Why should they care about respectability? (Well, we know why, but they don't make the same automatic link between respectability and utility that we do.)
I would rephrase your last question to: Doesn't doing so degrade the results of your process, turning it into something that few if any developers would bother using, thus making the W3C useless?
Well...if beamed EM to electricity is viable, then how about using that to heat self-contained propellant? Sure, it's technically still a rocket, but most of the reaction energy comes from outside the ship, so it's not 100% self-contained.
Or, once you get going at a high enough Mach, atmospheric friction will turn air into plasma. Use standard magnetic controls to keep this plasma off of your craft, trapping the plasma so it itself is what impacts even more air and turns it into plasma, then send this plasma out the back. Basically a more ambitious version of the SR-71's "aerodynamics only seal up when heated by fast travel".
And, of course, there's direct interaction with the Earth's magnetic field - though that takes a lot of power, especially at those (relative to significant magnetic field strength) low altitudes where the atmosphere exists.
So, how long 'til someone starts using this commercially? How much do the unrefined techniques cost to make blood, versus cost of getting blood from donors and shipping them long distances? Presumably, blood manufacturing plants would be set up close to where they're needed, perhaps even in the hospitals themselves.
In fact, what do people think of the following model: a business is set up to develop manufacturing of these machines. At first, it leases blood production vats to its customers (first rich ones, then any as production becomes cheaper), using the money from leases to pay for development (including a forum for users of the system, to point out the good and the bad of various models). Over time, convert from prebuilt systems to kits, then to plans that hospitals can license so they can build their own (and with the rest of this plan announced so it's in the hospitals' self interest not to pirate). Then, once it gets cost of manufacture down to some reasonable price (say, under $1000 - in 2001 dollars - for a unit that can supply a small-city clinic for a year), it documents how to build these devices so cheaply and gradually shuts down, converting all leases to final sales. End result: technology is in the public domain, with an established tradition of end users building their own systems from commodity parts, and hopefully developed fast enough that no viable competitors can emerge to monopolize the field.
The only problem I can see with that is fees for licensing patents owned by anyone but the buisiness itself, for instance the university that discovered this process...
Nah, I say non computer literate users... that is the biggest risk...
Agreed. Many (most?) of the "incompetent admins" are, in fact, home computer users who have no idea they've become admins simply by taking responsibility for their own computer. I wonder if a PSA warning people about this, and instructing them on "what you can do to fight cyberterrorism" (I hate that term, but it pulls the right heart strings just now), would cause a good percent of the vulnerable systems to get patched.
the Microsoft Macintosh Business unit, which is a somewhat independent MS arm
If only that were true. It is correct that large corporations are actually a bunch of smaller companies bound together as "business units" in an attempt to get them to play nice together, but Microsoft is bound closer than most such businesses, with the top leading by example.
As evidence, take their uniformly poor attitude towards security...and their applying features from games to other software (one can get obsessed about a game and learn all its controls, and if it crashes, one can just pick up from the last save; this mantra has problems when applied to, say, office software). Also see "embrace and extend" used across the board, to varying degrees of success.
When, yes. The problem is that this process takes years, and meanwhile even worse legislation gets put on top of it. Each specific piece of legislation must be declared unconstitutional, and when it does, Congress can just pass a slightly modified and thus "different" law that fails the exact same constitutionality check...and it will get enforced right up until the SC declares that one unconstitutional, too.
And don't forget, a large part of the damage these laws do is merely forcing someone to go to court. That can bankrupt many of the smaller players these laws are enforced against, irregardless of any legitimacy or the law. Thus do the bad laws get enforced anyway, as people try to avoid any actions that might possibly lead to a lawsuit.
Thus, in practice, the checks and balances have been bypassed and are obsolete. Time to come up with a new system, I say.
What if you get nuclear (or whatever) energy from resources on-site? Say, a Martian geothermal plant, with the output gasses vented to help build the atmosphere. Or a helium-3 fusion plant, where the helium-3 is mined from the Moon (inefficiency of lifting from Earth aside, there just plain isn't that much helium-3 down here).
You're right, using sunlight directly makes sense if we are using sunlight to begin with. And that's a good option. But not the only one.
I taped Enterprise to watch Junkyard Wars. After reviewing the tape...Junkyard Wars was much better, even though they did openly admit to seeding the junkyard with tires. (Seeding with unusual components like rocket motors, I can understand...but tires? Even if they were monster truck tires. Though they were a bit daring to have any components the crews would be messing with on "loan".)
