So, if scientific papers actually made a lot of money for some third-party industry, then the scientists would then be socialists and renegades?
The test would be: if someone somewhere makes a lot of money on the distribution of some media, therefore the "product" should be sewed shut by law so that revenue can be enhanced and locked down forever for the distributor.
Is that the test?
Music was free once, too, not too long ago. The aforementioned "test" is the only reason it no longer is.
More power to the scientists. They understand what "copyrights" are. A deal between the distributor, artist, and the people. A temporary period of time to make a profit, then release of the material for all time, for the public good.
Wow -- actually that's a pretty short track for orbital velocity!
Well, you couldn't get orbital speed in the atmosphere, so the track doesn't have to be that long.
We build interstate highway systems that need rebuilding every few years, and no one notices the cost. The track would cost tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions. The first one would, any way, because it's all new engineering and that means mistakes and redos. The successor catapults would be cheaper.
Back to the answer: you only need to get the ship going a bit -- and I don't have the maths, just the studies over the years by NASA, the National Space Society, endless seminars, fifty years and more of maths, starting with Sir Arthur Clarke -- you need to get the ship up the first few miles, and moving at a few hundred miles per hour, to totally eliminate the need for a first stage. Remember, the first stage is the biggest, and the reasons for that are that it's in the densest part of the atmosphere, and is lifting not only the entire structure of the successor stages and the the orbital craft, but it's OWN weight and the weight of its fuel, an enormous sum.
And don't forget, you can't get it going too fast, or sonic booms play havoc with the catapult, and friction fries the ship itself. No, you can't get orbial velocity in the atmosphere... but you can get the puppy moving pretty fast before the rockets kick in.
Kick out the first stage, and you can have your spaceplane without a giant fuel tank and strap-on boosters. Something the size of a big Lear jet, maybe.
Also, if you want to launch unmanned vehicles, you could harden the payload to take many more G's, and boost that acceleration UP, getting a huge piece of orbital velocity out of the way.
Piece of trivia: remember "When Worlds Collide", the George Pal SF movie of the fifties? They used, yup, a railway up a mountain to get the ark up to speed before the rockets cut in. I remember watching that image as a kid...
The maths and studies have been done over and over again, and they are buletproof.
The "rocket sled" (actually a linear induction motor used as a railgun of sorts, also called a mass driver by Gerry O'Neill and company, and first dubbed a "catapult" by Heinlein and something totally else by Clarke) doesn't have to accelerate the ship to orbital speed. That's ludicrous.
It merely has to replace the first stage, and that only requires a few miles of track, an upwardly sloping mountainside, and a few G's of acceleration. One the ship leaves the mouth of the catapult, it's moving fast enough for a very small fuel tank to kick it all the way to orbit -- not to mention the fact that at mountain height, it's past a goodly chuck of the atmosphere pretty quickly.
It's surprising how little ship you need to achieve orbit once you get rid of the first few miles and get some speed buildup. The ship is SMALL.
A catpult would prolly use maglev, be pretty cheap once the thing is built, and only require electricity to operate instead of rocket fuel. And it is reusable to a ridiculous degree.
As I recall, Rutan is not trying to build rocketplanes. He wants to build VTO rockets.
The plane was just a way of testing the reliability of the rocket design on a real-world vehicle.
It isn't THE vehicle, guys, it's a testbed.
The final rocket will be something else entirely... and probably not built by Rutan. The company is looking to SELL the rocket engines, to companies who want to go to space. How they are used is not Burt's current concern.
Cheaper to use a Piper Cub to deliver a warhead. Don't obsess about rockets; the 1950's are a long time ago.
A rocket is expensive, shows up on intelligence radar, and has the bad habit of failing during flight. A small plane, a container vessel, a U-Haul, or a speedboat delivers the nuclear punch without the high-tech nonsense.
Remember, while Bush was touting invincible missle shields, we had the worst one-day disaster in civilian or military casualties, ever.
Relax. We could launch armadas of DC-Xs from our airports and the total pollution wouldn't begin to touch the disaster of our coal-fired plants, and most especially our beloved cars.
'Sides, a ship would usually use H2 as the propellent -- and it combines with O2 to make...
this is a totally illogical ruling. the internet is not some ether that just floats around and doesn't exist in any physical location. the judge should have realized that these porn transactions happened at the location of the server.
For over a hundred years, courts have held that corporations, a non-physical entity with no address, no social security number, and no personal liability, are persons under the law.
Lawyers have counted angels on the heads of pins for generations. 'Bout time something good came out of their heads for something other than a corporation -- for us.
Should they start getting hoards of strange visitors harassing locals and pearing through curtains, then Tampa will have a case and would almost certainly get to throw them out of the neighbourhood.
If they start getting hoards of strange visitors, Tampa should expect a major lawsuit for publicizing the location of the house for all the world's psychos to visit. One could make a case that Tampa's prosecutors did let the address out for that purpose, to ensure the business' removal by enabling harrassment.
The fact that a house has naked college girls in it is not cause for a prosecutor to publish its address.
(assuming, of course, that the site did not advertise the girls' location -- a good bet)
If I were running that company, I'd figure a way to sue the local government for exposing the address to the public. It's like publishing the address of exotic dancers, a practice frowned-upon by dancers themselves.
