That vote however, doesn't count due to our first past the post voting system.
Vote, vote all you want - the electorals will do whatever the fuck *they* want. That's before we even get into gerrymandering to slant the electoral votes. Enjoy!
The current system not only disenfranchises minor parties, it also does not represent everyone who voted for a losing candidate. The fair way to do it is "proportional representation". You get 52% of the vote, you get 52% of the voting power in the legislature. You get 3% of the vote, you get 3% of the voting power. The other problem is our voting system was designed for farmers two centuries ago. That's why election day is after the harvest is in, and it only happens once a year. This "stickiness" of office holding allows candidates to promise anything they want, and then totally change their position once in office. You should be able to change who represents you if their position changes, or, alternately, make campaign promises binding contracts.
You may have posted that as a joke, but with unlimited bandwidth and low fees, Kansas City residents have an opportunity to become encrypted hubs for the rest of the country. It would go World > Out of country VPN > Kansas City > Elsewhere in the USA.
Let's assume a professor at Harvard publishes a series of articles about his specialty (say, astronomy), and syndicates it to newspapers around the country as the delivery mechanism. I use this example to clarify the constitutional issues. I think it is pretty clear this falls under freedom of speech, and the state cannot restrict what he says. Now substitute video for written article, and the consumer's ISP as the delivery mechanism (which is how Coursera works). From a legal standpoint, has anything changed because the professor's words are delivered a different way? I think not.
Coursera is acting as the syndicator, just like newpaper columnists work through syndicators to get their columns distributed to multiple newspapers. ISPs replace the newspaper as the way to deliver to the home. Just because the content being delivered is educational, it does not lose first amendment protection, and cannot be restrained the Minnesota is attempting to.
I wonder if the open-source books they will produce will break away from the paper textbook paradigm (linear text+static images)? The one I am writing ( http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Space_Transport_and_Engineering_Methods ) is heavily hyperlinked, I've included a spreadsheet and expect to include other media, am working on a resource library ( http://www.mediafire.com/?y1ko8gj5rouob ), and the concept of "class projects" (design studies) which become part of the book.
Most of the Space Station was built in one crappy old NASA building - 4708 at MSFC, in Huntsville, AL (I used to work there). One side was the factory floor where the module and truss structure were fabricated, the other side was the clean room where the equipment was installed. No way that would cost a $ Trillion. We didn't even have robotics, it was almost all manual assembly. With modern robotics, and "seed factory" machine tools you can start with even less stuff. Seed machines take metallic asteroid metals and turn it into parts. Then robots and remote control and a few live humans assemble those into a wider range of finished machines. Eventually you can process most asteroid materials into fuel, water, oxygen, and whatever else you need.
The advantage, of course, is that Near Earth Asteroid orbits take about 100 times less energy to reach from the Earth-Moon L-2 point than the Earth itself. So it is way easier in the long run to get your supplies from the asteroids. That includes fuel to land on the Moon or go to Mars. EML2 is only 60% of the velocity to reach as the Moon's surface. It's on the way, so you may as well build a "Space Truck Stop" there.
One downside is it is outside the Earth's magnetic field, so humans would be exposed to radiation/solar flares. You will want to do most of the work by remote control until you haul back your first big load of asteroid rock, and can use that for shielding.
At current exchange rates, the maximum you can earn from bitcoin "mining" (securing the transaction history) is $86400 per day. The current network hash rate is 270 petaflops. So how much they could have earned depends on how many Pflops they could throw at the problem.
Once I get my asteroid mining operation going, I will be happy to aim one in their direction. Just give me GPS coordinates to make sure I get the right target, and right size rock.
(Targeting asteroids for the highest bidder is an often overlooked revenue source).
2. Get hired by someone like Elon Musk or Richard Branson to help build their next space project.
3. Profit!
Free textbook is a nice side effect, since printed textbooks are too damn expensive, but the payoff is someone actually building one of the projects in the book. The book just serves as advertising for the ideas.
Pressurized greenhouses with recycling. Grow whatever you like.
