And just in case you can't tell the difference between books and film: Peter Jackson is a better fucking director than J.R.R. Tolkien, even if he weren't already dead!.
If, for whatever reason, you decide to boot to the console and run all of your programs in Xfree86 (and I do believe that some people do this, for what reasons I do not know), then you can know, because everything that's running is open source. OS X's core is open source, it's just the GUI layer that isn't.
Right, nobody will get shot for using DVDs. Thanks for the information about the coupon system, it was interesting.
As far as how they'll promote EVD, I am guessing (complete uninformed guess, here) that it will be one of two things. One possibility is that they are cooperating, or will cooperate, with large companies, such as video player manufacturers and disc manufacturers to try to bring it into the marketplace. If they can make them cheaper because of not having to pay license fees, then they may be able to gain market acceptance. The other possibility is that this is just another Stupid Government Trick, where they will come up with something, wave their arms a bit, and people totally ignore them. I don't think China's government is particularly immune to doing stupid but inconsequential things like that.
You have the right idea, and I'm certain that China is much less communist than Poland was. I think China used to be as well, but it has changed a lot since then, as has Poland and the other ex-communist countries.
I do believe I understand the coupon concept you're describing. As far as I know, nothing like that exists in China today; it's all supply and demand. It's very possible that something like that used to exist; I know that food was rationed on a coupon-like system from sometime in the 60s up until around the mid-80s.
I don't doubt that such things are pretty essential to a communist country. But the thing a lot of people fail to understand is that modern China isn't communist. It's called a "People's Republic", and the political party that runs the government is called the "Communist Party", but those are just names. The government is totalitarian and not always particularly nice, but the economy is very capitalist.
This may be how it works in former Eastern European countries, but it's not how it works in China. (As far as I can tell, having been to China twice, living with Chinese families, etc.)
It's also true in China that wages are low but things are cheap. The relative prices of things are very different, which can be confusing to someone coming from outside. Food, housing, buses, etc. are really cheap, cars are even more expensive than, say, in the US. However, consumer electronics aren't like that, since they're actually made in China to begin with; they're cheaper than they are elsewhere, usually by a pretty healthy margin.
The Chinese government pretty much just stays out of the marketplace for these kinds of things. Of course, huge areas of China's economy are still state-run industries, but huge areas are completely private. Lots and lots of people have (freely-bought, never heard of anything like your coupon system in China) VCD and DVD players. What do they play on these players? Pirated movies, of course. These are illegal even in China, but that doesn't seem to stop anybody. My girlfriend bought a copy of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, which is not only pirated but a banned movie in China. But nothing happens.
These days, China is communist only in name. It's an odd mix of totalitarian government and extreme free-market capitalism. So really, someone from the "former eastern bloc" assuming that things in China are the same as they are/were in his country is just as clueless as some American assuming that things in China are just like his stereotypes/paranoid fantasies.
And for the "but look at how many people China executes!" crowd: China only executes people for what it considers to be serious crimes. Their definition of serious may not line up too well with our definition of serious. It includes things which threaten people's lives, but also things which threaten the government's power, like being very vocal about certain opinions they don't appreciate. However, their definition of serious has never come anywhere near something as mundane as media formats, as far as I'm aware.
Our definition of Artificial Intelligence always moves to only include things that computers haven't done yet. Before anybody had built a compiler, translating a formula like "x = (y + z * q)/w" into machine instructions was considered AI. Then some clever people figured out how to do it, and people realized it wasn't that amazing, so it wasn't AI anymore. The same happened with playing a decent game of chess, and the same happened with playing a better game of chess than a human can play. Not too long ago, a program that could take reliable dictation would have been AI. Now that you can go to a store and pick up a copy for a hundred bucks, it's no longer AI.
Can real thought be simulated? Everything known to modern physics can be simulated with a sufficiently powerful computer. If you believe that modern physics is complete enough to describe a brain, and that the brain is everything that we think with, then the simple answer is yes. Human thought can be simulated. If you believe in a "mind" or "soul" outside the brain, or if you believe that our brains rely on something beyond modern physics that can't be simulated even when we discover what it is (both perfectly legitimate beliefs, although I don't share them) then it stands to reason that it may not be possible to simulate thought.
It basically comes down to, is a person a machine? I think so. I'm not religious, so I don't think there is anything beyond what we actually see. In which case, nature has proven by example that it's possible to build a machine that thinks.