By making the address public (and this is assuming, btw, that the address isn't listed on the site) the government there could be encouraging harrassment not only from the neighbors but from roving psychos around the country.
There are no numbers. At all. It's not quantifiable, so therefore they make them up.
As for losing jobs over porn, that's a non-issue as far as what we are concerned about in this thread. Businesses are hysterically concerned about lawsuits for "sexual harrassment", and are extremely nuts in general about the use of their equipment. The loss of those jobs has nothing to do with illegal porn.
By the way, it's a rather fluidly defined term, illegal porn. A few bad turns on the Supreme Court Road and Playboy could be illegal, to be over the top here. But not by much. I am very leery of "illegal" speech.
Hacking risk also is not quantifiable. It's perception.
As for the fear of going to jail.. AHA! Exactly! It's about fear, it's about avoidance, it's about being controlled. Just today a friend of mine, an honest-to-gawd coder, told me he's stopped downloading because he's afraid to go to jail. It's that bad. The control freaks can cow an entire world by very few lawsuits, and endless threats.
Such is why I like the radionets. Freedom is worth the bother. I'd rather be free and fending off Spam than spend an eternity logging into Microsoft's servers to verify my identity to permit me to use the Net.
Free speech, ie the First Amendment, is specifically joined to anonymous pamphleteering. The ability to post, view, and participate anonymously in free speech ventures is essential to not only our own liberty, but also to freedom fighters all over the planet, to whistleblowers, and to former cult members who want to tell their stories without being pursued and destroyed.
I like freedom. I'm weird that way. I had this dream once, that we could all speak our minds without being punished for it by anyone with enuf cash to hire a team of lawyers. I used to dream that we could share video and audio over secure channels, build our own TV networks, remove scarcity from the knowledge market by making infinite copies of books to the poor of the world... instead I see the triumph of the greedy who want control, over all of it.
Cable modem companies, @Home in particular, let millions of spam forgeries (the Sporge attack) hit the alt.religion.scientology newsgroup back in 99 (98?) and the FBI was not interested. At all. A bot attack from locations in California, routed thru Canada @Home unsecured clients.
Where was the blame for them then?
Where is it now?
Why is accountablity only for the guy without a fat bank account and corporate power? Sigh. Don't bother answering that.
Spam attacks are not stopped by the guv, or corporations, or lawyers or prosecutors. They are stopped by admins and net volunteers who track the bastid down.
It was like that in 98, and still is now. The Man and IP owners aren't interested in making the Internet a wonderful place to live; they want it CONTROLLED.
Certain types of people gravitate towards power over others. They thrive on it. Anyone who has dealt with a volunteer group or similar has watched in amazement as the sharks ate their way to power. And this is what is happening now.
The Guv does not want uncheck communications... kiddy porn is a straw man. They want access to our communications. The people who want power will rationalize anything, anything at all to get access to keys to wreck their opponents, whether it is "kiddy porn", unpatriotic speech, or suspicious encrypted communication... if you have nothing to hide, Sir, why are you hiding...?
IP interests are merely out to make money. Googols and Googolplexes of money that they did not have before, and they are using the straw man of "theft" on the net to build up case precedent to tax the sales of PCs, and access to the net, to pay them eternal revenue streams undreamt-of in the days of vinyl or even CDs.
Frankly, I'd like to see the radionet stay SMALL, and slow, and unconnected to the commercial Internet. Sort of like what the net was,:) originally.
That way, it belongs to the people creating and maintaining it, without the interference of conglomerates, RIAA, the gatekeepers of morality, IP barons, and campus net admins.
It's called freedom, and we had it once. It'd be ideal to get it back.
Otherwise, I'm thinking fondly of a cottage in Nova Scotia without anything resembling a PC or a Net. I do not want to live like a bug under so many microscopes.
And treaties are only valid after ratification if we feel like following the treaty, as the POTA Selected Bush has shown us by disregarding the ABM and others we have signed.
802.11* will get faster, one can hope, if no government or "free" market manipulations meddle with the natural growth of the tech.
Mayhap the radionet will never get better than modem speeds... ok, but most people get modem sppeds while connected with the net anyway. No diff.
As for connecting with the Internet, and the bottleneck that the connection with a commercial ISP engenders... is it really desirable to connect with the commercial Internet in the long run with this tech? I'm sure it will be done, of course, but perhaps a small-i, non-commercial, non-regulated internet should be grown on the rooftops of the world. Paid for out of our collective pockets, maintained by our hands and the hands of those who come after after us - the crazy college kids who always have had raw rebellion in their unwashed little souls...:)
Not possible? That was the first Internet, before businesses and the governent and all those rich, greedy interests ate it alive. It was a communal effort.
A radionet would be cheaper to create than the old Internet was: the hardware is cheap, the protocols written, the knowledge widespread.
As for backbones, mayhap someday lasers will be winking from their own "Pringle cans" from building to building, tucked away from FCC and FBI scanners and smiffers.
