Wikibooks has been around for a while, it just lacks collaboration from real experts. MIT open courseware has some textbooks. Scientific papers are becoming openly available in many cases. The evolution is just not complete. But take it from someone who has written technical reports and is working on a space propulsion online textbook ( http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Space_Transport_and_Engineering_Methods ), the hard part is the human writing and editing, not which software you do it on. Apple could have a slick program with a "make pretty" button, and people like me would still have to do all the same work to create the content.
Re:Now we should fix the copyright term
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The very first copyright law, the Statute of Anne, in 1707, placed ownership in the hands of creators, and limited duration to 14 years. Before that the Stationer's Company had a perpetual monopoly to print any book without compensation. Sound familiar? I think the Statute of Anne is a good model for our new legislation, and it can be framed as a "return to what copyright was supposed to be originally".
Re:Lamar Smith still needs to lose his job over th
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Everyone helping elect someone else from his district (I mean everyone, all around the world), would send a message that this topic (messing with the Internet), is a toxic death sentence for a politician who supports it. Kicking him out would be a great object lesson for the rest of the politicians.
No, there is another way to abandon the system, and that is internally. Imagine you own a farm, so your food is taken care of, and it has a well equipped workshop, so you can make the rest of your stuff. Income for tax purposes is near zero (you would sell some food or furniture or something to cover the stuff you can't make on your own). Now, assume the farm equipment and the shop are automated, so you don't have to spend a lot of time running them. Corporations and government get very little from you this way, so you have more or less abandoned the "system".
In reality, one person can't really do this on their own, there is too much specialized knowledge needed, but a community farm and a community workshop, where multiple people contribute their skills and share in the products could do it. Even better is open sourcing the plans how to do it, especially how to bootstrap your equipment - using the tools you have to make better tools. I'm at the early stages of doing that. I have a bootstrap drill press almost done, and will open source the plans for it ( started here but a lot more to finish it: http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Bootstrap_Drill_Press ). With a drill press, I can make pieces for modular construction of a workshop. Add a sawmill ( http://woodgears.ca/bandmill/backyard_milling.html ) and the production chain now goes back to raw logs. If we can make buildings for ourselves, we can say "fuck you" to the whole banking/mortgage industry. There will still be things you need to buy made elsewhere, but self-production can cut that down a lot, and not paying interest saves even more.
Sounds like an opportunity to write a bill scanning program, that checks submitted legislation for words like "internet", "online", "website", etc. Use the current SOPA act as a source for your search template. The Library of Congress Thomas website has all the bills online, so that part is easy.
There is only one "rich and powerful" class, the members are interchangeable between government and business. The average net worth of all top federal officials (executive, judicial, and legislative) is $6.5 million. Mayor Bloomberg is an example of a crossover, being both a multibillionaire, and politician, Romney, whose father was Governor of Michigan, got his start in Wall Street due to political connections, and then returned to politics with a net worth in the hundreds of millions.
So time to get over the idea of corporations vs government, and Democrat vs Republican, it's really "rich and powerful" vs "everyone else".
Numbered Swiss accounts are so last century for dodging taxes. The #1 rated tax haven is the "City of London", what the rest of the world thinks of as their financial district, not the much larger metropolis. According to Wikipedia:
"The City of London Corporation has been criticized for being undemocratic and a privileged haven for banks, financial institutions and big businesses....The City has come under criticism for the determining role of business votes over the residential vote: businesses in the City have around 24,000 votes, dwarfing the residents' 8,000 votes.[8] Tax justice campaigner Nicholas Shaxson said: "Voting would reflect the wishes not of the City's 300,000 workers, but of corporate managements. So Goldman Sachs and the People's Bank of China ('sic') would get to vote".[18] Journalist George Monbiot complained: "It's not the workers who decide how the votes are cast, but the bosses, who "appoint" the voters. Plutocracy, pure and simple."
Re:Making sure it stays dead
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The way to make sure this kind of law does not rise from the dead like a zombie in a bad horror movie is to punish the lawmakers who co-sponsored it. If you live in a state or district where your congressman/senator put his name on the respective bills (SOPA or PIPA), write them and tell them you will support/campaign for/contribute to their opponent, even if the bills are dead, just because they were stupid enough to ever think it was a good idea and put their name to it.
