>> One of the nice things about our anchor site is that it is in the middle of nowhere, approximately 400 miles from shipping or plane routes.
> So how are they going to get stuff over there?
By boat of course. The earth platform would be in the middle of the ocean. This isn't particularly difficult: Boeing Sea Launch alredy ships satellites from Seal Beach, CA down to the equator for launches. Arianespace ships satellites and launch vehicle components via boat to the ESA's French Guyana launch facility.
> wouldn't a nice 20 Billion USD worth satelite be a nice target to attack?
No satellite ever made has cost $20B. The original Hubble cost less than a billion, and no ISS component cost more than a billion.
No basis for Cost / Investment estimate of $10B
on
Going Up?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Although Highlift devotes considerable technical detail into estimating the operating cost of the space elevator, nowhere do I find any detai of how he gets his $7-10 billion cost of initial investment. This of course, is the whole problem. It doesn't matter if the elevator works on solar power and requires no infrastructure or maintenance - the key barrier to its construction will be the magnitude of investment. This penny-wise and dollar-foolish approach of engineering is very frustrating for someone like me who really wants to see a working space elevator in my lifetime.
To put things into perspective, Europe's Ariane 5 launch vehicle cost nearly $10B in development over a decade. If his $10B estimate is correct, then the Highlift space elevator isn't a project that any single country (besides the US) can undertake. Another perspective: Boeing's Sea Launch projeect, which involved a platform in the equatorial Pacific, a fueling and operations ship, and considerable infrastructure, cost less than $1B (considerably cheaper than Ariane 5 because it didn't involve a new launch vehicle).
I want to see the elevator happen, I really do. But to see it happen, these guys have got to get out of their "this is really cool on paper" engineering mode and get into a hard nosed "how are we going to make money out of this and make this really happen" mode.
> Doesn't something like a Space Elevator become an incredibly large and tempting target for anyone looking to kill/injure/destroy American/Western World society?
Simple remedy to that: just build it in the Eastern World.
The airships don't come and go - they're out there constantly. They're just invisible, both to optical and radar wavelengths. The ships are actually filled with tall, thin, vicious aliens who want to exploit earth's natural resources and kidnap earth's children.
The reason they haven't landed yet is because they find earth's atmosphere poisinous. The high humidity burns their skin the way hydrochloric acid burns human skin. They haven't developed the appropriate environmental suits yet because (despite being able to traval intersteller distances) they're not that smart, and don't know, for instance, how to turn door knobs. They're also confused about where to land, since all of their original crop sign navigation markers were soon replaced by the work of Disney executives and 30 year-old nerds who don't have girlfriends.
Well, you should see how humble those guys at Harvard are...:)
But when you put large numbers of like minded geeks together, its sorta natural that they accumulate large collections of geek hardware. For that matter, MIT also has the US's largest circulating anime video collection (you don't have to be a student to borrow) as well as the world's largest model railroad.
Back in the old days, the great teak wood forests of Northern Thailand were logged using elephants. Very nimble, incredibly strong, elephants could drag giant logs across the worst of terrain, with minimal damage to the ground or to the surrounding ecosystem. Sure they left around large piles of manure, but that at least helped fertilize the soil.
Then American-style mechanized logging came in, the great forests were indiscriminantly clear cut, and the elephants were replaced with 10-wheeled trucks. The elephants and their mahout masters were left unemployed, and now roam Bangkok, beggers, to be hit by cars and gawked at by tourists.
I admire this mechanized logger as a good way to log with less damage to the forests, but aren't we developing technology where environmentally friendly four-legged solutions already exist?
At 35,000 volumes, that donation certainly makes the Calgary collection larger than the MIT Science Fiction Society's collection. The MITSFS Collection has approximately 25,000 volumes, and is growing. I guess when the Gibson Donation is processed and shelved, it would take away the MITSFS's status as the world's largest open-shelved science fiction collection.
The size of the Gibson Donation is quite astonishing. The MITSFS Collection supposedly has 90% of all english-language science fiction ever published, and we have deals with the publishing companies to get a copy of every new SF book that comes out - often before the bookstores get them. I guess the Calgary donation has a lot of stuff that we totally overlooked (the Saturday Evening Post stuff), or else a lot of foreign language stuff (MITSFS isn't so strong on Japanese science fiction manga, for instance). If anybody is ever up in Cambridge, check the opening times, and stop by.
The Odyssey 1000 has 16MB of RAM as anti-shock buffer. It claims a 13 hour life from its lithium-polymer battery.
