People like to listen to music - that much is obvious from the popularity of radio and p2p services. People don't like to pay for bad music.
My suggestion is to have a combination coffee shop/light food type place, with sound isolated booths. Listening to music selections is free. If you like stuff, you can have a CD burned for you at checkout, or tracks can be accumulated until you have a disk full, then burned on request. The music sales would be an add-on to the main business of selling food and drink. The shop remits payment to the music companies as required.
The problem with music stores as they operate now is they are essentially data warehouses in very expensive locations. By reducing the setup to essentially a PC in the corner, you can cut the overhead dramatically and still retain the same income for the music makers.
I test space station software for a living, and I do in fact have to do a written log sheet when we run a test formally.
The test is also observed by a government observer, we verify the hardware and software configuration is per drawing before starting a set of formal tests, and I print and attach the test results to the log sheet. Then it gets reviewed by a number of people here, and sent to NASA, where it gets reviewed by some more people.
By the way, we have our share of insect problems, too. We occasionally get ant infestations under the raised floor in the computer room. It's most likely due to the break area in the basement being right underneath us (fridges & microwaves)
Take a laptop or a USB hard drive around to friends and combine your mp3 collections. Burn a CD spindle or two full of mp3s and pass it around some more. Ask your co-workers to borrow their CD collection a little at a time.
These methods are a little more work than downloading from KaZaa, but the RIAA can't spy on you as easily, either.
Hubble is an overgrown version of a digital camera. As CCDs improve, you eventually want to replace the ones up there with better ones. This has already been done a couple of times, but electronics keeps improving.
It also has batteries and solar cells that provide power, and these wear out and have to be replaced.
Hubble needs to point itself at things, and it does so using heavy spinning rotors, which are turned one way, and by Newton's Law, Hubble turns the other way. There are 5 of these "Control Moment Gyros", or CMGs. Being mechanical devices, they wear out and break over time.
You need 3 out of 5 to be working to point Hubble, and if they have an MTBF of 12.5 years (which is pretty good for a mechanical device), then you need to visit every 5 years and replace 2 to keep Hubble running.
Hubble has no propulsion and you don't want any until you are ready to kill it. Fluids sloshing in tanks will mess up your pointing of the telescope, and any exhaust from a rocket will contaminate the optical surfaces. When the Shuttle visits, the thrusters are 50-75 feet away, which is much less of a problem than if your booster pack is on the back end of the telescope only 2 feet from the science instruments.
And yes, IAARS, in fact the first group I worked at at Boeing back in 1981 supplied the graphite/epoxy frame that holds Hubble's mirrors in place.
What we need is a conflict of interest law that says any government official who receives political funding must abstain from any legislation relating to that donor as an inherent conflict of interest.
The penalty should be suspension from political office for a period (days to life) depending on the severity of the conflict.
I am a rocket scientist. In fact I've worked both on space tethers and giant space guns professionally.
Electromagnetic tethers work on the same principle as an electric motor - put a current through a wire in a magnetic field and you get a force. In earth orbit, you can make electrical contact with the ionosphere so that you have a one-way current in your wire, and thus a net force. The wire will accelerate one way, and the ionospheric plasma accelerates the other way, but there is plasma all around the earth, so you don't run out.
The force you get is IL x B, where I is current L is the length of the wire, and B is the magnetic field. Since the strength of the Earth's magnetic field is a given, you can only play with the current in the wire and the length of the wire to get more force.
The only consumable you have is a bit of gas that is ionized and squirted out to make your electrical contact with the ionosphere. It turns out you only need about 2% as much gas as a normal rocket would use for the same push, and only 1/8 as much as an ion thruster, so it is very mass-efficient. It can be powered by solar panels.
The downside is it only works well up to about 600 miles. Above that the ionosphere gets too thin to be of much use. That's where the momentum exchange tether comes in.
Vertical cables, or tethers, can be built in a wide range of lengths and spin rates. Any long vertical object in orbit tends to want to remain vertical because the Earth's gravity changes with the inverse square of the distance from the center of the planet.
So the bottom of the object, being closer to the Earth's center is tugged by gravity more than the middle, and the top is tugged less. This is the same effect that causes tides.
Left to itself, then, a vertical cable will stay vertical. The entire thing takes the same amount of time to orbit the earth. So the bottom end, which is moving in a smaller orbit, is moving slower, and the top end is moving faster.
A free object in a lower orbit actually moves faster, thus if you let go at the bottom of the cable, you will find yourself at a suborbital speed and re-enter. Similarly, if you let go at the top end, you were moving faster than the local orbital speed, and are thus flung into a higher orbit.
So if you are heading to, say, the Moon, you could ride up in a suborbital rocket that gets you to a landing platform at the bottom of the tether, ride an elevator to the top, then let go and get flung outwards.
While you were riding up the elevator, the rest of the tether is moving down due to Newton's law. Thus the electrodynamic motor, which is typically 10 km long and attached to the much longer momentum tether, is used to make up the altitude lost.