I've been saddened by the death of my dreams of the free-range Internet... it seems that the dream could live on in the form of jerry-rigged cans and mirrors all over the world.
for kiddie porn, slander against Scientologists, for, um, um...
what exactly are we afraid of here? What is the EXACT risk one runs by connecting a radionet to your DSL? Express it mathematically. Are you more likely to be killed in a car crash tomorrow? Cancer? Be murdered?
Is it mostly the DMCA and the Son of DMCA we're talking about here? If it is, damn them and run a Freenet.
The "risk" is mostly hysteria to the Nth degree. Kiddee Purn wasn't a threat to the republic when BBS's were running. It isn't now.
What we are really running a risk in creating these radionets, free from guvmint regs, is the specter of men on horseback ONCE AGAIN whipping up the panic over KP, Terrorist Encryption, and Copyright Violation Terror, and then we see the FBI rolling around the neighborhoods, triangulating broadcase nodes and arresting BBS operators for felonious and immoral behavior, ie talking to other people via a non-licensed digital medium.
Why do I see Prohibition 4 coming? First was the insane Alcohol Prohibition. Then it was the Drug Prohibition. Then, the Intellectual Property copy control Prohibition.
Four will be prohibition of networks without government saction, with nasty prison sentences. First amendment be damned, as we've seen these last few weeks.
Save the children! Save the Republic! Save the new profits to be made by the newly-rewritten copyright laws for the IP owning conglomerates of America!
Puritans can be defined as a group of people determined to root out other people having fun without consequence, and then punishing them for their sins. We are in a Puritanical phase in the US this decade.
The private sector can launch rockets more cheaply than government because 1) they can focus their business plans on things that actually pay (tourism), unlike the guv's work, which is general purpose space science, and 2) the guv did all the research heavy lifting at taxpayer's expense. Including the education of the rocket scientists by paying for both their education and the research projects they work on.
It's easy to be small and cheap when someone else gives you 60+ years of research for free.
"Vibrate" on a MICROSCOPIC scale. The moon isn't made of jello. As a parallel, the Earth's crust continuously reverberates with tiny slips of the continental plates, volcanic erruptions, and the tug of tidal forces. Structures and people aren't collapsing.
The FBI didn't "suddenly find" the suspects. They had known of most of them for a long time, and some were under surveillance. They just weren't expecting the mass movement, the attack, to happen as it did. (Probably prearranged long ago, I'd think.
You can't "deter" people who are trying to commit suicide and murder in the name of God. Execution, torture, slaughter of their families -- nothing works.
In '93, the blind cleric's rabid maniacal followers tried to blow up the WTC with a truck bomb. The attempt failed.
Bin Laden's ideological compatriots tried to blow up LAX on New Year's Eve, 1999. They were thwarted.
NOTHING HAS CHANGED since the 11th except for the cold knowledge that they got through. They hit us, and all the security teams and crypto backdoors and suspension of Posse Comitatus laws and a general agreement not to criticize the President or Ashcroft "at this time" would have stopped them from finding simple, simple ways of turning something normal into a weapon of horror.
NOW all of a sudden, our society is too free, we don't give the police enough power, we aren't safe.
Boys and girls, we were NEVER SAFE. We never have been, we never will be. What we are is unused to the real world as it is experienced by the majority of the world's peoples. We've grown up in Yogi Bear's Perfect Place, a land of suburban blandness and freedom, where the worst thing possible is mayhap a poor family lowering the neighborhood's property values. My point is, most of the people panicking have never had their complacency shattered.
I grew up in a neighborhood where you could watch someone stabbed dying outside of a taco restaurant, or in one case, outside my school on a stretcher. I've been robbed at gunpoint three times. I've been beaten savagely twice by ignorant hicks. I know in my bones that the world is not a safe, pink place to live.
I can live with danger. I also understand risk analysis, which says I've a better chance of getting killed in my car tomorrow than being killed by a religious cult from the Middle East/Central Asia.
What I can't live with is the certain knowledge that my panicked, hysterical, jingoistic, SCARED countrymen are about to give Ashcroft, who believes dancing is a vile tool of Satan, who believes Americans have no right to privacy, and I deeply suspect, believes the Internet is the vilest tool of Satan possible, the power to transform my country into a giant paternalistic prison camp, in the name of security.
The CIA and the FBI have all the tools they need to track terrorists. They WERE tracking the terrorists!! They just didn't expect the men to move simultaneously and attack... tho there is now sme reporting that states that they WERE told, and didn't listen.
Suspension of Habeus Corpus during wartime is perfectly OK. But only during. The trouble with giving up a freedom is that once gone, it never comes back. I'm hearing Ashcroft wants to seize assets without trial, hold people indefinitely without charge, monitor the use of everyone on the net, and oh yes, supports the DMCA and it's successor laws to the max. Encryption is OK if you're a corporation, just not for individuals.
Hawks of national security, just like cops, Secret Service agents, or bodyguards, never feel that their job is done until basically their clients are locked up in nice, safe walls where no one can hurt them.
We can let them shut down the internet as we know it. They will. And let them censor; they will. We can let them issue us smartID cards for our lifelong use. We can let them fucking tattoo us, all for our collective safety and security.
And you know what? In four years, they blow up the Holland Tunnel with high explosives in Chevy van, killing thousands. Or something similar.