The iPod has 32MB of RAM as anti-schock buffer. It claims a 10 hour life from its lithium-polymer battery.
I don't see how the Odyssey can offer 30% longer battery life if it needs to access the hard disk twice as often. Either it uses some absurdly energy efficient DSPs, offers dramatically less output from its headphone port, uses an ultra-low power consumption LCD, or simply overstates its battery life estimate.
When religious groups try to overthrow governments, atrocities ALWAYS occur. Egyptian Jihad, Aum Shinrikyo, the Taliban, the Huguenots, history is stained with the blood of religious zealots.
>> Get real. This isn't like in "Hackers" or "Johny Mnemonic" where the good guy hackers hack TV to expose The Man.
> Actually, it is precisely like that. It's just the "The Man" may be a bigger and more powerful entity than some people think.
My point was that in "Hackers" and "Johny Mnemonic," everybody that saw the hacked TV show was shocked, brought down The Man, the hero beds Angelina Jolie, and everyone lived happily ever after.
Here, the situation isn't as clear cut. Sure, everyone will say that the Chinese government is the bad guy, but are Fa Lun Gong really the good guys? I suspect people watching the hack were more annoyed than shocked to rebellion.
The most tragic part is that in China, when religion and politics ride the same cart, lots of people always die. Tens of millions dead in the quasi-Christian Taiping rebellion. Tens of thousands in the quasi-kung fu Boxer rebellion.
I fear that this incident will prove highly counter-productive to Fa Lun Gong.
For the Chinese man on the street, who might not sympathize with Fa Lun Gong (many that I know don't), an act like this marks them as trouble-makers who have clearly gone beyond passive resistance.
For the Chinese government, this incident allows them to go to the American government and claim that Fa Lun Gong is a bunch of religious cyber-terrorists. An excuse to crack down on illicit internet-cafes, rights of religious freedoms (they can claim that religion preaches terrorism), and hackers in general (ala US-styled counter-cyber-terrorism proposals).
For American policy makers, this seems similar to Al-Qaeda cyber-terrorism scenarios, where a telecom disruption might occur concurrently with a physical attack, thus disrupting the C4 capabilities of the emergency support teams.
Get real. This isn't like in "Hackers" or "Johny Mnemonic" where the good guy hackers hack TV to expose The Man.
Get the cheapest of Sony's all-in-one DVD dream packages (they go for less than $500, play SACD, and include changer, amp, tuner, and 5.1 speakers). Then get a SACD and a CD of a piece that you know well. Now, the hard part: clear your mind of your prejudices. Then listen. Again. And again.
No need to be scientific or try double-blind A/B comparisons; if you continue to deny that there is not audible difference between CD and SACD then you've ruined your ears with too much clubbing.
I've tried a similar test with Sony's top-of-the-line (and now discontinued) SCD-1, using some hideously expensive amplification and speakers, in a "dead" room. Turn the lights off, and damn.... it felt as if Miles Davis was right in front of me.
Sony's SACD watermarks are better than DVD-Audio watermarks.
SACD watermarks are in the physical pit grooves of the SACD. They are transparent to the user, i.e., even a perfect ear can not hear them.
DVD-Audio watermarks the actual data, i.e., inserts watermarks into the music. The DVD-A people claim that most people can't hear the difference. But DVD-A is being marketed at audiophiles, which claim to hear what most people can't, and who appreciate hi-fidelity for its own sake. DVD-A is destined to be a failure in the audiophile market.
Thailand already has a mandatory ID system, and has had one for the past several decades. The formal use is for voter and housing registration. When you turn 15, all Thai citizens must register for a card, and also receive a unique ID number. Nobody really cares about it though, because its been done for so long, and nobody really abuses like in the US.
1. This cost figure can not accurately represent the costs of redeveloping the SW and control systems for a military / highly-robust system. The SW development methodologies for an academic proof of concept and a military project differ substantially. Basically, instead of 1 grad student producing thousands of lines of code, you would have a large team of programmers, checkers, double checkers, certifiers, testers, and systems engineers developing the system. This adds substantially to the cost of development. Professional developers (not hackers), please comment.
2. AFAIK, the $40k cost did not include the cost of the inertial navigation system. These are very expensive, but neccesary to complement the GPS system used. I think, although I might have misforgotten, that the Draper Lab donated the one used in the test units.
The robustness of the controlling computer to the natural vibration of the chopper is what sets it apart.