If there is one thing they fear more than their desire for campaign funds, it's getting voted out of office. So make this a "vote you out of office" issue, so the next time the entertainment industry comes knocking (and they will), the legislator will tell them to go away.
On the other hand, if you happen to live where your representative was opposed to the bill, thank them for doing it, and tell them you will to everything you can to support them in the next election.
To some degree, it does not matter if you actually do work for their opponent or them or the other stuff, cause likely some staffer will just tally your opinion in a spreadsheet, but you want to show up in the column of "very strongly against" the next time this shows up. They do pay attention to the aggregate opinions.
Places like Google can put a message on their home search page, or on search results. Actually, I have already noticed their news aggregation page has a SOPA story most of the time in the past week or two. I don't know if they are giving the news algorithm a boost, or if the story is just that popular on it's own, but its there a lot
Fixing one of the bad parts of the bill is not good enough. We need both the Senate and House versions killed dead, and serious voter action against the supporters of the bill, even if they recant their position later. We want them to be in fear of their jobs if they even *think* of censoring free speech again. Otherwise this bullshit will just pop up again in the next session of Congress. The media giants will never stop wanting more, it's built into the DNA of what a corporation does to maximize profits, so they will always come back again. We have to treat them the way zombies get treated in the apocalypse movies they make.
India has nuclear bombs, and rockets capable of reaching orbit, therefore ballistic missiles that reach less than orbit. Therefore we have a self interest in making sure they have a civilized government which won't use them. Free speech is one of the tools to help maintain a civilized government, therefore that is also in our self interest to encourage it. Now you shut up.
There is already perfectly good technology for making items out of other materials, like CNC machines. If you couple that with a scrap furnace to remelt all the shavings you get cutting metal, there is very little waste. With wood, toss the shavings back into the forest and it eventually becomes more wood. Concrete can be formed additively, it's called "slip forming" and is used all the time for making things like highway pavement. Some people are working on general purpose 3-D concrete formers that work on the same principles as a makerbot, just bigger.
What I see in the long run is a combined CNC machine that shares one set of multi-axis motors, with different heads to do different materials: plastic extrusion, machining metal, etc, or if that is too difficult, several single purpose machines that are connected to a parts conveyor and an assembly robot. That starts to get beyond what a home garage might handle, but it would be the right scale for a copy shop that currently has several big photocopy machines.
If you enter into google "site:thepiratebay.org" followed by whatever you were looking for, it will bring up cached copies of TPB pages. The magnet links are just text. So does the court order block Google's cached pages also, or is this a trivial workaround?
As far as facilitating copyright violation, Viacom, the media giant, needs to sue itself. Go visit c|net's download section, and enter terms like "ripper", "torrent", and "eMule". You will find lots of software available. c|net is owned by CBS, which in turn is owned by Viacom. If they are against file sharing, then why are they distributing the software to do it?
The answer is they want to control the channels for media distribution. If they are the only source, people will have to come to them to get it. Piracy is a ruse to get laws passed so they can shut down *any* competition, even the legitimate independants. The alternate answer is they are too stupid to realize that one of their divisions distributes file sharing software, but 10 years after Napster you would think someone in management would have noticed by now.
Trees produce 3-10 tons per year per acre of net wood, plus around an equal amount of waste (bark, branches, leaves), which usually goes back into the ground. You can harvest logs with a 4 wheeler and a "log cart" trailer. That is basically an arch with a winch, and two wheels. You position it over the log, and winch it up so most of the weight is off the ground (you can let the back end trail on the ground if you expect to go downhill, to slow you down). You will not extract huge logs that way, but if you have big trees, you can split the logs first into manageable pieces. It doesn't require heavy equipment, we just use big machines because it's more efficient, but people harvested logs with nothing more than a couple of draft horses, and those are self-fueling.
You mean a massive harvesting operation like the lumber industry? Well built buildings can store wood for hundreds of years, and when it comes time to replace them, you convert them to biochar, which lasts hundreds more years.