There is NEVER security. Only national insecurity. Bin Laden has done what no "communist" could. He has gauged our ignorance of our own traditions. Remember years ago when someone conducted a survey, proposing the Bill of Rights to passers-by on a U.S. street? The majority not only did not recognize the BOR, they disagreed with them and voted them down!!
We are also a people, a country that cannot intelligently analyze risk; he knew that too. People are so afraid to fly that the airlines are dying. And there is not a chance in hell that terrorists are on board now; the trick wouldn't even work again -- the passengers would kill the terrorists before they finished walking down the aisles.
Bin Laden and his fellow cultists have managed what the Anarchists and the sad revolutionary communist party nimrods could never do. He has made us blow our own heads off. We are shutting down not only privacy, but the very debate on the subject itself. I heard a securty wonk on loan from the admin on National Public Radio the other day, stating blandly that we would need face recognition systems, smartCards for a national people-tracking system, cell phones that GPS the ID and location of every American at all times, and PCs mandated to have tracking devices on them. And the interviewer, on a nominally intellectual network, DIDN'T EVEN ARGUE -- HE AGREED. Not a peep. Fear disables all brain functions.
The men on horseback wasted no time. Within 24 hours of the attack, they were proposing and passing laws, working the talk shows, seeding fear and confusion. And it worked. Even Katz buys it.
ID cards, logged traffic on the net, tracer chips in our asses -- none of this would have stopped an attack! It just shuts US down! We lose everything we ever dreamed of for over 225 years because we panicked and wanted daddy to save us!
Daddy can't save us. He wants to, but all he'll do is lock us in the house and refuse to let us play with "dangerous" toys.
And they will keep killing us, all the mighty legions of what? a few hundred? a few thousand? members of a sociopathic, hate-filled, STUPID cult. They will change us into huddled, terrified children because a handful of men, some box cutters, plasic cutlery, and a surprise plan caught us by surprise. But not by much.
They will kill us until we remove their cancerous presence from the planet. But we won't do a thing to them by turning into a gulag.
Actually, the pilots ARE trained to sacrifice the plane for the sake of the people on the ground. They just aren't mind readers. How do you know what kind of hijackers you have on board, the idiot kind or the kill-the-infidels kind? Do we automatically make a plane crash if someone grabs a steak knife? The pilots had little time, and there also was no precedent for such an attack before.. but now there is.
And the passengers on 93 decided to take the plane down rather than be used. As will all other planes in the future... this attack strategem is useless to Bin Laden and his clones now.
First, As noted here[jerrypournelle.com], The Russians already bombed Afghanistan back to the stone age. and the Taliban are not the Afghans. The Taliban are a bunch of psychopathic nuts, hated by the majority population.
Actually, it wasn't JerryPournelle.com that originated that article.
I don't think Jerry, an avowed conservative who couldn't resist mentioning Monica Lewinsky in the midst of his grief, knew where these words came from. Read Salon; subscribe to it. I think it is hands-down the best news webzine in America.
Mr. Pournelle is a very bright man, and knows the quagmire is awaiting us. He also knows we can't avoid going in.
And here is the article Jerry quoted from:
An Afghan-American speaks
You can't bomb us back into the Stone Age. We're already there. But you can start a new world war, and that's exactly what Osama bin Laden wants.
By Tamim Ansary
Sept. 14, 2001 | I've been hearing a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age." Ronn Owens, on San Francisco's KGO Talk Radio, conceded today that this would mean killing innocent people, people who had nothing to do with this atrocity, but "we're at war, we have to accept collateral damage. What else can we do?" Minutes later I heard some TV pundit discussing whether we "have the belly to do what must be done."
And I thought about the issues being raised especially hard because I am from Afghanistan, and even though I've lived in the United States for 35 years I've never lost track of what's going on there. So I want to tell anyone who will listen how it all looks from where I'm standing.
I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. There is no doubt in my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in New York. I agree that something must be done about those monsters.
But the Taliban and bin Laden are not Afghanistan. They're not even the government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a plan. When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think "the people of Afghanistan" think "the Jews in the concentration camps." It's not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity. They were the first victims of the perpetrators. They would exult if someone would come in there, take out the Taliban and clear out the rats' nest of international thugs holed up in their country.
Some say, why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban? The answer is, they're starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffering. A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan -- a country with no economy, no food. There are millions of widows. And the Taliban has been burying these widows alive in mass graves. The soil is littered with land mines, the farms were all destroyed by the Soviets. These are a few of the reasons why the Afghan people have not overthrown the Taliban.
We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Trouble is, that's been done. The Soviets took care of it already. Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and healthcare? Too late. Someone already did all that. New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at least get the Taliban? Not likely. In today's Afghanistan, only the Taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. They'd slip away and hide. Maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled orphans; they don't move too fast, they don't even have wheelchairs. But flying over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn't really be a strike against the criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually it would only be making common cause with the Taliban -- by raping once again the people they've been raping all this time.
