Just read your post again and ran into more errors.
They don't need to get to the part that's 80 km up in the air. Anything from crashing a plane anywhere into the structure (and this time, we're talking a Cessna not a Boeing) to causing an overload in the powerplant supplying the structure will cause it to crash.
Taking out the power plant will *not* cause a structural failure of a launch loop. It causes it to slowly (weeks to months) lose altitude.
Oh and... "ground defenses with AAA... and maybe some jets"? You remember perhaps how that plane crashed into Pentagon?
You mean, in a densely populated civilian area with some of the densest air traffic in the world? Controlling the skies in open water far at sea is WAY easier.
Also, most of the structure being "up in the air", we are not talking about protecting a ground area, but of a 3D area extending for kilometers up and out around the structure's anchor points. And those go along the entire length of the structure. The whole 2000 kilometers of it.
Individual anchor cables can be lost, in the default design, without system failure. One can put in whatever sort of anchoring safety margin they wish; it's not like a space elevator where physics limits you to a tiny error margin.
I don't know -- I think once people grasp what a launch loop is all about, they generally find it pretty darn inspiring, too. A space elevator might be an elevator to heaven, but a launch loop is a stairway to heaven (er... escalator?;) ). There are all sorts of crazy things you can do with kinetically-suspended structures once you think about it. Like, say, having a huge building suspended in the stratosphere on a relatively tiny, guyed pillar, or any sort of arc. No need for a single straight cable all the way past GEO; it's free-form.
There's no reason you can't land on a Launch Loop. And the most popular space elevator design out there, Edwards', doesn't allow for atmospheric reentry of climbers.
Indeed. There's one company out there trying to raise money to build a suborbital variant of a launch loop for launching people on SS1-style joyrides; it'd cost a small fraction of the price of an orbital loop.
1) A space elevator stores the energy equivalent of a small to medium-sized atomic weapon. But ignoring that it's out at sea (where we've done tons of atomic testing, and nobody who's not likewise out there notices), it's a large amount of energy spread out over a large area (largely way off the ground, at that). 2000km, 350kt = under 200kg of TNT equivalent per meter. That's more like a large strip-mining detonation than anything else. FYI: Space elevators, too, store a large amount of energy (gravitational potential instead of kinetic), but they likewise would lose it over a large area high up in the event of a failure.
2) "Built out in the ocean" -- Launch Loops are proposed to be situated in the same spot as Space Elevators (since the storm threats apply to both -- although they're much more harmful to a space elevator, due to how small of a safety margin you can afford even with preposterous-strength materials used). That spot is on the equator, west of the Galapagos, in a region with no hurricanes and little storm activity. In the case of a launch loop, the entire structure is a lightning rod (a big iron loop), and the amount of energy lightning would add to the system in terms of heat to dissipate is insignificant compared to the thermal mass of the system. It's already been well studied.
3) Launch loops do not "use huge amounts of energy to stay afloat". Once it has been spun up, you only have to pay for *losses*. Remember, E=mgh. If m is constant, g is constant, and h is constant, your gravitational potential energy is constant too. No delta-E, no energy input required except for losses. And, the whole design is about minimizing said losses (hence the vacuum sheath, magnetic deflectors, etc). The energy for launches dwarfs the energy for maintenance with any reasonable launch rate.
4) Can't store energy? Launch loops are a giant energy store. How could you forget that? You were just talking about how they store as much energy as an atomic bomb, and now suddenly in your view they don't store any energy? You have to pump in energy for weeks to months to get the thing spun up.
5) No. An 80km cable does NOT have the same tensile requirements as a 42,000+ km cable. The reason space elevators have to be made of unobtanium is that it takes unobtanium *and* a highly tapered cable to be able to merely hold its own weight when it's 42,000+ km long. At 80km, you can make it out of plain old kevlar. It doesn't matter how many 80km cables you have -- the material requirements don't change just because you need more of them.