Use asteroids between Earth and Mars (there are thousands of them) as a source of materials, at the least for radiation shielding and soil. At first bring the pressurized structure with you, when you get more advanced you can build them out of asteroid metals.
Plasma thrusters like VASIMR can use oxygen as reaction mass. Your typical asteroid is 40% oxygen, so they are *full of fuel*. Any moving around to get asteroid material in the right orbit between Earth and Mars won't cost you much, cause you can get your fuel locally.
That's what people like me (space systems engineer, ie rocket scientist) are for.
Getting to Mars will be surprisingly inexpensive if you are smart about how you approach the problem:
* Seed factories - this is a collection of computer and remote controlled machine tools and robots, which not only produce useful products, but make more equipment to expand the factory. This is a small step from current factory automation. You use these seed factories on Earth to build your main factories, which in turn build your vehicles to get to orbit. Once in orbit you build more seed factories, and progressively work out to high orbit, Phobos, then Mars.
* Orbital mining - cuts way down on what you need to launch from Earth. The inner solar system if full of floating fuel depots and chunks of metal, otherwise known as asteroids/dead comets. We should use them.
* High leverage propulsion - Plasma thrusters, Skyhooks, Ramjets, and others. All of them perform much better than chemical rockets.
* Transfer Habitats - Pick an asteroid in orbit between Earth and Mars. Use the material for shielding, soil, possibly pressure vessel, and fuel production. Spin it at 1 gee. Ride in comfort to Mars and back, with fresh food, no bone loss, and no radiation worries. The habitat stays permanently in the transfer orbit, you use a capsule at both ends to arrive/leave the planet. Since the habitat is not going anywhere, it does not matter if it is heavy.
The first part - seed factories, makes sense for it's own sake, even if you never go to space. It cuts the cost of manufacturing on Earth. But it can help pay for the rest of it.
There are floating chunks of pumice created by undersea volcanoes. Rather than just making chairs with the floating plastic, someone should combine the plastic and pumice to make entire floating islands. Then put some chairs on them. That would be much more valuable than just the chairs, not to mention floating islands are cool.
A lot of stuff on demonoid wasnt in print anymore, and there was a big focus on books/other things that arent readily available anymore
The files themselves were not hosted on Demonoid, just the index, comments, and tracker. The "stuff" still exists on everyone's hard drives. I'm sure a lot of it will pop back up on other locations. One lesson to learn from this is a big central site is not so good from a security standpoint, it makes too attractive a target. 100 specialized sites catering to different interests would be more resilient, since it makes the work to take them down 100 times harder.
They can follow you to the ends of the earth, seize your assets and your bank accounts, and generally make your life extremely difficult.
They can in theory, but in practice they are underfunded and slow to process paperwork. So it becomes a gamble if your name comes up to be harassed before the prior years straighten themselves out.
The way you deal with selling to the next owner while allowing people to live how they want to live is to file the inspection report in the same office that deeds/mortgages/liens get filed. Then it will show up in a title search before a sale. That lets the next owner and their mortgage lender know if there are code deficiencies, and they can reject the purchase, adjust the sales price, or require repairs before buying. Many home sales already involve inspections and bonds (like for termites), so the building code history is just another thing to check.
Note: just because it was built to code at one time, does not mean it has not degraded since then, you still need to inspect a house to see if it is in good condition now.
* Using a stone axe to cut handles for more stone axes predates it by about a million years. And, no, a RepRap can't copy *all* it's own parts, only the plastic ones, so only being able to make the handles does not disqualify the axe from being first.
* Where did medieval blacksmiths get their tools? Generally they made them using blacksmith's tools. In fact, if you don't have any tools, you can make them from nothing starting with ore and charcoal in a furnace. First things you make are a large block for an anvil, a small block for a hammer head, and some smaller bits to make a chisel and file. These are poured direct from the furnace into sand molds. You use your first crude tools to make better tools, and off you go.
* You can use a clay furnace to make clay pottery, and a brick furnace to make more bricks.
* Water wheel-powered sawmills can cut lumber to make more sawmills (except for the blades, see the blacksmith for that).