The system was designed for *acrobatic flight*. It delivers on this goal by capturing flight data many times per second and integrating that into a flight dynamics model, which is in turn linked to the chopper's servo-control mechanisms. Right now, the only thing limiting its acrobatic flight capabilities is not the flight model, but simply programming the manoeuvres in. This last task is almost insignificant in terms of difficulty, when compared to the challenges of the vibration dampening system, systems integration, and flight dynamics model development.
I talked to Vlad after his IAP presentation ("Mr. Chopper: The Little Helicopter that Thought it Could").
I seem to recall him saying that the software could be modified in a fairly simple manner to perform autonomous rotary-wing auto-rotation landings. This seems like a great technology to implement on real choppers (with suitable upgrading of the flight system dynamics model) as a backup landing mechanism.
...
I happened once upon a girl whose eyes were full of fire.
Her physical endowments would have made your hands perspire.
To my surprise she told me that she never had been kissed.
Her boyfriend was a tired Engineering scientist.
...
Shuttleworth had to go through a lot of haggling to get into space. For one, he had to cut back on his original plan of staying two weeks to only ten days. There were also difficulties in resolving what would happen if Soyuz failed to dock with the ISS - would he get a free repeat flight or not? In addition, Shuttleworth insists on being the first African in space - however, South Africa isn't part of the ISS consortium.
The difficulties appear to have been resolved though, and through the magnificent power of over $20 million, a just about anyone can get into space.
But please, don't by claim that now we have "geeks in space" - the original Gemini, Mercury, and Apollo astronauts were the original ueber-geeks, and their hacks saved many missions from failure.
Slashdot Mirror
>> One of the nice things about our anchor site is that it is in the middle of nowhere, approximately 400 miles from shipping or plane routes.
> So how are they going to get stuff over there?
By boat of course. The earth platform would be in the middle of the ocean. This isn't particularly difficult: Boeing Sea Launch alredy ships satellites from Seal Beach, CA down to the equator for launches. Arianespace ships satellites and launch vehicle components via boat to the ESA's French Guyana launch facility.
> wouldn't a nice 20 Billion USD worth satelite be a nice target to attack?
No satellite ever made has cost $20B. The original Hubble cost less than a billion, and no ISS component cost more than a billion.
Although Highlift devotes considerable technical detail into estimating the operating cost of the space elevator, nowhere do I find any detai of how he gets his $7-10 billion cost of initial investment. This of course, is the whole problem. It doesn't matter if the elevator works on solar power and requires no infrastructure or maintenance - the key barrier to its construction will be the magnitude of investment. This penny-wise and dollar-foolish approach of engineering is very frustrating for someone like me who really wants to see a working space elevator in my lifetime.
To put things into perspective, Europe's Ariane 5 launch vehicle cost nearly $10B in development over a decade. If his $10B estimate is correct, then the Highlift space elevator isn't a project that any single country (besides the US) can undertake. Another perspective: Boeing's Sea Launch projeect, which involved a platform in the equatorial Pacific, a fueling and operations ship, and considerable infrastructure, cost less than $1B (considerably cheaper than Ariane 5 because it didn't involve a new launch vehicle).
I want to see the elevator happen, I really do. But to see it happen, these guys have got to get out of their "this is really cool on paper" engineering mode and get into a hard nosed "how are we going to make money out of this and make this really happen" mode.
> Doesn't something like a Space Elevator become an incredibly large and tempting target for anyone looking to kill/injure/destroy American/Western World society?
Simple remedy to that: just build it in the Eastern World.
Great, now I'll have a frickin' laser beam attached to my head...
The airships don't come and go - they're out there constantly. They're just invisible, both to optical and radar wavelengths. The ships are actually filled with tall, thin, vicious aliens who want to exploit earth's natural resources and kidnap earth's children.
The reason they haven't landed yet is because they find earth's atmosphere poisinous. The high humidity burns their skin the way hydrochloric acid burns human skin. They haven't developed the appropriate environmental suits yet because (despite being able to traval intersteller distances) they're not that smart, and don't know, for instance, how to turn door knobs. They're also confused about where to land, since all of their original crop sign navigation markers were soon replaced by the work of Disney executives and 30 year-old nerds who don't have girlfriends.
Patiwat Panurach
patiwat@sloan.mit.edu
Well, you should see how humble those guys at Harvard are... :)
But when you put large numbers of like minded geeks together, its sorta natural that they accumulate large collections of geek hardware. For that matter, MIT also has the US's largest circulating anime video collection (you don't have to be a student to borrow) as well as the world's largest model railroad.
