The article is untrue in every possible way. It's not a question of a single error - the whole thing is propaganda of the worst sort. If this is a new direction for El Reg, I'm out.
It's innovative, out-of-the box thinking. Make a social network to catch the falling edge of yet another meme. That's awkward, and social, so it's got a sort of irony going for it. It all fits into a grand theme immense in scope. You're picking at nits because you're listening too closely to one poorly played bagpipe. Step back and admire the intense grandiose cacophonic orchestra of failure building to its discordant crescendo. It's simultaneously horrifying and beautiful. (sniff) It's getting dusty in here. This is performance art man - don't interrupt.
"ASUS is the only mainstream PC maker to make a showing in the top five tablet brands, tying with RIM on a 2.3 per cent share of the tablet market and sales of 0.5 million for Q1. "
Except maybe Samsung. They make laptops. Are they not mainstream? They're not in the top 5, so I guess not. Been making PCs since 1982.
This is Michael Dell's fault. He's reaping the benefits of his no-frills race to the bottom no-margin strategy that a decade ago killed off much of his competition. A shame that for all that "winning" there is scant prize.
Wait 'til he finds out what W8 is going to do to his top and bottom numbers. This is going to seem like the Golden Age of Dell.
I can't wait 'til Google starts spinning off patent trolls to do independent battle with Microsoft, Apple, Nokia and Oracle in reprisal for them being such jerks. A dozen patents, three lawyers and a couple paralegals each out of a dozen different little trolls in every major jurisdiction in the world ought to be just the thing to set things right. Maybe partner with HTC or individual executive investors or somebody else so the little trolls can be "independent" entities with separate ownership.
That shouldn't cost more than a few million dollars a year.
Before you call it evil, look at Rockstar Consortium: http://reason.com/blog/2012/05/21/wired-tours-patent-trolling-company-foun
Much like the FTC's attempts to force disclosure of PageRank you can bet this is sponsored by Google's competitor.
What this actually does is discourage companies from leasing from the government. These were unused facilities Google is paying the upkeep on. If not for this the site may have had to be razed at great cost.
Good point! Off to build some W8 cRapps that use the secret APIs to accidently crash Metro. No doubt the malware hackers are already all over this one.
@AC - It won't work as a phone. Once W8 comes out they'll be plentiful on eBay and Cyanogen will probably do a mod that will turn it into a decent gPod.
@Dogged Why are you even still trying to pretend? We all know what's happening here. Microsoft is deprecating their entire legacy base to get engaged in mobile and nobody outside of Redmond thinks it's going to work. They're going to ditch everybody who made them what they are, and stand alone in a field demanding that others gather 'round. But they don't have the draw they once did. That flag is old and torn.
Prior to that they quite succesfully made apps for other people with greater and lesser success, but they got paid. The paltry pay of making inferior apps to spec for others is probably what motivated them to make their own game. It's really frustrating knowing what wins and being prevented from delivering it by a phenomenally stupid client. To suffer such over and again must have driven Rovio's coders near insane. I'm glad they found a way out.
I said it here before. You can trust me or you can wait and see. I really don't care which. At least I warned you so my duty is done. My duty doesn't extend to persuading you because I'm not responsible for this. It wasn't me who did this. When you're hurt by ignoring my warning find out who is responsible, and act appropriately. It won't be me. You will know that you were warned and some responsibility for ignoring that warning falls on you.
They desperately want to modernize and participate in modern advances. But the bald Internet is such a social shock that it would traumatize their people and could lead to disastrous unrest that would prevent progress - and unseat the government.
I'm not fond of their methods, but I don't envy them the challenges they face.
This is the part of the business Microsoft wants. The Manchurian CEO is now trimming off all the rest of it so all of the once mighty Nokia can fit in a filing cabinet managed by a few paralegals.
That's what the cycle does: it carries evaporated seawater over land and deposits it as rain and snow. So more of this is a good thing for freshwater resources. This is the greening of Africa.
Clouds are reflective of both optical and infrared radiation. More vapor = more clouds. More clouds = higher albedo (heat&light reflected to space without reaching the ground). Which results in lower temperatures at the surface ultimately. But in the short term warmer as the clouds also reflect what heat is already on the ground back down. You see this in the desert where the nighttime temperatures drop precipitously due to lack of cloud cover.
