It sounds terrible, but really: any sort of malfunction in a self-contained craft, and the crew is completely SOL. This isn't like driving a car, where if you're off by a little bit, you just correct and pull into the correct stall anyway.
All the equipment either works as planned and the ship stays on course, or it doesn't. If it doesn't, you're screwed. Period.
But this is nothing new. Exploring new frontiers has always been dangerous, and that hasn't stopped people from doing it. Sailing across the Atlantic wasn't exactly safe; if something went wrong (including something like the wind not blowing), you were done. Travelling from the US east coast to the west coast wasn't exactly a joyride, either, as anyone who's played Oregon Trail can tell you.
The point is, if we get ourselves hung up on making it perfectly safe, we'll never actually do it. Safety stagnates progress, because risk/reward is immutable. It's the unknown. That's both its value and its danger. What we need is a best-effort at safety, and willing volunteers.
Something tells me that there'd be no shortage of the latter. Say someone walked up to you and said "you can be one of the first people on Mars...but there's a 10% chance you won't make it. Want to go?"
It's possible you'd say no, I suppose. But there are plenty of people who'd leap at the chance, myself included.
That would be fantastic...my spiritual pain was caused by reading their list of supported apps, which was AIM, Outlook (Express), text, IE, Excel, Word and PowerPoint(!).
I supposed they didn't say it didn't work with other apps.
If I wasn't at work, I'd download it and futz. But I am, which means even if I did install it, it would happily find IE, Outlook, Word, Excel and Powerpoint.
PD is specifically not a zero-sum game: there can be a net gain from cooperation, such that the system as a whole comes out ahead.
This is why it's important that the lone cooperator serve 5 years, mutual cooperators serve 2 years, and mutual defectors serve 4 years. From a system standpoint, the end result is either 4 total years (mutual cooperation), 5 total years (single defection) or 8 total years (mutual defection).
Since the systemic outcomes differ, it's a positive-sum game. In a zero sum game, the systemic result would be the same regardless of the participant's cooperation. The fact that it's not zero sum is precisely what makes it interesting.
That's a bit misleading. If your computer can't handle Doom3 now, waiting 6 or 12 months won't fix the problem. Granted, in 6 or 12 months, you can get the upgrades necessary to play Doom3 for just a couple hundred dollars, but it's only arguably "little" added cost, and it's certainly noy "no" added cost.
Now, you might be thinking that you were going to upgrade anyway, and that's a point. But unless by "waiting for games" you mean "waiting 5 years for games," you're not going to beat the console upgrade cycle.
First off, thank you for your writing - I read a lot of books, but very few have brought me as much satisfaction as yours.
In any event, the question: the first book of yours I read was Snow Crash, followed by Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon. This earned you a spot in my head as an excellent author of techno/SF/cyberpunk (for lack of a more definitive, preferably singular, term). While I've enjoyed the Baroque Cycle (though I admit to not having read the The System Of yhe World yet), I also look at a novel like Snow Crash with an almost wistful nostalgia. With all that said, do you have any plans to write anything else in that genre/style, or do you feel you've explored it as far as you're interested in doing?
As a fellow consumer of Milwaukee cable, I agree - TW has so far impressed me with their HD service. OTOH, their inability to add ESPNHD to the lineup without an additional fee really has me irked.
I realize it's not their fault, but it still torques me. Much as I want to watch Sunday Night Football in HD, I'm not gonna pay anoth $6.95/mo for ESPNHD and four in-demand HD channels.
Even worse, though, I'm planning to move to Madison in the relatively near future...and man, have I not been impressed with Charter.
It is also utter rubbish to claim that books which do contain a certain degree of melodrama and fantasy are the exclusive purview of middle to low brow senses of literature.
Your supposed high brow sense of literature is the same infestation which has transformed the visual arts into an arena where only the most ambiguous or outrageous efforts qualify as "true" art, which has granted some deep meaning and import to aleatoric music, which has made of the arts in general something which, if appreciated by any but the most erudite, is clearly not actually art.
Which attitude, I might add, is relatively new, and therefore did not inform the great works of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, or the Enlightenment. Shakespeare wrote to entertain, not out of some misguided sense of "art for art's sake," as did Cervantes, Dickens, Twain and the Brontes.