The "magic beans" are automated carbon fiber factories. One starts at ground level making struts, from which you build an absurdly tall tower. The other starts from orbit, and makes carbon fiber cables, from which you build down. With current carbon fiber materials that does not quite let you do a full beanstalk, but you can use a rocket from the top of the tower to reach the bottom of the orbital cable, and still save vs using a rocket for the whole trip.
I used to be a tree farmer, you insensitive clod! (Really, no joke, I was). Planting trees makes plenty of money, even without carbon trading offsets. If you can get credits for CO2 removal, it is even more profitable.
I never cut my trees down, and still made money with it, because the "standing timber" increased in size while I owned it, and therefore was worth more as an asset. You have to buy a forest which is not mature for that to work. Mine were ~20 years old when I bought them, old enough to reach peak growth. Seedlings don't build much lumber volume the first few years. After some time, the maturing trees slow down their growth and some start dying off, so at that point you can start to harvest at a steady rate, and planting replacements for the ones you harvest to maintain growth. When that happens depends on which kind of tree it is.
* Build houses and furniture out of it * Use pyrolysis (partial burning without enough oxygen) to create char products (essentially make charcoal). Add it to soil. It improves the nutrient holding capacity of soil and takes a long time to decay itself when buried (~200 years). The reason it holds nutrients is charred wood has lots of tiny holes in it from the plant cells. Nutrients don't get washed away as easily. Holding more nutrients allows the next generation of trees to grow faster, or feed more people, depending what you use the land for. Pyrolysis also generates a bit of energy as a side effect. * Store the wood in a dry or cold location where it won't rot. There are plenty of deserts and ice caps for that. If you put it on ice, wood is a good insulator, and can reduce melting of glaciers by keeping the sun off them in the summers. That won't make a difference in the middle of Antarctica, but it can help around the margins of ice caps where melting is happening.
We are not going to construct colonies - either floating, or planet-bound, that are of sufficient scale & size to provide any hedge against extinction. The materials, the cost, the risk, and the energy requirements are simply too high.
This is incorrect. The energy cost to reach Earth orbit is about what potatoes cost where I live, weight for weight ($1/kg). Launch costs are much higher than that right now because we are doing it wrong, but that will not be true forever.
Once you deliver robotic mining and extraction machines to orbit, you can bootstrap the infrastructure for colonies by mining near Earth asteroids. So you only have to send the first set of equipment once. After that they copy themselves, with perhaps 1-2% of hard to make parts shipped from Earth.
Until the first colony is done, you only send the minimum amount of construction crew, and the maximum amount of robots controlled from Earth. You build that first colony in Earth orbit close enough that speed of light delay does not mess up control from the ground. After the first colony is built, you build more of them progressively further out.
No, I'm here. What did you want to know? Getting off the Earth? That's easy:
* Orbital velocity is root (R(e) * g), where R(e) is the radius of the Earth (6378000 meters), and g is the surface gravity (9.80665 m/s^2). That works out to 7908 m/s * Kinetic Energy is 0.5 * m * v^2. Thus kinetic energy to reach orbit is 31.27 MJ/kg. * One kiloWatt-hour (kWh) is the common unit of electric energy. 1000 W * 3600 seconds = 3.6 MJ. * Therefore it takes 31.27 / 3.6 = 8.7 kWh/kg to get something into orbit. * Multiply by your local electric rate. Where I an now, that works out to $1/kg, about what potatoes cost at the local market.
So getting off the Earth is cheap, if you use energy efficiently. You haven't been, though. You have been using about the least efficient method available: chemical rockets. The best rocket fuels only have a bit under half the energy needed to get to orbit (15 MJ/kg), and the engines are around 2/3 efficient, which leaves you at around 10 MJ/kg. So the fuel can't even get itself to orbit, much less anything else, like cargo. You end up using a lot of fuel to lift a smaller amount of fuel part way, then use that to push an even smaller amount a bit further, and finally that last bit pushes a very small cargo to orbit. For those who understand math, that is an exponential ratio of fuel to cargo, where the exponent is the ratio of mission velocity / rocket exhaust velocity. For chemical rockets, that works out to 2-3, depending on which fuel. So you use e (2.718...) raised to 2-3 power as much fuel as cargo that gets to orbit.