Not sure where they're going with this. Looks like a negative feedback loop.
Why that is unheard of! I am quite shocked! It is a good thing such rogues are so uncommon, and not a standard operating practice, or we would have to inspect every role in governance and industry for undue influence. Why someone might gain illicit control of an international standards body or, for example, an international mobile technology industry leader. Thank goodness this isn't common.
This is not the first bad bill to pass in the House. The US has two legislative, one executive and one Justice bodies for just this reason. Americans must advise their Senators that this must not pass the Senate, and we will. Even if this bill that violates the 4th Amendment of the Constitution passes the Senate, the President - a professor of constitutional law - is likely to veto it. And if all of these fail in their sworn duty to uphold the Constitution and give up their political careers to pass this bad law, the Supreme court is unlikely to uphold it.
If even that fails, only then is it time to talk about more serious action.
A venture can be high risk. For example one of the billionaires on the stage with his own money in (Simonyi, I think) said that he would not recommend his neighbor mortgage his home for this venture. But for those currently invested it's little risk at all for two reasons: 1) They wouldn't miss the money if it failed and 2) It is not possible for this venture to fail with this much money behind it.
Some of the biggest problems a venture can have is running out of investor money or patience before you get the cheddar, or there not being any cheddar. The first can't happen because these guys are so loaded, and the second is just not possible because the cheddar is ALL THAT IS outside of Earth - worlds beyond imagining, wealth beyond the dreams of Midas. And maybe all the Earth too, if you think about it...
Government interference can be a problem for a little guy who's just looking to build a nuclear reactor. But not for guys with an aggregate $100+ billion. For a single billion you can run for President and pack both houses of Congress too.
NASA estimates $2.6 billion for the first asteroid capture mission, $1B for each after. All told it will probably cost $10B to become self-sustaining with fuel factories selling their output on orbit - and 20 years for those costs to mount up and offsetting revenues to come in. They're cash-flow positive now, and there's no reason to expect they'll ever be $2B in the hole, which is no big deal for this group.
There's a good chance the rock they're looking for is already on course to smack directly into Earth, and they'll nudge it into orbit around the moon instead.
The rocks you need are already dangerously close to where they need to be. The correction is just tiny.
As I said, the metals are a thing for down the road. It's all about the water. As for the money, well, these guys ain't hurting and ain't gonna be. The operation is already generating positive cash flow.
Part of the reason for the fuel is to boost loads out of LEO, so that's a nice time to drop your platinum waste products.
They're not going to reveal the whole plan Tuesday. They're going to give only what they think they need to garner popular support. It's a commercial endeavor and they have significant interest in keeping most of the facts proprietary. Frankly, if they gave the game away they'd have considerable competition from India and China because the ROI is something like infinity. And no, that's not an exaggeration or a math error - I do know what infinity is. Approaching infinity is quite literally the potential ROI for this investment, because they could become in control of all the universe outside cislunar space, which drives the investment to an almost infinitesimal fraction of All That Is. And that's close enough to satisfy my linguistic conditionals for relative to infinity. I could say orders of magnitude (12+) but some "savant" would show up with a proof that it was more or less.
These guys think big and long term. I have to admire that. I have had talks with my youngest few about being on the boat. I will redouble those efforts now.
Whether you or I see a profit in it is, however, irrelevant. The guys involved have enough confetti between them to buy an entire sovereign nation on the equator part and parcel, root and branch, to launch their missions from, to do their business without let. They don't need our approval, they don't need any government's permission they don't already own or can get, any more than they need some scientific discovery: because if they needed such things they'd work it out before the announcement. Because other governments know this, I'm betting the launch will be from Bygongyr.
For a single billion dollars you can buy the entire US government over an election season: the presidency and every single congressman and senator - and his opponent too, ensuring that whoever wins, you've got their ear. These guys have _hundreds_ of billions of dollars. If they wanted to they could make us pay for this - but they don't, because they want to own it and they don't swing that way.