Beowulf includes both melodrama and fantasy, is an appreciation for this pivotal work low brow? Both the Iliad and the Odyssey, too, contain both aspects you so carefully denigrate. A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court, The Wizard Of Oz, War Of the Worlds and 1984 were all works of serious literature containing elements of both fantasy and melodrama, yet also exploring and highlighting the human condition.
If developing an appreciation for these works makes me low brow, I question both the validity and the value of your definition of high brow.
For what you propose to happen, the string wouldn't have to be "very" non-stretchable, it would have to be perfectly non-stretchable, and no such material exists.
On the distance/time scales encountered when dealing with engineering and mechanics, it's an assumption that can be of value, sort of like "disregarding friction from the air" prefacing every problem in high school physics texts. But it's no more accurate than the notional immovable object, unstoppable force, or frictionless surface.
(Although I seem to recall that liquid He is truly frictionless, come to think of it)
Agreed - but I was shooting for the theoretical limit of the technology (which, obviously, is at 100% energy efficiency). This went hand-in-hand with assuming that the entire top of the car is a solar cell, as well as that each step of solar -> electricity -> hydrogen -> kinetic is 100% efficient.
Clearly, these are all false assumptions, but if it's not sustainable under these ideal circumstances, there's not even any reason to further pursue the idea.
True, but that's because I'm trying to recognize the fact that for an alternative-energy vehicle to gain mass adoption, it has to perform at least as well as current gasoline-engine vehicles.
One of the advantages of current cars is that it can be run essentially indefinitely, only stopping once every ~5 hours, and then only for ~5 minutes.
The other problem is that the most common and significant period of "down time" for the car is when it's parked overnight, which is also exactly when parking it doesn't help at all.
No matter how rationally compelling a system such as this would be for the common driving habits of almost everyone (drive to work, park the car for ~9 hours, drive home, park the car for ~12 hours), very few people will buy a car that they can't just get in and drive to a different state (never mind that they haven't done that with their gasoline-engine cars in two decades).
So yes, your point is well-taken. But I think that's how you have to look at alternative-energy cars, if you seriously want them adopted into the marketplace.
OTOH, perhaps I'm overly pessimistic.
(In either case, though, you're right insofar as I should have stated that assumption. Sorry about that)
I seem to recall reading somewhere that ethanol requires more petroleum to create than it saves when used in internal combustion engines...but I don't have a source on that.
Someone correct my figures if I'm off, but according to my scratch calculations, this isn't theoretically sustainable without major advances in engine efficiency. Given 3.3 kWh/m^2 (which is average solar radiation in Seattle, according to here), and assuming your average car is about 5m x 2m (rough numbers, recall), it looks like you've got 49.5 kWh to play with.
Then, given 125,ooo BTU/gallon of gasoline, and around 3400 BTU/kWh (from here), you're looking at 37 kWh/gallon of gasoline. No current gasoline-engine car I know of burns less than 1.3 gallons per hour under any normal driving conditions.
Now, obviously, Seattle is the worst-case location in the continental US, but even in the best location (AZ, at 5.7 kWh/m^2), you've got to have a car which burns less than 2.3 gallons per hour. The more fuel-efficient of modern cars hit this pretty well, but I don't think the average is near that.
Or am I making some gross, embarassing error in my figuring?
The signal will flow through the tube at whatever speed waves propagate through the medium.
This is why sonar has a delay between the ping and the echo; the wave takes time to travel.
And "instantaneous" would absolutely break our understanding of the c limit, since our understanding is that no information can travel faster than c. This would be information moving faster.
Yeah, but there's a huge difference between the engine overcoming the brakes from a stop, and overcoming the brakes when the car's already at speed.
"Stop" friction is much higher than "moving" friction. No car ever built can overcome locked brakes from a standing start, that's true. I can certainly believe, though, that an engine can overcome the brakes at speed.
That's exactly the attitude that's holding back space exploration.
It's not safe. Period. People will be at risk, and when people are at risk, some of them are injured and/or die. Had everyone waited until it was safe to explore the world, the US would never have been settled from Europe.
Some may argue that would have been preferable. That's not the point.
Hemming everything in until it's safe prevents progress. Allow those who are willing to risk their lives by strapping (comparatively) untested rockets to their backs do so. As long as no one's conscripting children, there's no problem with it.