The answer is quite obvious: use something else. Something that has better efficiency, so you are not slaughtered by the exponential. There are a number of choices. Which one you use depends on a number of "mission requirements": What are you launching, how often, how much up front development money you can spend, how much risk do you want to take, etc.
OK, that takes care of getting out of *this* gravity well. What next?
(1) Don't go right down another one. The Moon and Mars can wait till you build up some infrastructure. Use near Earth asteroids first, followed by other asteroids, including the ones orbiting Mars, as a source of building materials. You can use efficient electric thrusters as long as you are not diving down a gravity well.
(2) Don't send humans first. Humans have all kinds of picky needs about temperature, pressure, food, radiation, etc. Robots, remote controlled, and automated equipment (which I will call just "robots" for brevity) are not as sensitive. Send robots first, have them build stuff up. Once you have enough stuff in place and can support the humans, then they can come.
There is a much bigger issue looming on the horizon ( 100 - 400 years) though that you will want to ponder -- what happens to "value" when anyone can simply "print" whatever object they want? =)
You might want to drop a couple of zeroes from the time estimate. There's are projects to open-source the core hardware manufacturing equipment like a plasma torch: http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/CNC_Torch_Table Once you are able to automate general production tools (lathe, milling machine, drill press, etc), you can then make more specialized tools, which in turn make the end products. It becomes a matter of software (CAD files) to produce all the parts. Some stuff, like computer chips, are too specialized to make locally, but it is quite feasible to do 80% today in a community fabrication shop. At the present state of technology, a generalized fab will not fit in your garage, but it should fit in a medium warehouse. That will improve over time just like computers once required large rooms for a single primitive version.
Besides the parts making machines, you also need materials handling (overhead cranes, robotic carts), and assembly robots, and lots of software. For now, it won't be hit "print" and an inkjet printer sized device spits out another printer, but a warehouse sized shop will be able to make all the parts for another shop. That upends the economics of the physical world the same way file sharing upends the economics of digital content. Making paper books or prints of movies on film reels is a linear process, it takes the same amount of work to make each copy. File sharing and self-copying fabrication shops are exponential.
Getting back to the discussion topic, that is also why SOPA will fail even if passed. Takedowns are a linear process. It is limited by how many people are working to detect the websites, get to a judge to order the removal, etc. File sharing distributes an exponential number of copies of whatever people want, so will always win that race. If necessary, the sharing will go on offline, by portable hard drives and pirate wifi hotspots (share with anyone in range, but not on the internet), but it will still be exponential growth as long as one person can share with at least two others.
Not to be pedantic, but there are no longer US troops in Iraq.
No, there is just a division's worth of "private security" attached to the US Embassy there. In terms of total staff, it's the largest US Embassy anywhere.
Take a look at the percentage of "institutional investor" ownership of the S&P 500: http://www.nasd100.com/sp500ownership The median is over 80%. Institutional investors are mutual funds, pension plans, and other such organizations where the beneficial owners (individual investors and pension plan participants) don't get a say in how the companies are run. The people who do get to decide are the corporate board and executives of the companies, and sometimes the people who run the institutional funds. But usually the latter leave it to the corporation, and just buy and sell the stock depending on how well it is doing. The institutional ownership share is so high, it is mathematically impossible for direct investors who buy shares in a company to have any effect on corporate policy. So the only people left who *do* have any control are the people running the companies, and the few activist institutions. Since many executives and board members sit on other boards, they form an interlocking club, where they know each other, travel to the same events, etc. Some of them are also in government and the media. These are the modern day nobility, and like any privileged class, they will do their damnedest to stay on top. You can call them "the rich and powerful" or "Wall Street" or "The 1%" as a shorthand.
In the case of Iran, if you want to understand what is going on, just like everywhere else, follow the money. Who is getting the oil income, and who is skimming off their share? Is Iran immune to the graft and corruption which leads leaders in that part of the world to accumulate billions in family wealth? I suspect not. The USA just has a more distributed system. The average net worth of top government officials (Congress, Executive, and Judiciary) is $6.5 million. You think they got that on government salaries?
Could you and other professors in the field collaborate on an open textbook? That way it's less effort on each person's part. Effectively it's a form of peer review also, with multiple eyes reviewing the content.