True. It helps with the bandwidth, but it's not essential. Like I said, it's "teleportation of information", which some people generalize to just "teleportation" (including of matter).
Teleportation of information, not teleportation of matter itself. You're right, the matter still has to get to its destination by standard processes. You'd need something like nanotech assemblers and scanners for teleportation:
Get a bunch of raw materials, and a teleport receiver, to the teleport-to site.
At the teleport-from site, scan the object to be "teleported" at an atomic (or maybe subatomic) level, possibly destroying it in the process.
During the scan, transmit the scan's results to the teleport-to site, assembling a duplicate of the teleported object.
From what I've heard, expect the same of the show itself. They're trying to distance themselves from the trappings of Star Trek (they explicitly mention the cliche of "magic" technology as the solution to everything - perhaps realistic for the 24th century, but a bit too distant from the imagniations of today's audiences). They are also trying to draw parallels to the onrush of the unfamiliar in today's world: the technology is here, but not many are truly familiar with it (unfortunately, despite the benefits of familiarization).
Even Mt. Everest is a small fraction of the altitude needed. And more to the point, achieving orbital velocity (Mach mid-20s) accounts for about 5/6 of the fuel needed; altitude only accounts for about 1/6. Rail guns and similar could theoretically impart the necessary velocity, but even extremely long (100s of kilometers) guns would still impart enough Gs to the payload during launch to crush and kill any large living organism (like humans)...and non-living payloads (like satellites) don't pay nearly as much as tourists.
From watching the X-Prize contenders, there seems to be a pretty consistent rule:
If a rocket company wannabe has actually flown hardware, it may be close to actually flying hardware...and beyond that, hardware that can carry things.
If a rocket company wannabe has not actually flown hardware, any tickets they sell are lotteries or fraud at best, and will not be actually redeemable for many years if ever.
The vast majority of wannabes are currently the latter. It does them no great service to hype up publicity this far ahead of actually being able to provide what they claim, and significantly harms those who are actually trying to build private launch capability.
In addition to the coriolis effect mentioned, RPM * radius is proportional to gravity. So, for the same gravity, lower RPM = higher radius. Higher radius means that any unit length (say, six feet, or however tall your average adult human body is) along that radius will encompass a lesser gravity gradient - so, higher radius = less gradient from head to feet.
At least, that seems to be why you'd care about RPM if gravity gradient was of any concern. (Though the coriolis effect is important, too.)
...and just after the Supreme Court rules in your favor, the legislators will pop out a nearly-identical law - equally unconstitutional, but it's gotta wind its way through the courts before it'll stop being enforced. And when that one's overruled, pop out another one. The courts have to rule on each individual law before any precedent can limit its scope. (Analogy: if some Southern state, where anti-black prejudice still rages, were to pass a "niggers can be shot on sight" law, how many would die before the courts could so much as issue an order? No one would be legally liable for the resulting death toll, since neither merely passing a law, nor acting in accordance with the currently-in-effect laws, are illegal...)
I wonder if Congress could be sued for such serial violation of duty? Probably not.
Yes. It's the paid-for hearts and minds of millions who believe what various leaders and media tell them to believe. Sure, there's some free thinkers out there, but they're not the majority. Heck, they're the new oppressable minority: unpopular (they prefer to speak the truth instead of what people want to hear), damaging our right to profit, and so forth. No way can they be allowed to have a say in the law.
You know, I keep seeing this exact same post crop up, and get modded up, every time an article related to the Moon is posted. Is this the definition of "karma whoring"?
Main points where the joke could be improved: remove, or at least improve, the denial of pre-1950 Moon mentionings (I can think of quite a few pre-1950 references to the Moon, which therefore strains the credulity of that bit), and address the issue of what happens when both Sun and Moon are both set (early pre-dawn, usually) or when the Moon is emitting no light (thus defeating its ostensible illumination purpose).
what about the other 75 year old senior citizens who have a clean computer and can't read web pages or send mail to their grandkids because the network is so flooded that they can't get anything through. Do you think they'll understand why this "dang new-fangled contraption ain't workin'?"
<shrugs> Most of the 75 year olds that I know would understand, or at least they would when (not if) they looked up the answer. Old age is no excuse for letting an active mind idle.
Slashdot Mirror
Why should they care about respectability? (Well, we know why, but they don't make the same automatic link between respectability and utility that we do.)