So what else is there? What can be done, then? Let me now speak with true fear and trembling. The only way to get Bin Laden is to go in there with ground troops. When people speak of "having the belly to do what needs to be done" they're thinking in terms of having the belly to kill as many as needed. Having the belly to overcome any moral qualms about killing innocent people. Let's pull our heads out of the sand. What's actually on the table is Americans dying. And not just because some Americans would die fighting their way through Afghanistan to Bin Laden's hideout. It's much bigger than that, folks. Because to get any troops to Afghanistan, we'd have to go through Pakistan. Would they let us? Not likely. The conquest of Pakistan would have to be first. Will other Muslim nations just stand by? You see where I'm going. We're flirting with a world war between Islam and the West.
And guess what: That's bin Laden's program. That's exactly what he wants. That's why he did this. Read his speeches and statements. It's all right there. He really believes Islam would beat the West. It might seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarize the world into Islam and the West, he's got a billion soldiers. If the West wreaks a holocaust in those lands, that's a billion people with nothing left to lose; that's even better from Bin Laden's point of view. He's probably wrong -- in the end the West would win, whatever that would mean -- but the war would last for years and millions would die, not just theirs but ours.
Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden does. Anyone else?
They don't need uncrackable crypto to fly a plane into a building. Just flying lessons and a preordained date.
The destruction of civil liberties on the net is not happening this week because of the evil Taliban. It is happening because the advocates of Carnivore et al are opportunists using patriotism to get what they wanted all along.
They aren't going after the Taliban, they are going after US.
Slashdot Mirror
So, if scientific papers actually made a lot of money for some third-party industry, then the scientists would then be socialists and renegades?
The test would be: if someone somewhere makes a lot of money on the distribution of some media, therefore the "product" should be sewed shut by law so that revenue can be enhanced and locked down forever for the distributor.
Is that the test?
Music was free once, too, not too long ago. The aforementioned "test" is the only reason it no longer is.
More power to the scientists. They understand what "copyrights" are. A deal between the distributor, artist, and the people. A temporary period of time to make a profit, then release of the material for all time, for the public good.
Wow -- actually that's a pretty short track for orbital velocity!
Well, you couldn't get orbital speed in the atmosphere, so the track doesn't have to be that long.
We build interstate highway systems that need rebuilding every few years, and no one notices the cost. The track would cost tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions. The first one would, any way, because it's all new engineering and that means mistakes and redos. The successor catapults would be cheaper.
Back to the answer: you only need to get the ship going a bit -- and I don't have the maths, just the studies over the years by NASA, the National Space Society, endless seminars, fifty years and more of maths, starting with Sir Arthur Clarke -- you need to get the ship up the first few miles, and moving at a few hundred miles per hour, to totally eliminate the need for a first stage. Remember, the first stage is the biggest, and the reasons for that are that it's in the densest part of the atmosphere, and is lifting not only the entire structure of the successor stages and the the orbital craft, but it's OWN weight and the weight of its fuel, an enormous sum.
And don't forget, you can't get it going too fast, or sonic booms play havoc with the catapult, and friction fries the ship itself. No, you can't get orbial velocity in the atmosphere... but you can get the puppy moving pretty fast before the rockets kick in.
Kick out the first stage, and you can have your spaceplane without a giant fuel tank and strap-on boosters. Something the size of a big Lear jet, maybe.
Also, if you want to launch unmanned vehicles, you could harden the payload to take many more G's, and boost that acceleration UP, getting a huge piece of orbital velocity out of the way.
Piece of trivia: remember "When Worlds Collide", the George Pal SF movie of the fifties? They used, yup, a railway up a mountain to get the ark up to speed before the rockets cut in. I remember watching that image as a kid...
The maths and studies have been done over and over again, and they are buletproof.
The "rocket sled" (actually a linear induction motor used as a railgun of sorts, also called a mass driver by Gerry O'Neill and company, and first dubbed a "catapult" by Heinlein and something totally else by Clarke) doesn't have to accelerate the ship to orbital speed. That's ludicrous.
It merely has to replace the first stage, and that only requires a few miles of track, an upwardly sloping mountainside, and a few G's of acceleration. One the ship leaves the mouth of the catapult, it's moving fast enough for a very small fuel tank to kick it all the way to orbit -- not to mention the fact that at mountain height, it's past a goodly chuck of the atmosphere pretty quickly.
It's surprising how little ship you need to achieve orbit once you get rid of the first few miles and get some speed buildup. The ship is SMALL.
A catpult would prolly use maglev, be pretty cheap once the thing is built, and only require electricity to operate instead of rocket fuel. And it is reusable to a ridiculous degree.
As I recall, Rutan is not trying to build rocketplanes. He wants to build VTO rockets.
The plane was just a way of testing the reliability of the rocket design on a real-world vehicle.
It isn't THE vehicle, guys, it's a testbed.
The final rocket will be something else entirely... and probably not built by Rutan. The company is looking to SELL the rocket engines, to companies who want to go to space. How they are used is not Burt's current concern.
Cheaper to use a Piper Cub to deliver a warhead. Don't obsess about rockets; the 1950's are a long time ago.
A rocket is expensive, shows up on intelligence radar, and has the bad habit of failing during flight. A small plane, a container vessel, a U-Haul, or a speedboat delivers the nuclear punch without the high-tech nonsense.