* Lathes, milling machines, and other machine tools have been making copies of themselves for a long time.
People always seem to forget where all the stuff we have now came from. I will credit modern CNC type machines with making it easier and cheaper to copy things, but they are not the first, humans have always been reproducing our tools.
Four years ago "You wouldn't pirate a car would you?" was an absurd parody of itself; now replicating an army of RPG miniatures isn't really stretching the imagination.
Not only is the answer for a car "Hell yes! I would if I could.", but here is a place you can do it legally:
I am the mythical "they" you mention, in that at one point I was studying taking Space Station modules to the Moon. I was working at Boeing, on the Space Station project, and naturally we wanted to sell more modules. Lunar dust was definitely the #1 issue that needed work. We came up with several approaches:
* Paving things - roads and landing pads are places you tend to kick up dust, so focus sunlight into concentrated areas and melt the regolith to pave it.
* Electrostatics - it's correct that the dust tends to stick to things via static charge. So you can also use static voltages to repel it, either charging up your modules and rovers, or wands you can wave over things.
* Removable spacesuit overalls and equipment covers, or hatches in the back of the suit, so the suit itself stays in the airlock.
* Blower, suction, or wash sprays in a "pre-airlock" area. This does not have to be full breathing pressure, but a cleaning chamber before you enter the main airlock.
Which of those will work best, or if you just live with it and replace filters and worn out parts, will take lots of testing, including on the Moon for real (vacuum chamber tests with simulated Lunar soil only go so far).
Maybe the consensus among armchair rocket scientists is it's not much benefit. Among real rocket scientists the consensus is it doubles payload over launching the same rocket from the ground. A rocket starting from sea level has the following losses:
* Gravity loss - when you are thrusting vertically, that is not adding to your orbital velocity. * Drag loss - aerodynamic drag flying through the atmosphere resists your acceleration * Thrust loss - rocket engines have less thrust at sea level because of air pressure x nozzle exit area.
Launching at jet airplane altitude helps with all of these, you spend more of the flight near horizontal, less drag because you are above most of the air already, and higher thrust. In addition, you get 10 km altitude and 240 m/s free from the carrier airplane.
I ran a study at Boeing on "jet boost", which is similar to air-launch except we dispense with the airplane part, and just strap fighter engines as boosters to a rocket core. We used the same trajectory program as NASA used to plan Shuttle missions, and got our engine data direct from Pratt & Whitney, so I am fairly confident we were getting accurate results.
The Gartner data shows US sales of 16 million units in the latest quarter. That is 64 million per year. There are 117 million households in the US, and 139 million employed people. So that comes to replacing a computer every 4 years for every home and job in the country. That does not sound like a dire situation, that sounds like a saturated market.
It's an empty structural shell that will *become* a spacecraft in about two years when they finish it. As of now it is nothing more than bare metal. I helped build the Space Station modules when I worked at Boeing, and doing the shell is about 5% of the work.
The tricky part is dealing with the Earth, Transfer Habitat, and Mars all having different orbit periods that are not simple multiples of each other. That makes it hard to line up for transfers.
How much in hard drives can you afford if you are no longer paying $50 a month for broadband? Individuals with clean records can sign up for uncapped business class service and VPNs or whatever they need to get content without hassles, and share access for a small fee. Customers supply hard drives which fill up with data and then get swapped, or a wifi network is used to pass the data.
Large providers are just the lazy way to get your data, there are plenty of other ways with a bit more effort and a lower price in the long run.
Slashdot Mirror
Bitcoin in circulation are larger in value than the money supply of 7 countries. OK, they are small countries, but you have to start somewhere.
Bitcoin current value: $110 million
Samoa money supply: $110 million
Source: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2214rank.html
It's supposed to be five lines:
Trust no one.
I want to believe.
The aliens soon
Will take
Their leave.
Burma Shave
http://www.sff.net/people/teaston/burma.htm
That vote however, doesn't count due to our first past the post voting system.
Vote, vote all you want - the electorals will do whatever the fuck *they* want. That's before we even get into gerrymandering to slant the electoral votes. Enjoy!