The very design calls for absolutely no unobtanium -- that's the whole point. It's not supported by tensile strength, but by kinetic energy. The only structures in tensile strain are the support ropes to stop it from toppling over to either side; since they only need to go ~80km (instead of over 42,000 km), they can be made of kevlar or similar, rather than unobtanium.
As for "prices for space elevators", give me a break. You've got a price for unobtanium already?
Since you seem to have trouble picturing the concept of a structure supported by kinetic energy, picture this thought exercise. You have an ultralight plate in the air that's using a gyro system to keep itself level. You're lying beneath it holding a basketball. It's going to fall on top of you, right? So you throw the basketball up at it. It hits the plate, transferring kinetic energy to the plate, knocking it back up in the air, and correspondingly accelerating the basketball back down at you. You catch it. The plate stops rising and starts falling. You throw the basketball up at the plate again and repeat the process. The plate is approximately hovering in place.
Now, each time, you're having to throw the basketball. But what if you had an automatic "ball catch and return" system -- a curved loop that takes the incoming basketball and redirects it back upwards, turning its downward momentum back into upward momentum? If all elements of the system were lossless -- the redirection, no air resistance, all energy transferred to the plate losslessly -- the plate would jerkily "hover" indefinitely. And if instead of a single basketball, you had a multitude of tiny particles carrying that kinetic energy in a continuous stream, the plate wouldn't jerk around; it would simply hover. One can easily see that in the absense of losses that the system would require no energy by looking at the gravitational potential energy for the system. It remains the same under suspension.
In a nutshell, that is how kinetically-suspended structures work. The energy that you have to continually "pay" into the system is merely the losses. In the case of the launch loop, your "stream of particles" is a loop of iron turning at high speed. The "redirection" is magnetic. It spins within a near vacuum sheath.
1) Graphene absolutely can be damaged; any material can. How do you think diamonds are split by steel tools? You're confusing *abrasion resistance* with *damage immunity*. Micrometeorites pack a large amount of energy in a tiny amount of area -- WAY more than the SP2 bond energies in the graphene bond structure. A micrometeorite impact turns what it strikes into plasma. 2) Your concept simply doesn't work because you have to be able to get your elevator back down. And to do so would require tethering it to Earth with a second space elevator even larger than the first. The net result is that you more than double your tensile strength requirements, which are already preposterously high. 3) Growing a single sheet of graphene is a neat lab trick. It's meaningless, though, because we're talking about *bulk* material. Producing objects that are an atom thick in a serial manner is beyond pointless when your goal is mass production. And FYI, "Ahn and colleagues showed that their graphene-based touch screen could handle twice as much strain as conventional ITO-based devices.". Yeah, what a supermaterial -- a whopping two times as strong as ITO.:P
1) SWNTs *are* graphene -- just merely rolled up. Graphene has the same theoretical (~130GPa) -- and likely maximum practical (half that) -- tensile strength as SWNTs. 2) A bulk material will generally have properties way less than that of your strongest individual micro-element. For example, the strongest nanotube composites yet made barely compete with conventional high-strength plastics. 3) "All we have to do is..."? Was that a joke? 4) The below post.
A couple hundred miles of maglev track versus tens of thousands of miles of unobtanium cable exposed to micrometeorites, space debris, undamped oscillations, etc. Hmm, which is more realistic...
And I have no clue what you mean by "80 mile high bridge", except to assume that you've grossly understood how a Lofstrom loop works.
The key issues are:
1) A Lofstrom loop requires no unobtanium. It may well be *physically impossible* to create the material needed for a space elevator on Earth, let alone economically practical. After all, the strongest *invididual SWNTs* measured thusfar were barely over 60GPa at the density of graphite, when you need a *bulk cable* that's ideally over 100GPa at graphite densities, preferably over 120.
2) A Lofstrom loop transmits power (the primary lift cost from both systems) at about 50% efficiency. A space elevator beams power at a couple percent efficiency. Hence a Lofstrom loop costs an order of magnitude less to operate.
So we're back to the start. Why a space elevator, apart from the fact that everyone knows of it through sci-fi? Wait, I think I answered my own question.
