The reason that space isn't weapon laden is that they Russians and the US signed treaties keeping it a "demilitarized zone."
That means that its meant for use strictly as for observation, (look down for photon coming up,) rather than shooting down.
Even the Chinese signed the treaty because they see the wisdom behind it.
You can't defend yourself from space based "bolides" (which can strike the planet like the "Hammer of Thor" without needing to be anything other than heavy and headed in the right direction.)
Such a weapon could be built now and use "space resources" (asteroids and comets conveniently placed in a wide belt between Mars and Jupiter,) and some long-term guidance for an automated system to crash a world-changing million ton hunk of dirt and ice into this planet.
Its enough to discourage anyone knowing that after a war the loser could still "drop the hammer" on you a generation after you though it was all over and you'd won.
You don't just fire an anti-satellite weapon, even if you're pissed off that "somebody leaked the formula for "New Coke" or some such.
Not even North Korea could pull it off even if they were going to dedicate a year's worth of GDP to the task.
(Its a lot easier to lob weapons in a ballistic trajectory towards a landmass than it is to hit a target up in space even if you use a nuke. [The inverse square law of damage dispersion can operate in three dimensions in space.])
It costs a shit load of dough to develop and man that kind of technology and has all kinds of political ramifications that would land people in hot water.
Even the Chinese aren't too happy about the shit storm they let loose when they shot the snot out of their own satellite.
They also hate the storm of debris which will put their own astronauts and satellites in danger for the next century.
I wouldn't worry about the RIAA and the MPAA wasting their salaries shooting a satellite down.
I wouldn't even worry about Iran trying to do it, never mind Al Queda.
the towel on any further attempts at, ahem, innovation.
They've been flailing around and failing to imitate Apple since the creation of the Macintosh.
Apart from "rousing the giant" long enough to kill Netscape through illegal anti-competitive moves in the nineties, Microsoft has finally realized that they suck at innovation, suck at integration and suck at being anything but exactly what their big (140k+ desktop per) clients want them to be.
Look for Windows to stay on the desktop and stop being an embarrassment on other platforms.
Balmer is now at the head of a moribund company and they have started the downward spiral.
Their cash reserves will give them a soft landing for another 50 years.
But once desktop machines go away, Microsoft goes away too.
The broadcasters just don't seem to realize, or want to accept, that the internet overwhelms and subsumes them.
Its not that broadcasters don't have their place, they do, but its no more valid than any other IP source.
The disintegration started by cable television is fully realized through the internet.
Instead of the national broadcast service (think BBC, CBC, NHK, etc.) or the communication oligarchy (think ABC, CBS, NBC, Skye,) every IP address becomes a source for news/entertainment/focus/distraction... whatever.
Your power to distract and disrupt is equal to anyone else's.
the hardware is much better controlled than the dog's breakfast on Windows.
It happens to last a lot longer too.
I still have a G4 PowerBook. Earlier this year I replaced it with a MacBook Pro but not because I had to.
In the same time I have seen my friend's PC based laptops fry, break, get crufty with registry snot and slow down.
I have also bought and disposed of two Windows based PC boxes, though that was mainly because of hard disk failures.
I have also been able to update my G4, G5, Intel from one revision to the next without problem and from one version to the next (except that OS X Leopard was the end of the line for the PowerPC based machines.)
Basically, I'm a whole lots more satisfied with the OSX Macs that the Windows box.
It turns out that the old drivers and OCR software doesn't run on the new Windows' 7 box.
There IS a work around though.
I have to scan (which I can still do), move the image to a thumb drive, move the files to my Mac, run OCR using a "free"ware I picked up off the web, copy and paste the OCRed text to my wiki.
The reason people don't upgrade Microsoft crap is that you never know what's going to suddenly stop working.
I wish she'd give the fuck up on Microsoft already because its nothing but a PITA.
I'm sick and tired of hearing my name followed by "the computer's fuckin' up again!"
Sony's lawyers are embarked on justifying their salaries and Uppest Management is being fed bullshit by those lawyers because they certainly don't listen to their customers.
If it bothers you so fuckin' much, STOP BUYING SONY CRAP.
Make your own hardware platform, open-source it, product it on a shoe-string.