By far the most readily available workable asteroid mineral is plain old ordinary water, and the designated target asteroids are 40% water by mass. Properly (and easily) refined in space this water becomes an equal mass of LH2/LO2 (liquid hydrogen and oxygen), also known as "rocket fuel", in a near-zero g environment. Kilotons of the stuff. It makes nice drinking water and breathable air too, and it might be possible in the longer term to actually grow produce in space to provide food and provisions to humans, though this is a minor impact over the fuel issue. The ready availability of kilotons of LH2/LO2 at LEO will make Man's leap from Earth possible. I've been wondering for a while when this would be figured out. I would imagine that LH2/LO2 at LEO would be very valuable. The initial missions require Xenon propellant because on-orbit LH2/LO2 is prohibitively expensive, but if they succeed this will change.
One of the limiting factors of space exploitation is the obscene cost of getting rocket fuel into space in the first place. Every kilo on orbit costs hundreds of kilos of rocket fuel to put it there, and you still have to spend almost all of that kilo to get it and your mission out of cislunar space before you even start heading somewhere interesting. If robotic operations can refine LH2/LO2 they can dip down to LEO to pick up passengers and equipment and move them quickly to where they need to be. A relatively tiny robotic factory can work every moment (night & day seems out of place here, because there is no night) continuously accumulating product.
If you have a robotic rocket fuel factory in high lunar orbit you can sell its output to people who want to do things in space at a considerable profit. You can then fuel robotic lunar landing craft to collect more water to refine from the lunar poles until you have unlimited fuel. You don't even have to claim you own this space produce (a political sticky point): you can charge for delivery and processing only. You can fuel, for example, manned trips to Mars the quick way rather than the slow way, and ensure that it's a round trip rather than a one-way trip. You can even send robotic fuel ships in advance to await the human mission in orbit around Mars, or anywhere else in the solar system.
Yes, asteroids contain other minerals too like iron, nickel, gold, platinum, iridium, that might someday be used to make space stations and whatnot or be returned to Earth for industrial uses. One day we'll do this, but the tooling to do it in zero g is currently not available. I imagine some sort of purified iron 3d printer is currently in design. Water to rocket fuel though is easily done and readily available. Most likely the waste minerals will be dumped on the lunar surface for the foreseeable future.
There are many now who would propose some different plan as if this was a NASA endeavor and they got to vote on it. Others would say this is a bad plan. This is one of the prime problems with publicly funded missions and one of the other chief impediments to exploitation of space: people can't agree on what to do, can't take a long view. They can't get committed to one course long enough to achieve it across different administrations, because one of the first things a new administration does is retask NASA and prevent completion of the space vision of the previous administration. Some want to mine the moon first, or build a space elevator, or do manned exploration, or sciency things. Every administration that comes into office immediately scraps the plans of the previous to make their own mark, proposing ironically a grand new vision that extends beyond their tenure. And so nothing gets done because the US political system lacks consistent purpose by design and these things take a long time window. But this isn't a publicly funded NASA mission. This is a commercial endeavor. Commercial endeavors don't have these problems. They don't need the public's active encouragement, nor absent persistence of vision.
To those who propose something else I would say "You want to do that? Fine. Gather up some money and do that. These guys, they want to fetch some asteroids and they're done with the "gather up money" part. It's their money, they actually do have the money, and they don't tell you what to do with your money. They're not asking you to pay for it. They're some of the most successful businessmen on Earth, so there's a good chance they have a plan to turn a profit." If you want to mine the moon, for example, you may find that mission more easily achieved by buying some fuel at LEO from these guys.
These guys mean to do this, and they know how to do it, and they have the money to do it. It's a real thing. They're some of the smartest people on the planet. Complaining that you have a better idea is just dumb. They have enough money to do this 50 times over at least, it doesn't require the invention of anything new or impossible, so it's going to happen and there's no risk it's going to fail. They don't have to ask you. They might, if they feel generous, let people invest and if they do I'm all in.
Space is big. Really, really big. It has more stuff in it than all the world by 12 orders of magnitude at least. What's at stake here is so much money that "all the money in the world" dwindles to a gnat's whisker. I, for one, am glad that there are humans with enough money, vision and will to pull it off. For a while there I was thinking I would die before Men turned this corner.