The risk-reward concept is immutable. The more you decrease risk, the more you decrease the reward.
That's not the one I'm thinking of, unfortunately (though it is another one I like). I'm quite certain the quote I have in mind does specifically reference the number of people 10 men can kill. It was bandied about plenty immediately after 9/11.
Slashdot Mirror
round trip>/b> could be accomplished in three months
(emphasis, obviously, mine)
It's relatively poorly written in a misleading fashion. The first number is one-way, the second round trip, so it's actually 76 to 45, or 152 to 90.
It sounds terrible, but really: any sort of malfunction in a self-contained craft, and the crew is completely SOL. This isn't like driving a car, where if you're off by a little bit, you just correct and pull into the correct stall anyway.
All the equipment either works as planned and the ship stays on course, or it doesn't. If it doesn't, you're screwed. Period.
But this is nothing new. Exploring new frontiers has always been dangerous, and that hasn't stopped people from doing it. Sailing across the Atlantic wasn't exactly safe; if something went wrong (including something like the wind not blowing), you were done. Travelling from the US east coast to the west coast wasn't exactly a joyride, either, as anyone who's played Oregon Trail can tell you.
The point is, if we get ourselves hung up on making it perfectly safe, we'll never actually do it. Safety stagnates progress, because risk/reward is immutable. It's the unknown. That's both its value and its danger. What we need is a best-effort at safety, and willing volunteers.
Something tells me that there'd be no shortage of the latter. Say someone walked up to you and said "you can be one of the first people on Mars...but there's a 10% chance you won't make it. Want to go?"
It's possible you'd say no, I suppose. But there are plenty of people who'd leap at the chance, myself included.
My apologies for what must have seemed incredibly condescending. My bad.
I sincerely doubt I've ever so comprehensively fucked up typing escape characters.
"Should have used the 'Preview' button," indeed.
Nothing to see, here.
Thereby making it much like your PC...*
%#060;/cheap shot>>
That would be fantastic...my spiritual pain was caused by reading their list of supported apps, which was AIM, Outlook (Express), text, IE, Excel, Word and PowerPoint(!).
I supposed they didn't say it didn't work with other apps.
If I wasn't at work, I'd download it and futz. But I am, which means even if I did install it, it would happily find IE, Outlook, Word, Excel and Powerpoint.
*sigh*
Being able to google my machine would be the best thing this side of perpetual motion.
Having to start doing everything with AIM, IE, Outlook and MS-Office would be the worst thing this side of the universal solvent.
Why, oh why, did they have to specifically aim this at all the apps I don't use?
PD is specifically not a zero-sum game: there can be a net gain from cooperation, such that the system as a whole comes out ahead.
This is why it's important that the lone cooperator serve 5 years, mutual cooperators serve 2 years, and mutual defectors serve 4 years. From a system standpoint, the end result is either 4 total years (mutual cooperation), 5 total years (single defection) or 8 total years (mutual defection).
Since the systemic outcomes differ, it's a positive-sum game. In a zero sum game, the systemic result would be the same regardless of the participant's cooperation. The fact that it's not zero sum is precisely what makes it interesting.
Now, you might be thinking that you were going to upgrade anyway, and that's a point. But unless by "waiting for games" you mean "waiting 5 years for games," you're not going to beat the console upgrade cycle.
In any event, the question: the first book of yours I read was Snow Crash, followed by Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon. This earned you a spot in my head as an excellent author of techno/SF/cyberpunk (for lack of a more definitive, preferably singular, term). While I've enjoyed the Baroque Cycle (though I admit to not having read the The System Of yhe World yet), I also look at a novel like Snow Crash with an almost wistful nostalgia. With all that said, do you have any plans to write anything else in that genre/style, or do you feel you've explored it as far as you're interested in doing?
I realize it's not their fault, but it still torques me. Much as I want to watch Sunday Night Football in HD, I'm not gonna pay anoth $6.95/mo for ESPNHD and four in-demand HD channels.
Even worse, though, I'm planning to move to Madison in the relatively near future...and man, have I not been impressed with Charter.
Your supposed high brow sense of literature is the same infestation which has transformed the visual arts into an arena where only the most ambiguous or outrageous efforts qualify as "true" art, which has granted some deep meaning and import to aleatoric music, which has made of the arts in general something which, if appreciated by any but the most erudite, is clearly not actually art.
