The way to deal with the issue of publishers
keeping rights to an item forever is to charge a significant renewal fee to keep a copyright
in force, perhaps $500 every 5 years. Allow
an initial 15 year term so that small authors
and publishers can get some income, but then
require the renewal fee after that. At a
reasonable limit (like 30 years), no more
renewals.
A more radical approach would be to have
copyright owners self-assess the value of their
work at renewal time, with the fee pegged at
a fraction (like 5%) of the self-assessed value.
The catch is anyone can buy the copyright at
the self-assessed value.
That way the Disney's of the world can keep
their copyrights, but they'll have to pay
to keep that right.
I've been thinking about the clause that says
"...to promote the progress of science and
useful arts...". In general, powers granted
to Congress are limited. If the framers of
the Constitution had wanted to grant copyrights
and patents for anything at all, that clause
would not have been necessary. By including
it, they have restricted the range of
copyrightable and patentable items to science
and the useful arts (by which 200 years ago
meant agriculture, engineering, etc, NOT
disney cartoons).
By this logic, AutoCad, being a technical tool,
would be copyrightable, but Doom III, being
merely entertainment, would not.
It's simple, really. Allow the receiving ISP
to bill upstream for carriage of bulk eamil
(just like any physical delivery service).
Then, having an incentive to make money, ISPs
will do as much as possible to bill other ISPs
who send them bulk email, and will do as much
as possible to prevent it's sending, so as to
avoid bills from other ISP's.
The final step is to allow users to set a
reading fee. At 10 cents a pop, I'll willingly
read whatever junk people want to send me, if
it goes towards my ISP's monthly charges.
At 1 cent, I can't be bothered. Let each
user set their own rate.
The speed of light in glass is lower than the
speed of light in air (by about 25 percent if
I recall), so using an air-core fiber would
cut signal delays as well as the other benefits.
The simplest solution for spam is for ISPs to charge for outgoing emails above some reasonable
threshhold. For example, average joe user gets
2000 outgoing emails for his $20 per month
basic account, and usage above that is a penny
per email.
This will do several useful things:
(1) Legitimate
businesses will strive to filter their email
lists, just like ones that use paper mail, because it will cost them more to send email.
Today the cost for an email address list is
pretty low, and the sending is cheap or free.
Therefore it gets overused, since it only takes
a few sales per million emails to cover your
costs.
(2) ISPs will have a new revenue stream, which
will help to lower the cost of providing the
rest of us with service.
(3) ISPs will have a better chance to collect
from spammers who steal their service. This
will serve to deter the spammers, and encourage
the ISPs to go after them. At a penny a pop,
sending a million emails would be priced at
$10,000, which would be a heck of an incentive.
String theory predicts 11 dimensions, 7 of which
are rolled up too small to see. I note the
co-incidence that the matter fraction in the interesting figure of the previous
post is centered on the same fraction (4/11)
as the number of visible dimensions to total
dimensions.
Daniel
The online version of Britannica has several good features. The text is generally written by experts in the field (for example the article on China was produced by about a dozen professors of Chinese history and culture). There is an extensive bibliography (a pre-web way of linking
content between paper documents), and there are
hyperlinks in the text to other parts of the text.
Unlike software, an online encyclopedia already presents it's 'source code' to the world, so one
of the types of 'free' is irrelevant to this type
of medium. Britannica.com is making the data available without cost to web surfers, and at a reasonable cost in CD-ROM form, given the editorial workload in keeping the thing updated.
So the other type of 'free' isn't relevant either.
A new encyclopedia project should be better
in some way than the existing ones (or what's the
point of doing it). With software, you get cheaper and better code by going open source.
How could a new encyclopeida be better?
- Better contributors: unlikely in my opinion
- More total content: Britannica's bibliography
points to a lot of stuff that isn't online. Work
on making it available.
- Links to best content on the Web: possible,
but Open Directory Project is already trying to
do this.
- Stability of good content: get permission to
keep mirrors of good stuff so it doesn't go away
like so much on the web does
I don't have a clear answer, but the question of
how this project will be better than what's out
there already deserves consideration.