Re: Google, and by default its' Partners are in Trouble
This is exactly it. Google wanted to license Java, in just the way that Sun wanted, but needed some freedom of action. And Sun wouldn't give that freedom of action at any price. So there was no deal, and Google had to find a legal way around that roadblock.
No doubt on good advice of counsel they found a way around. Now they have to convince the jury though, and that can be tricky.
Register
617 posts • joined Sunday 19th October 2008 04:01 GMT
Page:
This post has been deleted by its author
This post has been deleted by a moderator
Newspeak
The article is untrue in every possible way. It's not a question of a single error - the whole thing is propaganda of the worst sort. If this is a new direction for El Reg, I'm out.
Want
This looks to be a nice little device. But I was hoping for June delivery.
Re: Crucified
And now the news this morning: US ITC judge finds for Moto, rules injunction on XBox. So much for your claim.
Hey, I'm in love with their new strategy
It's innovative, out-of-the box thinking. Make a social network to catch the falling edge of yet another meme. That's awkward, and social, so it's got a sort of irony going for it. It all fits into a grand theme immense in scope. You're picking at nits because you're listening too closely to one poorly played bagpipe. Step back and admire the intense grandiose cacophonic orchestra of failure building to its discordant crescendo. It's simultaneously horrifying and beautiful. (sniff) It's getting dusty in here. This is performance art man - don't interrupt.
Re: Well at least
This being Via you can expect shipments in sample quantities by the end of 2015.
Samsung is a PC OEM
"ASUS is the only mainstream PC maker to make a showing in the top five tablet brands, tying with RIM on a 2.3 per cent share of the tablet market and sales of 0.5 million for Q1. "
Except maybe Samsung. They make laptops. Are they not mainstream? They're not in the top 5, so I guess not. Been making PCs since 1982.
Re: Not a snowball chance in Hell
On Windows PCs the OEMs don't make any profits to speak of anyway, so what sort of leverage could MS have with them any more?
It seems PC OEM Samsung has found the new way to profit: the Android smartphone is the new PC.
No money in PCs
This is Michael Dell's fault. He's reaping the benefits of his no-frills race to the bottom no-margin strategy that a decade ago killed off much of his competition. A shame that for all that "winning" there is scant prize.
Wait 'til he finds out what W8 is going to do to his top and bottom numbers. This is going to seem like the Golden Age of Dell.
Re: Crucified
The "F" in "FRAND" doesn't stand for "Free". FRAND patents still have to be licensed. Woe to Motorola Mobility for insisting on that.
Re: So now
I can't wait 'til Google starts spinning off patent trolls to do independent battle with Microsoft, Apple, Nokia and Oracle in reprisal for them being such jerks. A dozen patents, three lawyers and a couple paralegals each out of a dozen different little trolls in every major jurisdiction in the world ought to be just the thing to set things right. Maybe partner with HTC or individual executive investors or somebody else so the little trolls can be "independent" entities with separate ownership.
That shouldn't cost more than a few million dollars a year.
Before you call it evil, look at Rockstar Consortium: http://reason.com/blog/2012/05/21/wired-tours-patent-trolling-company-foun
Turnabout is fair play.
Re: "Developers, just be sure ....
So you did understand then.
Witch hunt
Much like the FTC's attempts to force disclosure of PageRank you can bet this is sponsored by Google's competitor.
What this actually does is discourage companies from leasing from the government. These were unused facilities Google is paying the upkeep on. If not for this the site may have had to be razed at great cost.
Re: Oh, PLEASE
Good point! Off to build some W8 cRapps that use the secret APIs to accidently crash Metro. No doubt the malware hackers are already all over this one.
A workstation goes under the desk
Like the HP Z820, which sports PCIe 3.0, up to 512 GB RAM, dual 8-core 3.10GHz E5-2687W CPUs, and GPUs a gogo.
Bring your Linux install CD. Windows 7 doesn't go past 192GB RAM. Linux goes ALL the way.
Retro geek
Not even close.
Re: Android Porting
@AC - It won't work as a phone. Once W8 comes out they'll be plentiful on eBay and Cyanogen will probably do a mod that will turn it into a decent gPod.
Footgun
@yossarianuk Exactly. If you need antivirus you're doing it wrong.