Slashdot Mirror
Wikibooks has been around for a while, it just lacks collaboration from real experts. MIT open courseware has some textbooks. Scientific papers are becoming openly available in many cases. The evolution is just not complete. But take it from someone who has written technical reports and is working on a space propulsion online textbook ( http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Space_Transport_and_Engineering_Methods ), the hard part is the human writing and editing, not which software you do it on. Apple could have a slick program with a "make pretty" button, and people like me would still have to do all the same work to create the content.
The very first copyright law, the Statute of Anne, in 1707, placed ownership in the hands of creators, and limited duration to 14 years. Before that the Stationer's Company had a perpetual monopoly to print any book without compensation. Sound familiar? I think the Statute of Anne is a good model for our new legislation, and it can be framed as a "return to what copyright was supposed to be originally".
Everyone helping elect someone else from his district (I mean everyone, all around the world), would send a message that this topic (messing with the Internet), is a toxic death sentence for a politician who supports it. Kicking him out would be a great object lesson for the rest of the politicians.
No, there is another way to abandon the system, and that is internally. Imagine you own a farm, so your food is taken care of, and it has a well equipped workshop, so you can make the rest of your stuff. Income for tax purposes is near zero (you would sell some food or furniture or something to cover the stuff you can't make on your own). Now, assume the farm equipment and the shop are automated, so you don't have to spend a lot of time running them. Corporations and government get very little from you this way, so you have more or less abandoned the "system".
In reality, one person can't really do this on their own, there is too much specialized knowledge needed, but a community farm and a community workshop, where multiple people contribute their skills and share in the products could do it. Even better is open sourcing the plans how to do it, especially how to bootstrap your equipment - using the tools you have to make better tools. I'm at the early stages of doing that. I have a bootstrap drill press almost done, and will open source the plans for it ( started here but a lot more to finish it: http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Bootstrap_Drill_Press ). With a drill press, I can make pieces for modular construction of a workshop. Add a sawmill ( http://woodgears.ca/bandmill/backyard_milling.html ) and the production chain now goes back to raw logs. If we can make buildings for ourselves, we can say "fuck you" to the whole banking/mortgage industry. There will still be things you need to buy made elsewhere, but self-production can cut that down a lot, and not paying interest saves even more.
Sounds like an opportunity to write a bill scanning program, that checks submitted legislation for words like "internet", "online", "website", etc. Use the current SOPA act as a source for your search template. The Library of Congress Thomas website has all the bills online, so that part is easy.
There is only one "rich and powerful" class, the members are interchangeable between government and business. The average net worth of all top federal officials (executive, judicial, and legislative) is $6.5 million. Mayor Bloomberg is an example of a crossover, being both a multibillionaire, and politician, Romney, whose father was Governor of Michigan, got his start in Wall Street due to political connections, and then returned to politics with a net worth in the hundreds of millions.
So time to get over the idea of corporations vs government, and Democrat vs Republican, it's really "rich and powerful" vs "everyone else".
Numbered Swiss accounts are so last century for dodging taxes. The #1 rated tax haven is the "City of London", what the rest of the world thinks of as their financial district, not the much larger metropolis. According to Wikipedia:
"The City of London Corporation has been criticized for being undemocratic and a privileged haven for banks, financial institutions and big businesses....The City has come under criticism for the determining role of business votes over the residential vote: businesses in the City have around 24,000 votes, dwarfing the residents' 8,000 votes.[8] Tax justice campaigner Nicholas Shaxson said: "Voting would reflect the wishes not of the City's 300,000 workers, but of corporate managements. So Goldman Sachs and the People's Bank of China ('sic') would get to vote".[18] Journalist George Monbiot complained: "It's not the workers who decide how the votes are cast, but the bosses, who "appoint" the voters. Plutocracy, pure and simple."
The way to make sure this kind of law does not rise from the dead like a zombie in a bad horror movie is to punish the lawmakers who co-sponsored it. If you live in a state or district where your congressman/senator put his name on the respective bills (SOPA or PIPA), write them and tell them you will support/campaign for/contribute to their opponent, even if the bills are dead, just because they were stupid enough to ever think it was a good idea and put their name to it.
