The thing potentially uses up to 180W of power. I don't think any external battery that would let you use it for any length of time would qualify as "small".
A few airliners have power plugs, if you have the right adapter for it. I doubt if they let you pull 180W from it, though.
Good question. I'm not sure if there is some tension kept on the ribbon, meaning that cutting the ribbon would make the elevator pull away slightly, or if it's some odd consequence of orbital mechanics that makes it all work out properly.
First, I don't think you can just sew it back together. AFAIK there's no "fix" for a broken ribbon.
I've heard the opposite from quite a number of fairly knowledgeable people when discussing this subject. I've never heard your position before your post, although that doesn't necessarily make it wrong. I admit I don't know enough myself to say for sure; maybe at this point nobody does.
Second, if the ribbon is completely broken, the top will go flying into space. Its not just going to keep hanging there above the platform.
Actually, it is. Even if you posit a fairly high-altitude attack with an airliner or a missile, you will cut off, at most, maybe ten miles of ribbon. That works out to less than 1/2000 of the length. Since the ribbon has an exponential taper, it will end up removing much, much less than 1/2000 of the weight, and the center of gravity of the whole thing will barely move at all.
Remember, a space elevator is neither a tower nor a suspension bridge. It is anchored simply to keep it from moving around under winds, small disturbances, etc. but the elevator itself is in orbit. If the anchor is removed, the elevator will stay. Removing a few miles at the end of the elevator is extremely close to simply removing the anchor, and so the rest of the cable will basically stay where it is. It may begin to move slowly, but it's nothing that couldn't be corrected with some small thrusters.
Yes, I remember the twin towers. They were attacked because they were symbolic and filled with lots of flammable people.
Did you read what followed in my post after the part you quoted? If you can actually hit the elevator (which will be perhaps a few feet wide, not as easy to hit as a skyscraper) then all you will manage to do is snap off the very lowest portion of it, which is the easiest to fix. Why risk the lives of your agents and spend a lot of effort to attack something that will cause no loss of life and no real damage?
If you feel a need to respond, please dispense with the mindless "don't you remember September 11?" stuff. Argue facts, not emotion.
There is no real safety issue. The Earth has a nice, thick atmosphere that will incinerate whatever pieces of the elevator end up going fast enough to be dangerous.
Private companies don't need governments to take care of their security for them. A space elevator will not be a very tempting target to attack externally. You can only hit the very, very, very bottom, and if you break it, you just lower a replacement for the bottom 0.01% that broke off. The main threat is crazy people somehow sneaking bombs aboard, and governments have proven that they can be just as gloriously incompetent at security screening as anybody else.
shared land use
And if the private company puts it in the middle of the ocean, or on an island that they own?
population relocation
And if there's no population to relocate, like in one of the scenarios above?
Anything that a vaguely normal person can do in his head is easily crackable by a normal PC. In order to be considered secure, RSA has to use numbers that are more than 200 digits long. Simply memorizing such a number is already beyond the abilities of most people; performing the hundreds of multiplications and other manipulations needed is beyond even the best of idiot savants. If there were a better way, it would probably mean a speedup for computer RSA algorithms as well, so I think it's fairly safe to say that nobody knows of one for now.
One thing that all of these "Why run for President? Start small!" people need to keep in mind (I'm not counting you among them, as you don't seem to have said that) is that it's not a choice of one or the other. A single party can field candidates at the local level and the national level at the same time. As far as I know, that is exactly what the Libertarian party is doing, too.
This is the general problem with third party candidates. They tend to offer amenable political views, but no solid evidence of leadership, capability to serve in a political office, or past track record we can use to judge how they actually act when in political power.
Unfortunately, neither of the two major candidates have any solid evidence of leadership, capability to serve in public office, or a decent past track record either. If this is what "political experience" gives us, save us from those with political experience!
Convince me, then. Why should I trust the same government that has conducted secret syphilis and radiation studies to watch over the food I eat?
A hard-core libertarian might call you naive for apparently believing that government is more trustable than private industry. Instead, let's all grow up and acknowledge that things are complicated and that people (gasp!) can have different views without needing at least one of them to be stupid.
In the context of ubiquitous computer-generated graphics, you have to be deliberately obtuse to think that it refers to the original trilogy. I don't care how old you are.
To the average slashdotter, the only thing that really counts as innovation is making a half-assed, incomplete copy of some proprietary technology, putting it on sourceforge under the GPL, and watching as nobody ever uses it.
The FCC rule that was being violated involves a tenant-landlord relationship, which is what exists between a university and students living in university housing. No such relationship exists between employees and employers.
Since the press makes that comparison, then why are they never in such uproar and immediate talk of recalls and class action suits over computer vulnerabilities?!?
