A Dyson sphere (as opposed to a Dyson Shell) is a collection of free orbiting habitats. They can accumulate slowly, each one being immediately useful. You don't have to build the whole sphere at once.
The first colonies of the first civilisation will develop at various rates, some faster and some slower. If those colonies eventually colonise another wave, it will be the fastest, most aggressive developers that get the prime destinations. And of the second wave, it will be the fastest most aggressive colonies that seed the third wave, with the slower developers falling further and further behind as the waves of colonisation expand.
After ten of so generations of colonies, the things will be expanding as fast as technology allows, burning through the galaxy like a wildfire.
[This is the plot that ID4 should have used to explain the "locusts". Both making a stupid story more logical (coz it also explains the weak security), and ending the movie on a more poignant note, as Goldblum's character pisses on their celebrations by explaining that this is just the first wave, in a decade or a century there will be another ship, and another after that, arriving faster and faster, and they will never stop coming.]
More than that, if we can detect their Dyson sphere, but can't hear any RF between the millions of habs in their Dyson sphere, then they are deliberately being very quiet. A civilisation old enough and advanced enough to build a fucking Dyson Sphere is being very quiet.
every single mission for the next TWO YEARS were military, most of them with classified cargoes, probably spy satellites.
Every single mission? Madam, your hyperbole is showing.
11 flights between Return to Flight in September 1988 and October 1990. These included Magellan, Galileo, Hubble, Ulysses, two TDRS satellites (unclassified, used by civilian agencies, including NASA). I can find four classified DoD flights, plus one unclassified DoD comsat launch. Five out of 11 flights, over two years.
Which doesn't seem an unusual rate until the DoD switched over to EELV in '93. Two to three DoD flights per year, both before and after Challenger.
(Of the four classified missions in those first two years, one was a classified comsat, one was an ELINT, one was a Lacrosse-1 radar sat, and one is still unknown but thought to be an experimental spy sat. So three spy sats out of 11 flights, only one of which could have been an optical spy sat in the Hubble-family, but probably wasn't.)
The only way NASA could get enough funding to build the shuttle was to ask the military
I don't believe the US military ever actually contributed funding to the development of the shuttle. I think it was the shuttle program managers using the possibility of military use to gain support for the shuttle program in Congress. (Those at NASA/contractors who were campaigning against the shuttle, wanting to build next-gen expendables (Nova!), would have been arguing that losing civilian payloads will make military payloads on expendable rockets more expensive for the government. The shuttle-advocates needed to be able to say "Ah, but the shuttle can also loft military payloads too!" Which led to design compromises you mention. In reality, the military could have separately funded a large partially-expendable unmanned cargo shuttle, while NASA funded the small fully reusable seven-seat manned shuttle. With both sides using the other's vehicle when required. Would have delivered much more capability than the actual shuttle + EELV development.)
This might happen. Exploration is driven by wealth, but migration by poverty. Because the poor are the only ones willing to suffer the hardships of being the first generation of settlers. Cubans are happy to sail rickety rafts to the US. Perhaps Somalians will sail rickety rockets to the moon, once the wealthy space tourists tire of the deprivations of actual space-flight, and the privateers look for new markets.
That would only be a reasonable argument if the economy itself was stagnant. (For example, Japan has had extremely slow growth for 20 years, but a rising standard of living. You could argue that technology has allowed a fixed income to buy an improved lifestyle, without the nation collectively working more than is needed to maintain that lifestyle.)
But if the economy has grown in the same period that wages have fallen or been stagnant, then the share of national wealth for the majority of people must, by definition, have fallen. You might argue that they are better off in absolute terms, but they clearly aren't being rewarded for their labour at a rate proportional to its economic impact. It would explain why people feel like they're treading water, even those who are fairly well off even in relative terms; trapped in a Red Queen Race, working harder and harder (Per person GDP growth means more productivity per unit labour) just to keep from going backwards.
To make it clear what I'm saying: Three scenarios; One: A country where people work just enough to maintain economic stability, and receive a stable income. Japan today. Two: A country where people work more than enough to maintain economic stability, and receive more buying power over time, and a commensurate rise in prosperity. US between the end of the '30s and the beginning of the '80s. Three: A country where people also work more than enough to maintain economic stability, but only receive a stable income. The US since the early '80s.
Scenarios One and Two are both fair. Scenario Three is not fair. People don't like "not fair".