If there is one thing they fear more than their desire for campaign funds, it's getting voted out of office. So make this a "vote you out of office" issue, so the next time the entertainment industry comes knocking (and they will), the legislator will tell them to go away.
On the other hand, if you happen to live where your representative was opposed to the bill, thank them for doing it, and tell them you will to everything you can to support them in the next election.
To some degree, it does not matter if you actually do work for their opponent or them or the other stuff, cause likely some staffer will just tally your opinion in a spreadsheet, but you want to show up in the column of "very strongly against" the next time this shows up. They do pay attention to the aggregate opinions.
Places like Google can put a message on their home search page, or on search results. Actually, I have already noticed their news aggregation page has a SOPA story most of the time in the past week or two. I don't know if they are giving the news algorithm a boost, or if the story is just that popular on it's own, but its there a lot
Fixing one of the bad parts of the bill is not good enough. We need both the Senate and House versions killed dead, and serious voter action against the supporters of the bill, even if they recant their position later. We want them to be in fear of their jobs if they even *think* of censoring free speech again. Otherwise this bullshit will just pop up again in the next session of Congress. The media giants will never stop wanting more, it's built into the DNA of what a corporation does to maximize profits, so they will always come back again. We have to treat them the way zombies get treated in the apocalypse movies they make.
India has nuclear bombs, and rockets capable of reaching orbit, therefore ballistic missiles that reach less than orbit. Therefore we have a self interest in making sure they have a civilized government which won't use them. Free speech is one of the tools to help maintain a civilized government, therefore that is also in our self interest to encourage it. Now you shut up.
There is already perfectly good technology for making items out of other materials, like CNC machines. If you couple that with a scrap furnace to remelt all the shavings you get cutting metal, there is very little waste. With wood, toss the shavings back into the forest and it eventually becomes more wood. Concrete can be formed additively, it's called "slip forming" and is used all the time for making things like highway pavement. Some people are working on general purpose 3-D concrete formers that work on the same principles as a makerbot, just bigger.
What I see in the long run is a combined CNC machine that shares one set of multi-axis motors, with different heads to do different materials: plastic extrusion, machining metal, etc, or if that is too difficult, several single purpose machines that are connected to a parts conveyor and an assembly robot. That starts to get beyond what a home garage might handle, but it would be the right scale for a copy shop that currently has several big photocopy machines.
If you enter into google "site:thepiratebay.org" followed by whatever you were looking for, it will bring up cached copies of TPB pages. The magnet links are just text. So does the court order block Google's cached pages also, or is this a trivial workaround?
As far as facilitating copyright violation, Viacom, the media giant, needs to sue itself. Go visit c|net's download section, and enter terms like "ripper", "torrent", and "eMule". You will find lots of software available. c|net is owned by CBS, which in turn is owned by Viacom. If they are against file sharing, then why are they distributing the software to do it?
The answer is they want to control the channels for media distribution. If they are the only source, people will have to come to them to get it. Piracy is a ruse to get laws passed so they can shut down *any* competition, even the legitimate independants. The alternate answer is they are too stupid to realize that one of their divisions distributes file sharing software, but 10 years after Napster you would think someone in management would have noticed by now.
Trees produce 3-10 tons per year per acre of net wood, plus around an equal amount of waste (bark, branches, leaves), which usually goes back into the ground. You can harvest logs with a 4 wheeler and a "log cart" trailer. That is basically an arch with a winch, and two wheels. You position it over the log, and winch it up so most of the weight is off the ground (you can let the back end trail on the ground if you expect to go downhill, to slow you down). You will not extract huge logs that way, but if you have big trees, you can split the logs first into manageable pieces. It doesn't require heavy equipment, we just use big machines because it's more efficient, but people harvested logs with nothing more than a couple of draft horses, and those are self-fueling.
You mean a massive harvesting operation like the lumber industry? Well built buildings can store wood for hundreds of years, and when it comes time to replace them, you convert them to biochar, which lasts hundreds more years.
The "magic beans" are automated carbon fiber factories. One starts at ground level making struts, from which you build an absurdly tall tower. The other starts from orbit, and makes carbon fiber cables, from which you build down. With current carbon fiber materials that does not quite let you do a full beanstalk, but you can use a rocket from the top of the tower to reach the bottom of the orbital cable, and still save vs using a rocket for the whole trip.