I think it's pretty clear; no matter how simple, how obvious, and how easy a Windows vulnerability may be to exploit, using it to gain control of somebody's system is still way over the heads of 99% of journalists out there. Everybody can understand using a cheap pen to open a bike lock, but only a tiny percentage of the population can understand using a buffer overflow to smash stack and gain entry in the same manner.
JQ Public doesn't matter on this; he'll follow whatever his techie friends do. The number of people who can buy a computer all by themselves but never consider one day upgrading the OS can probably be counted on one hand. When all of JQ Public's techie friends can't pirate Windows anymore, and they all (hah!) switch to Linux, then JQ Public will have a strong incentive to follow along.
Re:In every answer Kerry pledges spend more money.
on
Bush vs. Kerry on Science
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Given the relatively amounts of money spent in science, all of Kerry's proposals could probably be paid for by simply rolling back half of Bush's massive defense spending increase.
Has any country ever not attacked a neighbor because they're a convenient source of some useful product?
The examples of Sweden and Switzerland during the Second World War come to mind. Of course, using two countries who avoided being attacked because they bent over for evil instead of fighting it is probably not the best way to advocate this position.
Well, here's the thing. There are a lot of people out there who are making money by charging for software. Are there any people out there who are making money by giving away software and charging for the "value added" that you propose? Of course there are plenty of companies making money off of free software like Linux by selling support, packaging, etc., but that's not quite the same thing. That's not to say that your idea couldn't work, but call me a skeptic.
Free software depends on adherence by users to an agreement with the developers not to illegally use the software in a proprietary manner. If we expect people to abide by free software licenses, we have to abide by commercial software licenses too.
This doesn't really make a lot of sense. Software piracy is covered by basic copyright, and doesn't require a license. Also, Free Software licenses cover people who modify the code, whereas commercial software licenses cover people who use the program. It is entirely reasonable to expect one type of license to be binding and the other type to not be.
In my opinion, the only thing he did wrong was to not put a clause into his license that when the user clicks on it specifically authorizes the code to delete the home directory if it chooses to.
Putting something illegal into a contract doesn't suddenly let you do it, whether it's murder, slavery, working for less than the minimum wage, or deleting all of somebody's files without their consent.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently you have never used the CPU-sucking monstrosity that Apple calls Xcode.
Totalitarianism cloaked with the name of "Socialism" is a proven failure, but here in Europe, actual Socialism seems to be alive and well.
The thing potentially uses up to 180W of power. I don't think any external battery that would let you use it for any length of time would qualify as "small".
A few airliners have power plugs, if you have the right adapter for it. I doubt if they let you pull 180W from it, though.
Good question. I'm not sure if there is some tension kept on the ribbon, meaning that cutting the ribbon would make the elevator pull away slightly, or if it's some odd consequence of orbital mechanics that makes it all work out properly.
First, I don't think you can just sew it back together. AFAIK there's no "fix" for a broken ribbon.
I've heard the opposite from quite a number of fairly knowledgeable people when discussing this subject. I've never heard your position before your post, although that doesn't necessarily make it wrong. I admit I don't know enough myself to say for sure; maybe at this point nobody does.
Second, if the ribbon is completely broken, the top will go flying into space. Its not just going to keep hanging there above the platform.
Actually, it is. Even if you posit a fairly high-altitude attack with an airliner or a missile, you will cut off, at most, maybe ten miles of ribbon. That works out to less than 1/2000 of the length. Since the ribbon has an exponential taper, it will end up removing much, much less than 1/2000 of the weight, and the center of gravity of the whole thing will barely move at all.
Remember, a space elevator is neither a tower nor a suspension bridge. It is anchored simply to keep it from moving around under winds, small disturbances, etc. but the elevator itself is in orbit. If the anchor is removed, the elevator will stay. Removing a few miles at the end of the elevator is extremely close to simply removing the anchor, and so the rest of the cable will basically stay where it is. It may begin to move slowly, but it's nothing that couldn't be corrected with some small thrusters.
Yes, I remember the twin towers. They were attacked because they were symbolic and filled with lots of flammable people.
Did you read what followed in my post after the part you quoted? If you can actually hit the elevator (which will be perhaps a few feet wide, not as easy to hit as a skyscraper) then all you will manage to do is snap off the very lowest portion of it, which is the easiest to fix. Why risk the lives of your agents and spend a lot of effort to attack something that will cause no loss of life and no real damage?
If you feel a need to respond, please dispense with the mindless "don't you remember September 11?" stuff. Argue facts, not emotion.