Similar data to IoP's graph show that earnings growth has contracted further and further up the income ladder. Ie, more and more people are seeing flat or falling real-income. Fewer and fewer are seeing any benefit from national growth. That is not politically sustainable, historically there's usually some... reaction... when this goes on for too long, followed by some... breakage. How much depends on whether the masses recognise those causing the problems, or are led to blame a scape-goat by ideologues. (US in the '30s vs Germany in the '30s.) And to this outside observer, people in the US don't seem to be well informed, or well led.
[Note that none of this allots blame for the situation in the US. It's just an observation about the data. I'm happy to allot blame. Blame should be allotted. But I'm not doing so in this comment. If it seems like I am, it's just because the cause of the situation is so fucking obvious.]
Unless you are an insane conspiracy nut, which you are, you'd realise it's not in Obama's interest to trash the US economy while he's in office (and running for reelection to that office).
So who does have a political interest in seeing the economy stay down while a Democrat is in the presidency? Check if those people have been acting to prevent recovery. If so, you know they've put their personal political interest ahead of your nation's interests. Respond accordingly.
Also, "Give a man to fish"? Give a man to fish?
"Give a man to fish, and they'll eat for a day. Teach them the location of popular beaches..."
Perhaps we're spending too much money causing poverty. If there are other aspects of society working against anti-poverty programs, removing that resistance will have a greater effect than adding more money or improving the efficiency on just the anti-poverty side.
Example: The War on Drugs. If it causes more harm than good, then taking money away from it will actually make anti-harm programs seem more effective, even though we don't actually improve the efficiency of anti-harm programs.
So Apollo, as relatively harmless Cold War cock waving, may have helped reduce poverty by taking money (on both sides) away from other, more destructive (poverty causing) forms of Cold War cock waving.
I honestly don't know the design process (before my time), but my suspicion based on vague conversations with people who were around back then, is that Hubble was designed to be serviceable because it is in a shuttle orbit, i.e., the mandate to be on the shuttle drove these design decisions, not the other way round.
From what I recall of that era, Hubble was always human serviceable. However, when the shuttle development was delayed, it was going to be launched on an expendable launcher, but when it was delayed, it was mandated to switch back to the shuttle. Which caused more delays to rework the telescope to make it compatible with the shuttle. Then when they were ready in 1986, Challenger happened, suspending the shuttle program for two years, and then lowering the flight-rate when they returned to service.
But people have been pushing for an large optical space telescope decades before Hubble. Hubble's core concept (a human serviceable large mirror LEO telescope, called LST, I think) dates from the late '60s, early '70s. (Indeed, the original LST was meant to launch in 1979.) So there were probably various proposals during the '70s, some wanting human-serviceable, some wanting throw-away (Called LOT?). During that debate, obviously the guys wanting human-serviceable 'scopes recruited the shuttle proponents to their side. That debate, and the inevitable acrimony, is probably what some people remember, but the shuttle-team never forced human-serviceability onto Hubble. Hubble just was the human-serviceable proposal, which won funding thanks to the shuttle. (I suspect that they only got funding from Congress for any large mirror space telescope because it involved the shuttle. The entire program was cancelled at least once in the mid-'70s. Without the shuttle connection, they would have been limited to OAO-scale 'scopes for at least another decade.)
The same factions still existed during the follow-up proposals to Hubble. The human-serviceable side had ideas for expanding Hubble with a new (external) primary mirror. Essentially turning the whole of Hubble into a secondary. The non-serviceable side obviously proposed what became James Webb, and used the cost-overruns and delays of Hubble, and the approaching end of the shuttle program, to win. (Finally they'd show those HSF idiots how to do a cost-effective and well-run program... Heh heh heh... sigh...)
I know that on the designs I've partipated in, we didn't like LEO
But if you look at the observatories that preceded Hubble, during the '60s, '70s and even '80s, they were almost all LEO. It was only in the '90s that we started to see them use the ESL-points and solar orbits. Hubble wasn't unusual for the era. And I believe all rival proposals were LEO anyway. I think Ulysses was the first BEO observatory, other than planetary probes. (Ironically, Ulysses was launched on the Shuttle.)
even back when we had the option of launching on the shuttle, we'd prefer to use something else and be somewhere else.
Different era. You knew the shuttle as a fat useless pig. Hubble was proposed in the '70s when it was sexy and new.
ISS is not a great science platform for the same reasons, plus vibration and very limited power.
(Limited power? It always surprises me to hear that, given the ridiculous size of those arrays. Have they really budgeted so little for science missions? Dicks.)
