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White House Must Answer Petition To 'Build Death Star'
EdIII writes "The White House petition to secure funding for building the Death Star has garnered over 25,000 signatures, which means the White House must officially respond. I can't wait to see it. My question to Slashdot readers: what modifications would you add to the proposed Death Star? Obviously, as one journalist put it, 'guardrails around any of the facility's seemingly endless number of bridges, spans, shafts and pits.' What other changes would you ask your representatives to make?"
No more shafts leading directly to the core, please.
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They don't actually *have* to respond, just because there are the required number of signatures. They've ignored many of these petitions, most recently those petitions regarding state secession following the November elections.
...it is ADA compliant.
We already have one. Where did you think all the money went?
-Obama
It just helps the White House trivialize other petitions. We are fast becoming a nation of idiots, who don't value our rights. There are so many good petitions and then we have this. Should it even be on Slashdot? It should get a curt, "No Comment" from the White House. 25,000 idiots.
"What, our Debt Star isn't enough? Don't try to out-greed us, peasants."
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Those X-Wings weren't flying very fast and the targeting couldn't hit them with lasers! Lasers travel at the speed of light and you couldn't hit a target moving less than the speed of light? Definitely gov't contractors that built the targeting system.
While you're at it, some ID requirement and checkpoints into vital area like the shield and tractor beam controls. Maybe put at guard or an alarm whenever some vital system like the shield is disabled.
And DirecTV for UFC fights. When your entire company of troops gets distracted by a light saber fight, they're just saying they need better entertainment. A firing range would help the troops relax and maybe just maybe help them hit targets with their laser rifle.
Right. People like Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk. They're just dummies that haven't thought about it enough, or maybe they're just not good with numbers or technology. Why would we even consider the possibility of leaving this rock if we can't manage more than a year or so off-planet right now? Obviously you're right, it's impossible, and everyone else is wrong.
Or just maybe petitioning for a Death Star has absolutely nothing to do with seriously considering the possibility of living somewhere other than earth, and it might be possible. If you listen to some people much smarter than you or me, possibly even in our lifetime.
Beyond that, why so angry about people having dreams of space? Take a deep breath.
No. It just shows that Americans are taking Obama's online petitions just as seriously as he does.
Randal: A construction job of that magnitude would require a helluva lot more manpower than the Imperial army had to offer. I'll bet there were independent contractors working on that thing: plumbers, aluminum siders, roofers.
Dante: Not just Imperials, is what you're getting at.
Randal: Exactly. In order to get it built quickly and quietly they'd hire anybody who could do the job. Do you think the average storm trooper knows how to install a toilet main? All they know is killing and white uniforms.
Dante: All right, so even if independent contractors are working on the Death Star, why are you uneasy with its destruction?
Randal: All those innocent contractors hired to do a job were killed- casualties of a war they had nothing to do with. (notices Dante's confusion) All right, look-you're a roofer, and some juicy government contract comes your way; you got the wife and kids and the two-story in suburbia-this is a government contract, which means all sorts of benefits. All of a sudden these left-wing militants blast you with lasers and wipe out everyone within a three-mile radius. You didn't ask for that. You have no personal politics. You're just trying to scrape out a living.
What else can happen when an unstoppable force collides with an immovable object?
No, the short version of nanorobotics is that nanorobot power supplies are constrained by the laws of physics, like power supplies (ever notice how many bacteria thrive by eating metal and rocks for their primary energy source? yeah, me neither. i can't even get my laptop to last all day on one battery) or communications problems (how can a nanorobot know where it is relative to what it's building? deduced reckoning? how can it talk to its controller and accomplish its task without getting drowned out by trillions of other nanorobots in the communications cross-talk?) or basic materials science (what materials can have atoms gingerly placed next to each other by robots for assembly and still hold up even under the stresses of a death star's own gravity field, to say nothing of travel) or any one of a number of obstacles. Not that these problems can't be ameliorated or worked around in a variety of contexts to achieve a variety of interesting goals eventually (e.g. arbitrary lifespans for carbon-based lifeforms such as ourselves), but "ordering a Death Star as easily as ordering a happy meal" being permanently impossible *is* something I can comfortably argue.
Besides, "omnipresent crime prevention" is pretty dystopian when you get down to it.
That will be the real exciting fight to see in Congress. I propose that the Congress folks duke it out in a no-rules laser sword iron death cage rumble, to decide which state can add to their license plate, "The Death Star State!"