Remember, while Bush was touting invincible missle shields, we had the worst one-day disaster in civilian or military casualties, ever.
Done with box cutters.
K.I.S.S. works for nukes too.
You listening, Bush Inc.?
You cluster dozens of the rockets. Much better, because redundancy gives you a better chance of not-dying.
Also, Rutan and co. are working on bigger engines. This was a testbed. And it worked! Good engineering and testing == success.
Rutan is god.
Relax. We could launch armadas of DC-Xs from our airports and the total pollution wouldn't begin to touch the disaster of our coal-fired plants, and most especially our beloved cars.
'Sides, a ship would usually use H2 as the propellent -- and it combines with O2 to make...
Water.
this is a totally illogical ruling. the internet is not some ether that just floats around and doesn't exist in any physical location. the judge should have realized that these porn transactions happened at the location of the server.
For over a hundred years, courts have held that corporations, a non-physical entity with no address, no social security number, and no personal liability, are persons under the law.
Lawyers have counted angels on the heads of pins for generations. 'Bout time something good came out of their heads for something other than a corporation -- for us.
If they start getting hoards of strange visitors, Tampa should expect a major lawsuit for publicizing the location of the house for all the world's psychos to visit. One could make a case that Tampa's prosecutors did let the address out for that purpose, to ensure the business' removal by enabling harrassment.
The fact that a house has naked college girls in it is not cause for a prosecutor to publish its address.
(assuming, of course, that the site did not advertise the girls' location -- a good bet)
William Gibson coined it in his cyberpunk stories in the seventies and eighties.
If I were running that company, I'd figure a way to sue the local government for exposing the address to the public. It's like publishing the address of exotic dancers, a practice frowned-upon by dancers themselves.
By making the address public (and this is assuming, btw, that the address isn't listed on the site) the government there could be encouraging harrassment not only from the neighbors but from roving psychos around the country.
There are no numbers. At all. It's not quantifiable, so therefore they make them up.
As for losing jobs over porn, that's a non-issue as far as what we are concerned about in this thread. Businesses are hysterically concerned about lawsuits for "sexual harrassment", and are extremely nuts in general about the use of their equipment. The loss of those jobs has nothing to do with illegal porn.
By the way, it's a rather fluidly defined term, illegal porn. A few bad turns on the Supreme Court Road and Playboy could be illegal, to be over the top here. But not by much. I am very leery of "illegal" speech.
Hacking risk also is not quantifiable. It's perception.
As for the fear of going to jail.. AHA! Exactly! It's about fear, it's about avoidance, it's about being controlled. Just today a friend of mine, an honest-to-gawd coder, told me he's stopped downloading because he's afraid to go to jail. It's that bad. The control freaks can cow an entire world by very few lawsuits, and endless threats.
Such is why I like the radionets. Freedom is worth the bother. I'd rather be free and fending off Spam than spend an eternity logging into Microsoft's servers to verify my identity to permit me to use the Net.
Free speech, ie the First Amendment, is specifically joined to anonymous pamphleteering. The ability to post, view, and participate anonymously in free speech ventures is essential to not only our own liberty, but also to freedom fighters all over the planet, to whistleblowers, and to former cult members who want to tell their stories without being pursued and destroyed.
I like freedom. I'm weird that way. I had this dream once, that we could all speak our minds without being punished for it by anyone with enuf cash to hire a team of lawyers. I used to dream that we could share video and audio over secure channels, build our own TV networks, remove scarcity from the knowledge market by making infinite copies of books to the poor of the world... instead I see the triumph of the greedy who want control, over all of it.
Cable modem companies, @Home in particular, let millions of spam forgeries (the Sporge attack) hit the alt.religion.scientology newsgroup back in 99 (98?) and the FBI was not interested. At all. A bot attack from locations in California, routed thru Canada @Home unsecured clients.
:) originally.
Where was the blame for them then?
Where is it now?
Why is accountablity only for the guy without a fat bank account and corporate power? Sigh. Don't bother answering that.
Spam attacks are not stopped by the guv, or corporations, or lawyers or prosecutors. They are stopped by admins and net volunteers who track the bastid down.
It was like that in 98, and still is now. The Man and IP owners aren't interested in making the Internet a wonderful place to live; they want it CONTROLLED.
Certain types of people gravitate towards power over others. They thrive on it. Anyone who has dealt with a volunteer group or similar has watched in amazement as the sharks ate their way to power. And this is what is happening now.
The Guv does not want uncheck communications... kiddy porn is a straw man. They want access to our communications. The people who want power will rationalize anything, anything at all to get access to keys to wreck their opponents, whether it is "kiddy porn", unpatriotic speech, or suspicious encrypted communication... if you have nothing to hide, Sir, why are you hiding...?
IP interests are merely out to make money. Googols and Googolplexes of money that they did not have before, and they are using the straw man of "theft" on the net to build up case precedent to tax the sales of PCs, and access to the net, to pay them eternal revenue streams undreamt-of in the days of vinyl or even CDs.
Frankly, I'd like to see the radionet stay SMALL, and slow, and unconnected to the commercial Internet. Sort of like what the net was,
That way, it belongs to the people creating and maintaining it, without the interference of conglomerates, RIAA, the gatekeepers of morality, IP barons, and campus net admins.