I used to be a tree farmer, you insensitive clod! (Really, no joke, I was). Planting trees makes plenty of money, even without carbon trading offsets. If you can get credits for CO2 removal, it is even more profitable.
I never cut my trees down, and still made money with it, because the "standing timber" increased in size while I owned it, and therefore was worth more as an asset. You have to buy a forest which is not mature for that to work. Mine were ~20 years old when I bought them, old enough to reach peak growth. Seedlings don't build much lumber volume the first few years. After some time, the maturing trees slow down their growth and some start dying off, so at that point you can start to harvest at a steady rate, and planting replacements for the ones you harvest to maintain growth. When that happens depends on which kind of tree it is.
Ways to sequester captured CO2 as lumber:
* Build houses and furniture out of it
* Use pyrolysis (partial burning without enough oxygen) to create char products (essentially make charcoal). Add it to soil. It improves the nutrient holding capacity of soil and takes a long time to decay itself when buried (~200 years). The reason it holds nutrients is charred wood has lots of tiny holes in it from the plant cells. Nutrients don't get washed away as easily. Holding more nutrients allows the next generation of trees to grow faster, or feed more people, depending what you use the land for. Pyrolysis also generates a bit of energy as a side effect.
* Store the wood in a dry or cold location where it won't rot. There are plenty of deserts and ice caps for that. If you put it on ice, wood is a good insulator, and can reduce melting of glaciers by keeping the sun off them in the summers. That won't make a difference in the middle of Antarctica, but it can help around the margins of ice caps where melting is happening.
We are not going to construct colonies - either floating, or planet-bound, that are of sufficient scale & size to provide any hedge against extinction. The materials, the cost, the risk, and the energy requirements are simply too high.
This is incorrect. The energy cost to reach Earth orbit is about what potatoes cost where I live, weight for weight ($1/kg). Launch costs are much higher than that right now because we are doing it wrong, but that will not be true forever.
Once you deliver robotic mining and extraction machines to orbit, you can bootstrap the infrastructure for colonies by mining near Earth asteroids. So you only have to send the first set of equipment once. After that they copy themselves, with perhaps 1-2% of hard to make parts shipped from Earth.
Until the first colony is done, you only send the minimum amount of construction crew, and the maximum amount of robots controlled from Earth. You build that first colony in Earth orbit close enough that speed of light delay does not mess up control from the ground. After the first colony is built, you build more of them progressively further out.
No, I'm here. What did you want to know? Getting off the Earth? That's easy:
* Orbital velocity is root (R(e) * g), where R(e) is the radius of the Earth (6378000 meters), and g is the surface gravity (9.80665 m/s^2). That works out to 7908 m/s
* Kinetic Energy is 0.5 * m * v^2. Thus kinetic energy to reach orbit is 31.27 MJ/kg.
* One kiloWatt-hour (kWh) is the common unit of electric energy. 1000 W * 3600 seconds = 3.6 MJ.
* Therefore it takes 31.27 / 3.6 = 8.7 kWh/kg to get something into orbit.
* Multiply by your local electric rate. Where I an now, that works out to $1/kg, about what potatoes cost at the local market.
So getting off the Earth is cheap, if you use energy efficiently. You haven't been, though. You have been using about the least efficient method available: chemical rockets. The best rocket fuels only have a bit under half the energy needed to get to orbit (15 MJ/kg), and the engines are around 2/3 efficient, which leaves you at around 10 MJ/kg. So the fuel can't even get itself to orbit, much less anything else, like cargo. You end up using a lot of fuel to lift a smaller amount of fuel part way, then use that to push an even smaller amount a bit further, and finally that last bit pushes a very small cargo to orbit. For those who understand math, that is an exponential ratio of fuel to cargo, where the exponent is the ratio of mission velocity / rocket exhaust velocity. For chemical rockets, that works out to 2-3, depending on which fuel. So you use e (2.718...) raised to 2-3 power as much fuel as cargo that gets to orbit.