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Let's take these in order.
Access shafts smaller than 2 meters
Given that the average person is 2 meters tall (give or take), and adding the bulk of hard-vacuum capable work gear, making maintenance access shafts smaller than 2 meters would cause a lot more problems. I'd recommend, instead, putting a locking/securable cover or grate over entrances and exits of access shafts.
No straight runs on access shafts that are for core ventilation
I presume you're talking about the "Thermal exhaust port" here. Twists and turns in shafts like that can cause backpressure, causing problems and leading to overheating and thermal runaway (read: big explosion).
Tractor Beam generator disables requiring multi-person authorization
I'd say multi-person and multi-point authorization.
Cameras on the prison levels
Actually, there were multiple cameras on the detention level - they were the second thing shot (after the stormtroopers) when Han and co. arrived there. Hence, also, the "Weapons malfunction" call.
Better training of security staff
Unfortunately, they were stormtrooper clones with only a genetic imprint for education and no actual field experience.
A 5 fold increase in garbage compactor speed and no main airlock opening until the garbage has been vented into space.
The speed of the garbage compactor wasn't the issue, it was the ease with which the system could be disabled from a single point. The main access door was locked while the compactor was cycling, but the locks were lifted (and the door opened) when the compactor was overridden. This is an entirely sensible system to have in place - if something goes wrong with the compactor, you will need to get access to it, and having the only access door permanently sealed mid-cycle (which is where 99% of problems will occur) makes a maintenance access door like the one in the movie pointless.
Defense turrets around the power core
Given the rebels' ability to easily hack into and alter computer systems at will (with the cost of a only simple, easily replaceable astromech in the case of doing massive damage and causing an overload), would it really be a good idea to have computer-controlled autocannons around the power core? Then all the rebels would need to do is send in an rogue astromech, which would interface with the ship's computer and direct the "defense turrets" to open fire on the core. Oh, and given the history of accuracy of those turrets, would you really want them in a place where a miss would do the rebel's job for you?
Decentralized power generators
Yay! Lots of targets to hit! In lots of places, which makes it exceedingly difficult to guard and protect them all, and even with the system decentralized, you would still have the issue of a massive power surge from one generator (from, say, it's destruction) feeding back into another generator and causing a chain-reaction. And if you don't have the generators linked you still have the issue of maintenance and lack of redundancy. Oh, and that huge weapon that destroys planets requires a HUGE amount of power - chances are it's difficult (if not impossible) to co-ordinate that much power production with a group of parallel power plants, hence the huge single core.
My guess is that the White House is going to respond a little bit seriously and call out the Outer Space Treaty as a reason why we can't create a Death Star. Or maybe if they respond around Christmas they'll show several LEGO Death Star kits they've purchased and donated to charity and call the task completed. [Nothing in the petition asked for a FULL SIZED Death Star, after all.]
What would be the point of building a space station with a planet-destroying superlaser when all live on the same planet as all of our enemies?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Exactly like my grand-grandmother, who died convinced that we never went to the moon because "that's just impossible".
That's no moon...
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Serious petitions happen on there all the time. The administration doesn't take them seriously. The responses generally amount to "explain what we're already doing and going to continue doing".
Because most Americans would vote against that. Seriously, only 10% of the country thinks guns should be illegal.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Julius Caesar was never emperor of Rome.
The senate declared him "dictator in perpetuity", but that's not quite the same thing. Augustus is considered the first emperor, having real imperial power as we'd mean it today, even though he eschewed any title which would seem to give him monarchical status. He did use the title Imperator, from which the English word Emperor derives, but it did not really have the same meaning at the time. He also used the title Princeps, meaning first citizen, but that also was not a title similar to Emperor. Effectively, Augustus had absolute power, but did not have a title recognizing that power.
Later Roman Emperors held various titles, but even those varied over time.
I find it interesting, furthermore, that the term "Caesar" became associated with the imperial position in Rome. It did not start out as anything more than the cognomen for Gaius Julius. Roman Emperors started adding it to their names to try to link themselves to the famous (and popular) Gaius Julius Caesar. Eventually, it became such a standard part of the title that it eventually came to mean "emperor" or "king" for various European cultures.
(Your comment was not really wrong, btw, considering the context. I just thought you or orther readers might be interested in additional detail about the term Emperor of Rome.)