Negotiate with games makers to port their games to your platform, while agreeing that their existing agreements with Sony will be honored (meaning NO PIRATING their software.)
End result, you have an open platform, lots of expansion capabilities, lots of games, and YOU WIN!
There is no idea stupid enough to deter a lawyer, an accountant or a two year old.
Listening to and reading about this kind of "NO! MINE, MINE, MINE!" petulance over the ownership of sounds is very much like listening to two year olds debate over who owns a gun, never mind the facts that it doesn't belong to them and that they didn't create it.
Its language folks. NOBODY OWNS WORDS! It defeats the purpose of language when anybody own a word. It then becomes something that only initiates can "grok"(1), for "Chthlu"(2) sake.
In fact, and this should delight them, lets require that ALL legal documents the world over be embossed in copper/aluminum alloy sheets in Kligonee (and set in that typeface too,) to differentiate any legal scribblings from any earth language.
This would make learning of Klingonee mandatory for all lawyers. (Trekkies would have a leg up on taking over.)
I would also not be averse to strength trials where "two men enter, one walks out" types of legal debates (complete with batleths as arguments.)
Accountants at least know how to do arithmetic. But they should not be allowed to make any decisions.
Two year olds should be spanked when they refuse to STFU.
1) Contributed by Robert Heinlein. (3) 2) Contributed by H. P. Lovecraft. (3) 3) This is not a primer on etymology. Dig up where, when why and by whom the words were created yourselves.
figuring out what a piece of obscured code actually does when connected to the internet, loading itself into a page making it past a firewall, unpacking itself in RAM, going through all of your cookies and sending those back to an IP address, loading the next snooping segment and going through your mail client, and on and on.
Surely its a lot harder to figure out what that alphabet soup of nonsense abbreviations mean.
Oh wait, you've never seen an assembler dump with all of the nonsense it creates with actual variable names being referred to as the program-base address + offset locations... Get the idea?
and a kid is going to be stuck going through eight semesters, its no wonder that everybody's trying to reduce the load.
If students can just get the approved text book through a fast, inexpensive download, instead of screwing around trying NOT to have to buy a textbook made of inert dead trees attached to some textbook publisher's website anyway, they are more likely to do so rather that trying to do without.
One iPad can replace all of those books (1/2/3 books per course [6/12/18 books per semester {24/48/72 books before graduation}]) with just ONE easy to carry piece of plastic and metal.
No wonder EVERYBODY is for them, students, faculty and staff...
I have a friend who swears in French when ever he gets "hit his thumb with a hammer" upset.
He says "FLOCONS DE MAIS!!!" which is French for "Corn Flakes!!!"
He's an Anglo living in Québec so he doesn't really know the choice words or how Québecers can string them together into interesting and colorful expressions.:-)
Plus swearwords really don't translate well.
A literal transliterration (as opposed to a translation) of swearwords across almost any linguistic/cultural barrier makes for absolutely hilarious dialogue in plays.
the average person is taking off his shoes, carrying liquids in less that 5 oz. containers, walking through full body scanners, subjecting him/her-self to indignities, tiny seats and spending hours locked in a flying tube, eating bad peanuts, drinking bad soda (should s/he be unfortunate enough to be flying at meal-time, s/he will be subjected to a meal where the serving tray may be as nutritious and flavorful as the white "mystery meat" on it,) reading in-flight magazines and the airline's shopping mall catalog.
Most of the flight is controlled by "Otto" the pilot and the take-off and landing are shakily barely controlled by the poor schmucks in the front of the thrown cigar tube trying to not screw up the check list or discover a new species of bird with a fondness for jet engine intakes.
The other riders are either boring, bored, or insane, rude, hostile or, worse, they earnestly want to tell you all about their dull-as-dishwater lives, husbands or wives or kids and won't shut their yaps. (I've flown enough that I take the train everywhere now because I don't want to have to strangle the screaming baby two rows back who's barely legal army wife mother has never heard in all her sixteen years on this planet of discipline, now SHUT THE FUCK UP THE WHOLE SORRY LOT OF YA!)
Flying is for poor people who's time isn't worth waiting for and neither are they.
the engine and flight surface controls can all be run through a few fiber-optic cables each barely thicker than a human hair.