Re:Good, Original SF Recommendations
on
Farscape is Back
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· Score: 1
Crazy. If you had started out with, say, Excession, or Look to Windward, I could understand. But starting out with Consider Phlebas and Use of Weapons and not liking it? Nutty. Oh well, everybody has the right to be wrong.:-)
Re:Good, Original SF Recommendations
on
Farscape is Back
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I cannot even begin to devise a plan of action for how to start to express my extreme shock that Iain M. Banks is inexplicably not on your list.
Aside from that mindbending omission, I agree that SF is as good today as it ever was.
Complainers who think that there's no good SF anymore have two key problems. One is that they're forgetting about the selection effect; if you average (for example) one good SF movie every three years, then it feels like an eternity between new ones, but the past is littered with them. Second, they somehow forget about books. Partly this is because of the legions of Star Trek fans whose largest experience with written SF is Star Trek novels, and partly because, well, there's a lot of people out there who just don't read. But SF is at its best in the form of the written word.
That's not a problem with slashdot, that's a problem with your browser. Why on earth would a browser be designed so your scroll wheel could change a popup menu?
MAD never would have lead to doom for all, only for the countries participating in it, some of their various allies, and certain unfortunates. Even in the US and Russia, in a MAD scenario, not everybody would die. Civilization in those countries would certainly be wrecked, and a vast number of people would die, but not all of them. As far as the world goes, for most people it would be a horrible, sad event, and probably lead to a great deal of disruption, but life would go on. The popular SF idea of nuclear war making the planet uninhabitable was never anywhere close to being true.
The best kind of research is research where the result is not known. If you already know the result, then it's not that interesting. It can still be useful, to round out our knowledge or whatever, but all the truly great research is, almost by definition, going into uncharted territory.
In that case, how exactly do you consider the ethics of something that nobody has ever seen, has never been built, and nobody even knows what it can do? It's all very easy to look back and say, well, this group should have considered ethics more carefully when they came up with what they made. But it's all hindsight; the scientists working in the Manhattan Engineering District didn't forsee MAD, they were just building a big bomb. This big bomb does kill lots of people, but that was happening already; just look at Dresden, or the Tokyo firebombing, or dozens of other examples during that war.
It's all well and good to say that ethics should be a bigger part of it, but it's not something that ultimately makes sense. You may as well require scientists to file environmental impact statements for their basic research as well.
My personal website gets a fair number of hits, about 300 entries per day in the access log since I started on this host. How many entries per hit is not something I really know, but that's still a fair amount. Of course, it helps that I actually have things people want to look at on my site; pictures that at least some people find interesting and a bit of software that some people like. In all honesy, if your younger brother's page has info about his pets and some pictures of his watch collection, of course he's not going to get any hits! Nobody cares. You're not seeing some evil side-effect of Google's searching algorithm. You were seeing the result of crappy search engines, which often directed people to pages that didn't have anything relevant to their search on them. Now Google lets you find what you want, so visits to pages that don't have anything people want drop off, of course.
Actually, there are no (that I know of) Mac-specific MS Word macro viruses. However, they are still worth checking for on the Mac, for two reasons. First, although the macro virus probably won't work completely as it should on the Mac, often it can work well enough to at least self-replicate. Second, even if it can't, scanning for them still prevents an unsuspecting Mac user from passing on the virus to a Windows-using friend.
My only point in all of this is to say that this was *NOT* a well thought out sci-fi story - it was an action series full of sci-fi, martial arts, and philosophical elements.
You know, a lot of people figured this out after seeing the first movie.
Lest we forget, the "other company" of which you speak is actually the same company, since Apple bought NeXT, and subsequently NeXT added Apple's biological and technological distinctiveness to their own.
It's not actually that insane. The Orion studies showed that a sizeable Orion craft (where "sizeable" means larger than every man-made thing put in orbit combined, probably) could be launched into orbit while adding about 1% to the total radioactive contamination of the atmosphere at the time. And given advances in bomb technology since then, this number would probably be quite a bit less, as modern bombs are more efficient. It would take about 350 explosions to get to orbit, but these are very small explosions by nuclear-bomb standards.
Consider also the failure modes for Orion-to-orbit and chemical-to-orbit. There's really no way for an Orion ship to blow up by accident on its way up. It could crash, if the firing mechanism broke, but it wouldn't explode unless you were very stupid with the bomb designs and had them on a dumb timer or something. Whereas chemical rockets can and do explode, and doing so with a few hundred bombs on board could end up spreading material far and wide, especially considering that the level of hardening and shielding that goes into RTGs couldn't really be applied to Orion pulse units.