There is no real safety issue. The Earth has a nice, thick atmosphere that will incinerate whatever pieces of the elevator end up going fast enough to be dangerous.
security
Private companies don't need governments to take care of their security for them. A space elevator will not be a very tempting target to attack externally. You can only hit the very, very, very bottom, and if you break it, you just lower a replacement for the bottom 0.01% that broke off. The main threat is crazy people somehow sneaking bombs aboard, and governments have proven that they can be just as gloriously incompetent at security screening as anybody else.
shared land use
And if the private company puts it in the middle of the ocean, or on an island that they own?
population relocation
And if there's no population to relocate, like in one of the scenarios above?
Anything that a vaguely normal person can do in his head is easily crackable by a normal PC. In order to be considered secure, RSA has to use numbers that are more than 200 digits long. Simply memorizing such a number is already beyond the abilities of most people; performing the hundreds of multiplications and other manipulations needed is beyond even the best of idiot savants. If there were a better way, it would probably mean a speedup for computer RSA algorithms as well, so I think it's fairly safe to say that nobody knows of one for now.
I couldn't agree more.
One thing that all of these "Why run for President? Start small!" people need to keep in mind (I'm not counting you among them, as you don't seem to have said that) is that it's not a choice of one or the other. A single party can field candidates at the local level and the national level at the same time. As far as I know, that is exactly what the Libertarian party is doing, too.
This is the general problem with third party candidates. They tend to offer amenable political views, but no solid evidence of leadership, capability to serve in a political office, or past track record we can use to judge how they actually act when in political power.
Unfortunately, neither of the two major candidates have any solid evidence of leadership, capability to serve in public office, or a decent past track record either. If this is what "political experience" gives us, save us from those with political experience!
Convince me, then. Why should I trust the same government that has conducted secret syphilis and radiation studies to watch over the food I eat?
A hard-core libertarian might call you naive for apparently believing that government is more trustable than private industry. Instead, let's all grow up and acknowledge that things are complicated and that people (gasp!) can have different views without needing at least one of them to be stupid.
Why go through all that trouble when you can just ask Google?
(By the way, it does agree with you.)
No dispute from me. It is only those who are outside of the average who will ever accomplish any real innovation.
In the context of ubiquitous computer-generated graphics, you have to be deliberately obtuse to think that it refers to the original trilogy. I don't care how old you are.
To the average slashdotter, the only thing that really counts as innovation is making a half-assed, incomplete copy of some proprietary technology, putting it on sourceforge under the GPL, and watching as nobody ever uses it.
The FCC rule that was being violated involves a tenant-landlord relationship, which is what exists between a university and students living in university housing. No such relationship exists between employees and employers.
Since the press makes that comparison, then why are they never in such uproar and immediate talk of recalls and class action suits over computer vulnerabilities?!?
I think it's pretty clear; no matter how simple, how obvious, and how easy a Windows vulnerability may be to exploit, using it to gain control of somebody's system is still way over the heads of 99% of journalists out there. Everybody can understand using a cheap pen to open a bike lock, but only a tiny percentage of the population can understand using a buffer overflow to smash stack and gain entry in the same manner.
--
"There are four lights!!!"
If you want to save energy, you should start with your sig.
JQ Public doesn't matter on this; he'll follow whatever his techie friends do. The number of people who can buy a computer all by themselves but never consider one day upgrading the OS can probably be counted on one hand. When all of JQ Public's techie friends can't pirate Windows anymore, and they all (hah!) switch to Linux, then JQ Public will have a strong incentive to follow along.
Given the relatively amounts of money spent in science, all of Kerry's proposals could probably be paid for by simply rolling back half of Bush's massive defense spending increase.
Can you hear falling snow when it lands on your shoulder?
You must live somewhere with very mild winters to ask such a question.
Has any country ever not attacked a neighbor because they're a convenient source of some useful product?
The examples of Sweden and Switzerland during the Second World War come to mind. Of course, using two countries who avoided being attacked because they bent over for evil instead of fighting it is probably not the best way to advocate this position.
Well, here's the thing. There are a lot of people out there who are making money by charging for software. Are there any people out there who are making money by giving away software and charging for the "value added" that you propose? Of course there are plenty of companies making money off of free software like Linux by selling support, packaging, etc., but that's not quite the same thing. That's not to say that your idea couldn't work, but call me a skeptic.
Free software depends on adherence by users to an agreement with the developers not to illegally use the software in a proprietary manner. If we expect people to abide by free software licenses, we have to abide by commercial software licenses too.
This doesn't really make a lot of sense. Software piracy is covered by basic copyright, and doesn't require a license. Also, Free Software licenses cover people who modify the code, whereas commercial software licenses cover people who use the program. It is entirely reasonable to expect one type of license to be binding and the other type to not be.
In my opinion, the only thing he did wrong was to not put a clause into his license that when the user clicks on it specifically authorizes the code to delete the home directory if it chooses to.
Putting something illegal into a contract doesn't suddenly let you do it, whether it's murder, slavery, working for less than the minimum wage, or deleting all of somebody's files without their consent.