I don't think it would be too difficult to isolate an observatory module from the main station's vibrations. I think the bigger issue is the amount of cruft that co-orbits with the ISS, and pointing being even more restricted than Hubble. That said, it did surprise me that they didn't build a small crew-tended observatory module (a la the Cupola.) It doesn't have to be huge and expensive, just somewhere to test novel instruments without waiting for a whole new flagship observatory.
"Hubble would have been there had it not been for the mandate that it ride the shuttle."
Hubble was serviceable, hence it needed to be in LEO. It had nothing to do with being launched on the shuttle. Plenty of probes have been launched beyond LEO from the shuttle, they just use an upper-stage (just as they would if launched from anything else.)
He3 is a waste product from D-D fusion. And D-D and D-T fusion are much easier than He-3 fusion. So if we ever achieve commercial He3 fusion, we'll have already had D-D fusion for decades. And since He3 fusion requires higher temperatures/pressures (ie, better confinement), the same technology would make D-D and D-T fusion more efficient/compact. Which means that even as He3 fusion displaces D-D/D-T for big power-stations, they'll move into entirely new markets (such as mobile power plants. Ships/etc.) And the process repeats, each time you improve He3, you improve D-D/D-T fusion even more.
But it's more than that. If we have fusion, it would be massively useful in space. So if we have the infrastructure on the moon necessary to mine the extremely trace amounts of He3 from the regolith, we'd have a lot of fusion power plants on the moon. And He3 is a waste product of D-D fusion...
So even after Earth bans D-D fusion, it would be cheaper and easier to do anything else in space and just export the He3 waste from their own fusion plants, than to mine He3 from the regolith.
He3 just isn't a reason for going to the moon. (And I say this as a space fanboi.)
Pedantically (which is all I seem to be doing lately), the anchor would be beyond L1/L2. There needs to be enough mass past the stationary orbit to balance the weight of the down-cable, and the payloads, plus a bit more to keep the system under tension.
By definition a space elevator orbits whatever you attach it to. Otherwise, it falls.
By definition, a space elevator is in a super-orbit.That is, it's centre of mass is moving faster than the natural orbital velocity for the centre-of-mass' distance from the parent mass. It would move into a higher eccentric orbit (or escape) were it not for the application of a force in addition to gravity. Specifically being being attached to the ground by a insanely long cable. Which keeps the whole system stable, under tension.
It seems to me that the main game is what we used to get as a playable demo. A few hours of free but limited game-play to give you a taste of the full unlocked game. Now those two-to-four hours are the full game.
If over 50% of your players finish your whole AAA game on the release day, you're doing it wrong.
Except it isn't a sign of strength. It makes the Putin regime look weak. "These guys used to kill journalists without fear of consequences, now they can't intimidate three little girls?"
People will feel increasingly emboldened to speak out (at least privately). Particularly people in regional government, police, judges, etc. It eats into the margin of error for mishandling a crisis; things that would have worked before will only increase opposition (for example, if they poison Kasparov, there'll be outrage, but if they release him, it proves they are weak. Manufactured corruption charges won't be believed, and a judge just might feel bold enough to throw them out.)
I was under the (incorrect) belief that the original poster had used the phrase correctly. h4rr4r corrected me,
And now, thanks to h4rr4r, you're under the incorrect belief that two similar English phrases can't have different meanings in different contexts. God forbid he every encounter a full-blown double entendre, he'll have a stroke.
I'm glad you have learned about circular reasoning, but you needn't let it prevent you from using simple English words correctly just because a half-educated jerk on the internet shouted at you.
You are incorrectly confusing the name of an obscure logical fallacy with a simple English phrase.
The name of the logical fallacy itself comes from an archaic use of "beg" meaning assume/demand, still seen in "begging your pardon", "the committee begs to report", "beg to differ". Specifically, to take for granted without justification. Moreso, whenever anyone uses it in the context of the logical fallacy, they almost always use it to name the fallacy. "That argument is 'Begging The Question'."
OTOH, "which begs the question" is a simple, vastly more common English phrase which means just what it says. It's not even a colloquialism, since it requires no prior knowledge to interpret. And it's impossible to misunderstand which sense the poster meant, without being wilfully obtuse.
but relying on filtering software to keep your kids safe is abdicating the school's responsibility
The school may have idiotic political riders attached to its State/Federal funding grants. Or it may have been required by idiotic governing bodies. Or the idiot dean believes it's necessary to protect the school. In any of those cases, a low-paid, barely trained, this-isn't-my-job-I-just-got-roped-in, school IT manager is not in a position to override those requirements.