It's called freedom, and we had it once. It'd be ideal to get it back.
Otherwise, I'm thinking fondly of a cottage in Nova Scotia without anything resembling a PC or a Net. I do not want to live like a bug under so many microscopes.
And treaties are only valid after ratification if we feel like following the treaty, as the POTA Selected Bush has shown us by disregarding the ABM and others we have signed.
802.11* will get faster, one can hope, if no government or "free" market manipulations meddle with the natural growth of the tech.
:)
Mayhap the radionet will never get better than modem speeds... ok, but most people get modem sppeds while connected with the net anyway. No diff.
As for connecting with the Internet, and the bottleneck that the connection with a commercial ISP engenders... is it really desirable to connect with the commercial Internet in the long run with this tech? I'm sure it will be done, of course, but perhaps a small-i, non-commercial, non-regulated internet should be grown on the rooftops of the world. Paid for out of our collective pockets, maintained by our hands and the hands of those who come after after us - the crazy college kids who always have had raw rebellion in their unwashed little souls...
Not possible? That was the first Internet, before businesses and the governent and all those rich, greedy interests ate it alive. It was a communal effort.
A radionet would be cheaper to create than the old Internet was: the hardware is cheap, the protocols written, the knowledge widespread.
As for backbones, mayhap someday lasers will be winking from their own "Pringle cans" from building to building, tucked away from FCC and FBI scanners and smiffers.
I've been saddened by the death of my dreams of the free-range Internet... it seems that the dream could live on in the form of jerry-rigged cans and mirrors all over the world.
And it might even be... fun again?
for kiddie porn, slander against Scientologists, for, um, um...
what exactly are we afraid of here? What is the EXACT risk one runs by connecting a radionet to your DSL? Express it mathematically. Are you more likely to be killed in a car crash tomorrow? Cancer? Be murdered?
Is it mostly the DMCA and the Son of DMCA we're talking about here? If it is, damn them and run a Freenet.
The "risk" is mostly hysteria to the Nth degree. Kiddee Purn wasn't a threat to the republic when BBS's were running. It isn't now.
What we are really running a risk in creating these radionets, free from guvmint regs, is the specter of men on horseback ONCE AGAIN whipping up the panic over KP, Terrorist Encryption, and Copyright Violation Terror, and then we see the FBI rolling around the neighborhoods, triangulating broadcase nodes and arresting BBS operators for felonious and immoral behavior, ie talking to other people via a non-licensed digital medium.
Why do I see Prohibition 4 coming? First was the insane Alcohol Prohibition. Then it was the Drug Prohibition. Then, the Intellectual Property copy control Prohibition.
Four will be prohibition of networks without government saction, with nasty prison sentences. First amendment be damned, as we've seen these last few weeks.
Save the children! Save the Republic! Save the new profits to be made by the newly-rewritten copyright laws for the IP owning conglomerates of America!
Puritans can be defined as a group of people determined to root out other people having fun without consequence, and then punishing them for their sins. We are in a Puritanical phase in the US this decade.
I may be cynical, but I'm usually right.
The private sector can launch rockets more cheaply than government because 1) they can focus their business plans on things that actually pay (tourism), unlike the guv's work, which is general purpose space science, and 2) the guv did all the research heavy lifting at taxpayer's expense. Including the education of the rocket scientists by paying for both their education and the research projects they work on.
It's easy to be small and cheap when someone else gives you 60+ years of research for free.
"Vibrate" on a MICROSCOPIC scale. The moon isn't made of jello. As a parallel, the Earth's crust continuously reverberates with tiny slips of the continental plates, volcanic erruptions, and the tug of tidal forces. Structures and people aren't collapsing.
The FBI didn't "suddenly find" the suspects. They had known of most of them for a long time, and some were under surveillance. They just weren't expecting the mass movement, the attack, to happen as it did. (Probably prearranged long ago, I'd think.
You can't "deter" people who are trying to commit suicide and murder in the name of God. Execution, torture, slaughter of their families -- nothing works.
You can only kill them.
No. We expect it because we have been cut off from the real world for centuries.
In '93, the blind cleric's rabid maniacal followers tried to blow up the WTC with a truck bomb. The attempt failed.
Bin Laden's ideological compatriots tried to blow up LAX on New Year's Eve, 1999. They were thwarted.
NOTHING HAS CHANGED since the 11th except for the cold knowledge that they got through. They hit us, and all the security teams and crypto backdoors and suspension of Posse Comitatus laws and a general agreement not to criticize the President or Ashcroft "at this time" would have stopped them from finding simple, simple ways of turning something normal into a weapon of horror.
NOW all of a sudden, our society is too free, we don't give the police enough power, we aren't safe.
Boys and girls, we were NEVER SAFE. We never have been, we never will be. What we are is unused to the real world as it is experienced by the majority of the world's peoples. We've grown up in Yogi Bear's Perfect Place, a land of suburban blandness and freedom, where the worst thing possible is mayhap a poor family lowering the neighborhood's property values. My point is, most of the people panicking have never had their complacency shattered.