I think this is based on the the standard cart-before-the-horse "How will we get tax revenues when electric cars become common" fear.
Honestly, until we're even within spitting distance of such a scenario, they can safely be neglected. For the next decade or two, they're not going to have a relevant dent in tax revenues. There's no need to do this sort of stuff now when it'll be obsoleted before it's needed, and when at best it's an additional hindrance on the industry.
Yes, this article is clearly bunk. But still, it's quite possible that light has more of an impact on the human body than has been traditionally accepted. Human skin might even be mildly photosynthetic -- not kidding. Fungi have been found at Chernobyl using ionizing radiation as an energy source -- and it appears that it's melanin that they've been using to capture the energy. Ionization of melanin can enhance NADH/NAD+ conversion, which is the last step before ATP production. UV was shown to be effective in causing this effect.
I have a sort of backburner project in which I break down the Icelandic vocabulary by morphology patterns and frequency of use, with the frequency of use arrived at by polling Google (the search engine). I figured, hey, with Google as a source, you'll get mostly people talking, plus news, plus ads, plus books, and in general a nice cross-section, right? Well, just ignoring some of my search methodology problems involving homonyms and declension forms (I have some ideas on how to counter those), I found that there were some serious biases by using Google as a search methodology which should have been obvious in retrospect. For example, "síða" (which can mean, among other things, webpage) was listed as one of the most common nouns.:)
Whatever corpus you choose, it's going to have its own biases.
So by that logic, why is China, the world's largest "communist" state, the world's second biggest economy (and closing), only 4th in international arms sales? Why is US #1 in international arms sales? Many despotic regimes such as Saudi Arabia are entirely dependent on arms sales from the US.
Exporting war and brutality is an capitalism/communism-independent phenom.:P
Meh, everyone speaks English nowadays; it's the universal language for international communication. It's actually kind of frustrating when you're trying to learn someone else's language. I was in Iceland recently, and whenever I opened my mouth to practice my Icelandic, as soon as they heard my poor beginner Icelandic, they automatically switched to English. Thus preventing me from actually getting any better at the language through practice with them.:P Essentially everyone there between ages 14 and 70 speaks excellent English -- some so well that they could blend right in in America (apparently the TV show "Friends" functioned as a great learn-accent-free-English instructional video set;) ). And I encountered people from all sorts of other countries on my trip; all spoke English, most very well.
That's probably the most intelligent comment I've seen in this thread in all regards. Especially the point about locking people into futures trades.
And the original article is right -- oil exploration/production and refining have relatively little to do with each other. They don't even profit based on the same numbers. Production profits based on the market value of the particular type of crude. Refining profits based on the "crack spread", the difference in price between a particular refined product and its feedstock. Both fluctuate wildly and independently.
There is an "oil cartel" -- OPEC. But acting as though every entity involved in the oil industry, from multinationals to refiners, is likewise a cartel, is just plain silly. The amount of competition between different oil companies is huge. They're all selling basically the same product**, so they deal in very small margins, trying to out-optimize their operations relative to each other, with pure, raw scale being the way to keep their total profits up.
** -- There are some ways oil companies try to distinguish their products from each other, namely in how they market branded gasoline (not just commercials talking about additives or whatnot, but more in terms of marketing to retailers -- getting them to pay a small premium in exchange for services like delivery and whatnot).
Exactly. It sounds like the goal is to use commodity hardware (read: cheap) but with extreme error correction levels to handle attenuation factors hundreds of thousands of times greater than traditional wifi (at the cost of bandwidth which isn't needed). They could probably make the things for $15 a pop and cover the whole country with $500k worth of hardware (plus installation, plus profit).
Typical wifi ranges with a clear line of sight are, what, 300 feet or so? 5280 * 45 / 300 = 792 times normal wifi range. With signal strengths dropping off proportional to distance squared, that's an attenuation ~630k times greater. And you're complaining about 1/100,000th the bitrate?