If the momentum exchange tether is short, i.e. hundreds of km long, the difference in gravity between the top and bottom isn't too great and you can build it out of ordinary strong materials. When it gets sizeable in relation to the Earth's radius, then you need materials somewhat stronger than what we have available in quantity.
Because the Earth's orbit has both natural and manmade objects flying around, you need to be able to tolerate damage to the tether. At a minimum you need something like 6 cables, spaced far enough apart that no single object can take out more than 2 at a time (you can always get 2 if you are aimed just right), and you need a way to replace damaged sections and transfer the tension around the damaged area in the mean time. The Tethers Unlimited design uses a fine mesh of many strands.
In the limit of a very long tether, you can get the bottom end to be stationary relative to the ground, and you get the space elevator. But it turns out that one that large, even using insanely strong nanotubes, weighs so much it would never make sense economically. A practical one would be in the 100s to a few 1000 km long.
My suggestion is to have a self-assessed fee to keep the work in copyright, but make the work 'public-domainable' at the self-assessed value.
For example, after an initial copyright period, say the 50 years required by the Berne convention, the copyright holder has to pay a fee of 1% of the value of the work for each 10 year extension. The copyright holder gets to determine the value of the work themselves. But anyone can come along and pay the determined value to make the work public domain.
In the case of works with no residual value to the holder, or the holder is dead & lost, etc. the copyright will expire in 50 years, since no one will do the paperwork for the assessment.
In the case of low to moderate value works, a copyright holder can keep it in force for a nominal fee, or get bought out at full value which he himself determined.
In the case of high value works, like major motion pictures, the holders will get to pay a significant fee to keep it in force - i.e. $500k per renewal for a $50M movie.
You can make a lunar battery using two things the Moon has plenty of: sunlight and rocks.
Energy can be stored in the ground quite easily by shining concentrated sunlight on it. Lunar gravel, of which you have plenty of, becomes heated during the day, and then transfers heat back during the night. The surrounding soil doesn't transfer much heat because it is ground rock particles with vacuum between them. The surface can be covered with an insulating blanket to stop losses from thermal radiation.
To get the heat in during the day, you have a heat pipe going into your storage pit to spread the heat. You put a cover on the heat pipe at night to stop heat leaking out. To generate power, you have pipes running through the storage pit that heat water or some other fluid running through it, just like any conventional generator.
The generator can run day and night as long as the storage pit is big enough not to cool down too much during the night.
A simple way to handle spammers and rogue ISPs is for reputable ISPs to start charging for net email traffic. Thus if a peering ISP is sending you more email than you are sending them, you charge them for the service of transporting their mail to your users.
ISPs that provide service to spammers will then be paying for their outgoing email, and will have every reason to charge the spammers for the extra traffic.
ISPs on the receiving end of excess traffic will either have a new revenue stream, or will have a legitimate reason to blacklist an ISP: they haven't paid for the service they are getting.
A combination of a Big Gun and a Space Tower would provide a transportation system vastly superior to what we have now.
First - why is the current system not working well? It comes down to two fixed numbers: the energy in rocket fuel (15 MJ/kg for the best fuel we have now - LOX-Hydrogen) and the energy to reach earth orbit, which is a function of the mass of the Earth (31 MJ/kg). As you can see, the fuel has barely half the energy required to get itself into orbit, much less any payload. Therefore rockets use most of their fuel to get some of their fuel plus the cargo to the halfway point, in energy terms, from which point the rest of the fuel can do the job. In fact, you have to have 88% of your takeoff weight in fuel. Now a vehicle that has decent safety margins weighs 15% or more of the takeoff weight, so you can see you are already in a less than zero payload situation. To get something to orbit, you have to resort to expedients like dropping part of your vehicle when the fuel in that part is gone, or using very thin margins or very expensive lightweight materials. Until we have bulk carbon nanotubes (100x stronger than steel), where we can drop the vehicle weight drastically and still have some safety margins, we need to change the fuel energy, the mission energy, or both.
The Jules Verne approach, that of a big gun, gives the vehicle a substantial push, so the mission energy is reduced. There is a big gun not far from where I work (at the NASA center in Huntsville, AL) that uses the powder charge from a battleship gun to fire ~1 lb projectiles at orbital speed. The gun has been used almost daily for 30 years, and it's main job has been to test heat shield materials. An even bigger gun was built about 10 years ago at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory that could fire ~10 lb projectiles at half of orbital speed. The livermore gun cost $3 million to build, which is peanuts by aerospace standards. One big enough to throw a couple of hundred pounds at half of orbital speed would cost in the tens of millions, and could deliver useful payloads to orbit (~20 lb at a time).
Because this type of gun could be fired several times a day, even if the payloads are small individually, they add up over the course of a year. This type of launch system is best for launching bulk items - food (frozen), water, fuel, and structural components.