... then your school should be teaching kids how to use the Internet safely.
They should do this anyway. And not just kids, staff too. Especially staff.
Hmmm, perhaps as a motivating factor, graded access. Lowest level is white-list-only, available to anyone. Those who've done the half-hour "school internet policy" session get all-but-black-list access, and all access logged. Staff and students who do a higher-level extracurricular class get unfiltered access, but still logged. The most skilled dozen students in the school also get recruited to help the IT manager with low-level admin duties. The most skilled dozen staff members are used to maintain the filters, police the usage logs, etc, and perhaps sit on an IT policy advisory committee (which serves as an IT-aware buffer against the IT-ignorant dean/school-board.)
In the US system, third parties are worthless. You need to change the voting system before you can meaningfully vote for a third party. And the only way to do that is to elect enough candidates willing to change the system, and you can only elect them through the existing two-party system. So that has to be your focus. However, no "third party" is that organised.
[If you want to try. Organise at the local level, where your voice is proportionately louder. Find areas where a few hundred votes can change an election. Advocate for a change to Approval Voting, or IRV, or "Best Two" Multi-Party Primaries, or a similar system, gather like-minded people from both major parties who agree to vote as a block within their respective major party, pledge them to whichever candidate at the primary level supports your cause. Once you have enough to change the local system, it should be self-sustaining, and you can move outwards to more areas. Eventually you get a whole state, with success bringing wider support and independent copy-cat efforts...]
While Congress has extremely low (single digit) approval figures, incumbents typically retain an advantage over their rivals in those same polls. "I hate Congress", but "my Congressman is the exception". Hence nothing radically changes.
IMO, we need fewer third parties like the Greens and more Tea Parties, formal factions acting within existing parties at the Primary level. A way of focusing votes on issues that matter. The problem isn't too many vested interests, but too few. [I'm not saying the Tea Party is better than the Greens. I'm actually a lefty. I mean it's a better method for achieving change. In the US system, third parties are worthless.]
Instead of making token gestures with lame online petitions, both parties should already have an anti-TSA "Party", each faction wielding thousands of votes for anti-TSA pledging candidates at Primary elections (or against pro-TSA candidates.) After all, hatred for the TSA can come from both left and right ideologies. (As well as the vast non-ideological middle who are just sick of being hassled.)
The only problem with Ribbon was that they didn't go far enough. Tabbed toolbars is cute and all, but tabbed work-spaces would have been better.
Ie, if each tab changed not just the available tools, but changes the entire way the whole document is displayed and worked on. A "Design" tab should use visual metaphors for the structure of the document. A "Write" tab would focus on... well, getting out of the way. While a "File" tab should pull back to the meta level of the document as an object.
The problem wasn't that they changed the UI, it was that they changed things without adding any new functionality for the user.
Slashdot Mirror
A Dyson sphere (as opposed to a Dyson Shell) is a collection of free orbiting habitats. They can accumulate slowly, each one being immediately useful. You don't have to build the whole sphere at once.
The first colonies of the first civilisation will develop at various rates, some faster and some slower. If those colonies eventually colonise another wave, it will be the fastest, most aggressive developers that get the prime destinations. And of the second wave, it will be the fastest most aggressive colonies that seed the third wave, with the slower developers falling further and further behind as the waves of colonisation expand.
After ten of so generations of colonies, the things will be expanding as fast as technology allows, burning through the galaxy like a wildfire.
[This is the plot that ID4 should have used to explain the "locusts". Both making a stupid story more logical (coz it also explains the weak security), and ending the movie on a more poignant note, as Goldblum's character pisses on their celebrations by explaining that this is just the first wave, in a decade or a century there will be another ship, and another after that, arriving faster and faster, and they will never stop coming.]
More than that, if we can detect their Dyson sphere, but can't hear any RF between the millions of habs in their Dyson sphere, then they are deliberately being very quiet. A civilisation old enough and advanced enough to build a fucking Dyson Sphere is being very quiet.
So maybe we should take the hint.
every single mission for the next TWO YEARS were military, most of them with classified cargoes, probably spy satellites.
Every single mission? Madam, your hyperbole is showing.