Furthermore smartgrids don't need high bitrate. It's irrelevant to them. So what's the point? What they need is a widely deployable, low cost solution.
Unfortunately, the video isn't working for me on this computer. However, the ability to change depth of focus in post merely requires a blurring algorithm that's selective by z-buffer value. No new information is needed. It does require that the whole image be "sharp", of course.
File immediately when you haven't raised money yet? File immediately when you don't know if you have a viable business model yet? File immediately when you, as a starting entrepreneur not versed in patent law, don't know the risks of disclosure? Um, *yeah* it hurts small businesses.
And so on. How about we actually talk about patents filed *today* instead of 5-10 years ago?
The difference between you and I on this is that I actually have patents pending in the field and a patent attorney I've discussed things many times with.
From the sound of it, it basically sounds like it captures a picture with a Z-buffer -- that is, they capture spatial information and angular information, and the angular information is then matched up to find corresponding objects to assess depth for refocusing.
One nifty thing about pictures and videos with built-in Z-buffers would be that it'd be really easy to render into them. Heck, you could have a camera with a built-in GPU that could do it in realtime as you're recording.:)
One step beyond the Z-buffer would be to then do a reverse perspective transformation and extract polygonal information from the scene. This would be of particular use in video recording, where people moving allows the camera to see what's behind them, hidden sides of their bodies, etc. Then you could not only refocus your image, but outright move the camera around in the scene. Of course, if we get to that point, then we'll start seeing increasing demand for cameras that always capture 360-degree panoramas. Combine this with built-in GPS and timestamping and auto-networking of images (within whatever privacy constraints are specified by the camera's owners), and the meshes captured from different angles by people who don't even know each other could be merged into a more complete scene. In busy areas, you could have a full 3d recreation of said area at any point in time.:) "Let's do a flyover along this path in Times Square on this date at this time..."
Slashdot Mirror
Just read your post again and ran into more errors.
Taking out the power plant will *not* cause a structural failure of a launch loop. It causes it to slowly (weeks to months) lose altitude.
You mean, in a densely populated civilian area with some of the densest air traffic in the world? Controlling the skies in open water far at sea is WAY easier.
Also, most of the structure being "up in the air", we are not talking about protecting a ground area, but of a 3D area extending for kilometers up and out around the structure's anchor points. And those go along the entire length of the structure. The whole 2000 kilometers of it.
Individual anchor cables can be lost, in the default design, without system failure. One can put in whatever sort of anchoring safety margin they wish; it's not like a space elevator where physics limits you to a tiny error margin.
I don't know -- I think once people grasp what a launch loop is all about, they generally find it pretty darn inspiring, too. A space elevator might be an elevator to heaven, but a launch loop is a stairway to heaven (er... escalator? ;) ). There are all sorts of crazy things you can do with kinetically-suspended structures once you think about it. Like, say, having a huge building suspended in the stratosphere on a relatively tiny, guyed pillar, or any sort of arc. No need for a single straight cable all the way past GEO; it's free-form.
There's no reason you can't land on a Launch Loop. And the most popular space elevator design out there, Edwards', doesn't allow for atmospheric reentry of climbers.
Indeed. There's one company out there trying to raise money to build a suborbital variant of a launch loop for launching people on SS1-style joyrides; it'd cost a small fraction of the price of an orbital loop.
Wrong on every count.
1) A space elevator stores the energy equivalent of a small to medium-sized atomic weapon. But ignoring that it's out at sea (where we've done tons of atomic testing, and nobody who's not likewise out there notices), it's a large amount of energy spread out over a large area (largely way off the ground, at that). 2000km, 350kt = under 200kg of TNT equivalent per meter. That's more like a large strip-mining detonation than anything else. FYI: Space elevators, too, store a large amount of energy (gravitational potential instead of kinetic), but they likewise would lose it over a large area high up in the event of a failure.