Oops
Accidentally downvoted the article, sorry.
We're configuring servers with 192GB by default now. Maybe RAM demand will hold up.
Boring
Guess who's deeply invested in the justice department. Nothing will happen.
What purpose?
They know there is no cure for this except to sell people what they want. It's pointless.
$1 per day
That is about 4 cents an hour. I don't see how that's going to be a big profit center.
Re: @AC: 16:43
@Dogged Why are you even still trying to pretend? We all know what's happening here. Microsoft is deprecating their entire legacy base to get engaged in mobile and nobody outside of Redmond thinks it's going to work. They're going to ditch everybody who made them what they are, and stand alone in a field demanding that others gather 'round. But they don't have the draw they once did. That flag is old and torn.
Angry Birds was Rovio's first own app
Prior to that they quite succesfully made apps for other people with greater and lesser success, but they got paid. The paltry pay of making inferior apps to spec for others is probably what motivated them to make their own game. It's really frustrating knowing what wins and being prevented from delivering it by a phenomenally stupid client. To suffer such over and again must have driven Rovio's coders near insane. I'm glad they found a way out.
Prove it
I said it here before. You can trust me or you can wait and see. I really don't care which. At least I warned you so my duty is done. My duty doesn't extend to persuading you because I'm not responsible for this. It wasn't me who did this. When you're hurt by ignoring my warning find out who is responsible, and act appropriately. It won't be me. You will know that you were warned and some responsibility for ignoring that warning falls on you.
5 months and obsolete
No W8 for this one.
Re: Making Nokia's implosion looks like a bad hair day...
As much as we dislike Sony, at least they have more than one business line. And they haven't sold their soul. Yet.
Re: surely this is
If you need antivirus, you're doing it wrong.
Oh the horror
Their own browser allows people to buy things online.
Hold the stick firmly, but low
In a calm tone softly say the words "good dog" while backing away slowly.
That's nothing
I used Google search, and the next time I went to the refrigerator all the milk had curdled.
I followed a Google maps route once, and it took me two extra minutes due to construction.
Once, in gmail I got a spam. From my brother, who was whitelisted for some reason.
These are all signs that Google is a scion of the apocalypse.
China is in a difficult position
They desperately want to modernize and participate in modern advances. But the bald Internet is such a social shock that it would traumatize their people and could lead to disastrous unrest that would prevent progress - and unseat the government.
I'm not fond of their methods, but I don't envy them the challenges they face.
Oh my
This is the part of the business Microsoft wants. The Manchurian CEO is now trimming off all the rest of it so all of the once mighty Nokia can fit in a filing cabinet managed by a few paralegals.
Accelerating the water cycle = more fresh water
That's what the cycle does: it carries evaporated seawater over land and deposits it as rain and snow. So more of this is a good thing for freshwater resources. This is the greening of Africa.
Close, but no cigar
Clouds are reflective of both optical and infrared radiation. More vapor = more clouds. More clouds = higher albedo (heat&light reflected to space without reaching the ground). Which results in lower temperatures at the surface ultimately. But in the short term warmer as the clouds also reflect what heat is already on the ground back down. You see this in the desert where the nighttime temperatures drop precipitously due to lack of cloud cover.
Not sure where they're going with this. Looks like a negative feedback loop.
Undisclosed Microsoft ties?
Why that is unheard of! I am quite shocked! It is a good thing such rogues are so uncommon, and not a standard operating practice, or we would have to inspect every role in governance and industry for undue influence. Why someone might gain illicit control of an international standards body or, for example, an international mobile technology industry leader. Thank goodness this isn't common.
A bad bill
This is not the first bad bill to pass in the House. The US has two legislative, one executive and one Justice bodies for just this reason. Americans must advise their Senators that this must not pass the Senate, and we will. Even if this bill that violates the 4th Amendment of the Constitution passes the Senate, the President - a professor of constitutional law - is likely to veto it. And if all of these fail in their sworn duty to uphold the Constitution and give up their political careers to pass this bad law, the Supreme court is unlikely to uphold it.
If even that fails, only then is it time to talk about more serious action.
Re: oh well. oracle has other problems too...