Back in the old days, the great teak wood forests of Northern Thailand were logged using elephants. Very nimble, incredibly strong, elephants could drag giant logs across the worst of terrain, with minimal damage to the ground or to the surrounding ecosystem. Sure they left around large piles of manure, but that at least helped fertilize the soil.
Then American-style mechanized logging came in, the great forests were indiscriminantly clear cut, and the elephants were replaced with 10-wheeled trucks. The elephants and their mahout masters were left unemployed, and now roam Bangkok, beggers, to be hit by cars and gawked at by tourists.
I admire this mechanized logger as a good way to log with less damage to the forests, but aren't we developing technology where environmentally friendly four-legged solutions already exist?
Patiwat Panurach
patiwat@sloan.mit.edu
At 35,000 volumes, that donation certainly makes the Calgary collection larger than the MIT Science Fiction Society's collection. The MITSFS Collection has approximately 25,000 volumes, and is growing. I guess when the Gibson Donation is processed and shelved, it would take away the MITSFS's status as the world's largest open-shelved science fiction collection.
The size of the Gibson Donation is quite astonishing. The MITSFS Collection supposedly has 90% of all english-language science fiction ever published, and we have deals with the publishing companies to get a copy of every new SF book that comes out - often before the bookstores get them. I guess the Calgary donation has a lot of stuff that we totally overlooked (the Saturday Evening Post stuff), or else a lot of foreign language stuff (MITSFS isn't so strong on Japanese science fiction manga, for instance). If anybody is ever up in Cambridge, check the opening times, and stop by.
Patiwat Panurach
patiwat@sloan.mit.edu
The Odyssey 1000 has 16MB of RAM as anti-shock buffer. It claims a 13 hour life from its lithium-polymer battery.
The iPod has 32MB of RAM as anti-schock buffer. It claims a 10 hour life from its lithium-polymer battery.
I don't see how the Odyssey can offer 30% longer battery life if it needs to access the hard disk twice as often. Either it uses some absurdly energy efficient DSPs, offers dramatically less output from its headphone port, uses an ultra-low power consumption LCD, or simply overstates its battery life estimate.
Patiwat Panurach
patiwat@sloan.mit.edu
Excuses to repress != Right to repress
When religious groups try to overthrow governments, atrocities ALWAYS occur. Egyptian Jihad, Aum Shinrikyo, the Taliban, the Huguenots, history is stained with the blood of religious zealots.
>> Get real. This isn't like in "Hackers" or "Johny Mnemonic" where the good guy hackers hack TV to expose The Man.
> Actually, it is precisely like that. It's just the "The Man" may be a bigger and more powerful entity than some people think.
My point was that in "Hackers" and "Johny Mnemonic," everybody that saw the hacked TV show was shocked, brought down The Man, the hero beds Angelina Jolie, and everyone lived happily ever after.
Here, the situation isn't as clear cut. Sure, everyone will say that the Chinese government is the bad guy, but are Fa Lun Gong really the good guys? I suspect people watching the hack were more annoyed than shocked to rebellion.
The most tragic part is that in China, when religion and politics ride the same cart, lots of people always die. Tens of millions dead in the quasi-Christian Taiping rebellion. Tens of thousands in the quasi-kung fu Boxer rebellion.
I fear that this incident will prove highly counter-productive to Fa Lun Gong.
For the Chinese man on the street, who might not sympathize with Fa Lun Gong (many that I know don't), an act like this marks them as trouble-makers who have clearly gone beyond passive resistance.
For the Chinese government, this incident allows them to go to the American government and claim that Fa Lun Gong is a bunch of religious cyber-terrorists. An excuse to crack down on illicit internet-cafes, rights of religious freedoms (they can claim that religion preaches terrorism), and hackers in general (ala US-styled counter-cyber-terrorism proposals).
For American policy makers, this seems similar to Al-Qaeda cyber-terrorism scenarios, where a telecom disruption might occur concurrently with a physical attack, thus disrupting the C4 capabilities of the emergency support teams.
Get real. This isn't like in "Hackers" or "Johny Mnemonic" where the good guy hackers hack TV to expose The Man.
Patiwat Panurach
patiwat@sloan.mit.edu
"It is the obligation of a record company to bring the fruits of its artists' musical creativity to the public"
Such is elegantly stated in the introduction of Sony's wonderful Royal Edition Leonard Bernstein/NYPO 150th Anniversary series of 100 CDs.
Any laws governing record company relations with artists and the public should always be based on this fundamental obligation of record companies.