I would rephrase your last question to: Doesn't doing so degrade the results of your process, turning it into something that few if any developers would bother using, thus making the W3C useless?
Or Black Rock, home of Burning Man...which is where a bunch of rocket enthusiasts already do many of their test launches.
Hey, the dude's gotta do something with his money. Even his Ferraris would eventually get boring if they're all he ever tinkered with...
Well...if beamed EM to electricity is viable, then how about using that to heat self-contained propellant? Sure, it's technically still a rocket, but most of the reaction energy comes from outside the ship, so it's not 100% self-contained.
Or, once you get going at a high enough Mach, atmospheric friction will turn air into plasma. Use standard magnetic controls to keep this plasma off of your craft, trapping the plasma so it itself is what impacts even more air and turns it into plasma, then send this plasma out the back. Basically a more ambitious version of the SR-71's "aerodynamics only seal up when heated by fast travel".
And, of course, there's direct interaction with the Earth's magnetic field - though that takes a lot of power, especially at those (relative to significant magnetic field strength) low altitudes where the atmosphere exists.
Ah, the infamous business non-rationality conundrum: you can control a product's quality or its market share, but not both simultaneously. ;)
So, how long 'til someone starts using this commercially? How much do the unrefined techniques cost to make blood, versus cost of getting blood from donors and shipping them long distances? Presumably, blood manufacturing plants would be set up close to where they're needed, perhaps even in the hospitals themselves.
In fact, what do people think of the following model: a business is set up to develop manufacturing of these machines. At first, it leases blood production vats to its customers (first rich ones, then any as production becomes cheaper), using the money from leases to pay for development (including a forum for users of the system, to point out the good and the bad of various models). Over time, convert from prebuilt systems to kits, then to plans that hospitals can license so they can build their own (and with the rest of this plan announced so it's in the hospitals' self interest not to pirate). Then, once it gets cost of manufacture down to some reasonable price (say, under $1000 - in 2001 dollars - for a unit that can supply a small-city clinic for a year), it documents how to build these devices so cheaply and gradually shuts down, converting all leases to final sales. End result: technology is in the public domain, with an established tradition of end users building their own systems from commodity parts, and hopefully developed fast enough that no viable competitors can emerge to monopolize the field.
The only problem I can see with that is fees for licensing patents owned by anyone but the buisiness itself, for instance the university that discovered this process...
Nah, I say non computer literate users... that is the biggest risk...
Agreed. Many (most?) of the "incompetent admins" are, in fact, home computer users who have no idea they've become admins simply by taking responsibility for their own computer. I wonder if a PSA warning people about this, and instructing them on "what you can do to fight cyberterrorism" (I hate that term, but it pulls the right heart strings just now), would cause a good percent of the vulnerable systems to get patched.
I never said they were efficient about it or good at it, just that they do it. Much like wannabe Borg, in fact.
the Microsoft Macintosh Business unit, which is a somewhat independent MS arm
If only that were true. It is correct that large corporations are actually a bunch of smaller companies bound together as "business units" in an attempt to get them to play nice together, but Microsoft is bound closer than most such businesses, with the top leading by example.
As evidence, take their uniformly poor attitude towards security...and their applying features from games to other software (one can get obsessed about a game and learn all its controls, and if it crashes, one can just pick up from the last save; this mantra has problems when applied to, say, office software). Also see "embrace and extend" used across the board, to varying degrees of success.
When, yes. The problem is that this process takes years, and meanwhile even worse legislation gets put on top of it. Each specific piece of legislation must be declared unconstitutional, and when it does, Congress can just pass a slightly modified and thus "different" law that fails the exact same constitutionality check...and it will get enforced right up until the SC declares that one unconstitutional, too.
And don't forget, a large part of the damage these laws do is merely forcing someone to go to court. That can bankrupt many of the smaller players these laws are enforced against, irregardless of any legitimacy or the law. Thus do the bad laws get enforced anyway, as people try to avoid any actions that might possibly lead to a lawsuit.
Thus, in practice, the checks and balances have been bypassed and are obsolete. Time to come up with a new system, I say.
What if you get nuclear (or whatever) energy from resources on-site? Say, a Martian geothermal plant, with the output gasses vented to help build the atmosphere. Or a helium-3 fusion plant, where the helium-3 is mined from the Moon (inefficiency of lifting from Earth aside, there just plain isn't that much helium-3 down here).
You're right, using sunlight directly makes sense if we are using sunlight to begin with. And that's a good option. But not the only one.