The Eiffel approach, a space tower, is related to the space elevator, but not as all-encompassing. A conventional rocket uses a lot of it's fuel just climbing above the atmosphere. For the Shuttle, it has used up two thirds of it's takeoff weight by the time the solid boosters separate at an altiude of 28 miles. A full space elevator requires materials beyond what we have available in quantity. A tower tens of miles high can be built with today's graphite-epoxy. For example, a typical graphite-epoxy has a strength of 300,000 psi and a density of 0.066 lb/cubic inch. Therefore it can support a column of itself that is 4.55 million inches (72 miles) tall.
In a well designed tower, the structure would taper similar to the Eiffel Tower,since only the bottom has to support the entire weight. Higher parts only have to support what's above them.
A rocket starting from the top of the tower can therefore have more of a safety margin, or carry much less fuel and therefore much more payload.
Towers less than 17 miles tall do not need to be considered, since strapping on fighter jet engines as boosters will do an equivalent job below this height. Jet engine boosters are much cheaper and more reliable than solid rocket boosters. Their only limitation is that they have smaller thrust (~30,000 lb each) than big solid rockets (Shuttle is 3 million lb thrust each), so they can only be used for smaller vehicles. But they are perfectly adequate for launching, say a crew of 3 into orbit, or a couple of tons of delicate cargo the big gun would pulverise.
Rather than trying to filter bad files, it would seem to be easier to filter bad IP addresses, since a working IP address is needed for a P2P program to function at all.
Assume you have a "this is crap" button in your P2P program. When you push it, the IP address that you got the file from gets added to a list of known 'bad sources'. If sufficient bad sources occur in an address block, then the entire block could be 'tainted' in the list
Search results from bad or tainted sources could then be listed lower down on a results page, or not displayed.
To prevent spoofing of the list, you could limit the number of reports per day from any one IP address, or devalue reports coming from sources that are tainted.
Conversely, you can also have a "good shit" button to give the reverse effect to IP addresses that supply good files.
Over the holidays I bought 30 classical music CDs in a boxed set for $45. At $1.50 a disc it was well worth it for me to buy the CDs rather than downloading and burning that much music myself.
The interesting thing for me was the fact that someone is making money selling them at this price. Sure, the music itself is out of copyright, and the orchestras they used to record the music were from eastern europe where labor is cheap, but it demonstrates how low CD prices can get. Add back some reasonable royalties for the writers and performers, and single unit packaging, and you should be able to sell CDs for $3 apiece.
Remember, the real reason that the Russians were invited to join the Space Station after the cold war ended was to keep their rocket scientists busy. That way they wouldn't go to work building missiles for the highest bidder.
Having been there when the redesign to add the Russian hardware happened, I can say it probably added cost and complexity to the program. But the effects on the civilian space program were secondary to the avoided cost of having to deal with half a dozen countries hiring former russian rocket scientists.
Remember our own space program was started by former _German_ rocket scientists
I recently bought a 30 CD collection of classical music for $45. At $1.50 a disc it's worth it to me not to have to download the files and burn the discs myself. And the publisher seems to be able to provide a nice box, printed sleeves, and the discs themselves for a tenth of what popular music goes for.
A payment mechanism that can work is for ISPs to charge for net email traffic. It takes work to transport an incoming email received from a peering ISP, so an ISP should charge for the service.
The accounting can be as simple as counting incoming minus outgoing messages, then billing for the difference. Then ISPs hosting spam would get charged for the excess traffic they send, and in turn they would have to pass that cost to the spam originators.
By increasing the cost to the spammers, you will reduce their number, and they will have to consider how to target their emails to people who might actually be interested in their product.
This is what happens in the paper mail world - there is a cost for each piece of mail to be delivered, so mailing lists are pruned to people that are likely to be interested in the product.
If you wanted to block _all_ the sunlight falling on Venus, which is more than you need to do to get Earth-like conditions, the numbers go like this:
The area of mirrors required is approximately equivalent to a 10,000 x 10,000 km square. If formed of rolled sheet steel 1 micron thick, you will need 0.1 cubic kilometers of steel. A small iron-nickel asteroid will do nicely. To heat the material for rolling, concentrated sunlight can be used, focussed by some of the mirrors you made. Thus what you need to start with is a seed factory that can produce the parts for a rolling mill.
Once you have the mirrors made, they can operate as solar sails to deliver themselves to Venus and maintain position once there.
I met a gentleman who worked at a large brokerage house on Wall street, and it was in fact cheaper and faster to send data tapes from the west coast office every day via FedEx than to do it by wire. This conversation took place several years ago and the relative costs may have changed by now, but the way he put it was:
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a fully loaded 747 flying cross-country"
Estimates of the computer power required to match a human brain run from 100 to 100,000 Teraflops. A commodity cluster can be bought for about $300K per Teraflops at the moment. A human-equivalent machine is worth about 5 humans because it can work 24x7, and a human (including overhead + salary + benefits) costs something like $120K per year, if they are doing technical work like designing CPUs. Assume you would want to amortize your computer cluster over 2 years. Therefore a human-equivalent machine would be worth 10 man-years, or $1.2M. Today this buys 4 Teraflops, or 1/25th of the lower bound for human-equivalence.