Which attitude, I might add, is relatively new, and therefore did not inform the great works of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, or the Enlightenment. Shakespeare wrote to entertain, not out of some misguided sense of "art for art's sake," as did Cervantes, Dickens, Twain and the Brontes.
Beowulf includes both melodrama and fantasy, is an appreciation for this pivotal work low brow? Both the Iliad and the Odyssey, too, contain both aspects you so carefully denigrate. A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court, The Wizard Of Oz, War Of the Worlds and 1984 were all works of serious literature containing elements of both fantasy and melodrama, yet also exploring and highlighting the human condition.
If developing an appreciation for these works makes me low brow, I question both the validity and the value of your definition of high brow.
(with accompanying forehead-slap, of course)
Crap. The worst part is, I make that (or a closely related) mistake so often. Apparently, I can't get past being suckered by the "hour" in the unit.
FEH
Thanks for the correction.
I hope that's true; I've always been attracted to the use of ethanol to replace gasoline.
On the distance/time scales encountered when dealing with engineering and mechanics, it's an assumption that can be of value, sort of like "disregarding friction from the air" prefacing every problem in high school physics texts. But it's no more accurate than the notional immovable object, unstoppable force, or frictionless surface.
(Although I seem to recall that liquid He is truly frictionless, come to think of it)
Obviously, you can make ethanol without using any petroleum whatsoever.
The claim I recall had to do with current ethanol production, and trying to scale it up to replace gasoline usage in private vehicles.
Clearly, these are all false assumptions, but if it's not sustainable under these ideal circumstances, there's not even any reason to further pursue the idea.
One of the advantages of current cars is that it can be run essentially indefinitely, only stopping once every ~5 hours, and then only for ~5 minutes.
The other problem is that the most common and significant period of "down time" for the car is when it's parked overnight, which is also exactly when parking it doesn't help at all.
No matter how rationally compelling a system such as this would be for the common driving habits of almost everyone (drive to work, park the car for ~9 hours, drive home, park the car for ~12 hours), very few people will buy a car that they can't just get in and drive to a different state (never mind that they haven't done that with their gasoline-engine cars in two decades).
So yes, your point is well-taken. But I think that's how you have to look at alternative-energy cars, if you seriously want them adopted into the marketplace.
OTOH, perhaps I'm overly pessimistic.
(In either case, though, you're right insofar as I should have stated that assumption. Sorry about that)
Yes? No? Can someone back up/debunk that for me?
Then, given 125,ooo BTU/gallon of gasoline, and around 3400 BTU/kWh (from here), you're looking at 37 kWh/gallon of gasoline. No current gasoline-engine car I know of burns less than 1.3 gallons per hour under any normal driving conditions.
Now, obviously, Seattle is the worst-case location in the continental US, but even in the best location (AZ, at 5.7 kWh/m^2), you've got to have a car which burns less than 2.3 gallons per hour. The more fuel-efficient of modern cars hit this pretty well, but I don't think the average is near that.
Or am I making some gross, embarassing error in my figuring?
No
The signal will flow through the tube at whatever speed waves propagate through the medium.
This is why sonar has a delay between the ping and the echo; the wave takes time to travel.
And "instantaneous" would absolutely break our understanding of the c limit, since our understanding is that no information can travel faster than c. This would be information moving faster.
"Stop" friction is much higher than "moving" friction. No car ever built can overcome locked brakes from a standing start, that's true. I can certainly believe, though, that an engine can overcome the brakes at speed.
It's not safe. Period. People will be at risk, and when people are at risk, some of them are injured and/or die. Had everyone waited until it was safe to explore the world, the US would never have been settled from Europe.
Some may argue that would have been preferable. That's not the point.
Hemming everything in until it's safe prevents progress. Allow those who are willing to risk their lives by strapping (comparatively) untested rockets to their backs do so. As long as no one's conscripting children, there's no problem with it.
The risk-reward concept is immutable. The more you decrease risk, the more you decrease the reward.
That's not the one I'm thinking of, unfortunately (though it is another one I like). I'm quite certain the quote I have in mind does specifically reference the number of people 10 men can kill. It was bandied about plenty immediately after 9/11.