100 Giga-neurons x 10 kilo-synapses/neuron x
100 Hz synapse firing rate = 100,000 Tbits/s
Assuming (a) one synapse firing = 1 bit data,
and (b)1 Flop = 32 bits, then 1 brain = 3000
TeraFLOPs. SETI@home is cranking about 1% of
that
Given another factor of 100 increase in cpu
power applied to the problem, rather than
searching for an extraterrestrial intelligence,
we can BUILD and extra terrestrial intelligence
(a non-human one)(pun intended).
You can divide all businesses into two categories. #1 is providing the necessities of life (food, clothing, shelter). #2 is entertainment, which covers everything else. In #2 you can include that part of #1 category products beyond the basics. For example, you need to eat food, but eating out at a nice restaurant is mostly entertainment.
Once upon a time, almost everybody spent most of their time on category #1 stuff. In our modern high tech society, most of category #1 stuff is cheap, and we then choose how to spend the bulk of our money on #2: entertaining ourselves.
Thousand-player combat games aren't that new
(in the SCA, the medieval re-creation group I
belong to), we've been doing live-action battles
with that many people for about 20 years. But the training and travel time, and equipment costs are much higher than for playing Everquest, so the number of people doing it is much smaller.
For now, live action games have better visuals,
sound is about on par, and kinesthetics (feeling your body moving, touch, and smell are way better than video games. I give video games another 10 years, and they will be able to match the full sensory range of live action. At that point many of us live action players will probably move over to electronic - it's a heck of a lot easier to build a castle electronically than in real life.
The point I am getting at is kids have, in the 20th century at least, been able to entertain themselves. At one point it was stuff like playing baseball and climbing trees, because that's all there was. Nowadays, some kids still play baseball and climb trees. Others play video games. The range of options has expanded, and the mix of choices has shifted. These trends will continue in the future.
From the Roman road network, to the early use of
mass production for rifles, to today's tactical
lasers, high tech has been used for military/
political purposes. So what's new?
I made an error in my original post. In the next to the last paragraph substitute "if each district had 10 reps" for "if a state had 10 reps". Providing 10 representatives for each district gets us to about where the nation was originally in representation ratio. Then you split up those guys according to polling percentages.
Initially, the US had 3.9 million population represented by 65 people in the House of Representatives, which was 16.7 reps/million pop. Currently there are 435 representatives for 276 million people, or 1.57 reps/million population. So we've already lost over 90% of our representation relative to when the system was set up.
The other problem is the 'winner take all' system of voting, where 51% of the voters can select 100% of the representatives, which isn't therefore very representative.
What would help immensely is a 'fractional representation' system, where if a state had 10 reps, and the votes went 45% dem, 45% rep, and 10% independant, then they get 4.5, 4.5 and 1.0 votes. The fractional votes would be reps that only get to cast a fractional vote, but are represented by a whole human. So the dems would get 4 guys with a whole vote each, and one guy with a 0.5 vote.
That way all of every citizen's votes count(except you might set a floor of 0.1 vote and round to the nearest.1 vote to keep things manageable)
Daniel
We know where Pioneer 10 is going to about 9 decimal places. Eventually we will have advanced
propulsion systems that will allow us to chase
Pioneer 10 down and bring it back to the National Air & Space Museum, where it belongs.
Daniel
I was a participant in the Space Elevator workshop that led to this news item. I would like to make several comments on space elevator design:
1) A ground to synchronous orbit (35,000 km high) elevator is often discussed, but such a design is neither necessary nor economic.
A segmented elevator cable in earth orbit plus
orbit mechanics allows you to get around with only 1/7 of the height in actual cable segments. You coast between cable segments.
A tower from the ground several tens of km tall
saves you most of the losses that a rocket like
the shuttle sees from trajectory inefficiency and atmospheric drag. You simply launch from the top of the tower.
2) A real space elevator design will have multiple redundant cables because natural meteoroids and manmade orbital debris will occasionally run into the cable sections. The cables will be cross-connected so that the loads will be routed around any break (kind of like packet routing for the internet). You will have robot 'spiders' that will carry replacment spools of cables and be able to replace broken sections. This maintenance is like painting bridges continuously to keep them from rusting.