For once El Reg leaves him out of the article and you guys have to bring him up in the comments?
Money pit
Who would want a $2B/yr money pit? Really, who?
Re: Slightly different take on this...
A venture can be high risk. For example one of the billionaires on the stage with his own money in (Simonyi, I think) said that he would not recommend his neighbor mortgage his home for this venture. But for those currently invested it's little risk at all for two reasons: 1) They wouldn't miss the money if it failed and 2) It is not possible for this venture to fail with this much money behind it.
Some of the biggest problems a venture can have is running out of investor money or patience before you get the cheddar, or there not being any cheddar. The first can't happen because these guys are so loaded, and the second is just not possible because the cheddar is ALL THAT IS outside of Earth - worlds beyond imagining, wealth beyond the dreams of Midas. And maybe all the Earth too, if you think about it...
Government interference can be a problem for a little guy who's just looking to build a nuclear reactor. But not for guys with an aggregate $100+ billion. For a single billion you can run for President and pack both houses of Congress too.
NASA estimates $2.6 billion for the first asteroid capture mission, $1B for each after. All told it will probably cost $10B to become self-sustaining with fuel factories selling their output on orbit - and 20 years for those costs to mount up and offsetting revenues to come in. They're cash-flow positive now, and there's no reason to expect they'll ever be $2B in the hole, which is no big deal for this group.
Yeah, it's going to happen.
Re: Near Earth Orbit asteroids??? Are you nuts!
There's a good chance the rock they're looking for is already on course to smack directly into Earth, and they'll nudge it into orbit around the moon instead.
All about the water
The rocks you need are already dangerously close to where they need to be. The correction is just tiny.
As I said, the metals are a thing for down the road. It's all about the water. As for the money, well, these guys ain't hurting and ain't gonna be. The operation is already generating positive cash flow.
Part of the reason for the fuel is to boost loads out of LEO, so that's a nice time to drop your platinum waste products.
Cash flow positive
The company is already cash flow positive, and is not looking for more investors at this time.
Re: The resource is water
They're not going to reveal the whole plan Tuesday. They're going to give only what they think they need to garner popular support. It's a commercial endeavor and they have significant interest in keeping most of the facts proprietary. Frankly, if they gave the game away they'd have considerable competition from India and China because the ROI is something like infinity. And no, that's not an exaggeration or a math error - I do know what infinity is. Approaching infinity is quite literally the potential ROI for this investment, because they could become in control of all the universe outside cislunar space, which drives the investment to an almost infinitesimal fraction of All That Is. And that's close enough to satisfy my linguistic conditionals for relative to infinity. I could say orders of magnitude (12+) but some "savant" would show up with a proof that it was more or less.
These guys think big and long term. I have to admire that. I have had talks with my youngest few about being on the boat. I will redouble those efforts now.
Whether you or I see a profit in it is, however, irrelevant. The guys involved have enough confetti between them to buy an entire sovereign nation on the equator part and parcel, root and branch, to launch their missions from, to do their business without let. They don't need our approval, they don't need any government's permission they don't already own or can get, any more than they need some scientific discovery: because if they needed such things they'd work it out before the announcement. Because other governments know this, I'm betting the launch will be from Bygongyr.
For a single billion dollars you can buy the entire US government over an election season: the presidency and every single congressman and senator - and his opponent too, ensuring that whoever wins, you've got their ear. These guys have _hundreds_ of billions of dollars. If they wanted to they could make us pay for this - but they don't, because they want to own it and they don't swing that way.
The resource is water
By far the most readily available workable asteroid mineral is plain old ordinary water, and the designated target asteroids are 40% water by mass. Properly (and easily) refined in space this water becomes an equal mass of LH2/LO2 (liquid hydrogen and oxygen), also known as "rocket fuel", in a near-zero g environment. Kilotons of the stuff. It makes nice drinking water and breathable air too, and it might be possible in the longer term to actually grow produce in space to provide food and provisions to humans, though this is a minor impact over the fuel issue. The ready availability of kilotons of LH2/LO2 at LEO will make Man's leap from Earth possible. I've been wondering for a while when this would be figured out. I would imagine that LH2/LO2 at LEO would be very valuable. The initial missions require Xenon propellant because on-orbit LH2/LO2 is prohibitively expensive, but if they succeed this will change.