So, applying an 18 month Moore's Law doubling time, We have 7 to 22 years until human equivalent machines become affordable, plus however long it will take to program them and/or let them learn on their own. This will be in the range of 0 to 7 years. Once you get more-than-human equivalent machines, the Moore's Law time constant will shrink as they design their successors faster and faster. In another 3 years (18 months + 9 months + 4.5 months +...) you will either reach a Singularity or smack into some fundamental limit of the universe that prevents further progress.
Aside from the machines designing the next generation of smarter machines in an accelerating feedback loop, other machines will be accelerating progress in all other scientific and technical fields.
To sum up, The End of Life as We Know It is due in about 10 to 32 years unless (a) there is a limit to technology, especially in computers, that we hit before the singularity, or (b) we sufficiently mess up our civilization to stop or set back progress; i.e. nuclear war, someone crosses the flu and ebola viruses, etc.
The mix design for their winning canoe can be described as "graphite-reinforced waterproof foam rubber" just as well as calling it concrete. While it does have a large amount of portland cement in the mix, it also has latex and microspheres (which reduce weight by providing air bubbles), and is reinforced by graphite fibers.
Any device capable of reproducing media is a press in the sense that 'freedom of the press' is meant in the US Constitution which states: Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the Press (Amendment I).
For example: if a CD can carry text, audio, and video, then it is just as much a news medium as the New York Times, NPR, or CNN.
For a more blatant example, any PC with an attached paper printer is literally a printing press. Any law which would interfere with the ability of this combination to print would be blatantly unconstitutional.
The obvious solution is to have ISPs charge
back the cost of bulk email to the senders,
and credit the recipients. If the major ISPs
just charged senders a penny per email over
some reasonable limit, most spam would stop.
Example: if AOL allowed 2500 outgoing emails
per account per month, that would handle most
any normal amount of manually generated
messages. Anthing above that would be $0.01
each. So a spammer sending a million emails
would owe $10,000. That gives the ISP an
incentive to collect, defrays the overhead
costs of the computer network, and makes the
spammer think really hard about who they
want to send to.
I test software for the Space Station. We have a goal of 1 defect per 20,000 lines of code that
goes out the door. What's a comparable goal in the commercial world?
We have twice as many people testing the code
as we have writing the code.
If MS Word crashes in a commercial office, no
big deal. If the code that I test crashes,
it can kill the crew or destroy the Space Station.
The point is that government projects often
involve critical systems, where screw-ups will
kill people (or worse). So the whole software
development process is geared to getting it
right. That means analysing the task, writing
the software requirements, writing the code,
testing exhaustively to prove you met the
requirements, and each step of the way cross-
checking your work with the other guys.
The requirements guy sends his document to the
coder and tester to make sure he doesn't write
requirements that can't be coded or tested.
Likewise, as a tester I pass my test procedure
back to the requirements guy and coder to
make sure I covered the requirements and I
understood how the code is supposed to work.
This takes a lot of work and time, but you know
what, we put up around 35 MBytes of embedded flight
software up there (not counting the astronaut
laptops). The hardware that software
controls was never all put together except
on orbit. And it worked. Sure, there were
bugs in the code. But by and large it
worked the first time.
Then just _fold_ the board. Take an ATX board,
split it halfway (cpu and memory on one half,
card slots on the other). Have a couple of many
pin connectors on the backs to join the boards
together like two slices of bread. Effectively
it gives you an 8 layer board for the cost of
4 layer + a few connectors.
Living as I do in rural Alabama (no cable,
no DSL), I still am able to do broadband through
satellite. For my type of usage (I'm not
running a server, mostly browsing and downloading)
it works great. This is despite my uplink being
through a phone line at 24K (I'm 15 miles from
the central office).
If I load up on file downloads in parallel I can
easily get 1 Mbit speeds and still web browse
on the side.
This service is available anywhere a DirecTV
dish can be placed, so unless you are blocked
by trees or hills, that's pretty much the whole
US.
Now, having said that, has anyone got the
comparison of the rate of broadband adoption
vs. other recent consumer items (VCR, DVD,
cellphones)?
Slashdot Mirror
People like to listen to music - that much is obvious from the popularity of radio and p2p services. People don't like to pay for bad music.
My suggestion is to have a combination coffee shop/light food type place, with sound isolated booths. Listening to music selections is free.
If you like stuff, you can have a CD burned for
you at checkout, or tracks can be accumulated
until you have a disk full, then burned on
request. The music sales would be an add-on
to the main business of selling food and drink.
The shop remits payment to the music companies
as required.
The problem with music stores as they operate
now is they are essentially data warehouses in
very expensive locations. By reducing the
setup to essentially a PC in the corner, you
can cut the overhead dramatically and still
retain the same income for the music makers.