Not that I'm necessarily advocating Orion-to-orbit here. I think that there are better alternatives, both in the cost sense and in the environmental sense. But it shouldn't be dismissed just because it's "nuclear" or "bomb".
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but you seem to be thinking that Orion is some far-out futuristic design.
Orion is very, very much existing technology. Sure, the project never made it past a conventional-bomb-powered demonstration vehicle, but the great thing about Orion is that there's really nothing inherently difficult about it once you know how to build small nuclear weapons. At that point, the only really tricky part is the design of the bomb gun, which has to be able to keep up a good rate of fire without being destroyed by the explosions, but even that is pretty much solved, although it hasn't been tested.
The great thing about Orion is that it is so ludicrously overpowered that nothing needs to be done carefully or with finesse. Everybody in aerospace spends a lot of time and effort shaving the last pound off of every possible thing because every tiny extra bit of weight shows up directly on the vehicle's performance and operating cost. But a first-generation Orion ship could be horribly over-engineered, say by building the entire thing from thick steel, and by having the pusher plate be thick enough for a completely silly safety margin, and still outperform any existing technology by many orders of magnitude.
I think it is very realistic to say that the time from project-start to a working Orion ship would be just a few years, given the right kind of management (i.e. Apollo, SR-71, or X-15-type management, not ISS-type management). It is very nearly build-and-go, no fundamental research needs to be done, nor difficult design questions answered.
But again, there are plenty of reasons why nobody is building one, and why they probably never will.
I know why. Because HHTTG already has a wonderful radio adaptation, and it already has a not-so-wonderful video adaptation. So it's reasonable to expect more of the same.
Decentralized, totally secure and anonymous connections *are* available worldwide, or as close to worldwide as 'any place with a cybercafe' is. Anonymous, yup, decentralized, yup, secure, grab PuTTY and go, yup.
Of course maybe you know this and were being ironic, in which case it's just the mods who are being silly.
That's pretty good, but I'm having trouble getting units to do more complicated calculations. (It seems to be made specifically for unit conversions, and not so much for general calculation, though.) For example, I can't figure out how to give it a file size and a transfer rate and get an ETA, such as '2500MB / 50kB/sec'. And it doesn't understand paretheses at all, nor addition. I think they really have separate problem domains. Google's calculator is good for complex calculations involving units, but it probably doesn't have nearly as many units as 'units' does, making 'units' more useful as a straight unit converter.
There are three kinds of backdoors. There are those which are found right away and thus do no damage. There are those which ship and may cause damage but are eventually found. And there are those which ship and are never found.
We can only ever know about the first two kinds, of course.
Open Source software has had a few of the first kind, and this is one of them. It has had a very, very, very few of the second kind (the classic compiler backdoor is the only one I know of).
Closed source software has had some of the first kind, and quite a few of the second kind.
So, which type of software development is more likely to have the third kind? We can't know for sure, but we can be pretty confident that if there aren't any long-term-but-eventually-found backdoors, there aren't any never-found backdoors either. Likewise, if there are many long-term-but-eventually-found backdoors, there are likely to be a few sitting around that are never found.
There certainly are modern high-velocity nuclear engines. Not in the sense that they actually physically exist, but the technology is around and all of the hard problems have been solved. If we wanted to, we could launch a million-ton spacecraft to Mars within a few years, and a probe to Tau Ceti in a hundred years would be well within the realm of possibility.
I'm talking, of course, about Orion. If you're not familiar with it, you build a large space ship with a giant, thick steel plate at the back, and fill it with nuclear bombs. The "engine" consists of tossing around ten bombs per second out the back and setting them off. This can actually work quite well, and would provide both high thrust and high efficiency, and allow us to put completely insane amounts of material into orbit.
Of course, for various reasons which should be obvious to the enlightened reader, Orion will almost certainly never be built.
(radius of the sun^3) / (radius of Earth^3) = 1 296 634.08
(In other words, the Sun is 1.3 million times the volume of the Earth.)
Google's calculator is awesome. It knows a good amount of physical constants, it knows a ton of different units, and it figures out the best units for the answer like magic.
Slashdot Mirror
And just in case you can't tell the difference between books and film: Peter Jackson is a better fucking director than J.R.R. Tolkien, even if he weren't already dead!.