The answer is quite obvious: use something else. Something that has better efficiency, so you are not slaughtered by the exponential. There are a number of choices. Which one you use depends on a number of "mission requirements": What are you launching, how often, how much up front development money you can spend, how much risk do you want to take, etc.
OK, that takes care of getting out of *this* gravity well. What next?
(1) Don't go right down another one. The Moon and Mars can wait till you build up some infrastructure. Use near Earth asteroids first, followed by other asteroids, including the ones orbiting Mars, as a source of building materials. You can use efficient electric thrusters as long as you are not diving down a gravity well.
(2) Don't send humans first. Humans have all kinds of picky needs about temperature, pressure, food, radiation, etc. Robots, remote controlled, and automated equipment (which I will call just "robots" for brevity) are not as sensitive. Send robots first, have them build stuff up. Once you have enough stuff in place and can support the humans, then they can come.
There is a much bigger issue looming on the horizon ( 100 - 400 years) though that you will want to ponder -- what happens to "value" when anyone can simply "print" whatever object they want? =)
You might want to drop a couple of zeroes from the time estimate. There's are projects to open-source the core hardware manufacturing equipment like a plasma torch: http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/CNC_Torch_Table Once you are able to automate general production tools (lathe, milling machine, drill press, etc), you can then make more specialized tools, which in turn make the end products. It becomes a matter of software (CAD files) to produce all the parts. Some stuff, like computer chips, are too specialized to make locally, but it is quite feasible to do 80% today in a community fabrication shop. At the present state of technology, a generalized fab will not fit in your garage, but it should fit in a medium warehouse. That will improve over time just like computers once required large rooms for a single primitive version.
Besides the parts making machines, you also need materials handling (overhead cranes, robotic carts), and assembly robots, and lots of software. For now, it won't be hit "print" and an inkjet printer sized device spits out another printer, but a warehouse sized shop will be able to make all the parts for another shop. That upends the economics of the physical world the same way file sharing upends the economics of digital content. Making paper books or prints of movies on film reels is a linear process, it takes the same amount of work to make each copy. File sharing and self-copying fabrication shops are exponential.
Getting back to the discussion topic, that is also why SOPA will fail even if passed. Takedowns are a linear process. It is limited by how many people are working to detect the websites, get to a judge to order the removal, etc. File sharing distributes an exponential number of copies of whatever people want, so will always win that race. If necessary, the sharing will go on offline, by portable hard drives and pirate wifi hotspots (share with anyone in range, but not on the internet), but it will still be exponential growth as long as one person can share with at least two others.
Not to be pedantic, but there are no longer US troops in Iraq.
No, there is just a division's worth of "private security" attached to the US Embassy there. In terms of total staff, it's the largest US Embassy anywhere.
Take a look at the percentage of "institutional investor" ownership of the S&P 500: http://www.nasd100.com/sp500ownership
The median is over 80%. Institutional investors are mutual funds, pension plans, and other such organizations where the beneficial owners (individual investors and pension plan participants) don't get a say in how the companies are run. The people who do get to decide are the corporate board and executives of the companies, and sometimes the people who run the institutional funds. But usually the latter leave it to the corporation, and just buy and sell the stock depending on how well it is doing. The institutional ownership share is so high, it is mathematically impossible for direct investors who buy shares in a company to have any effect on corporate policy. So the only people left who *do* have any control are the people running the companies, and the few activist institutions. Since many executives and board members sit on other boards, they form an interlocking club, where they know each other, travel to the same events, etc. Some of them are also in government and the media. These are the modern day nobility, and like any privileged class, they will do their damnedest to stay on top. You can call them "the rich and powerful" or "Wall Street" or "The 1%" as a shorthand.
In the case of Iran, if you want to understand what is going on, just like everywhere else, follow the money. Who is getting the oil income, and who is skimming off their share? Is Iran immune to the graft and corruption which leads leaders in that part of the world to accumulate billions in family wealth? I suspect not. The USA just has a more distributed system. The average net worth of top government officials (Congress, Executive, and Judiciary) is $6.5 million. You think they got that on government salaries?
Could you and other professors in the field collaborate on an open textbook? That way it's less effort on each person's part. Effectively it's a form of peer review also, with multiple eyes reviewing the content.