I grew up in a neighborhood where you could watch someone stabbed dying outside of a taco restaurant, or in one case, outside my school on a stretcher. I've been robbed at gunpoint three times. I've been beaten savagely twice by ignorant hicks. I know in my bones that the world is not a safe, pink place to live.
I can live with danger. I also understand risk analysis, which says I've a better chance of getting killed in my car tomorrow than being killed by a religious cult from the Middle East/Central Asia.
What I can't live with is the certain knowledge that my panicked, hysterical, jingoistic, SCARED countrymen are about to give Ashcroft, who believes dancing is a vile tool of Satan, who believes Americans have no right to privacy, and I deeply suspect, believes the Internet is the vilest tool of Satan possible, the power to transform my country into a giant paternalistic prison camp, in the name of security.
The CIA and the FBI have all the tools they need to track terrorists. They WERE tracking the terrorists!! They just didn't expect the men to move simultaneously and attack... tho there is now sme reporting that states that they WERE told, and didn't listen.
Suspension of Habeus Corpus during wartime is perfectly OK. But only during. The trouble with giving up a freedom is that once gone, it never comes back. I'm hearing Ashcroft wants to seize assets without trial, hold people indefinitely without charge, monitor the use of everyone on the net, and oh yes, supports the DMCA and it's successor laws to the max. Encryption is OK if you're a corporation, just not for individuals.
Hawks of national security, just like cops, Secret Service agents, or bodyguards, never feel that their job is done until basically their clients are locked up in nice, safe walls where no one can hurt them.
We can let them shut down the internet as we know it. They will. And let them censor; they will. We can let them issue us smartID cards for our lifelong use. We can let them fucking tattoo us, all for our collective safety and security.
And you know what? In four years, they blow up the Holland Tunnel with high explosives in Chevy van, killing thousands. Or something similar.
There is NEVER security. Only national insecurity. Bin Laden has done what no "communist" could. He has gauged our ignorance of our own traditions. Remember years ago when someone conducted a survey, proposing the Bill of Rights to passers-by on a U.S. street? The majority not only did not recognize the BOR, they disagreed with them and voted them down!!
We are also a people, a country that cannot intelligently analyze risk; he knew that too. People are so afraid to fly that the airlines are dying. And there is not a chance in hell that terrorists are on board now; the trick wouldn't even work again -- the passengers would kill the terrorists before they finished walking down the aisles.
Bin Laden and his fellow cultists have managed what the Anarchists and the sad revolutionary communist party nimrods could never do. He has made us blow our own heads off. We are shutting down not only privacy, but the very debate on the subject itself. I heard a securty wonk on loan from the admin on National Public Radio the other day, stating blandly that we would need face recognition systems, smartCards for a national people-tracking system, cell phones that GPS the ID and location of every American at all times, and PCs mandated to have tracking devices on them. And the interviewer, on a nominally intellectual network, DIDN'T EVEN ARGUE -- HE AGREED. Not a peep. Fear disables all brain functions.
The men on horseback wasted no time. Within 24 hours of the attack, they were proposing and passing laws, working the talk shows, seeding fear and confusion. And it worked. Even Katz buys it.
ID cards, logged traffic on the net, tracer chips in our asses -- none of this would have stopped an attack! It just shuts US down! We lose everything we ever dreamed of for over 225 years because we panicked and wanted daddy to save us!
Daddy can't save us. He wants to, but all he'll do is lock us in the house and refuse to let us play with "dangerous" toys.
And they will keep killing us, all the mighty legions of what? a few hundred? a few thousand? members of a sociopathic, hate-filled, STUPID cult. They will change us into huddled, terrified children because a handful of men, some box cutters, plasic cutlery, and a surprise plan caught us by surprise. But not by much.
They will kill us until we remove their cancerous presence from the planet. But we won't do a thing to them by turning into a gulag.
Actually, the pilots ARE trained to sacrifice the plane for the sake of the people on the ground. They just aren't mind readers. How do you know what kind of hijackers you have on board, the idiot kind or the kill-the-infidels kind? Do we automatically make a plane crash if someone grabs a steak knife? The pilots had little time, and there also was no precedent for such an attack before.. but now there is.
And the passengers on 93 decided to take the plane down rather than be used. As will all other planes in the future... this attack strategem is useless to Bin Laden and his clones now.
Actually, it wasn't JerryPournelle.com that originated that article.
It was that hated agent of liberals, Salon.com.
Here's the link: An Afghan-American Speaks
I don't think Jerry, an avowed conservative who couldn't resist mentioning Monica Lewinsky in the midst of his grief, knew where these words came from. Read Salon; subscribe to it. I think it is hands-down the best news webzine in America.
Mr. Pournelle is a very bright man, and knows the quagmire is awaiting us. He also knows we can't avoid going in.
And here is the article Jerry quoted from:
They don't need uncrackable crypto to fly a plane into a building. Just flying lessons and a preordained date.
The destruction of civil liberties on the net is not happening this week because of the evil Taliban. It is happening because the advocates of Carnivore et al are opportunists using patriotism to get what they wanted all along.
They aren't going after the Taliban, they are going after US.
We're fucked.