Daniel
I test space station software for a living,
and I do in fact have to do a written log sheet
when we run a test formally.
The test is also observed by a government observer, we verify the hardware and software configuration is per drawing before starting a set of formal tests, and I print and attach the test results to the log sheet. Then it gets reviewed by a number of people here, and sent to NASA, where it gets reviewed by some more people.
By the way, we have our share of insect problems, too. We occasionally get ant infestations under the raised floor in the computer room. It's most likely due to the break area in the basement being right underneath us (fridges & microwaves)
Daniel
Take a laptop or a USB hard drive around to
friends and combine your mp3 collections.
Burn a CD spindle or two full of mp3s and
pass it around some more. Ask your co-workers
to borrow their CD collection a little at a
time.
These methods are a little more work than
downloading from KaZaa, but the RIAA can't
spy on you as easily, either.
Hubble is an overgrown version of a digital camera. As CCDs improve, you eventually want to replace the ones up there with better ones. This has already been done a couple of times, but electronics keeps improving.
It also has batteries and solar cells that provide power, and these wear out and have to be replaced.
Hubble needs to point itself at things, and it does so using heavy spinning rotors, which are
turned one way, and by Newton's Law, Hubble
turns the other way. There are 5 of these
"Control Moment Gyros", or CMGs. Being mechanical devices, they wear out and break over time.
You need 3 out of 5 to be working to point Hubble, and if they have an MTBF of 12.5 years (which is pretty good for a mechanical device), then you need to visit every 5 years and replace 2 to keep Hubble running.
Hubble has no propulsion and you don't want any until you are ready to kill it. Fluids sloshing in tanks will mess up your pointing of the telescope, and any exhaust from a rocket will contaminate the optical surfaces. When the Shuttle visits, the thrusters are 50-75 feet away, which is much less of a problem than if your booster pack is on the back end of the telescope only 2 feet from the science instruments.
And yes, IAARS, in fact the first group I worked at at Boeing back in 1981 supplied the graphite/epoxy frame that holds Hubble's mirrors in place.
Daniel
What we need is a conflict of interest law that says any government official who receives political funding must abstain from any legislation relating to that donor as an inherent conflict of interest.
The penalty should be suspension from political
office for a period (days to life) depending on
the severity of the conflict.
Daniel
I am a rocket scientist. In fact I've worked both on space tethers and giant space guns
professionally.
Electromagnetic tethers work on the same principle as an electric motor - put a current
through a wire in a magnetic field and you get a force. In earth orbit, you can make electrical
contact with the ionosphere so that you have a
one-way current in your wire, and thus a net force. The wire will accelerate one way, and the
ionospheric plasma accelerates the other way, but there is plasma all around the earth, so you
don't run out.
The force you get is IL x B, where I is current
L is the length of the wire, and B is the magnetic field. Since the strength of the
Earth's magnetic field is a given, you can only
play with the current in the wire and the length of the wire to get more force.
The only consumable you have is a bit of gas
that is ionized and squirted out to make your electrical contact with the ionosphere. It turns out you only need about 2% as much gas as a normal rocket would use for the same push, and only 1/8 as much as an ion thruster, so it is very mass-efficient. It can be powered by solar panels.
The downside is it only works well up to about 600 miles. Above that the ionosphere gets too thin to be of much use. That's where the momentum exchange tether comes in.
Vertical cables, or tethers, can be built in a wide range of lengths and spin rates. Any long vertical object in orbit tends to want to remain vertical because the Earth's gravity changes with the inverse square of the distance from the center of the planet.
So the bottom of the object, being closer to the Earth's center is tugged by gravity more than the middle, and the top is tugged less. This is the same effect that causes tides.
Left to itself, then, a vertical cable will stay vertical. The entire thing takes the same amount of time to orbit the earth. So the bottom end, which is moving in a smaller orbit, is moving slower, and the top end is moving faster.
A free object in a lower orbit actually moves
faster, thus if you let go at the bottom of
the cable, you will find yourself at a suborbital speed and re-enter. Similarly, if you let go at the top end, you were moving faster than the local orbital speed, and are thus flung into a higher orbit.
So if you are heading to, say, the Moon, you could ride up in a suborbital rocket that gets you to a landing platform at the bottom of the tether, ride an elevator to the top, then let go and get flung outwards.
While you were riding up the elevator, the rest of the tether is moving down due to Newton's law. Thus the electrodynamic motor, which is typically 10 km long and attached to the much longer momentum tether, is used to make up the altitude lost.
If the momentum exchange tether is short, i.e.
hundreds of km long, the difference in gravity
between the top and bottom isn't too great and
you can build it out of ordinary strong materials. When it gets sizeable in relation
to the Earth's radius, then you need materials
somewhat stronger than what we have available
in quantity.