You could even employ HUD technology (which is already see-through) and only have the landing gear, wing tanks and engines (flight and control surfaces) opaque.
Or better yet, what a wonderful way to discover that being up at 35,000 feet induces uncontrolled sphincter contractions.
Great way to come face to feces with acrophobia and agoraphobia...:-)
Pee and poop flung about the passenger compartment as you scream like a monkey at the "Sandoz factory"*.
The smell alone would get you fellow passengers to throw you out the invisible hatch while you flail your arms trying to pull an invisible rip chord.
WEEEeeee!!!!
* Sandoz used to run a facility in Montréal, Québec, Canada in the 1950s where they experimented with Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) for the C.I.A. (See Project MK-ULTRA [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKULTRA ] for more info.)
Even if you factor in all the companies who handle small parcel shipping (say under 100 lbs/box) it is still a lot more efficient and has a much smaller carbon footprint that the hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands and millions of parcels that are delivered everyday.
It gets even more efficient if we take how many railroad car-full of products get shipped to regional centers. (What? You think TigerDirect doesn't send their supplier's stuff to UPS warehouses and lets customers' orders ship from the closest one? It beats shipping from only one place.)
FedEx, UPS, DHL and the USPS all have deals like this.
YOU as an end consumer aren't affected directly.
The manufacturers and resellers love NOT having to pay for warehousing.
Why do you think "Bob's Furniture" "Bob-o-pedic" can get to your house with next day or two day delivery?
Sealy gets an order for 10,000 Posturepedic mattresses, re-brands them, delivers them "en masse" to a single warehouse and stays the Hell out of the retail chain.
"Bob's Furniture" gets orders from all over, gets the mattresses from the warehouse onto a truck and does local deliveries and stay's the Hell out of the production chain.
As long as YOU get a bed for cheap and fast, what the hell do you care?
Its just one mattress,
"Bob's Furniture" handles thousands of these delivery every day. Its the most efficient way of handling retail sales.
Sealy handles thousands of "Bob's" type clients everyday and sells beds in lots, lots and lots of lots. Millions of mattresses a month. Its the most efficient way of handling wholesales sales.
Its not the end purchaser who realizes some environmental benefits, its the shipper.
Its not about Joe Schmoe's environmental impact, its about Amazon and UPS and Fed Ex and USPS combined carbon footprint versus the environmental impact of all the Joe Schmoes out there.
This was bogus science starting from a false premise.
I never ate the crap pretending it was food in school.
I ate breakfast before and diner after but I never ate the tasteless, over-processed, artificially-flavored, artificially-colored, overcooked, salt-laden glop that they would slop on the plates.
YEEEWWW!
I am now a healthy, (apart from having contracted MS somehow,) svelte, muscular 56 year old.
I eschew all processed foods and monitor my blood pressure daily. I will NOT go like my 'rents after popping and artery in my brain.
I will go into my grave after all my friends have gone into theirs. Will I enjoy the wait though? Maybe. (Some of their daughters are cute.:-)
At least, I'll look healthy when I eventually do...
I don't think the passengers would be too happy suddenly having to sit a few hours on a tarmac in Albuquerque when they're missing their connections in Atlanta.
Slashdot Mirror
360 of them? Your math is way too conservative.
The interference is not a hindrance to transmission but a feature of multi-phase communication.
You can move an beam around effectively in fractions of phase angles with a synthetic aperture antenna.
Also, you don't use one antenna but several and the effectively width of the dish is the spread of them.
No dish would raise suspicion, no changes are required to aim them, its just one untappable, non-RF-emitting fiber-optic cable.
The signal is going into/from the set of dishes and into/from a transceiver capable of handling the phase change and frequency detection.
The reason that space isn't weapon laden is that they Russians and the US signed treaties keeping it a "demilitarized zone."
That means that its meant for use strictly as for observation, (look down for photon coming up,) rather than shooting down.
Even the Chinese signed the treaty because they see the wisdom behind it.
You can't defend yourself from space based "bolides" (which can strike the planet like the "Hammer of Thor" without needing to be anything other than heavy and headed in the right direction.)