The current system not only disenfranchises minor parties, it also does not represent everyone who voted for a losing candidate. The fair way to do it is "proportional representation". You get 52% of the vote, you get 52% of the voting power in the legislature. You get 3% of the vote, you get 3% of the voting power. The other problem is our voting system was designed for farmers two centuries ago. That's why election day is after the harvest is in, and it only happens once a year. This "stickiness" of office holding allows candidates to promise anything they want, and then totally change their position once in office. You should be able to change who represents you if their position changes, or, alternately, make campaign promises binding contracts.
You may have posted that as a joke, but with unlimited bandwidth and low fees, Kansas City residents have an opportunity to become encrypted hubs for the rest of the country. It would go World > Out of country VPN > Kansas City > Elsewhere in the USA.
Let's assume a professor at Harvard publishes a series of articles about his specialty (say, astronomy), and syndicates it to newspapers around the country as the delivery mechanism. I use this example to clarify the constitutional issues. I think it is pretty clear this falls under freedom of speech, and the state cannot restrict what he says. Now substitute video for written article, and the consumer's ISP as the delivery mechanism (which is how Coursera works). From a legal standpoint, has anything changed because the professor's words are delivered a different way? I think not.
Coursera is acting as the syndicator, just like newpaper columnists work through syndicators to get their columns distributed to multiple newspapers. ISPs replace the newspaper as the way to deliver to the home. Just because the content being delivered is educational, it does not lose first amendment protection, and cannot be restrained the Minnesota is attempting to.
They could use the books already on Wikibooks ( http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page ) as a starting point.
I wonder if the open-source books they will produce will break away from the paper textbook paradigm (linear text+static images)? The one I am writing ( http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Space_Transport_and_Engineering_Methods ) is heavily hyperlinked, I've included a spreadsheet and expect to include other media, am working on a resource library ( http://www.mediafire.com/?y1ko8gj5rouob ), and the concept of "class projects" (design studies) which become part of the book.
Most of the Space Station was built in one crappy old NASA building - 4708 at MSFC, in Huntsville, AL (I used to work there). One side was the factory floor where the module and truss structure were fabricated, the other side was the clean room where the equipment was installed. No way that would cost a $ Trillion. We didn't even have robotics, it was almost all manual assembly. With modern robotics, and "seed factory" machine tools you can start with even less stuff. Seed machines take metallic asteroid metals and turn it into parts. Then robots and remote control and a few live humans assemble those into a wider range of finished machines. Eventually you can process most asteroid materials into fuel, water, oxygen, and whatever else you need.
The advantage, of course, is that Near Earth Asteroid orbits take about 100 times less energy to reach from the Earth-Moon L-2 point than the Earth itself. So it is way easier in the long run to get your supplies from the asteroids. That includes fuel to land on the Moon or go to Mars. EML2 is only 60% of the velocity to reach as the Moon's surface. It's on the way, so you may as well build a "Space Truck Stop" there.
One downside is it is outside the Earth's magnetic field, so humans would be exposed to radiation/solar flares. You will want to do most of the work by remote control until you haul back your first big load of asteroid rock, and can use that for shielding.
At current exchange rates, the maximum you can earn from bitcoin "mining" (securing the transaction history) is $86400 per day. The current network hash rate is 270 petaflops. So how much they could have earned depends on how many Pflops they could throw at the problem.
Once I get my asteroid mining operation going, I will be happy to aim one in their direction. Just give me GPS coordinates to make sure I get the right target, and right size rock.
(Targeting asteroids for the highest bidder is an often overlooked revenue source).
My approach:
1. Write open-source rocket science textbook: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Space_Transport_and_Engineering_Methods and give it away
2. Get hired by someone like Elon Musk or Richard Branson to help build their next space project.
3. Profit!
Free textbook is a nice side effect, since printed textbooks are too damn expensive, but the payoff is someone actually building one of the projects in the book. The book just serves as advertising for the ideas.
Pressurized greenhouses with recycling. Grow whatever you like.