If, for whatever reason, you decide to boot to the console and run all of your programs in Xfree86 (and I do believe that some people do this, for what reasons I do not know), then you can know, because everything that's running is open source. OS X's core is open source, it's just the GUI layer that isn't.
Right, nobody will get shot for using DVDs. Thanks for the information about the coupon system, it was interesting.
As far as how they'll promote EVD, I am guessing (complete uninformed guess, here) that it will be one of two things. One possibility is that they are cooperating, or will cooperate, with large companies, such as video player manufacturers and disc manufacturers to try to bring it into the marketplace. If they can make them cheaper because of not having to pay license fees, then they may be able to gain market acceptance. The other possibility is that this is just another Stupid Government Trick, where they will come up with something, wave their arms a bit, and people totally ignore them. I don't think China's government is particularly immune to doing stupid but inconsequential things like that.
You have the right idea, and I'm certain that China is much less communist than Poland was. I think China used to be as well, but it has changed a lot since then, as has Poland and the other ex-communist countries.
I do believe I understand the coupon concept you're describing. As far as I know, nothing like that exists in China today; it's all supply and demand. It's very possible that something like that used to exist; I know that food was rationed on a coupon-like system from sometime in the 60s up until around the mid-80s.
I don't doubt that such things are pretty essential to a communist country. But the thing a lot of people fail to understand is that modern China isn't communist. It's called a "People's Republic", and the political party that runs the government is called the "Communist Party", but those are just names. The government is totalitarian and not always particularly nice, but the economy is very capitalist.
This may be how it works in former Eastern European countries, but it's not how it works in China. (As far as I can tell, having been to China twice, living with Chinese families, etc.)
It's also true in China that wages are low but things are cheap. The relative prices of things are very different, which can be confusing to someone coming from outside. Food, housing, buses, etc. are really cheap, cars are even more expensive than, say, in the US. However, consumer electronics aren't like that, since they're actually made in China to begin with; they're cheaper than they are elsewhere, usually by a pretty healthy margin.
The Chinese government pretty much just stays out of the marketplace for these kinds of things. Of course, huge areas of China's economy are still state-run industries, but huge areas are completely private. Lots and lots of people have (freely-bought, never heard of anything like your coupon system in China) VCD and DVD players. What do they play on these players? Pirated movies, of course. These are illegal even in China, but that doesn't seem to stop anybody. My girlfriend bought a copy of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, which is not only pirated but a banned movie in China. But nothing happens.
These days, China is communist only in name. It's an odd mix of totalitarian government and extreme free-market capitalism. So really, someone from the "former eastern bloc" assuming that things in China are the same as they are/were in his country is just as clueless as some American assuming that things in China are just like his stereotypes/paranoid fantasies.
And for the "but look at how many people China executes!" crowd: China only executes people for what it considers to be serious crimes. Their definition of serious may not line up too well with our definition of serious. It includes things which threaten people's lives, but also things which threaten the government's power, like being very vocal about certain opinions they don't appreciate. However, their definition of serious has never come anywhere near something as mundane as media formats, as far as I'm aware.
Our definition of Artificial Intelligence always moves to only include things that computers haven't done yet. Before anybody had built a compiler, translating a formula like "x = (y + z * q)/w" into machine instructions was considered AI. Then some clever people figured out how to do it, and people realized it wasn't that amazing, so it wasn't AI anymore. The same happened with playing a decent game of chess, and the same happened with playing a better game of chess than a human can play. Not too long ago, a program that could take reliable dictation would have been AI. Now that you can go to a store and pick up a copy for a hundred bucks, it's no longer AI.
Can real thought be simulated? Everything known to modern physics can be simulated with a sufficiently powerful computer. If you believe that modern physics is complete enough to describe a brain, and that the brain is everything that we think with, then the simple answer is yes. Human thought can be simulated. If you believe in a "mind" or "soul" outside the brain, or if you believe that our brains rely on something beyond modern physics that can't be simulated even when we discover what it is (both perfectly legitimate beliefs, although I don't share them) then it stands to reason that it may not be possible to simulate thought.
It basically comes down to, is a person a machine? I think so. I'm not religious, so I don't think there is anything beyond what we actually see. In which case, nature has proven by example that it's possible to build a machine that thinks.