3) Existing high strength carbon fiber (1 million psi strength) is sufficient for economically rational space elevators. Carbon nanotubes are
strong enough for a 35,000 km space elevator,
but they would also make possible ultra-light rockets that would eliminate the cost justification for such a large elevator.
Eventually, someone will develop "e-checks". Essentially, it'll be like writing a check to
cash right now. The bank gives you a check number
(say 16 alpha-numeric = 80 bits worth), you
tell them the dollar amount, which is debited
from your checking account. You forward the
bank identification (their routing number),
the check number, and the amount to the merchant.
He gives that info to HIS bank, which collects
from your bank.
All this can happen in real time. You shop online, find something you like. Open another window to your bank, and get a check number.
Copy/paste the number into the merchants form,
with the amount and bank rounting info. The
banks do some back office magic, and your payment
is in the merchant's account immediately.
Stealing the number does no good, since it is
only valid for one transaction. Similarly, you
eat at a restaurant. You get bill. You pull out
PDA and get a check number from your bank. Give
to server. Server takes number over to their terminal. A few seconds later it comes back as
good/paid, and everyone goes away happy.
There's no reason you couldn't do this with a
credit account. Instead of giving the card
to a store clerk, you swipe it through the
card reader in your handheld PDA. Your credit
card issuer then gives you a single use number to
give to the clerk. Clerk feeds it into the
terminal, and it clears.
Conventional rockets operate with two energy givens. The first is the amount of kinetic energy it takes to get to Earth orbit (about 32 MJ/kg), and the second is the energy available in the fuel (about 15 MJ/kg for O2/H2). Since there is not enough energy in the fuel to get to orbit by itself, you have to use a large amount of fuel to get a smaller amount of fuel plus the vehicle and payload up to a point where the remaining fuel has the energy to get you to orbit.
It turns out that what is left at the end is about 13% of your starting weight (the other 87% was fuel). Making a vehicle that weighs 15% of total takeoff weight is reasonable, and one that weighs 10% of total takeoff weight is really hard. So you've got somewhere in the range of -2% to +3% left over for cargo.
The traditional approach to the small payload problem is to not take the whole vehicle to orbit. Since you lose so much weight between takeoff and orbit, you don't need to take all your engines and tanks all the way. This is called staging. The other thing that helps is that loadbearing structure you only use once can be built lighter than stuff you want to use many times (a factor of 10 reduction in fatigue life buys you about 10% in weight savings).
Of course, having to put your rocket back together after a flight, and having it last only a few or one flight makes things expensive. That's how we got in the fix we're in.
There are several ways to work the problem. One is to use more advanced structural materials. So for the same weight as you used to build a throwaway structure, you build one that lasts hundreds of uses. Unfortunately, the attempt at making a lightweight composite tank for the X-33 didn't work out, but the general idea of using lighter, stronger materials is a good one.
Using an air-breathing engine at the start helps because the effective energy content of the fuel you carry is higher. You can give the vehicle a head start with some sort of ground accelerator, or by starting from the top of a tall tower. You can lower the destination with an orbital tether. You can feed energy to your vehicle with a laser.
There isn't any one 'best' answer. Which one makes the most economic sense depends on what you want to fly, how often, when you want to start (technology progresses), how much you can afford to spend to push technology faster, and how much risk you want to take.
Helium3 is present on the moon in parts per billion on the surface from solar wind particles that got stuck. On Uranus, Helium represents 15% of the gas giant's atmosphere, with Helium 3 being one part in 10,000 of that, so you have 15 parts per million He3 on Uranus, which is several thousand times the concentration on the Moon.
If you have a need for He3, that means you have fusion working, so you can use fusion rockets to travel to Uranus and retrieve the stuff. Any mining engineer will tell you that you want to mine where the 'ore' is richest. Even though Uranus is harder to get to (about 50 times harder than the Moon), the higher concentration wins big time.