2) "Built out in the ocean" -- Launch Loops are proposed to be situated in the same spot as Space Elevators (since the storm threats apply to both -- although they're much more harmful to a space elevator, due to how small of a safety margin you can afford even with preposterous-strength materials used). That spot is on the equator, west of the Galapagos, in a region with no hurricanes and little storm activity. In the case of a launch loop, the entire structure is a lightning rod (a big iron loop), and the amount of energy lightning would add to the system in terms of heat to dissipate is insignificant compared to the thermal mass of the system. It's already been well studied.
3) Launch loops do not "use huge amounts of energy to stay afloat". Once it has been spun up, you only have to pay for *losses*. Remember, E=mgh. If m is constant, g is constant, and h is constant, your gravitational potential energy is constant too. No delta-E, no energy input required except for losses. And, the whole design is about minimizing said losses (hence the vacuum sheath, magnetic deflectors, etc). The energy for launches dwarfs the energy for maintenance with any reasonable launch rate.
4) Can't store energy? Launch loops are a giant energy store. How could you forget that? You were just talking about how they store as much energy as an atomic bomb, and now suddenly in your view they don't store any energy? You have to pump in energy for weeks to months to get the thing spun up.
5) No. An 80km cable does NOT have the same tensile requirements as a 42,000+ km cable. The reason space elevators have to be made of unobtanium is that it takes unobtanium *and* a highly tapered cable to be able to merely hold its own weight when it's 42,000+ km long. At 80km, you can make it out of plain old kevlar. It doesn't matter how many 80km cables you have -- the material requirements don't change just because you need more of them.
The very design calls for absolutely no unobtanium -- that's the whole point. It's not supported by tensile strength, but by kinetic energy. The only structures in tensile strain are the support ropes to stop it from toppling over to either side; since they only need to go ~80km (instead of over 42,000 km), they can be made of kevlar or similar, rather than unobtanium.
As for "prices for space elevators", give me a break. You've got a price for unobtanium already?
Since you seem to have trouble picturing the concept of a structure supported by kinetic energy, picture this thought exercise. You have an ultralight plate in the air that's using a gyro system to keep itself level. You're lying beneath it holding a basketball. It's going to fall on top of you, right? So you throw the basketball up at it. It hits the plate, transferring kinetic energy to the plate, knocking it back up in the air, and correspondingly accelerating the basketball back down at you. You catch it. The plate stops rising and starts falling. You throw the basketball up at the plate again and repeat the process. The plate is approximately hovering in place.
Now, each time, you're having to throw the basketball. But what if you had an automatic "ball catch and return" system -- a curved loop that takes the incoming basketball and redirects it back upwards, turning its downward momentum back into upward momentum? If all elements of the system were lossless -- the redirection, no air resistance, all energy transferred to the plate losslessly -- the plate would jerkily "hover" indefinitely. And if instead of a single basketball, you had a multitude of tiny particles carrying that kinetic energy in a continuous stream, the plate wouldn't jerk around; it would simply hover. One can easily see that in the absense of losses that the system would require no energy by looking at the gravitational potential energy for the system. It remains the same under suspension.
In a nutshell, that is how kinetically-suspended structures work. The energy that you have to continually "pay" into the system is merely the losses. In the case of the launch loop, your "stream of particles" is a loop of iron turning at high speed. The "redirection" is magnetic. It spins within a near vacuum sheath.
1) Graphene absolutely can be damaged; any material can. How do you think diamonds are split by steel tools? You're confusing *abrasion resistance* with *damage immunity*. Micrometeorites pack a large amount of energy in a tiny amount of area -- WAY more than the SP2 bond energies in the graphene bond structure. A micrometeorite impact turns what it strikes into plasma. :P
2) Your concept simply doesn't work because you have to be able to get your elevator back down. And to do so would require tethering it to Earth with a second space elevator even larger than the first. The net result is that you more than double your tensile strength requirements, which are already preposterously high.
3) Growing a single sheet of graphene is a neat lab trick. It's meaningless, though, because we're talking about *bulk* material. Producing objects that are an atom thick in a serial manner is beyond pointless when your goal is mass production. And FYI, "Ahn and colleagues showed that their graphene-based touch screen could handle twice as much strain as conventional ITO-based devices.". Yeah, what a supermaterial -- a whopping two times as strong as ITO.