> they're in the minority. Quite a small minority.
:-)
So are true hackers. But we will triumph
- patiwat
> Prove it.
I'll let you prove it yourself.
Get the cheapest of Sony's all-in-one DVD dream packages (they go for less than $500, play SACD, and include changer, amp, tuner, and 5.1 speakers). Then get a SACD and a CD of a piece that you know well. Now, the hard part: clear your mind of your prejudices. Then listen. Again. And again.
No need to be scientific or try double-blind A/B comparisons; if you continue to deny that there is not audible difference between CD and SACD then you've ruined your ears with too much clubbing.
I've tried a similar test with Sony's top-of-the-line (and now discontinued) SCD-1, using some hideously expensive amplification and speakers, in a "dead" room. Turn the lights off, and damn.... it felt as if Miles Davis was right in front of me.
- patiwat
Sony's SACD watermarks are better than DVD-Audio watermarks.
SACD watermarks are in the physical pit grooves of the SACD. They are transparent to the user, i.e., even a perfect ear can not hear them.
DVD-Audio watermarks the actual data, i.e., inserts watermarks into the music. The DVD-A people claim that most people can't hear the difference. But DVD-A is being marketed at audiophiles, which claim to hear what most people can't, and who appreciate hi-fidelity for its own sake. DVD-A is destined to be a failure in the audiophile market.
- patiwat
> And does Christensen actually know any of the
> students at MIT?
Prof. Christensen doesn't teach at MIT. He teaches at Harvard Business School.
- patiwat@sloan.mit.edu
The April issue of Scientific American even has an article on "The Science of Bad Breath" by Mel Rosenberg
Thailand already has a mandatory ID system, and has had one for the past several decades. The formal use is for voter and housing registration. When you turn 15, all Thai citizens must register for a card, and also receive a unique ID number. Nobody really cares about it though, because its been done for so long, and nobody really abuses like in the US.
- patiwat@sloan.mit.edu
> This cost $40k, excluding labor
1. This cost figure can not accurately represent the costs of redeveloping the SW and control systems for a military / highly-robust system. The SW development methodologies for an academic proof of concept and a military project differ substantially. Basically, instead of 1 grad student producing thousands of lines of code, you would have a large team of programmers, checkers, double checkers, certifiers, testers, and systems engineers developing the system. This adds substantially to the cost of development. Professional developers (not hackers), please comment.
2. AFAIK, the $40k cost did not include the cost of the inertial navigation system. These are very expensive, but neccesary to complement the GPS system used. I think, although I might have misforgotten, that the Draper Lab donated the one used in the test units.
patiwat@sloan.mit.edu
The robustness of the controlling computer to the natural vibration of the chopper is what sets it apart.
The system was designed for *acrobatic flight*. It delivers on this goal by capturing flight data many times per second and integrating that into a flight dynamics model, which is in turn linked to the chopper's servo-control mechanisms. Right now, the only thing limiting its acrobatic flight capabilities is not the flight model, but simply programming the manoeuvres in. This last task is almost insignificant in terms of difficulty, when compared to the challenges of the vibration dampening system, systems integration, and flight dynamics model development.
patiwat@sloan.mit.edu
I seem to recall him saying that the software could be modified in a fairly simple manner to perform autonomous rotary-wing auto-rotation landings. This seems like a great technology to implement on real choppers (with suitable upgrading of the flight system dynamics model) as a backup landing mechanism.
patiwat@sloan.mit.edu
As the MIT drinking song goes...
...
I happened once upon a girl whose eyes were full of fire.
Her physical endowments would have made your hands perspire.
To my surprise she told me that she never had been kissed.
Her boyfriend was a tired Engineering scientist.
...
Shuttleworth had to go through a lot of haggling to get into space. For one, he had to cut back on his original plan of staying two weeks to only ten days. There were also difficulties in resolving what would happen if Soyuz failed to dock with the ISS - would he get a free repeat flight or not? In addition, Shuttleworth insists on being the first African in space - however, South Africa isn't part of the ISS consortium.
The difficulties appear to have been resolved though, and through the magnificent power of over $20 million, a just about anyone can get into space.
But please, don't by claim that now we have "geeks in space" - the original Gemini, Mercury, and Apollo astronauts were the original ueber-geeks, and their hacks saved many missions from failure.
> I know that a loss is a loss is a loss.
Wrong, it WAS a loss. Extraordinary losses will not be losses in the next quarter, and are therefore useless in valuing the company.
- patiwat@-nospam-.mit.edu