Crazy. If you had started out with, say, Excession, or Look to Windward, I could understand. But starting out with Consider Phlebas and Use of Weapons and not liking it? Nutty. Oh well, everybody has the right to be wrong. :-)
I cannot even begin to devise a plan of action for how to start to express my extreme shock that Iain M. Banks is inexplicably not on your list.
Aside from that mindbending omission, I agree that SF is as good today as it ever was.
Complainers who think that there's no good SF anymore have two key problems. One is that they're forgetting about the selection effect; if you average (for example) one good SF movie every three years, then it feels like an eternity between new ones, but the past is littered with them. Second, they somehow forget about books. Partly this is because of the legions of Star Trek fans whose largest experience with written SF is Star Trek novels, and partly because, well, there's a lot of people out there who just don't read. But SF is at its best in the form of the written word.
That's not a problem with slashdot, that's a problem with your browser. Why on earth would a browser be designed so your scroll wheel could change a popup menu?
MAD never would have lead to doom for all, only for the countries participating in it, some of their various allies, and certain unfortunates. Even in the US and Russia, in a MAD scenario, not everybody would die. Civilization in those countries would certainly be wrecked, and a vast number of people would die, but not all of them. As far as the world goes, for most people it would be a horrible, sad event, and probably lead to a great deal of disruption, but life would go on. The popular SF idea of nuclear war making the planet uninhabitable was never anywhere close to being true.
The best kind of research is research where the result is not known. If you already know the result, then it's not that interesting. It can still be useful, to round out our knowledge or whatever, but all the truly great research is, almost by definition, going into uncharted territory.
In that case, how exactly do you consider the ethics of something that nobody has ever seen, has never been built, and nobody even knows what it can do? It's all very easy to look back and say, well, this group should have considered ethics more carefully when they came up with what they made. But it's all hindsight; the scientists working in the Manhattan Engineering District didn't forsee MAD, they were just building a big bomb. This big bomb does kill lots of people, but that was happening already; just look at Dresden, or the Tokyo firebombing, or dozens of other examples during that war.
It's all well and good to say that ethics should be a bigger part of it, but it's not something that ultimately makes sense. You may as well require scientists to file environmental impact statements for their basic research as well.
My personal website gets a fair number of hits, about 300 entries per day in the access log since I started on this host. How many entries per hit is not something I really know, but that's still a fair amount. Of course, it helps that I actually have things people want to look at on my site; pictures that at least some people find interesting and a bit of software that some people like. In all honesy, if your younger brother's page has info about his pets and some pictures of his watch collection, of course he's not going to get any hits! Nobody cares. You're not seeing some evil side-effect of Google's searching algorithm. You were seeing the result of crappy search engines, which often directed people to pages that didn't have anything relevant to their search on them. Now Google lets you find what you want, so visits to pages that don't have anything people want drop off, of course.
If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you.
How much is it? Is it in a good waterfront location? Please contact my agent.
Actually, there are no (that I know of) Mac-specific MS Word macro viruses. However, they are still worth checking for on the Mac, for two reasons. First, although the macro virus probably won't work completely as it should on the Mac, often it can work well enough to at least self-replicate. Second, even if it can't, scanning for them still prevents an unsuspecting Mac user from passing on the virus to a Windows-using friend.
My only point in all of this is to say that this was *NOT* a well thought out sci-fi story - it was an action series full of sci-fi, martial arts, and philosophical elements.
You know, a lot of people figured this out after seeing the first movie.
Lest we forget, the "other company" of which you speak is actually the same company, since Apple bought NeXT, and subsequently NeXT added Apple's biological and technological distinctiveness to their own.
It's not actually that insane. The Orion studies showed that a sizeable Orion craft (where "sizeable" means larger than every man-made thing put in orbit combined, probably) could be launched into orbit while adding about 1% to the total radioactive contamination of the atmosphere at the time. And given advances in bomb technology since then, this number would probably be quite a bit less, as modern bombs are more efficient. It would take about 350 explosions to get to orbit, but these are very small explosions by nuclear-bomb standards.
Consider also the failure modes for Orion-to-orbit and chemical-to-orbit. There's really no way for an Orion ship to blow up by accident on its way up. It could crash, if the firing mechanism broke, but it wouldn't explode unless you were very stupid with the bomb designs and had them on a dumb timer or something. Whereas chemical rockets can and do explode, and doing so with a few hundred bombs on board could end up spreading material far and wide, especially considering that the level of hardening and shielding that goes into RTGs couldn't really be applied to Orion pulse units.