It's fairly easy to separate helium 3 from the Uranus atmosphere, too. It's cold there, so it doesn't take much refrigeration to liquefy the hydrogen, leaving pure helium. Then further refrigeration liquefys the helium, and you can use thesuperfluid properties of He3 or the melting point differences to separate He4 from He3.
A little closer to practicality would be to put a scanner on the shopping cart. You scan the items as you load them into the cart. Then the entire cart gets wheeled through a checkout aisle where it's weighed on a scale (to verify that you didn't add items to the cart without scanning).
The supermarkets could cut down on checkout clerks because now you would be doing the scanning for them.
According to this FDIC site, the number bank branches increased faster than the population in 1999. So there isn't any evidence that the Internet is killing off visiting banks in person (yet).
Assume 5 DVDs per pound. 747 cargo capacity is 200,000 lb. Therefore you can carry 1 million DVDs coast-to-coast. Flight time is 4 hours. That's 69.4 DVDs per second = 300 Gigabytes/sec.
How does that compare to the Internet's backbone rate?
"Envision an ideal place to live or run a business--a friendly, safe and secure community with large areas of open space and extensive entertainment and recreational facilities. Imagine that this community levies no local taxes--no income tax, no real estate tax, no sales tax, no business tax, no import duties."
That pretty much describes a libertarian scenario. The only way to square that statement with the previous quote that they will fly the flag of a specific country is that they will work a deal with some small country to fly a flag of convenience. This means they are nominally under a particular country's control, but in practice they won't be bothered. For example, imagine they offer Tuvalu a flat $1M a year for 'ship's license fees' or whatever. They get to use Tuvalu's flag on their flagpole. Even if Tuvalu wanted to enforce a particular law (which they wouldn't, that's what their yearly payoff is for), how would they do it when the ship is on the other side of the world, and the ship outnumbers the island population 6:1?
Slashdot Mirror
The way to deal with the issue of publishers
keeping rights to an item forever is to charge a significant renewal fee to keep a copyright
in force, perhaps $500 every 5 years. Allow
an initial 15 year term so that small authors
and publishers can get some income, but then
require the renewal fee after that. At a
reasonable limit (like 30 years), no more
renewals.
A more radical approach would be to have
copyright owners self-assess the value of their
work at renewal time, with the fee pegged at
a fraction (like 5%) of the self-assessed value.
The catch is anyone can buy the copyright at
the self-assessed value.
That way the Disney's of the world can keep
their copyrights, but they'll have to pay
to keep that right.
Daniel
I've been thinking about the clause that says
"...to promote the progress of science and
useful arts...". In general, powers granted
to Congress are limited. If the framers of
the Constitution had wanted to grant copyrights
and patents for anything at all, that clause
would not have been necessary. By including
it, they have restricted the range of
copyrightable and patentable items to science
and the useful arts (by which 200 years ago
meant agriculture, engineering, etc, NOT
disney cartoons).
By this logic, AutoCad, being a technical tool,
would be copyrightable, but Doom III, being
merely entertainment, would not.
Daniel
The best reference on using space resources is
still the report 'Advanced Automation for
Space Missions', several copies of which are
online.
Next best is the series of 'Space Manufacturing N'
conference reports (where N=1 to 12 or so).
Dani Eder
It's simple, really. Allow the receiving ISP
to bill upstream for carriage of bulk eamil
(just like any physical delivery service).
Then, having an incentive to make money, ISPs
will do as much as possible to bill other ISPs
who send them bulk email, and will do as much
as possible to prevent it's sending, so as to
avoid bills from other ISP's.
The final step is to allow users to set a
reading fee. At 10 cents a pop, I'll willingly
read whatever junk people want to send me, if
it goes towards my ISP's monthly charges.
At 1 cent, I can't be bothered. Let each
user set their own rate.
Daniel
The speed of light in glass is lower than the speed of light in air (by about 25 percent if I recall), so using an air-core fiber would cut signal delays as well as the other benefits.
The simplest solution for spam is for ISPs to charge for outgoing emails above some reasonable
threshhold. For example, average joe user gets
2000 outgoing emails for his $20 per month
basic account, and usage above that is a penny
per email.