1) SWNTs *are* graphene -- just merely rolled up. Graphene has the same theoretical (~130GPa) -- and likely maximum practical (half that) -- tensile strength as SWNTs.
2) A bulk material will generally have properties way less than that of your strongest individual micro-element. For example, the strongest nanotube composites yet made barely compete with conventional high-strength plastics.
3) "All we have to do is..."? Was that a joke?
4) The below post.
A couple hundred miles of maglev track versus tens of thousands of miles of unobtanium cable exposed to micrometeorites, space debris, undamped oscillations, etc. Hmm, which is more realistic...
And I have no clue what you mean by "80 mile high bridge", except to assume that you've grossly understood how a Lofstrom loop works.
The key issues are:
1) A Lofstrom loop requires no unobtanium. It may well be *physically impossible* to create the material needed for a space elevator on Earth, let alone economically practical. After all, the strongest *invididual SWNTs* measured thusfar were barely over 60GPa at the density of graphite, when you need a *bulk cable* that's ideally over 100GPa at graphite densities, preferably over 120.
2) A Lofstrom loop transmits power (the primary lift cost from both systems) at about 50% efficiency. A space elevator beams power at a couple percent efficiency. Hence a Lofstrom loop costs an order of magnitude less to operate.
So we're back to the start. Why a space elevator, apart from the fact that everyone knows of it through sci-fi? Wait, I think I answered my own question.
False. The batteries do not wear out "every 3-5 years". These aren't lead-acids we're talking about. They're generally *warrantied* for 7-10 years.
I think this is based on the the standard cart-before-the-horse "How will we get tax revenues when electric cars become common" fear.
Honestly, until we're even within spitting distance of such a scenario, they can safely be neglected. For the next decade or two, they're not going to have a relevant dent in tax revenues. There's no need to do this sort of stuff now when it'll be obsoleted before it's needed, and when at best it's an additional hindrance on the industry.
Yes, this article is clearly bunk. But still, it's quite possible that light has more of an impact on the human body than has been traditionally accepted. Human skin might even be mildly photosynthetic -- not kidding. Fungi have been found at Chernobyl using ionizing radiation as an energy source -- and it appears that it's melanin that they've been using to capture the energy. Ionization of melanin can enhance NADH/NAD+ conversion, which is the last step before ATP production. UV was shown to be effective in causing this effect.
I have a sort of backburner project in which I break down the Icelandic vocabulary by morphology patterns and frequency of use, with the frequency of use arrived at by polling Google (the search engine). I figured, hey, with Google as a source, you'll get mostly people talking, plus news, plus ads, plus books, and in general a nice cross-section, right? Well, just ignoring some of my search methodology problems involving homonyms and declension forms (I have some ideas on how to counter those), I found that there were some serious biases by using Google as a search methodology which should have been obvious in retrospect. For example, "síða" (which can mean, among other things, webpage) was listed as one of the most common nouns. :)
Whatever corpus you choose, it's going to have its own biases.
So by that logic, why is China, the world's largest "communist" state, the world's second biggest economy (and closing), only 4th in international arms sales? Why is US #1 in international arms sales? Many despotic regimes such as Saudi Arabia are entirely dependent on arms sales from the US.
Exporting war and brutality is an capitalism/communism-independent phenom. :P
Meh, everyone speaks English nowadays; it's the universal language for international communication. It's actually kind of frustrating when you're trying to learn someone else's language. I was in Iceland recently, and whenever I opened my mouth to practice my Icelandic, as soon as they heard my poor beginner Icelandic, they automatically switched to English. Thus preventing me from actually getting any better at the language through practice with them. :P Essentially everyone there between ages 14 and 70 speaks excellent English -- some so well that they could blend right in in America (apparently the TV show "Friends" functioned as a great learn-accent-free-English instructional video set ;) ). And I encountered people from all sorts of other countries on my trip; all spoke English, most very well.