Such a weapon could be built now and use "space resources" (asteroids and comets conveniently placed in a wide belt between Mars and Jupiter,) and some long-term guidance for an automated system to crash a world-changing million ton hunk of dirt and ice into this planet.
Its enough to discourage anyone knowing that after a war the loser could still "drop the hammer" on you a generation after you though it was all over and you'd won.
Bwahahaha!
Dude its a toroid about 1 km wide by 265,000 km (165,000 mi) long. [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_orbit ]
That is a HUGE volume of space. Heavier satellites are further out within the toroid.
That can accommodate an enormous amount of satellites.
You don't just fire an anti-satellite weapon, even if you're pissed off that "somebody leaked the formula for "New Coke" or some such.
Not even North Korea could pull it off even if they were going to dedicate a year's worth of GDP to the task.
(Its a lot easier to lob weapons in a ballistic trajectory towards a landmass than it is to hit a target up in space even if you use a nuke. [The inverse square law of damage dispersion can operate in three dimensions in space.])
It costs a shit load of dough to develop and man that kind of technology and has all kinds of political ramifications that would land people in hot water.
Even the Chinese aren't too happy about the shit storm they let loose when they shot the snot out of their own satellite.
They also hate the storm of debris which will put their own astronauts and satellites in danger for the next century.
I wouldn't worry about the RIAA and the MPAA wasting their salaries shooting a satellite down.
I wouldn't even worry about Iran trying to do it, never mind Al Queda.
I have referrals that tell you "I saw the most amazing ..." without providing attribution.
Its http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/21/us/21cyber.html?ref=us
wiping her chin on her dress. (Ohhhh My ribs hurt. :-)
the towel on any further attempts at, ahem, innovation.
They've been flailing around and failing to imitate Apple since the creation of the Macintosh.
Apart from "rousing the giant" long enough to kill Netscape through illegal anti-competitive moves in the nineties, Microsoft has finally realized that they suck at innovation, suck at integration and suck at being anything but exactly what their big (140k+ desktop per) clients want them to be.
Look for Windows to stay on the desktop and stop being an embarrassment on other platforms.
Balmer is now at the head of a moribund company and they have started the downward spiral.
Their cash reserves will give them a soft landing for another 50 years.
But once desktop machines go away, Microsoft goes away too.
arched over it and you get purified, distilled H2O dripping own the clear plastic dome.
You don't need to hail this as revolutionary.
You can apply the principle to a pool, pond or lake full of water (better is its running water since oxygenation helps keep moss down.)
Paint the bottom or float a black pan below the surface and you can get solar evaporation.
The arched cover can be designed with ribs in it to carry the water down.
The broadcasters just don't seem to realize, or want to accept, that the internet overwhelms and subsumes them.
Its not that broadcasters don't have their place, they do, but its no more valid than any other IP source.
The disintegration started by cable television is fully realized through the internet.
Instead of the national broadcast service (think BBC, CBC, NHK, etc.) or the communication oligarchy (think ABC, CBS, NBC, Skye,) every IP address becomes a source for news/entertainment/focus/distraction ... whatever.
Your power to distract and disrupt is equal to anyone else's.
the hardware is much better controlled than the dog's breakfast on Windows.
It happens to last a lot longer too.
I still have a G4 PowerBook. Earlier this year I replaced it with a MacBook Pro but not because I had to.
In the same time I have seen my friend's PC based laptops fry, break, get crufty with registry snot and slow down.
I have also bought and disposed of two Windows based PC boxes, though that was mainly because of hard disk failures.
I have also been able to update my G4, G5, Intel from one revision to the next without problem and from one version to the next (except that OS X Leopard was the end of the line for the PowerPC based machines.)
Basically, I'm a whole lots more satisfied with the OSX Macs that the Windows box.
It turns out that the old drivers and OCR software doesn't run on the new Windows' 7 box.
There IS a work around though.
I have to scan (which I can still do), move the image to a thumb drive, move the files to my Mac, run OCR using a "free"ware I picked up off the web, copy and paste the OCRed text to my wiki.
The reason people don't upgrade Microsoft crap is that you never know what's going to suddenly stop working.