Not that I'm necessarily advocating Orion-to-orbit here. I think that there are better alternatives, both in the cost sense and in the environmental sense. But it shouldn't be dismissed just because it's "nuclear" or "bomb".
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but you seem to be thinking that Orion is some far-out futuristic design.
Orion is very, very much existing technology. Sure, the project never made it past a conventional-bomb-powered demonstration vehicle, but the great thing about Orion is that there's really nothing inherently difficult about it once you know how to build small nuclear weapons. At that point, the only really tricky part is the design of the bomb gun, which has to be able to keep up a good rate of fire without being destroyed by the explosions, but even that is pretty much solved, although it hasn't been tested.
The great thing about Orion is that it is so ludicrously overpowered that nothing needs to be done carefully or with finesse. Everybody in aerospace spends a lot of time and effort shaving the last pound off of every possible thing because every tiny extra bit of weight shows up directly on the vehicle's performance and operating cost. But a first-generation Orion ship could be horribly over-engineered, say by building the entire thing from thick steel, and by having the pusher plate be thick enough for a completely silly safety margin, and still outperform any existing technology by many orders of magnitude.
I think it is very realistic to say that the time from project-start to a working Orion ship would be just a few years, given the right kind of management (i.e. Apollo, SR-71, or X-15-type management, not ISS-type management). It is very nearly build-and-go, no fundamental research needs to be done, nor difficult design questions answered.
But again, there are plenty of reasons why nobody is building one, and why they probably never will.
I know why. Because HHTTG already has a wonderful radio adaptation, and it already has a not-so-wonderful video adaptation. So it's reasonable to expect more of the same.
This should be marked 'funny', not 'insightful'.
Decentralized, totally secure and anonymous connections *are* available worldwide, or as close to worldwide as 'any place with a cybercafe' is. Anonymous, yup, decentralized, yup, secure, grab PuTTY and go, yup.
Of course maybe you know this and were being ironic, in which case it's just the mods who are being silly.
That's pretty good, but I'm having trouble getting units to do more complicated calculations. (It seems to be made specifically for unit conversions, and not so much for general calculation, though.) For example, I can't figure out how to give it a file size and a transfer rate and get an ETA, such as '2500MB / 50kB/sec'. And it doesn't understand paretheses at all, nor addition. I think they really have separate problem domains. Google's calculator is good for complex calculations involving units, but it probably doesn't have nearly as many units as 'units' does, making 'units' more useful as a straight unit converter.
There are three kinds of backdoors. There are those which are found right away and thus do no damage. There are those which ship and may cause damage but are eventually found. And there are those which ship and are never found.
We can only ever know about the first two kinds, of course.
Open Source software has had a few of the first kind, and this is one of them. It has had a very, very, very few of the second kind (the classic compiler backdoor is the only one I know of).
Closed source software has had some of the first kind, and quite a few of the second kind.
So, which type of software development is more likely to have the third kind? We can't know for sure, but we can be pretty confident that if there aren't any long-term-but-eventually-found backdoors, there aren't any never-found backdoors either. Likewise, if there are many long-term-but-eventually-found backdoors, there are likely to be a few sitting around that are never found.
There certainly are modern high-velocity nuclear engines. Not in the sense that they actually physically exist, but the technology is around and all of the hard problems have been solved. If we wanted to, we could launch a million-ton spacecraft to Mars within a few years, and a probe to Tau Ceti in a hundred years would be well within the realm of possibility.
I'm talking, of course, about Orion. If you're not familiar with it, you build a large space ship with a giant, thick steel plate at the back, and fill it with nuclear bombs. The "engine" consists of tossing around ten bombs per second out the back and setting them off. This can actually work quite well, and would provide both high thrust and high efficiency, and allow us to put completely insane amounts of material into orbit.
Of course, for various reasons which should be obvious to the enlightened reader, Orion will almost certainly never be built.
Can 'units' do this?
(radius of the sun^3) / (radius of Earth^3) = 1 296 634.08
(In other words, the Sun is 1.3 million times the volume of the Earth.)
Google's calculator is awesome. It knows a good amount of physical constants, it knows a ton of different units, and it figures out the best units for the answer like magic.
Heh, a new phrase to add to the lexicon.
Parents: Once upon a time...
Soldiers: No shit...
Pilots: There I was...
Geeks: I kid you not...
(No, I really do believe you, I just thought it was funny.)