Use asteroids between Earth and Mars (there are thousands of them) as a source of materials, at the least for radiation shielding and soil. At first bring the pressurized structure with you, when you get more advanced you can build them out of asteroid metals.
Plasma thrusters like VASIMR can use oxygen as reaction mass. Your typical asteroid is 40% oxygen, so they are *full of fuel*. Any moving around to get asteroid material in the right orbit between Earth and Mars won't cost you much, cause you can get your fuel locally.
That's what people like me (space systems engineer, ie rocket scientist) are for.
Getting to Mars will be surprisingly inexpensive if you are smart about how you approach the problem:
* Seed factories - this is a collection of computer and remote controlled machine tools and robots, which not only produce useful products, but make more equipment to expand the factory. This is a small step from current factory automation. You use these seed factories on Earth to build your main factories, which in turn build your vehicles to get to orbit. Once in orbit you build more seed factories, and progressively work out to high orbit, Phobos, then Mars.
* Orbital mining - cuts way down on what you need to launch from Earth. The inner solar system if full of floating fuel depots and chunks of metal, otherwise known as asteroids/dead comets. We should use them.
* High leverage propulsion - Plasma thrusters, Skyhooks, Ramjets, and others. All of them perform much better than chemical rockets.
* Transfer Habitats - Pick an asteroid in orbit between Earth and Mars. Use the material for shielding, soil, possibly pressure vessel, and fuel production. Spin it at 1 gee. Ride in comfort to Mars and back, with fresh food, no bone loss, and no radiation worries. The habitat stays permanently in the transfer orbit, you use a capsule at both ends to arrive/leave the planet. Since the habitat is not going anywhere, it does not matter if it is heavy.
The first part - seed factories, makes sense for it's own sake, even if you never go to space. It cuts the cost of manufacturing on Earth. But it can help pay for the rest of it.
There are floating chunks of pumice created by undersea volcanoes. Rather than just making chairs with the floating plastic, someone should combine the plastic and pumice to make entire floating islands. Then put some chairs on them. That would be much more valuable than just the chairs, not to mention floating islands are cool.
A lot of stuff on demonoid wasnt in print anymore, and there was a big focus on books/other things that arent readily available anymore
The files themselves were not hosted on Demonoid, just the index, comments, and tracker. The "stuff" still exists on everyone's hard drives. I'm sure a lot of it will pop back up on other locations. One lesson to learn from this is a big central site is not so good from a security standpoint, it makes too attractive a target. 100 specialized sites catering to different interests would be more resilient, since it makes the work to take them down 100 times harder.
They can follow you to the ends of the earth, seize your assets and your bank accounts, and generally make your life extremely difficult.
They can in theory, but in practice they are underfunded and slow to process paperwork. So it becomes a gamble if your name comes up to be harassed before the prior years straighten themselves out.
The way you deal with selling to the next owner while allowing people to live how they want to live is to file the inspection report in the same office that deeds/mortgages/liens get filed. Then it will show up in a title search before a sale. That lets the next owner and their mortgage lender know if there are code deficiencies, and they can reject the purchase, adjust the sales price, or require repairs before buying. Many home sales already involve inspections and bonds (like for termites), so the building code history is just another thing to check.
Note: just because it was built to code at one time, does not mean it has not degraded since then, you still need to inspect a house to see if it is in good condition now.
Spend their time playing with the sex robots.
Except it's not first, not by a long shot:
* Using a stone axe to cut handles for more stone axes predates it by about a million years. And, no, a RepRap can't copy *all* it's own parts, only the plastic ones, so only being able to make the handles does not disqualify the axe from being first.
* Where did medieval blacksmiths get their tools? Generally they made them using blacksmith's tools. In fact, if you don't have any tools, you can make them from nothing starting with ore and charcoal in a furnace. First things you make are a large block for an anvil, a small block for a hammer head, and some smaller bits to make a chisel and file. These are poured direct from the furnace into sand molds. You use your first crude tools to make better tools, and off you go.
* You can use a clay furnace to make clay pottery, and a brick furnace to make more bricks.