Because the Earth's orbit has both natural and
manmade objects flying around, you need to be
able to tolerate damage to the tether. At a
minimum you need something like 6 cables, spaced
far enough apart that no single object can
take out more than 2 at a time (you can always
get 2 if you are aimed just right), and you need a way to replace damaged sections and transfer the tension around the damaged area in the mean time. The Tethers Unlimited design uses a fine mesh of many strands.
In the limit of a very long tether, you can get the bottom end to be stationary relative to the ground, and you get the space elevator. But it turns out that one that large, even using insanely strong nanotubes, weighs so much it would never make sense economically. A practical one would be in the 100s to a few 1000 km long.
Daniel
My suggestion is to have a self-assessed
fee to keep the work in copyright, but
make the work 'public-domainable' at the
self-assessed value.
For example, after an initial copyright
period, say the 50 years required by the
Berne convention, the copyright holder
has to pay a fee of 1% of the value of the
work for each 10 year extension. The
copyright holder gets to determine the
value of the work themselves. But anyone
can come along and pay the determined
value to make the work public domain.
In the case of works with no residual
value to the holder, or the holder is
dead & lost, etc. the copyright will
expire in 50 years, since no one will
do the paperwork for the assessment.
In the case of low to moderate value
works, a copyright holder can keep
it in force for a nominal fee, or get
bought out at full value which he
himself determined.
In the case of high value works, like
major motion pictures, the holders will
get to pay a significant fee to keep it
in force - i.e. $500k per renewal for
a $50M movie.
Daniel
You can make a lunar battery using two things
the Moon has plenty of: sunlight and rocks.
Energy can be stored in the ground quite easily by shining concentrated sunlight on it. Lunar
gravel, of which you have plenty of, becomes
heated during the day, and then transfers heat
back during the night. The surrounding soil
doesn't transfer much heat because it is ground
rock particles with vacuum between them.
The surface can be covered with an insulating
blanket to stop losses from thermal radiation.
To get the heat in during the day, you have
a heat pipe going into your storage pit to
spread the heat. You put a cover on the heat
pipe at night to stop heat leaking out. To
generate power, you have pipes running through
the storage pit that heat water or some other
fluid running through it, just like any
conventional generator.
The generator can run day and night as long
as the storage pit is big enough not to cool
down too much during the night.
Daniel
A simple way to handle spammers and rogue ISPs
is for reputable ISPs to start charging for
net email traffic. Thus if a peering ISP is
sending you more email than you are sending them,
you charge them for the service of transporting
their mail to your users.
ISPs that provide service to spammers will then
be paying for their outgoing email, and will have
every reason to charge the spammers for the
extra traffic.
ISPs on the receiving end of excess traffic
will either have a new revenue stream, or will
have a legitimate reason to blacklist an ISP:
they haven't paid for the service they are
getting.
Daniel
A combination of a Big Gun and a Space Tower would provide a transportation system vastly superior to what we have now.
First - why is the current system not working well? It comes down to two fixed numbers: the energy in rocket fuel (15 MJ/kg for the best
fuel we have now - LOX-Hydrogen) and the energy
to reach earth orbit, which is a function of
the mass of the Earth (31 MJ/kg). As you can see, the fuel has barely half the energy required to get itself into orbit, much less any payload. Therefore rockets use most of their fuel to get some of their fuel plus the cargo to the halfway point, in energy terms, from which point the rest of the fuel can do the job. In fact, you have to have 88% of your takeoff weight in fuel. Now a vehicle that has decent safety margins weighs 15% or more of the takeoff weight, so you can see you are already in a less than zero payload situation. To get something to orbit, you have to resort to expedients like dropping part of your vehicle when the fuel in that part is gone, or using very thin margins or very expensive lightweight materials. Until we have bulk carbon nanotubes (100x stronger than steel), where we can drop the vehicle weight drastically and
still have some safety margins, we need to change the fuel energy, the mission energy, or both.
The Jules Verne approach, that of a big gun, gives the vehicle a substantial push, so the mission energy is reduced. There is a big gun not far from where I work (at the NASA center in Huntsville, AL) that uses the powder charge from a battleship gun to fire ~1 lb projectiles at orbital speed. The gun has been used almost daily for 30 years, and it's main job has been to test heat shield materials. An even bigger gun was built about 10 years ago at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory that could fire ~10 lb projectiles at half of orbital speed. The livermore gun cost $3 million to build, which is peanuts by aerospace standards. One big enough to
throw a couple of hundred pounds at half of orbital speed would cost in the tens of millions, and could deliver useful payloads to orbit (~20 lb at a time).
Because this type of gun could be fired several times a day, even if the payloads are small individually, they add up over the course of a year. This type of launch system is best for launching bulk items - food (frozen), water, fuel, and structural components.
The Eiffel approach, a space tower, is related to the space elevator, but not as all-encompassing. A conventional rocket uses a lot of it's fuel just climbing above the atmosphere. For the Shuttle, it has used up two thirds of it's takeoff weight by the time the solid boosters separate at an altiude of 28 miles. A full space elevator requires materials beyond what we have
available in quantity. A tower tens of miles high can be built with today's graphite-epoxy. For example, a typical graphite-epoxy has a strength of 300,000 psi and a density of 0.066 lb/cubic inch. Therefore it can support a column of itself that is 4.55 million inches (72 miles) tall.