I wish she'd give the fuck up on Microsoft already because its nothing but a PITA.
I'm sick and tired of hearing my name followed by "the computer's fuckin' up again!"
Sony's lawyers are embarked on justifying their salaries and Uppest Management is being fed bullshit by those lawyers because they certainly don't listen to their customers.
If it bothers you so fuckin' much, STOP BUYING SONY CRAP.
Make your own hardware platform, open-source it, product it on a shoe-string.
Negotiate with games makers to port their games to your platform, while agreeing that their existing agreements with Sony will be honored (meaning NO PIRATING their software.)
End result, you have an open platform, lots of expansion capabilities, lots of games, and YOU WIN!
END OF THE WHINING....
There is no idea stupid enough to deter a lawyer, an accountant or a two year old.
Listening to and reading about this kind of "NO! MINE, MINE, MINE!" petulance over the ownership of sounds is very much like listening to two year olds debate over who owns a gun, never mind the facts that it doesn't belong to them and that they didn't create it.
Its language folks. NOBODY OWNS WORDS! It defeats the purpose of language when anybody own a word. It then becomes something that only initiates can "grok"(1), for "Chthlu"(2) sake.
In fact, and this should delight them, lets require that ALL legal documents the world over be embossed in copper/aluminum alloy sheets in Kligonee (and set in that typeface too,) to differentiate any legal scribblings from any earth language.
This would make learning of Klingonee mandatory for all lawyers. (Trekkies would have a leg up on taking over.)
I would also not be averse to strength trials where "two men enter, one walks out" types of legal debates (complete with batleths as arguments.)
Accountants at least know how to do arithmetic. But they should not be allowed to make any decisions.
Two year olds should be spanked when they refuse to STFU.
1) Contributed by Robert Heinlein. (3)
2) Contributed by H. P. Lovecraft. (3)
3) This is not a primer on etymology. Dig up where, when why and by whom the words were created yourselves.
figuring out what a piece of obscured code actually does when connected to the internet, loading itself into a page making it past a firewall, unpacking itself in RAM, going through all of your cookies and sending those back to an IP address, loading the next snooping segment and going through your mail client, and on and on.
Surely its a lot harder to figure out what that alphabet soup of nonsense abbreviations mean.
Oh wait, you've never seen an assembler dump with all of the nonsense it creates with actual variable names being referred to as the program-base address + offset locations ... Get the idea?
How asinine...
and a kid is going to be stuck going through eight semesters, its no wonder that everybody's trying to reduce the load.
If students can just get the approved text book through a fast, inexpensive download, instead of screwing around trying NOT to have to buy a textbook made of inert dead trees attached to some textbook publisher's website anyway, they are more likely to do so rather that trying to do without.
One iPad can replace all of those books (1/2/3 books per course [6/12/18 books per semester {24/48/72 books before graduation}]) with just ONE easy to carry piece of plastic and metal.
No wonder EVERYBODY is for them, students, faculty and staff...
I have a friend who swears in French when ever he gets "hit his thumb with a hammer" upset.
He says "FLOCONS DE MAIS!!!" which is French for "Corn Flakes!!!"
He's an Anglo living in Québec so he doesn't really know the choice words or how Québecers can string them together into interesting and colorful expressions. :-)
Plus swearwords really don't translate well.
A literal transliterration (as opposed to a translation) of swearwords across almost any linguistic/cultural barrier makes for absolutely hilarious dialogue in plays.
the average person is taking off his shoes, carrying liquids in less that 5 oz. containers, walking through full body scanners, subjecting him/her-self to indignities, tiny seats and spending hours locked in a flying tube, eating bad peanuts, drinking bad soda (should s/he be unfortunate enough to be flying at meal-time, s/he will be subjected to a meal where the serving tray may be as nutritious and flavorful as the white "mystery meat" on it,) reading in-flight magazines and the airline's shopping mall catalog.
Most of the flight is controlled by "Otto" the pilot and the take-off and landing are shakily barely controlled by the poor schmucks in the front of the thrown cigar tube trying to not screw up the check list or discover a new species of bird with a fondness for jet engine intakes.