Or, in short:
Slashdot is hosted there
...for how much longer?
I hope laws don't change to make linking illegal.
Unfortunately, if the already issued opinion of a certain judge in the 2600 case isn't overruled, the laws won't have to change...
If I recall correctly, "Scrapheap Challenge" came first. "Junkyard Wars" is the americanized version of that.
I taped Enterprise to watch Junkyard Wars. After reviewing the tape...Junkyard Wars was much better, even though they did openly admit to seeding the junkyard with tires. (Seeding with unusual components like rocket motors, I can understand...but tires? Even if they were monster truck tires. Though they were a bit daring to have any components the crews would be messing with on "loan".)
True. It helps with the bandwidth, but it's not essential. Like I said, it's "teleportation of information", which some people generalize to just "teleportation" (including of matter).
From what I've heard, expect the same of the show itself. They're trying to distance themselves from the trappings of Star Trek (they explicitly mention the cliche of "magic" technology as the solution to everything - perhaps realistic for the 24th century, but a bit too distant from the imagniations of today's audiences). They are also trying to draw parallels to the onrush of the unfamiliar in today's world: the technology is here, but not many are truly familiar with it (unfortunately, despite the benefits of familiarization).
Even Mt. Everest is a small fraction of the altitude needed. And more to the point, achieving orbital velocity (Mach mid-20s) accounts for about 5/6 of the fuel needed; altitude only accounts for about 1/6. Rail guns and similar could theoretically impart the necessary velocity, but even extremely long (100s of kilometers) guns would still impart enough Gs to the payload during launch to crush and kill any large living organism (like humans)...and non-living payloads (like satellites) don't pay nearly as much as tourists.
From watching the X-Prize contenders, there seems to be a pretty consistent rule:
If a rocket company wannabe has actually flown hardware, it may be close to actually flying hardware...and beyond that, hardware that can carry things.
If a rocket company wannabe has not actually flown hardware, any tickets they sell are lotteries or fraud at best, and will not be actually redeemable for many years if ever.
The vast majority of wannabes are currently the latter. It does them no great service to hype up publicity this far ahead of actually being able to provide what they claim, and significantly harms those who are actually trying to build private launch capability.
In addition to the coriolis effect mentioned, RPM * radius is proportional to gravity. So, for the same gravity, lower RPM = higher radius. Higher radius means that any unit length (say, six feet, or however tall your average adult human body is) along that radius will encompass a lesser gravity gradient - so, higher radius = less gradient from head to feet.
At least, that seems to be why you'd care about RPM if gravity gradient was of any concern. (Though the coriolis effect is important, too.)
...and just after the Supreme Court rules in your favor, the legislators will pop out a nearly-identical law - equally unconstitutional, but it's gotta wind its way through the courts before it'll stop being enforced. And when that one's overruled, pop out another one. The courts have to rule on each individual law before any precedent can limit its scope. (Analogy: if some Southern state, where anti-black prejudice still rages, were to pass a "niggers can be shot on sight" law, how many would die before the courts could so much as issue an order? No one would be legally liable for the resulting death toll, since neither merely passing a law, nor acting in accordance with the currently-in-effect laws, are illegal...)
I wonder if Congress could be sued for such serial violation of duty? Probably not.
Is demo some large unit of currency or something?
Yes. It's the paid-for hearts and minds of millions who believe what various leaders and media tell them to believe. Sure, there's some free thinkers out there, but they're not the majority. Heck, they're the new oppressable minority: unpopular (they prefer to speak the truth instead of what people want to hear), damaging our right to profit, and so forth. No way can they be allowed to have a say in the law.
You know, I keep seeing this exact same post crop up, and get modded up, every time an article related to the Moon is posted. Is this the definition of "karma whoring"?
Main points where the joke could be improved: remove, or at least improve, the denial of pre-1950 Moon mentionings (I can think of quite a few pre-1950 references to the Moon, which therefore strains the credulity of that bit), and address the issue of what happens when both Sun and Moon are both set (early pre-dawn, usually) or when the Moon is emitting no light (thus defeating its ostensible illumination purpose).
what about the other 75 year old senior citizens who have a clean computer and can't read web pages or send mail to their grandkids because the network is so flooded that they can't get anything through. Do you think they'll understand why this "dang new-fangled contraption ain't workin'?"
<shrugs> Most of the 75 year olds that I know would understand, or at least they would when (not if) they looked up the answer. Old age is no excuse for letting an active mind idle.