This will do several useful things:
(1) Legitimate
businesses will strive to filter their email
lists, just like ones that use paper mail, because it will cost them more to send email.
Today the cost for an email address list is
pretty low, and the sending is cheap or free.
Therefore it gets overused, since it only takes
a few sales per million emails to cover your
costs.
(2) ISPs will have a new revenue stream, which
will help to lower the cost of providing the
rest of us with service.
(3) ISPs will have a better chance to collect
from spammers who steal their service. This
will serve to deter the spammers, and encourage
the ISPs to go after them. At a penny a pop,
sending a million emails would be priced at
$10,000, which would be a heck of an incentive.
Daniel
String theory predicts 11 dimensions, 7 of which are rolled up too small to see. I note the co-incidence that the matter fraction in the interesting figure of the previous post is centered on the same fraction (4/11) as the number of visible dimensions to total dimensions. Daniel
The online version of Britannica has several good features. The text is generally written by experts in the field (for example the article on China was produced by about a dozen professors of Chinese history and culture). There is an extensive bibliography (a pre-web way of linking
content between paper documents), and there are
hyperlinks in the text to other parts of the text.
Unlike software, an online encyclopedia already presents it's 'source code' to the world, so one
of the types of 'free' is irrelevant to this type
of medium. Britannica.com is making the data available without cost to web surfers, and at a reasonable cost in CD-ROM form, given the editorial workload in keeping the thing updated.
So the other type of 'free' isn't relevant either.
A new encyclopedia project should be better
in some way than the existing ones (or what's the
point of doing it). With software, you get cheaper and better code by going open source.
How could a new encyclopeida be better?
- Better contributors: unlikely in my opinion
- More total content: Britannica's bibliography
points to a lot of stuff that isn't online. Work
on making it available.
- Links to best content on the Web: possible,
but Open Directory Project is already trying to
do this.
- Stability of good content: get permission to
keep mirrors of good stuff so it doesn't go away
like so much on the web does
I don't have a clear answer, but the question of
how this project will be better than what's out
there already deserves consideration.
Daniel
By my calculation, a human brain cranks at
100 Giga-neurons x 10 kilo-synapses/neuron x
100 Hz synapse firing rate = 100,000 Tbits/s
Assuming (a) one synapse firing = 1 bit data,
and (b)1 Flop = 32 bits, then 1 brain = 3000
TeraFLOPs. SETI@home is cranking about 1% of
that
Given another factor of 100 increase in cpu
power applied to the problem, rather than
searching for an extraterrestrial intelligence,
we can BUILD and extra terrestrial intelligence
(a non-human one)(pun intended).
Daniel
You can divide all businesses into two categories. #1 is providing the necessities of life (food, clothing, shelter). #2 is entertainment, which covers everything else. In #2 you can include that part of #1 category products beyond the basics. For example, you need to eat food, but eating out at a nice restaurant is mostly entertainment.
Once upon a time, almost everybody spent most of their time on category #1 stuff. In our modern high tech society, most of category #1 stuff is cheap, and we then choose how to spend the bulk of our money on #2: entertaining ourselves.
Thousand-player combat games aren't that new
(in the SCA, the medieval re-creation group I
belong to), we've been doing live-action battles
with that many people for about 20 years. But the training and travel time, and equipment costs are much higher than for playing Everquest, so the number of people doing it is much smaller.
For now, live action games have better visuals,
sound is about on par, and kinesthetics (feeling your body moving, touch, and smell are way better than video games. I give video games another 10 years, and they will be able to match the full sensory range of live action. At that point many of us live action players will probably move over to electronic - it's a heck of a lot easier to build a castle electronically than in real life.
The point I am getting at is kids have, in the 20th century at least, been able to entertain themselves. At one point it was stuff like playing baseball and climbing trees, because that's all there was. Nowadays, some kids still play baseball and climb trees. Others play video games. The range of options has expanded, and the mix of choices has shifted. These trends will continue in the future.
Daniel
From the Roman road network, to the early use of
mass production for rifles, to today's tactical
lasers, high tech has been used for military/
political purposes. So what's new?