The other riders are either boring, bored, or insane, rude, hostile or, worse, they earnestly want to tell you all about their dull-as-dishwater lives, husbands or wives or kids and won't shut their yaps. (I've flown enough that I take the train everywhere now because I don't want to have to strangle the screaming baby two rows back who's barely legal army wife mother has never heard in all her sixteen years on this planet of discipline, now SHUT THE FUCK UP THE WHOLE SORRY LOT OF YA!)
Flying is for poor people who's time isn't worth waiting for and neither are they.
the engine and flight surface controls can all be run through a few fiber-optic cables each barely thicker than a human hair.
You could even employ HUD technology (which is already see-through) and only have the landing gear, wing tanks and engines (flight and control surfaces) opaque.
It COULD be done to some extent ... but why?
Or better yet, what a wonderful way to discover that being up at 35,000 feet induces uncontrolled sphincter contractions.
Great way to come face to feces with acrophobia and agoraphobia... :-)
Pee and poop flung about the passenger compartment as you scream like a monkey at the "Sandoz factory"*.
The smell alone would get you fellow passengers to throw you out the invisible hatch while you flail your arms trying to pull an invisible rip chord.
WEEEeeee!!!!
* Sandoz used to run a facility in Montréal, Québec, Canada in the 1950s where they experimented with Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) for the C.I.A. (See Project MK-ULTRA [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKULTRA ] for more info.)
Even if you factor in all the companies who handle small parcel shipping (say under 100 lbs/box) it is still a lot more efficient and has a much smaller carbon footprint that the hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands and millions of parcels that are delivered everyday.
It gets even more efficient if we take how many railroad car-full of products get shipped to regional centers. (What? You think TigerDirect doesn't send their supplier's stuff to UPS warehouses and lets customers' orders ship from the closest one? It beats shipping from only one place.)
FedEx, UPS, DHL and the USPS all have deals like this.
YOU as an end consumer aren't affected directly.
The manufacturers and resellers love NOT having to pay for warehousing.
Why do you think "Bob's Furniture" "Bob-o-pedic" can get to your house with next day or two day delivery?
Sealy gets an order for 10,000 Posturepedic mattresses, re-brands them, delivers them "en masse" to a single warehouse and stays the Hell out of the retail chain.
"Bob's Furniture" gets orders from all over, gets the mattresses from the warehouse onto a truck and does local deliveries and stay's the Hell out of the production chain.
As long as YOU get a bed for cheap and fast, what the hell do you care?
Its just one mattress,
"Bob's Furniture" handles thousands of these delivery every day. Its the most efficient way of handling retail sales.
Sealy handles thousands of "Bob's" type clients everyday and sells beds in lots, lots and lots of lots. Millions of mattresses a month. Its the most efficient way of handling wholesales sales.
Its not the end purchaser who realizes some environmental benefits, its the shipper.
Its not about Joe Schmoe's environmental impact, its about Amazon and UPS and Fed Ex and USPS combined carbon footprint versus the environmental impact of all the Joe Schmoes out there.
This was bogus science starting from a false premise.
if she whacked you with a hammer for suggesting a BJ. (Change GF)
I never ate the crap pretending it was food in school.
I ate breakfast before and diner after but I never ate the tasteless, over-processed, artificially-flavored, artificially-colored, overcooked, salt-laden glop that they would slop on the plates.
YEEEWWW!
I am now a healthy, (apart from having contracted MS somehow,) svelte, muscular 56 year old.
I eschew all processed foods and monitor my blood pressure daily. I will NOT go like my 'rents after popping and artery in my brain.
I will go into my grave after all my friends have gone into theirs. Will I enjoy the wait though? Maybe. (Some of their daughters are cute. :-)
At least, I'll look healthy when I eventually do...
That's one semester's worth of books (and those are the crappy ones like Poetry or Spanish or Phenomenological Art.)
If the iPads are usable for two semesters, which they would be, the students actually save money.
Its not as if these students are nerds.
They're just schmucks who are never going to write a single program in their entire lives.
Let 'em have iPads.
Its cheaper than killing trees.
I don't think the passengers would be too happy suddenly having to sit a few hours on a tarmac in Albuquerque when they're missing their connections in Atlanta.
NEVER compare apples to oranges.