That's probably the most intelligent comment I've seen in this thread in all regards. Especially the point about locking people into futures trades.
And the original article is right -- oil exploration/production and refining have relatively little to do with each other. They don't even profit based on the same numbers. Production profits based on the market value of the particular type of crude. Refining profits based on the "crack spread", the difference in price between a particular refined product and its feedstock. Both fluctuate wildly and independently.
There is an "oil cartel" -- OPEC. But acting as though every entity involved in the oil industry, from multinationals to refiners, is likewise a cartel, is just plain silly. The amount of competition between different oil companies is huge. They're all selling basically the same product**, so they deal in very small margins, trying to out-optimize their operations relative to each other, with pure, raw scale being the way to keep their total profits up.
** -- There are some ways oil companies try to distinguish their products from each other, namely in how they market branded gasoline (not just commercials talking about additives or whatnot, but more in terms of marketing to retailers -- getting them to pay a small premium in exchange for services like delivery and whatnot).
Exactly. It sounds like the goal is to use commodity hardware (read: cheap) but with extreme error correction levels to handle attenuation factors hundreds of thousands of times greater than traditional wifi (at the cost of bandwidth which isn't needed). They could probably make the things for $15 a pop and cover the whole country with $500k worth of hardware (plus installation, plus profit).
Typical wifi ranges with a clear line of sight are, what, 300 feet or so? 5280 * 45 / 300 = 792 times normal wifi range. With signal strengths dropping off proportional to distance squared, that's an attenuation ~630k times greater. And you're complaining about 1/100,000th the bitrate?
Furthermore smartgrids don't need high bitrate. It's irrelevant to them. So what's the point? What they need is a widely deployable, low cost solution.
Unfortunately, the video isn't working for me on this computer. However, the ability to change depth of focus in post merely requires a blurring algorithm that's selective by z-buffer value. No new information is needed. It does require that the whole image be "sharp", of course.
Where on Earth did you get that? How is light supposed to travel around obstructions?
File immediately when you haven't raised money yet? File immediately when you don't know if you have a viable business model yet? File immediately when you, as a starting entrepreneur not versed in patent law, don't know the risks of disclosure? Um, *yeah* it hurts small businesses.
List of AVC Patents.
Let's start going down the list:
Filing date: Mar. 2, 2004
Filing date: Aug. 8, 2007
Filing date: Aug. 8, 2007
Filing date: Mar. 2, 2004
Filing date: Nov. 22, 2002
Filing date: Dec. 5, 2002
Filing date:Nov. 21, 2002
Filing date: Nov. 28, 2003
And so on. How about we actually talk about patents filed *today* instead of 5-10 years ago?
The difference between you and I on this is that I actually have patents pending in the field and a patent attorney I've discussed things many times with.
Did I ever say otherwise? I said, "There's lots of things about the global system which suck."
From the sound of it, it basically sounds like it captures a picture with a Z-buffer -- that is, they capture spatial information and angular information, and the angular information is then matched up to find corresponding objects to assess depth for refocusing.
One nifty thing about pictures and videos with built-in Z-buffers would be that it'd be really easy to render into them. Heck, you could have a camera with a built-in GPU that could do it in realtime as you're recording. :)
One step beyond the Z-buffer would be to then do a reverse perspective transformation and extract polygonal information from the scene. This would be of particular use in video recording, where people moving allows the camera to see what's behind them, hidden sides of their bodies, etc. Then you could not only refocus your image, but outright move the camera around in the scene. Of course, if we get to that point, then we'll start seeing increasing demand for cameras that always capture 360-degree panoramas. Combine this with built-in GPS and timestamping and auto-networking of images (within whatever privacy constraints are specified by the camera's owners), and the meshes captured from different angles by people who don't even know each other could be merged into a more complete scene. In busy areas, you could have a full 3d recreation of said area at any point in time. :) "Let's do a flyover along this path in Times Square on this date at this time..."
If your goal is to reward big businesses and screw over small ones, by all means, increase filing costs.