Daniel
I made an error in my original post. In the next to the last paragraph substitute "if each district had 10 reps" for "if a state had 10 reps". Providing 10 representatives for each district gets us to about where the nation was originally in representation ratio. Then you split up those guys according to polling percentages.
Daniel
The other problem is the 'winner take all' system of voting, where 51% of the voters can select 100% of the representatives, which isn't therefore very representative.
What would help immensely is a 'fractional representation' system, where if a state had 10 reps, and the votes went 45% dem, 45% rep, and 10% independant, then they get 4.5, 4.5 and 1.0 votes. The fractional votes would be reps that only get to cast a fractional vote, but are represented by a whole human. So the dems would get 4 guys with a whole vote each, and one guy with a 0.5 vote.
That way all of every citizen's votes count(except you might set a floor of 0.1 vote and round to the nearest .1 vote to keep things manageable)
Daniel
We know where Pioneer 10 is going to about 9 decimal places. Eventually we will have advanced propulsion systems that will allow us to chase Pioneer 10 down and bring it back to the National Air & Space Museum, where it belongs. Daniel
I was a participant in the Space Elevator workshop that led to this news item. I would like to make several comments on space elevator design:
1) A ground to synchronous orbit (35,000 km high) elevator is often discussed, but such a design is neither necessary nor economic.
A segmented elevator cable in earth orbit plus
orbit mechanics allows you to get around with only 1/7 of the height in actual cable segments. You coast between cable segments.
A tower from the ground several tens of km tall
saves you most of the losses that a rocket like
the shuttle sees from trajectory inefficiency and atmospheric drag. You simply launch from the top of the tower.
2) A real space elevator design will have multiple redundant cables because natural meteoroids and manmade orbital debris will occasionally run into the cable sections. The cables will be cross-connected so that the loads will be routed around any break (kind of like packet routing for the internet). You will have robot 'spiders' that will carry replacment spools of cables and be able to replace broken sections. This maintenance is like painting bridges continuously to keep them from rusting.
3) Existing high strength carbon fiber (1 million psi strength) is sufficient for economically rational space elevators. Carbon nanotubes are
strong enough for a 35,000 km space elevator,
but they would also make possible ultra-light rockets that would eliminate the cost justification for such a large elevator.
Daniel
See my discussion posted to the top level.
If you have any questions, fire away. Daniel
Eventually, someone will develop "e-checks". Essentially, it'll be like writing a check to
cash right now. The bank gives you a check number
(say 16 alpha-numeric = 80 bits worth), you
tell them the dollar amount, which is debited
from your checking account. You forward the
bank identification (their routing number),
the check number, and the amount to the merchant.
He gives that info to HIS bank, which collects
from your bank.
All this can happen in real time. You shop online, find something you like. Open another window to your bank, and get a check number.
Copy/paste the number into the merchants form,
with the amount and bank rounting info. The
banks do some back office magic, and your payment
is in the merchant's account immediately.
Stealing the number does no good, since it is
only valid for one transaction. Similarly, you
eat at a restaurant. You get bill. You pull out
PDA and get a check number from your bank. Give
to server. Server takes number over to their terminal. A few seconds later it comes back as
good/paid, and everyone goes away happy.
There's no reason you couldn't do this with a
credit account. Instead of giving the card
to a store clerk, you swipe it through the
card reader in your handheld PDA. Your credit
card issuer then gives you a single use number to
give to the clerk. Clerk feeds it into the
terminal, and it clears.
Daniel
Conventional rockets operate with two energy givens. The first is the amount of kinetic energy it takes to get to Earth orbit (about 32 MJ/kg), and the second is the energy available in the fuel (about 15 MJ/kg for O2/H2). Since there is not enough energy in the fuel to get to orbit by itself, you have to use a large amount of fuel to get a smaller amount of fuel plus the vehicle and payload up to a point where the remaining fuel has the energy to get you to orbit.