In a well designed tower, the structure would taper similar to the Eiffel Tower,since only the bottom has to support the entire weight. Higher parts only have to support what's above them.
A rocket starting from the top of the tower can therefore have more of a safety margin, or carry much less fuel and therefore much more payload.
Towers less than 17 miles tall do not need to be considered, since strapping on fighter jet engines as boosters will do an equivalent job below this height. Jet engine boosters are much cheaper and more reliable than solid rocket boosters. Their only limitation is that they have smaller thrust (~30,000 lb each) than big solid rockets (Shuttle is 3 million lb thrust each), so they can only be used for smaller vehicles. But they are perfectly adequate for launching, say a crew of 3 into orbit, or a couple of tons of delicate cargo the big gun would pulverise.
Dani
Rather than trying to filter bad files,
it would seem to be easier to filter bad
IP addresses, since a working IP address
is needed for a P2P program to function at
all.
Assume you have a "this is
crap" button in your P2P program. When
you push it, the IP address that you got
the file from gets added to a list of known
'bad sources'. If sufficient bad sources
occur in an address block, then the entire
block could be 'tainted' in the list
Search results from bad or tainted
sources could then be listed lower down on a results page, or not displayed.
To prevent spoofing of the list, you could
limit the number of reports per day from
any one IP address, or devalue reports coming
from sources that are tainted.
Conversely, you can also have a "good shit"
button to give the reverse effect to IP
addresses that supply good files.
Daniel
Over the holidays I bought 30 classical
music CDs in a boxed set for $45. At $1.50
a disc it was well worth it for me to buy
the CDs rather than downloading and burning
that much music myself.
The interesting thing for me was the fact
that someone is making money selling them
at this price. Sure, the music itself is
out of copyright, and the orchestras they
used to record the music were from eastern
europe where labor is cheap, but it
demonstrates how low CD prices can get.
Add back some reasonable royalties for the
writers and performers, and single unit
packaging, and you should be
able to sell CDs for $3 apiece.
Daniel
Remember, the real reason that the Russians were
invited to join the Space Station after the cold
war ended was to keep their rocket scientists busy.
That way they wouldn't go to work building missiles
for the highest bidder.
Having been there when the redesign to add the
Russian hardware happened, I can say it probably
added cost and complexity to the program. But the
effects on the civilian space program were secondary
to the avoided cost of having to deal with
half a dozen countries hiring former russian
rocket scientists.
Remember our own space program was started by
former _German_ rocket scientists
Daniel
I recently bought a 30 CD collection of classical
music for $45. At $1.50 a disc it's worth it to
me not to have to download the files and burn
the discs myself. And the publisher seems to be
able to provide a nice box, printed sleeves, and
the discs themselves for a tenth of what popular
music goes for.
Daniel
A payment mechanism that can work is for ISPs to
charge for net email traffic. It takes work to
transport an incoming email received from a peering
ISP, so an ISP should charge for the service.
The accounting can be as simple as counting
incoming minus outgoing messages, then billing for
the difference. Then ISPs hosting spam would get
charged for the excess traffic they send, and in
turn they would have to pass that cost to the
spam originators.
By increasing the cost to the spammers, you will
reduce their number, and they will have to consider
how to target their emails to people who might
actually be interested in their product.
This is what happens in the paper mail world -
there is a cost for each piece of mail to be
delivered, so mailing lists are pruned to people
that are likely to be interested in the product.
Daniel
If you wanted to block _all_ the sunlight falling
on Venus, which is more than you need to do to get
Earth-like conditions, the numbers go like this:
The area of mirrors required is approximately
equivalent to a 10,000 x 10,000 km square. If
formed of rolled sheet steel 1 micron thick, you
will need 0.1 cubic kilometers of steel. A small
iron-nickel asteroid will do nicely. To heat the
material for rolling, concentrated sunlight can
be used, focussed by some of the mirrors you made.
Thus what you need to start with is a seed
factory that can produce the parts for a rolling
mill.
Once you have the mirrors made, they can operate
as solar sails to deliver themselves to Venus
and maintain position once there.
Daniel
I met a gentleman who worked at a large brokerage
house on Wall street, and it was in fact cheaper
and faster to send data tapes from the west coast
office every day via FedEx than to do it by wire.
This conversation took place several years ago
and the relative costs may have changed by now,
but the way he put it was:
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a fully
loaded 747 flying cross-country"
Daniel
Estimates of the computer power required to match
...) you will either reach a
a human brain run from 100 to 100,000 Teraflops.