* Water wheel-powered sawmills can cut lumber to make more sawmills (except for the blades, see the blacksmith for that).
* Lathes, milling machines, and other machine tools have been making copies of themselves for a long time.
People always seem to forget where all the stuff we have now came from. I will credit modern CNC type machines with making it easier and cheaper to copy things, but they are not the first, humans have always been reproducing our tools.
Four years ago "You wouldn't pirate a car would you?" was an absurd parody of itself; now replicating an army of RPG miniatures isn't really stretching the imagination.
Not only is the answer for a car "Hell yes! I would if I could.", but here is a place you can do it legally:
http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Wikispeed_SGT01
I am the mythical "they" you mention, in that at one point I was studying taking Space Station modules to the Moon. I was working at Boeing, on the Space Station project, and naturally we wanted to sell more modules. Lunar dust was definitely the #1 issue that needed work. We came up with several approaches:
* Paving things - roads and landing pads are places you tend to kick up dust, so focus sunlight into concentrated areas and melt the regolith to pave it.
* Electrostatics - it's correct that the dust tends to stick to things via static charge. So you can also use static voltages to repel it, either charging up your modules and rovers, or wands you can wave over things.
* Removable spacesuit overalls and equipment covers, or hatches in the back of the suit, so the suit itself stays in the airlock.
* Blower, suction, or wash sprays in a "pre-airlock" area. This does not have to be full breathing pressure, but a cleaning chamber before you enter the main airlock.
Which of those will work best, or if you just live with it and replace filters and worn out parts, will take lots of testing, including on the Moon for real (vacuum chamber tests with simulated Lunar soil only go so far).
Maybe the consensus among armchair rocket scientists is it's not much benefit. Among real rocket scientists the consensus is it doubles payload over launching the same rocket from the ground. A rocket starting from sea level has the following losses:
* Gravity loss - when you are thrusting vertically, that is not adding to your orbital velocity.
* Drag loss - aerodynamic drag flying through the atmosphere resists your acceleration
* Thrust loss - rocket engines have less thrust at sea level because of air pressure x nozzle exit area.
Launching at jet airplane altitude helps with all of these, you spend more of the flight near horizontal, less drag because you are above most of the air already, and higher thrust. In addition, you get 10 km altitude and 240 m/s free from the carrier airplane.
I ran a study at Boeing on "jet boost", which is similar to air-launch except we dispense with the airplane part, and just strap fighter engines as boosters to a rocket core. We used the same trajectory program as NASA used to plan Shuttle missions, and got our engine data direct from Pratt & Whitney, so I am fairly confident we were getting accurate results.
The Gartner data shows US sales of 16 million units in the latest quarter. That is 64 million per year. There are 117 million households in the US, and 139 million employed people. So that comes to replacing a computer every 4 years for every home and job in the country. That does not sound like a dire situation, that sounds like a saturated market.
That is not a spacecraft in the same sense that this is not a car:
http://www.mehr-khodro.com/images/601_02_WELDING_ROBOTS.jpg
It's an empty structural shell that will *become* a spacecraft in about two years when they finish it. As of now it is nothing more than bare metal. I helped build the Space Station modules when I worked at Boeing, and doing the shell is about 5% of the work.
Actually, astronaut Buzz Aldrin has considered it:
http://buzzaldrin.com/space-vision/rocket_science/aldrin-mars-cycler/
There are scientific papers on possible orbits, and I am putting the idea of transfer habitats in the book I am writing:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Space_Transport_and_Engineering_Methods/Interplanetary
The tricky part is dealing with the Earth, Transfer Habitat, and Mars all having different orbit periods that are not simple multiples of each other. That makes it hard to line up for transfers.
How much in hard drives can you afford if you are no longer paying $50 a month for broadband? Individuals with clean records can sign up for uncapped business class service and VPNs or whatever they need to get content without hassles, and share access for a small fee. Customers supply hard drives which fill up with data and then get swapped, or a wifi network is used to pass the data.
Large providers are just the lazy way to get your data, there are plenty of other ways with a bit more effort and a lower price in the long run.