free of it?

I guess you COMPLETELY MISSED the point of these aerostats floating at an altitude where the Venus atmosphere is exactly the same as it is at sea level on Earth.

well, we're imagining a space suit that could keep you alive under normal conditions in space in the neighborhood of earth. So this theoretical space suit never runs out of air, and could indefinitely keep you alive in the same area of space that earth orbits. So no crazy heat shield other than that required around earth.

The point is that you probably wouldn't reach the sun ( think this is also true of any gas giants) , so how bad would Venus have to be to kill you before you hit the ground.

Extra credit if you show your work or conduct any experiments near the sun.

I'm pretty sure the "It also has a thin atmosphere of carbon dioxide that can be used to feed photosynthetic plants" part of the article is referring to Mars.

Probably when your oxygen, or heat source runs out.. that said, I don't think most spacesuits can survive temps upwards of 200C, and I'd be surprised if you didn't hit those temps somewhere around mercury (give or take a few thousand miles).

Ok, what about being shot into the sun? Assuming you're in a space suit capable of like support in open space, leaving from earth, at what point would you actually die? I imagine you wouldn't make it alive to the sun's corona, right?

Generally you are right. Sulfuric acid can be handled just fine.... under normal conditions on Earth. But on Venus? Constant high temperatures? Hard UV radiation? I'd say this rules out most normally usable plastics. Before people are put into such a balloon, I'd like to see them at least for a few years floating over Venus... UNMANNED.

It seems to have popped up in .cr.

Many plastics are resistant to sulfuric acid and for metals there are coatings and/or passivation techniques to reduce corrosion. Also "lightweight" is relative since the atmosphere is hundreds of times as dense as Earth's.

The cloud deck just happens to start at the postulated 50 km, and those clouds are composed of SULPHURIC ACID. How is the structure, necessarily extremely lightweight, going to withstand that kind of environment? There are also very high wind speeds.

On the surface, the idea is tantalizing, but even a cursory review of some of the gotchas pretty well relegates it to pure fantasy.

We can BEGIN to think seriously about colonies around other planets AFTER we've successfully sent a colony of mice there and back. Until that happens it's just nonsense.

Atmospheric pressure about the same as on earth at that height. Heat ~75 degrees Celsius. Here on earth we have much less heat and still devastating storms. I don't think I would feel save in a zeppelin. No way to do an emergency landing, and those glorified balloons are not known to be exceptionally fast. So not outrunning a storm.

Oh wow man you man it sound like... well.. basejumping into lava

You'd certainly go unconscious pretty quickly... extremely high temperatures combined with no oxygen and poison gases if you do try to take a breath. No doubt you'd have heat-stroke before you hit, but the human body doesn't just instantly shut-off when stressed beyond its limits. With the fall taking less than 2 minutes, you'd likely still be alive, even if pretty far gone.

If you fell out of this thing, would you die before you hit the ground?

That's the implication... It's a veiled threat to sabotage their own customers, out of spite. Verizon has bandied the same argument about with in the net neutrality debates regarding both their cellular and FIOS networks.

With FIOS it might sting the affected customers a bit, but would really just deliver more subscribers into the hands of cable companies, hurting Verizon even more. But with cellular, it's a particularly ridiculous claim, as they've recently been losing large numbers of customers to T-Mobile/Sprint, and have been forced to reluctantly cut their prices to reduce the churn. Failing to maintain their network would lose them even more customers, and require many further price cuts to maintain their position.

In another culture, there's a similar expression: "with hunger, the bread is never too hard." Same idea, but a bit more difficult to twist into the ridiculous thread that ensued from this comment.

I imagine if you can show a financial loss as a result of their shoddy security practices, they may be held liable in civil court and be required to pay compensation plus penalties, like any other organization.

This could very well be true. Most certainly I am discouraged from any relationship with them

This was done in response to the crappy new TLDs

spam

I think they probably mean that it would discourage investment BY VERIZON into building out their network, since they would be forced to let other companies use the infrastructure that they invested in building.

Isn't "discourage investment" one of those buzzwords that people throw around to scare others like "terrorism"? I mean has anyone ever seen a "discouraged investor" moping about and not investing elsewhere after someone decided to sue some other company. Let's get this straight, Verizon and ATT - the only investment this might discourage is in your stock. Thats says nothing about what this move would do to "investment" as whole, either nationally or globally. Are people actually so stupid that they'd swallow this verbal crap? Seriously?

...what the penalty to ICANN for exposing data?

Not long ago I saw a documentation about cheese/lactose/lactose intolerance in tv. One very strange fact was mentioned there, which is probably valid only for Europe: The percentage of people with lactose intolerance increases from the north to the south. However, at the same time the popular cheese in a region gets softer with a higher content of lactose in the same direction, i.e. the more you get south, the higher the lactose content. It is paradox that regions with the most lactose intolerant people prefer cheese with the highest lactose content.

Hard dry cheeses are quite a bit lower in lactose than, say, milk, but most other types are not:

http://www.stevecarper.com/li/list_of_lactose_percentages.htm

And "less lactose than milk" is still nowhere near lactose-free.

Most modern cheeses have cream or milk re-added after most of the fermentation is done. This re-adds some lactose. Under simple methods of fermentation, however, this isn't done. So the lactose level is reduced considerably more.

a food that triggered only mild symptoms on one occasion may cause more severe symptoms at another time.

...may cause...
This is only a possibility. This does not exclude, that many people never have a severe reaction. And it does not exclude that even if such a risk of a severe reaction does exist, it is so rare that it does not prevent the allergic persons to pass on their genes... An opportunity these persons might never have had, if they rather starved than accepted the risk.

Btw.. a friend of mine is allergic to flavour enhancers. Not really a big deal. He gets some minor skin problems. From time to time he says (more or less): "F**k it... today I want to eat my ". I doubt he would do it, if doing so he constantly would had the sword of Damocles of a deadly reaction over his head.

I looked for some statistics, but did not have much time. So this must be enough:
http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=15618

As many as one-third of peanut-sensitive patients have severe reactions, such as fatal and near-fatal anaphylaxis. ("Anaphylactic deaths in asthmatic patients," Allergy Proc., 1989)

I would interpret this that two-thirds never have fatal or near-fatal reactions.

The people who think allergies are psychological are morons though. I don't think that's what was happening here.

No, I'll take that back. I was right. Your link even states the truth:

Symptoms of a food allergy can range from mild to severe. Just because an initial reaction causes few problems doesn't mean that all reactions will be similar; a food that triggered only mild symptoms on one occasion may cause more severe symptoms at another time.

Fair enough, I was misinformed. Let the truth reign.

Oh, yeah good point. It does have a lot less lactose than milk. Of course, it depends on the cheese.

Well, its usually said to imply that food allergies are somehow psychological in nature. Implying that if you had no other choice, you would discover that you really aren't allergic to foods. Often said about people who say they have gluten intolerance ( while that's a different topic, they do get lumped together).

And if it's one thing that could help humanity, it's to make sure change is happening as quickly as possible. /snark

Yeah, funny thing about change; change could be bad or it could be good. One thing is guaranteed, though. Change has always happened and is always going to happen. Get used to it.