A commodity cluster can be bought for about $300K
per Teraflops at the moment. A human-equivalent
machine is worth about 5 humans because it can
work 24x7, and a human (including overhead +
salary + benefits) costs something like $120K per
year, if they are doing technical work like
designing CPUs. Assume you would want to amortize
your computer cluster over 2 years. Therefore
a human-equivalent machine would be worth 10
man-years, or $1.2M. Today this buys 4 Teraflops,
or 1/25th of the lower bound for human-equivalence.
So, applying an 18 month Moore's Law doubling time,
We have 7 to 22 years until human equivalent
machines become affordable, plus however long it
will take to program them and/or let them learn on their own. This will be in the range of 0 to 7
years. Once you get more-than-human equivalent
machines, the Moore's Law time constant will shrink
as they design their successors faster and
faster. In another 3 years (18 months + 9 months
+ 4.5 months +
Singularity or smack into some fundamental limit
of the universe that prevents further progress.
Aside from the machines designing the next
generation of smarter machines in an accelerating
feedback loop, other machines will be accelerating
progress in all other scientific and technical
fields.
To sum up, The End of Life as We Know It is due
in about 10 to 32 years unless (a) there is a
limit to technology, especially in computers,
that we hit before the singularity, or (b) we
sufficiently mess up our civilization to stop
or set back progress; i.e. nuclear war, someone
crosses the flu and ebola viruses, etc.
Daniel
The mix design for their winning canoe can
be described as "graphite-reinforced waterproof
foam rubber" just as well as calling it
concrete. While it does have a large amount
of portland cement in the mix, it also has
latex and microspheres (which reduce weight
by providing air bubbles), and is reinforced
by graphite fibers.
Daniel
Any device capable of reproducing media is a
press in the sense that 'freedom of the press'
is meant in the US Constitution which states:
Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom
of the Press (Amendment I).
For example: if a CD can carry text, audio, and
video, then it is just as much a news medium as
the New York Times, NPR, or CNN.
For a more blatant example, any PC with an
attached paper printer is literally a printing
press. Any law which would interfere with the
ability of this combination to print would be
blatantly unconstitutional.
Daniel
The obvious solution is to have ISPs charge
back the cost of bulk email to the senders,
and credit the recipients. If the major ISPs
just charged senders a penny per email over
some reasonable limit, most spam would stop.
Example: if AOL allowed 2500 outgoing emails
per account per month, that would handle most
any normal amount of manually generated
messages. Anthing above that would be $0.01
each. So a spammer sending a million emails
would owe $10,000. That gives the ISP an
incentive to collect, defrays the overhead
costs of the computer network, and makes the
spammer think really hard about who they
want to send to.
Daniel
I test software for the Space Station. We have a goal of 1 defect per 20,000 lines of code that
goes out the door. What's a comparable goal in the commercial world?
We have twice as many people testing the code
as we have writing the code.
If MS Word crashes in a commercial office, no
big deal. If the code that I test crashes,
it can kill the crew or destroy the Space Station.
The point is that government projects often
involve critical systems, where screw-ups will
kill people (or worse). So the whole software
development process is geared to getting it
right. That means analysing the task, writing
the software requirements, writing the code,
testing exhaustively to prove you met the
requirements, and each step of the way cross-
checking your work with the other guys.
The requirements guy sends his document to the
coder and tester to make sure he doesn't write
requirements that can't be coded or tested.
Likewise, as a tester I pass my test procedure
back to the requirements guy and coder to
make sure I covered the requirements and I
understood how the code is supposed to work.
This takes a lot of work and time, but you know
what, we put up around 35 MBytes of embedded flight
software up there (not counting the astronaut
laptops). The hardware that software
controls was never all put together except
on orbit. And it worked. Sure, there were
bugs in the code. But by and large it
worked the first time.
Daniel
Then just _fold_ the board. Take an ATX board,
split it halfway (cpu and memory on one half,
card slots on the other). Have a couple of many
pin connectors on the backs to join the boards
together like two slices of bread. Effectively
it gives you an 8 layer board for the cost of
4 layer + a few connectors.
Daniel
That's one calibration of his 'business status'
Can anyone in the physical neighborhood of this address:
Bernard Shifman
Shifman Consulting
2828 N. Burling St. Ste. 402
Chicago, IL 61108
tell us if that is a residential neighborhood
and therefore whether 'Suite 402' is really
an apartment, or if it is a maildrop address?
That would give us another calibration.
Daniel
Living as I do in rural Alabama (no cable,
no DSL), I still am able to do broadband through
satellite. For my type of usage (I'm not
running a server, mostly browsing and downloading)
it works great. This is despite my uplink being
through a phone line at 24K (I'm 15 miles from
the central office).
If I load up on file downloads in parallel I can
easily get 1 Mbit speeds and still web browse
on the side.
This service is available anywhere a DirecTV
dish can be placed, so unless you are blocked
by trees or hills, that's pretty much the whole
US.
Now, having said that, has anyone got the
comparison of the rate of broadband adoption
vs. other recent consumer items (VCR, DVD,
cellphones)?
Daniel