One of the limiting factors of space exploitation is the obscene cost of getting rocket fuel into space in the first place. Every kilo on orbit costs hundreds of kilos of rocket fuel to put it there, and you still have to spend almost all of that kilo to get it and your mission out of cislunar space before you even start heading somewhere interesting. If robotic operations can refine LH2/LO2 they can dip down to LEO to pick up passengers and equipment and move them quickly to where they need to be. A relatively tiny robotic factory can work every moment (night & day seems out of place here, because there is no night) continuously accumulating product.
If you have a robotic rocket fuel factory in high lunar orbit you can sell its output to people who want to do things in space at a considerable profit. You can then fuel robotic lunar landing craft to collect more water to refine from the lunar poles until you have unlimited fuel. You don't even have to claim you own this space produce (a political sticky point): you can charge for delivery and processing only. You can fuel, for example, manned trips to Mars the quick way rather than the slow way, and ensure that it's a round trip rather than a one-way trip. You can even send robotic fuel ships in advance to await the human mission in orbit around Mars, or anywhere else in the solar system.
Yes, asteroids contain other minerals too like iron, nickel, gold, platinum, iridium, that might someday be used to make space stations and whatnot or be returned to Earth for industrial uses. One day we'll do this, but the tooling to do it in zero g is currently not available. I imagine some sort of purified iron 3d printer is currently in design. Water to rocket fuel though is easily done and readily available. Most likely the waste minerals will be dumped on the lunar surface for the foreseeable future.
There are many now who would propose some different plan as if this was a NASA endeavor and they got to vote on it. Others would say this is a bad plan. This is one of the prime problems with publicly funded missions and one of the other chief impediments to exploitation of space: people can't agree on what to do, can't take a long view. They can't get committed to one course long enough to achieve it across different administrations, because one of the first things a new administration does is retask NASA and prevent completion of the space vision of the previous administration. Some want to mine the moon first, or build a space elevator, or do manned exploration, or sciency things. Every administration that comes into office immediately scraps the plans of the previous to make their own mark, proposing ironically a grand new vision that extends beyond their tenure. And so nothing gets done because the US political system lacks consistent purpose by design and these things take a long time window. But this isn't a publicly funded NASA mission. This is a commercial endeavor. Commercial endeavors don't have these problems. They don't need the public's active encouragement, nor absent persistence of vision.
To those who propose something else I would say "You want to do that? Fine. Gather up some money and do that. These guys, they want to fetch some asteroids and they're done with the "gather up money" part. It's their money, they actually do have the money, and they don't tell you what to do with your money. They're not asking you to pay for it. They're some of the most successful businessmen on Earth, so there's a good chance they have a plan to turn a profit." If you want to mine the moon, for example, you may find that mission more easily achieved by buying some fuel at LEO from these guys.
These guys mean to do this, and they know how to do it, and they have the money to do it. It's a real thing. They're some of the smartest people on the planet. Complaining that you have a better idea is just dumb. They have enough money to do this 50 times over at least, it doesn't require the invention of anything new or impossible, so it's going to happen and there's no risk it's going to fail. They don't have to ask you. They might, if they feel generous, let people invest and if they do I'm all in.
Space is big. Really, really big. It has more stuff in it than all the world by 12 orders of magnitude at least. What's at stake here is so much money that "all the money in the world" dwindles to a gnat's whisker. I, for one, am glad that there are humans with enough money, vision and will to pull it off. For a while there I was thinking I would die before Men turned this corner.
Mueller
This string taints every article it's in, making it unworthy of print.
Re: Google, and by default its' Partners are in Trouble
This is exactly it. Google wanted to license Java, in just the way that Sun wanted, but needed some freedom of action. And Sun wouldn't give that freedom of action at any price. So there was no deal, and Google had to find a legal way around that roadblock.
No doubt on good advice of counsel they found a way around. Now they have to convince the jury though, and that can be tricky.
Sell some phones
If they don't sell some phones, nothing else matters.
Sony proprietary formats
It's like they're not at all interested in improving their image as the purveyor of stuff that doesn't work with your other stuff.
Page: