J. Storrs-Hall's space ramp
on
Going Up?
·
· Score: 2
John Storrs-Hall's space ramp is another interesting approach
to cost-effective space launches. Again, it depends on materials that are a little better than what we have today, but not too much better. The
recent materials work on buckytubes may make the space ramp feasible.
The space ramp is about 100 km high and 300 km long, with a linear induction motor running its length. You take an elevator up to one end, hop on the induction motor, and get accelerated at 10 G for about 80 seconds. This puts you in low-earth orbit, at an amortized cost of 42 cents per kg. Prior to amortization, you'd be paying about a buck a kilogram. The cost for space shuttle launches is about $10K per kilogram.
I have a Palm IIIx that I barely ever use. Handwriting recognition is just a big unreliable pain. I would love to see something like the HP100LX, but it appears that chicklet keyboards have gone out of fashion. In time speech recognition will become good enough to obsolete both HR and keyboards, but in the meantime I'd really like to see chicklet keyboards make a come-back.
This is a perfect application for Ronnie Horesh's idea of
social policy bonds.
Here is how they work.
I place $1000 in escrow with some widely-trusted escrow agent. I create a
certificate and instruct the escrow agent to pay the $1000 to the bearer
of the certificate as soon as it can be verified that an amateur rocket
launch has reached a height of 200 kilometers. Next I sell the certificate
on EBay. To make things interesting, let's assume that hundreds or
thousands of certficates have been issued by people who want to see cheap
spaceflight become real.
The price of the certificates will fluctuate, just as stock prices do, based
on the prevailing estimation of when and if the launch will actually
occur. As with the stock market, there will be some people who buy and
sell bonds purely on the basis of price momentum, but over the long term,
the biggest winners will be those people who actually keep track of
progress toward cheap spaceflight. Those people will have an incentive to
help advance the state of the art.
The difference between this and a prize is that a prize has only one
winner. With a prize, runners-up come home empty-handed. Knowing this,
people who aren't sure they'll win may simply drop out of the race.
Escrow certificates make it possible to reward everybody who contributes
to the achievement of the goal.
Ronnie Horesh is an economist in New Zealand. He invented social policy
bonds with the idea that they would be issued by the government, as a
means to allow the government to specify and fund social agendas, while
leaving the details of implementation to the free market. The government
can certainly afford to post much larger bonds than I can as an
individual, but one nice thing about this idea is that it can be completely
privatized, assuming any trusted escrow agent is willing to issue and
honor certificates.
By steering laser beams at a rapidly rotating helical surface, you
can build a 3D display that doesn't require special glasses and can
be viewed simultaneously from all angles. Only slightly off-topic.
Here's a descri pti on of a fancy color version, and the photo at the
bottom of
this
page shows one in operation.
The doggone page suffers a serious omission! It
doesn't tell me where to buy a naked PC!
Anybody know of a list of naked-PC vendors anywere on the web?
The greatest composers of all time, such as Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, would
never have written music if there were no copyright -- hey, wait a minute, there WERE no
copyrights. True artists would continue to create, because the act of creation is its own
reward.
Bach and Beethoven were definitely paid for
their compositions. (I imagine Brahms was too, but
I don't know for sure.) The people who paid them had the power to dictate what was to be composed, and when it should be ready. Bach lived in a time when the notion of appeasing royalty was still quite contemporary, and this was the purpose of his Musical Offering, which he hoped would result in a job. (IIRC, it didn't.)
Musical compositions were definitely recognized as the products (if not the belongings) of their creators, and I'd be surprised to learn that they weren't "owned" by somebody, either the composer or the person hiring the composer. I believe information sans owner is probably the historically new idea, not the reverse.
As others have pointed out, STM stands for "scanning tunneling
microscope". I used the acronym because story titles are limited
in length.
An STM is an interesting gadget. You have a very sharp probe (the point is a single atom) which
hovers over the sample. Everything is electrically conductive except
for the gap between the probe and the
sample, typically a few nanometers. The gap is an insulator except for the ability of electrons to
tunnel across the gap. The current flow due to tunneling is quite
sensitive to the gap size.
Set up a servo to control the height of the probe, holding the tunneling
current constant (the probe is moved with piezoelectric crystals).
Horizontally sweep the probe in a TV-like raster pattern, recording
the probe's height as a function of horizontal position, add false
color, and voila, you've imaged atoms.
protein sequence is linear; while local structural details may be
predictable with some reliability, ultimately it is the final 3D fold
with long range interactions that form the final structure. You can
imagine that the longer the protein, the harder it is to fold, due to
the increased number of potential tertiary interactions.
It definitely is a hard problem, but it's the next logical thing to
attack now that the human genome is more or less sequenced. The use of
seti@home-style distributed computing seems like a good idea, except
for those long range electrostatic and van der Waals interactions you
mention. For a distributed system that relies on a central server,
those are the killer. They represent an enormous amount of global
communication on each time step of the simulation, and therefore a big
bottleneck if they all have to pass thru the central server. This is a
strong argument in favor of allowing client-to-client communication.
That would allow the thing to scale much better.
There is hope in some algorithms (such as DPMTA)
which intelligently partition large groups of particles to simplify
the computation of long-range forces:
...the classical N-Body problem involves computing the net effect of
the interactions of each pair of particles out of a set of N... the
amount of computation grows as the square of the number of particles,
for the naive implementation... The FMA process, however, uses a
Multipole Expansion (MPE) to represent the effects of a group of
particles as a single entity. By using the MPE when computing forces
on a particle, and doing operations to combine multipole expansions,
the overall amount of computation can be reduced to an almost linear
relationship with the number of particles.
Hopefully the folding@home folks are aware of such algorithms, and
are using them to reduce the need for inter-client communication.
By farming out as much of that computation as possible to the clients,
they minimize the reliance on their non-scalable server CPU, and they
also effectively slow down the clients a little, postponing the day
when they find themselves hopelessly bandwidth-bound.
Rodney
Brooks has been working on his Cog
project for the last several years, but before that he worked on a
very similar idea to yours, called the subsumption
architecture. A good quick overview can be gotten from one of
Brooks's early papers, Elephants
Don't Play Chess.
The real question is, do we have an independent idea conceptually of what these things are?
Right, what's important is the richness of representations. Daniel Dennett talks about an internal language of the human brain which he calls "mentalese", composed of representations that embody huge amounts of knowledge and link to one another in very rich, complex ways.
The meaning of a concept has mostly to do with the way it links to other concepts. Concepts link to the world outside the mind in two ways: the purely empirical way of sensors and actuators (my "apple" representation gets tickled when I see a red sweet edible object, or when I pick it up and bite into it) and the social convention of speech and writing. Speech/writing involves the least amount of actual meaning, so I'm not optimistic that these kinds of projects will get very far.
In another posting you mentioned the Cyc project. The interesting thing those folks did was to consciously plan an ontology, a roadmap of the ways that concepts could link to one another. This will allow them some freedom to deepen the level of understanding of which Cyc is capable. It would probably be good if the ontology could also learn from the data presented to it, rather than relying entirely on the conscious design decisions of its developers. They may not think of every important relationship between concepts.
Relating to rich representations, I came across another open-source program a couple of days ago called FramerD developed at the MIT Media Lab. It's a distributed database that's designed to handle millions of thickly interlinked records. The description says: One primary cause of brittleness, incompatability, and obsolesence in advanced applications is the premature codification of structures, protocols, and semantics. FramerD was designed to provide robust and efficient data management without extensive up-front specification of data and operations.
Is anybody keeping track of these wild-ass flagrant miscarriages of
the legal system? There seems to have been a bizarre abundance of them
just in the last few weeks. Most of them seem to involve the usurpage
of rights for individuals to further the interest of corporations. The
corporations seem to have the financial means to redirect the legal
system, rendering the Constitution inert.
If these bizarre things could be compiled into an on-line database,
perhaps it would ease the research burden of any idealistic lawyer
who feels like attempting a counter-suit. Or maybe the EFF or the
Greens or some such group could organize a class-action suit, on
behalf of all U.S. citizens who aren't corporations.
All the references on Stallman's web page date
from 1995-96, and his "Right to Read" story was
published in 1997. There isn't a lot of more
recent stuff on this topic, and I don't recall
hearing much about it generally in the last year
or two. It looks like the most recent locus of
activity is www.public-domain.org.
Where is this debate at now? Has the Clinton
administration's Evil Copyright Initiative been
successfully thwarted? Enquiring minds want to
know...
The disk will be... a spinning, transparent plastic platter with a
writing laser on one side and reading laser on the other...
I like the two-sided laser idea, and the application of holography
(which might enable you to exploit the thickness of the disk to store
a few layers of bits rather than just one). But will we still be
cursed with moving mechanical parts (like rotating media)??
chips that use silicon to switch but optics to communicate...
Instantaneous on-chip optical communication
It sounds like they plan to replace any sufficiently long signal
paths with on-chip optical waveguides, requiring an LED at one end
and a phototransistor at the other. Putting LEDs on the same die
with transistors is problematic today, but presumably they can solve
that problem with some new LED chemistry. Next they need to be able
to build optical waveguides into a die, and insulate them from one
another (so they need transparent and opaque materials that can be
built up using photolithography). I dunno if such stuff exists, they
seem pretty confident about it.
One of the biggest advantages of photonic circuitry is an extremely
low power requirement.
This is supposed to be a consequence of packing the die with LEDs
and phototransistors, rather than charging up the RC delays of long
signal lines? Hmm, maybe. The LEDs might not need much light to throw
a bit a few microns.
For the benefit of us poor slobs who had the unutterably bad taste to attend college 20 years ago, when the best modulation methods going were things like Huffman codes and trellis codes, the notion of sending 19 bps/Hz (much less 90 bps/Hz) is a bit mysterious. Can one of you folks with a modern education post a few URLs where I could see how they are managing to accomplish this? Thanks, from the annoying old fart in the next cube.
I've read about these things before, but the website mentioned here doesn't give a price. I might be more inclined to buy one if I knew what it would cost me.
I wrote a paper on this sort
of thing for a nanotechnology conference a few
years ago. I concluded that a screensaver
arrangement with infrequent inter-processor communication could work for molecular dynamics, by having the geometric space computed by each node overlap sufficiently with its neighbors. This same idea is discussed toward the end of Moravec's
book Mind Children in the context of running Conway's Game of Life.
I was assuming very infrequent communication, sending email over modems every few days. If these guys can maintain direct net connectivity, the amount of overlap needed between neighboring nodes is much smaller. It would be a big win.
Yup, the tensile strength of buckytubes is now legendary. But currently we face the same materials science problem with buckytubes as with PCD: we have a fundamentally good material but we don't have a technology for making big chunks of it that makes its good properties available in bulk. For buckytubes AFAIK currently, we have no bulk process at all. But the curiosity is there, and that will change.
I don't know how buckytubes stand up under compression. I assume you could prevent buckling by packing them tightly enough. It will be interesting if buckytubes make the space dock practical.
The advantage of the space dock over tethers, 3001 towers, and similar schemes is that it's a lot less mass. If a tether breaks, it's a major planetary catastrophe. If the space dock suffers some kind of collapse (say, by getting hit by a meteor), the area of danger would be limited to a few hundred miles radius. Maybe <100 miles, if it's only a partial collapse, which is likely with a good design. There are plenty of big empty places in the Southwest where you could put it to minimize damage.
Veteran wrote: In an Apollo moon launch 70% of the fuel used is burned in getting the missile from 0 to the speed of sound.
J. Storrs-Hall, until recently the moderator of the sci.nanotech newsgroup, wrote an interesting proposal for what he calls a space dock. It's a platform 300 km long, at a height of 100 km above sea level, where air drag is much smaller. Your spaceship would ride an elevator to get up to the platform, and once there, a linear motor would accelerate it (at 10 G's for 80 seconds, survivable for humans) into circular orbit (8 km/sec), from which it's relatively easy to hit escape velocity.
This does not require nanotechnology. It would be possible (albeit initially expensive) to do it with existing materials and techniques. Once the construction is amortized, the total energy cost of putting a kilogram in orbit (elevator plus linear motor) is 43 cents. With hourly launches, it would be possible to amortize the cost of construction by charging about a dollar per kilogram.
In estimating cost of construction, JoSH writes: The wildcard is the cost of the diamond (and the ability to fabricate it into structural beams). Diamond is a bit expensive today! If an Apollo style (and -cost) project could do for diamond what the original one did for electronics, we could build the tower in the next decade or so, and with regard to near-term feasibility he writes: Even commercially available polycrystalline synthetic diamond with advertised strengths of 5 GPa would work.
There's a great album called The Big Kibosh by the New Orleans Klezmer All-Stars that has a couple tunes with an interesting hip-hop approach to klezmer (which they call klip-klop). Obligatory apropos joke: What goes klop klop klop klop bang klop klop klop? An Amish drive-by shooting.
'free software' is not a right, let alone a 'basic human right'.
That's true, but the issue goes to a general sleepiness or laziness that overcomes most peoples' thinking when confronted with any freedom-related issue, even one you would consider important.
...the open source community isn't building back doors into its software to aggressively hunt down copyright pirates that violate the privacy and security of every user. I just wonder how far off we are from a law that will effectively outlaw open source software in its current state... From there, how many more steps are there to Stallman's dystopia in The Right to Read? Our philosophies play a greater role in a greater number of our everyday decisions than most people realize...
As I get older, I find that my respect for Stallman increases. I once took the ``pragmatic'' ESR view that freedom as such was a minute philosophical nit-pick. If enough people can be convinced to think in such terms, the surrender of basic human rights will go off without a hitch. In Stallman's essay on the distinction between open source and free software, he writes:
The main argument for the term ``open source software'' is that ``free software'' makes some people uneasy. That's true: talking about freedom, about ethical issues, about responsibilities as well as convenience, is asking people to think about things they might rather ignore... It does not follow that society would be better off if we stop talking about these things...
[Some software] companies actively try to lead the public to lump all their activities together [really free software and deceptively-not-free software]; they want us to regard their non-free software as favorably as we would regard a real contribution, although it is not one. They present themselves as ``open source companies,'' hoping that we will get a warm fuzzy feeling about them, and that we will be fuzzy-minded in applying it.
In other responses to this article, it has been pointed out that what allows for mischief is acceptance in the mind of the public. It works to the corporations' benefit to blunt the distinctions available for public thought, so that just such trickery can evade notice.
I saw a lot of people on this thread telling the guy to start them right out with object oriented fundamentals... I don't think I've ever met an 11-year old that could fully grok on the concepts of operator overloading, data hiding, and (especially) inheritance and polymorphism.
I think your own bad experiences may have resulted from the kinds of teachers you had. I'm an old fart compared to you, and we old farts had OOP foisted upon us as one in a series of "programming methodologies", each of which was supposed to save the day and end the "Software Crisis".
Because it was introduced to me late in my CS education (long after I left college), I was very slow to internalize the ideas. If somebody had taught me inheritance and polymorphism when my brain was still supple and non-judgemental, and had shown me better examples, I might have been a lot more accepting of it. I bet your teachers might have had experiences a lot like mine. Maybe we need to wait another generation before we have really good OOP teachers.
Kids have enormous mental flexibility, and if you can hold their interest, they can learn an awful lot. Having hacked Python for a few years, I now find OOP totally natural, and I'm not unusually intelligent. It would astound me if it proved to be really impossible for kids to get this stuff.
Agreed, universal access to computers and the web would probably be a good thing for society, just as payphones and libraries are good for society. Especially with the advent of free on-line universities like Ars Digita, it could offer opportunities to people who couldn't otherwise have them.
But people who work for large corporations can already afford computers and internet service, and whether or not they have them is just a question of preference. There are lots of people who don't work for large corporations, and who don't own computers or pay for net service, because they spend their money on things they consider more valuable.
You'd come a lot closer to universal access with something like a phone booth. You walk up, pop in a quarter, and get ten minutes of web-surfing time. Like a real phone booth, you get anonymity as well. This would make the internet available in small amounts to people who don't want to spend much money on it. Regular users could use it to check an online PIM or a stock price.
The anonymity of a web phone booth would address many of the concerns voiced that the corporate PC giveaway is meant to track marketing data, or to enable the corporation to coerce people to work at home.
[Machines of greater-than-human intelligence] will not happen because people will not let machines become smarter than them; they will revolt before that happens. There will be no mass-produced nanobots because people are scared of what they cannot see...
Although a mob may have smart individuals in it, collectively it is as dumb as a cinder block. It has a behavioral repertoire about as diverse as that of an earthworm. Mobs do not make informed decisions about the future and act upon them. Besides that, you're presuming to speak for the mob, but that's another topic.
... and it's just not possible to make that kind of thing in quantity. You're resting your thoughts on technology that hasn't even started to be invented if you're talking mass-produced nanobots... Shouldn't [building nanobots] be your first unattainable dream, rather than [assuming] them being used everywhere?
Plenty of people are working on this. There are several news stories every month, sometimes several the same week, directly pertinent to the eventual goal of building molecular machines. Go to a Foresight conference and see for yourself, there's one in Bethesda, MD, in early November. If this stuff is on the way, which is the general consensus of everybody who actually pays any attention to the field, then maybe it's a good thing to think a little about what the world will be like, and how to preserve human interests in a potentially hostile future. I can imagine lots worse ways to pass one's time.
No matter what books you read...
technology will always only be as smart as those who made it, never smarter.
So if I invent a machine to perform activity X (in this case, thinking) it will never do X better than I can do X. If that's true as a general principle, there are no airplanes, cars, delivery trucks, construction cranes, adding machines, pocket organizers, or telephones.
Slashdot Mirror
The space ramp is about 100 km high and 300 km long, with a linear induction motor running its length. You take an elevator up to one end, hop on the induction motor, and get accelerated at 10 G for about 80 seconds. This puts you in low-earth orbit, at an amortized cost of 42 cents per kg. Prior to amortization, you'd be paying about a buck a kilogram. The cost for space shuttle launches is about $10K per kilogram.
I have a Palm IIIx that I barely ever use. Handwriting recognition is just a big unreliable pain. I would love to see something like the HP100LX, but it appears that chicklet keyboards have gone out of fashion. In time speech recognition will become good enough to obsolete both HR and keyboards, but in the meantime I'd really like to see chicklet keyboards make a come-back.
I place $1000 in escrow with some widely-trusted escrow agent. I create a certificate and instruct the escrow agent to pay the $1000 to the bearer of the certificate as soon as it can be verified that an amateur rocket launch has reached a height of 200 kilometers. Next I sell the certificate on EBay. To make things interesting, let's assume that hundreds or thousands of certficates have been issued by people who want to see cheap spaceflight become real.
The price of the certificates will fluctuate, just as stock prices do, based on the prevailing estimation of when and if the launch will actually occur. As with the stock market, there will be some people who buy and sell bonds purely on the basis of price momentum, but over the long term, the biggest winners will be those people who actually keep track of progress toward cheap spaceflight. Those people will have an incentive to help advance the state of the art.
The difference between this and a prize is that a prize has only one winner. With a prize, runners-up come home empty-handed. Knowing this, people who aren't sure they'll win may simply drop out of the race. Escrow certificates make it possible to reward everybody who contributes to the achievement of the goal.
Ronnie Horesh is an economist in New Zealand. He invented social policy bonds with the idea that they would be issued by the government, as a means to allow the government to specify and fund social agendas, while leaving the details of implementation to the free market. The government can certainly afford to post much larger bonds than I can as an individual, but one nice thing about this idea is that it can be completely privatized, assuming any trusted escrow agent is willing to issue and honor certificates.
By steering laser beams at a rapidly rotating helical surface, you can build a 3D display that doesn't require special glasses and can be viewed simultaneously from all angles. Only slightly off-topic. Here's a descri pti on of a fancy color version, and the photo at the bottom of this page shows one in operation.
The doggone page suffers a serious omission! It doesn't tell me where to buy a naked PC! Anybody know of a list of naked-PC vendors anywere on the web?
Bach and Beethoven were definitely paid for their compositions. (I imagine Brahms was too, but I don't know for sure.) The people who paid them had the power to dictate what was to be composed, and when it should be ready. Bach lived in a time when the notion of appeasing royalty was still quite contemporary, and this was the purpose of his Musical Offering, which he hoped would result in a job. (IIRC, it didn't.)
Musical compositions were definitely recognized as the products (if not the belongings) of their creators, and I'd be surprised to learn that they weren't "owned" by somebody, either the composer or the person hiring the composer. I believe information sans owner is probably the historically new idea, not the reverse.
An STM is an interesting gadget. You have a very sharp probe (the point is a single atom) which hovers over the sample. Everything is electrically conductive except for the gap between the probe and the sample, typically a few nanometers. The gap is an insulator except for the ability of electrons to tunnel across the gap. The current flow due to tunneling is quite sensitive to the gap size.
Set up a servo to control the height of the probe, holding the tunneling current constant (the probe is moved with piezoelectric crystals). Horizontally sweep the probe in a TV-like raster pattern, recording the probe's height as a function of horizontal position, add false color, and voila, you've imaged atoms.
Here is a more detailed description.
There is hope in some algorithms (such as DPMTA) which intelligently partition large groups of particles to simplify the computation of long-range forces:
Hopefully the folding@home folks are aware of such algorithms, and are using them to reduce the need for inter-client communication. By farming out as much of that computation as possible to the clients, they minimize the reliance on their non-scalable server CPU, and they also effectively slow down the clients a little, postponing the day when they find themselves hopelessly bandwidth-bound.Rodney Brooks has been working on his Cog project for the last several years, but before that he worked on a very similar idea to yours, called the subsumption architecture. A good quick overview can be gotten from one of Brooks's early papers, Elephants Don't Play Chess.
Right, what's important is the richness of representations. Daniel Dennett talks about an internal language of the human brain which he calls "mentalese", composed of representations that embody huge amounts of knowledge and link to one another in very rich, complex ways.
The meaning of a concept has mostly to do with the way it links to other concepts. Concepts link to the world outside the mind in two ways: the purely empirical way of sensors and actuators (my "apple" representation gets tickled when I see a red sweet edible object, or when I pick it up and bite into it) and the social convention of speech and writing. Speech/writing involves the least amount of actual meaning, so I'm not optimistic that these kinds of projects will get very far.
In another posting you mentioned the Cyc project. The interesting thing those folks did was to consciously plan an ontology, a roadmap of the ways that concepts could link to one another. This will allow them some freedom to deepen the level of understanding of which Cyc is capable. It would probably be good if the ontology could also learn from the data presented to it, rather than relying entirely on the conscious design decisions of its developers. They may not think of every important relationship between concepts.
Relating to rich representations, I came across another open-source program a couple of days ago called FramerD developed at the MIT Media Lab. It's a distributed database that's designed to handle millions of thickly interlinked records. The description says: One primary cause of brittleness, incompatability, and obsolesence in advanced applications is the premature codification of structures, protocols, and semantics. FramerD was designed to provide robust and efficient data management without extensive up-front specification of data and operations.
If these bizarre things could be compiled into an on-line database, perhaps it would ease the research burden of any idealistic lawyer who feels like attempting a counter-suit. Or maybe the EFF or the Greens or some such group could organize a class-action suit, on behalf of all U.S. citizens who aren't corporations.
Where is this debate at now? Has the Clinton administration's Evil Copyright Initiative been successfully thwarted? Enquiring minds want to know...
I like the two-sided laser idea, and the application of holography (which might enable you to exploit the thickness of the disk to store a few layers of bits rather than just one). But will we still be cursed with moving mechanical parts (like rotating media)??
chips that use silicon to switch but optics to communicate... Instantaneous on-chip optical communication
It sounds like they plan to replace any sufficiently long signal paths with on-chip optical waveguides, requiring an LED at one end and a phototransistor at the other. Putting LEDs on the same die with transistors is problematic today, but presumably they can solve that problem with some new LED chemistry. Next they need to be able to build optical waveguides into a die, and insulate them from one another (so they need transparent and opaque materials that can be built up using photolithography). I dunno if such stuff exists, they seem pretty confident about it.
One of the biggest advantages of photonic circuitry is an extremely low power requirement.
This is supposed to be a consequence of packing the die with LEDs and phototransistors, rather than charging up the RC delays of long signal lines? Hmm, maybe. The LEDs might not need much light to throw a bit a few microns.
For the benefit of us poor slobs who had the unutterably bad taste to attend college 20 years ago, when the best modulation methods going were things like Huffman codes and trellis codes, the notion of sending 19 bps/Hz (much less 90 bps/Hz) is a bit mysterious. Can one of you folks with a modern education post a few URLs where I could see how they are managing to accomplish this? Thanks, from the annoying old fart in the next cube.
I've read about these things before, but the website mentioned here doesn't give a price. I might be more inclined to buy one if I knew what it would cost me.
I was assuming very infrequent communication, sending email over modems every few days. If these guys can maintain direct net connectivity, the amount of overlap needed between neighboring nodes is much smaller. It would be a big win.
I don't know how buckytubes stand up under compression. I assume you could prevent buckling by packing them tightly enough. It will be interesting if buckytubes make the space dock practical.
The advantage of the space dock over tethers, 3001 towers, and similar schemes is that it's a lot less mass. If a tether breaks, it's a major planetary catastrophe. If the space dock suffers some kind of collapse (say, by getting hit by a meteor), the area of danger would be limited to a few hundred miles radius. Maybe <100 miles, if it's only a partial collapse, which is likely with a good design. There are plenty of big empty places in the Southwest where you could put it to minimize damage.
J. Storrs-Hall, until recently the moderator of the sci.nanotech newsgroup, wrote an interesting proposal for what he calls a space dock. It's a platform 300 km long, at a height of 100 km above sea level, where air drag is much smaller. Your spaceship would ride an elevator to get up to the platform, and once there, a linear motor would accelerate it (at 10 G's for 80 seconds, survivable for humans) into circular orbit (8 km/sec), from which it's relatively easy to hit escape velocity.
This does not require nanotechnology. It would be possible (albeit initially expensive) to do it with existing materials and techniques. Once the construction is amortized, the total energy cost of putting a kilogram in orbit (elevator plus linear motor) is 43 cents. With hourly launches, it would be possible to amortize the cost of construction by charging about a dollar per kilogram.
In estimating cost of construction, JoSH writes: The wildcard is the cost of the diamond (and the ability to fabricate it into structural beams). Diamond is a bit expensive today! If an Apollo style (and -cost) project could do for diamond what the original one did for electronics, we could build the tower in the next decade or so, and with regard to near-term feasibility he writes: Even commercially available polycrystalline synthetic diamond with advertised strengths of 5 GPa would work.
There's a great album called The Big Kibosh by the New Orleans Klezmer All-Stars that has a couple tunes with an interesting hip-hop approach to klezmer (which they call klip-klop). Obligatory apropos joke: What goes klop klop klop klop bang klop klop klop? An Amish drive-by shooting.
That's true, but the issue goes to a general sleepiness or laziness that overcomes most peoples' thinking when confronted with any freedom-related issue, even one you would consider important.
Because it was introduced to me late in my CS education (long after I left college), I was very slow to internalize the ideas. If somebody had taught me inheritance and polymorphism when my brain was still supple and non-judgemental, and had shown me better examples, I might have been a lot more accepting of it. I bet your teachers might have had experiences a lot like mine. Maybe we need to wait another generation before we have really good OOP teachers.
Kids have enormous mental flexibility, and if you can hold their interest, they can learn an awful lot. Having hacked Python for a few years, I now find OOP totally natural, and I'm not unusually intelligent. It would astound me if it proved to be really impossible for kids to get this stuff.
But people who work for large corporations can already afford computers and internet service, and whether or not they have them is just a question of preference. There are lots of people who don't work for large corporations, and who don't own computers or pay for net service, because they spend their money on things they consider more valuable.
You'd come a lot closer to universal access with something like a phone booth. You walk up, pop in a quarter, and get ten minutes of web-surfing time. Like a real phone booth, you get anonymity as well. This would make the internet available in small amounts to people who don't want to spend much money on it. Regular users could use it to check an online PIM or a stock price.
The anonymity of a web phone booth would address many of the concerns voiced that the corporate PC giveaway is meant to track marketing data, or to enable the corporation to coerce people to work at home.