It turns out that what is left at the end is about 13% of your starting weight (the other 87% was fuel). Making a vehicle that weighs 15% of total takeoff weight is reasonable, and one that weighs 10% of total takeoff weight is really hard. So you've got somewhere in the range of -2% to +3% left over for cargo.
The traditional approach to the small payload problem is to not take the whole vehicle to orbit. Since you lose so much weight between takeoff and orbit, you don't need to take all your engines and tanks all the way. This is called staging. The other thing that helps is that loadbearing structure you only use once can be built lighter than stuff you want to use many times (a factor of 10 reduction in fatigue life buys you about 10% in weight savings).
Of course, having to put your rocket back together after a flight, and having it last only a few or one flight makes things expensive. That's how we got in the fix we're in.
There are several ways to work the problem. One is to use more advanced structural materials. So for the same weight as you used to build a throwaway structure, you build one that lasts hundreds of uses. Unfortunately, the attempt at making a lightweight composite tank for the X-33 didn't work out, but the general idea of using lighter, stronger materials is a good one.
Using an air-breathing engine at the start helps because the effective energy content of the fuel you carry is higher. You can give the vehicle a head start with some sort of ground accelerator, or by starting from the top of a tall tower. You can lower the destination with an orbital tether. You can feed energy to your vehicle with a laser.
There isn't any one 'best' answer. Which one makes the most economic sense depends on what you want to fly, how often, when you want to start (technology progresses), how much you can afford to spend to push technology faster, and how much risk you want to take.
Daniel
Helium3 is present on the moon in parts per billion on the surface from solar wind particles that got stuck. On Uranus, Helium represents 15% of the gas giant's atmosphere, with Helium 3 being one part in 10,000 of that, so you have 15 parts per million He3 on Uranus, which is several thousand times the concentration on the Moon.
If you have a need for He3, that means you have fusion working, so you can use fusion rockets to travel to Uranus and retrieve the stuff. Any mining engineer will tell you that you want to mine where the 'ore' is richest. Even though Uranus is harder to get to (about 50 times harder than the Moon), the higher concentration wins big time.
It's fairly easy to separate helium 3 from the Uranus atmosphere, too. It's cold there, so it doesn't take much refrigeration to liquefy the hydrogen, leaving pure helium. Then further refrigeration liquefys the helium, and you can use thesuperfluid properties of He3 or the melting point differences to separate He4 from He3.
Daniel
A little closer to practicality would be to put
a scanner on the shopping cart. You scan the items as you load them into the cart. Then the
entire cart gets wheeled through a checkout aisle
where it's weighed on a scale (to verify that you
didn't add items to the cart without scanning).
The supermarkets could cut down on checkout clerks because now you would be doing the scanning for them.
Where's your source, Jon?
According to this FDIC site, the number bank branches increased faster than the population in 1999. So there isn't any evidence that the Internet is killing off visiting banks in person (yet).
Assume 5 DVDs per pound. 747 cargo capacity is
200,000 lb. Therefore you can carry 1 million
DVDs coast-to-coast. Flight time is 4 hours.
That's 69.4 DVDs per second = 300 Gigabytes/sec.
How does that compare to the Internet's backbone
rate?
Daniel
First paragraph of their Overview page:
"Envision an ideal place to live or run a business--a friendly, safe and secure community with large areas of open space and extensive
entertainment and recreational facilities. Imagine that this community levies no local taxes--no income tax, no real estate tax, no sales tax, no
business tax, no import duties."
That pretty much describes a libertarian scenario.
The only way to square that statement with the previous quote that they will fly the flag of a specific country is that they will work a deal with some small country to fly a flag of convenience. This means they are nominally under a particular country's control, but in practice they won't be bothered. For example, imagine
they offer Tuvalu a flat $1M a year for 'ship's
license fees' or whatever. They get to use Tuvalu's flag on their flagpole. Even if Tuvalu wanted to enforce a particular law (which they wouldn't, that's what their yearly payoff is for),
how would they do it when the ship is on the other side of the world, and the ship outnumbers the island population 6:1?
You could base it here:
http://www.freedomship.com/
(a project to build a mobile libertarian haven
disguised as an overgrown cruise ship)