11 flights between Return to Flight in September 1988 and October 1990. These included Magellan, Galileo, Hubble, Ulysses, two TDRS satellites (unclassified, used by civilian agencies, including NASA). I can find four classified DoD flights, plus one unclassified DoD comsat launch. Five out of 11 flights, over two years.
Which doesn't seem an unusual rate until the DoD switched over to EELV in '93. Two to three DoD flights per year, both before and after Challenger.
(Of the four classified missions in those first two years, one was a classified comsat, one was an ELINT, one was a Lacrosse-1 radar sat, and one is still unknown but thought to be an experimental spy sat. So three spy sats out of 11 flights, only one of which could have been an optical spy sat in the Hubble-family, but probably wasn't.)
The only way NASA could get enough funding to build the shuttle was to ask the military
I don't believe the US military ever actually contributed funding to the development of the shuttle. I think it was the shuttle program managers using the possibility of military use to gain support for the shuttle program in Congress. (Those at NASA/contractors who were campaigning against the shuttle, wanting to build next-gen expendables (Nova!), would have been arguing that losing civilian payloads will make military payloads on expendable rockets more expensive for the government. The shuttle-advocates needed to be able to say "Ah, but the shuttle can also loft military payloads too!" Which led to design compromises you mention. In reality, the military could have separately funded a large partially-expendable unmanned cargo shuttle, while NASA funded the small fully reusable seven-seat manned shuttle. With both sides using the other's vehicle when required. Would have delivered much more capability than the actual shuttle + EELV development.)
This might happen. Exploration is driven by wealth, but migration by poverty. Because the poor are the only ones willing to suffer the hardships of being the first generation of settlers. Cubans are happy to sail rickety rafts to the US. Perhaps Somalians will sail rickety rockets to the moon, once the wealthy space tourists tire of the deprivations of actual space-flight, and the privateers look for new markets.
People who say it better than me: http://space.mike-combs.com/wannabe.htm
That would only be a reasonable argument if the economy itself was stagnant. (For example, Japan has had extremely slow growth for 20 years, but a rising standard of living. You could argue that technology has allowed a fixed income to buy an improved lifestyle, without the nation collectively working more than is needed to maintain that lifestyle.)
But if the economy has grown in the same period that wages have fallen or been stagnant, then the share of national wealth for the majority of people must, by definition, have fallen. You might argue that they are better off in absolute terms, but they clearly aren't being rewarded for their labour at a rate proportional to its economic impact. It would explain why people feel like they're treading water, even those who are fairly well off even in relative terms; trapped in a Red Queen Race, working harder and harder (Per person GDP growth means more productivity per unit labour) just to keep from going backwards.
To make it clear what I'm saying: Three scenarios; One: A country where people work just enough to maintain economic stability, and receive a stable income. Japan today. Two: A country where people work more than enough to maintain economic stability, and receive more buying power over time, and a commensurate rise in prosperity. US between the end of the '30s and the beginning of the '80s. Three: A country where people also work more than enough to maintain economic stability, but only receive a stable income. The US since the early '80s.
Scenarios One and Two are both fair. Scenario Three is not fair. People don't like "not fair".
Similar data to IoP's graph show that earnings growth has contracted further and further up the income ladder. Ie, more and more people are seeing flat or falling real-income. Fewer and fewer are seeing any benefit from national growth. That is not politically sustainable, historically there's usually some... reaction... when this goes on for too long, followed by some... breakage. How much depends on whether the masses recognise those causing the problems, or are led to blame a scape-goat by ideologues. (US in the '30s vs Germany in the '30s.) And to this outside observer, people in the US don't seem to be well informed, or well led.
[Note that none of this allots blame for the situation in the US. It's just an observation about the data. I'm happy to allot blame. Blame should be allotted. But I'm not doing so in this comment. If it seems like I am, it's just because the cause of the situation is so fucking obvious.]
Unless you are an insane conspiracy nut, which you are, you'd realise it's not in Obama's interest to trash the US economy while he's in office (and running for reelection to that office).
So who does have a political interest in seeing the economy stay down while a Democrat is in the presidency? Check if those people have been acting to prevent recovery. If so, you know they've put their personal political interest ahead of your nation's interests. Respond accordingly.
Also, "Give a man to fish"? Give a man to fish?
"Give a man to fish, and they'll eat for a day. Teach them the location of popular beaches..."
Perhaps we're spending too much money causing poverty. If there are other aspects of society working against anti-poverty programs, removing that resistance will have a greater effect than adding more money or improving the efficiency on just the anti-poverty side.
Example: The War on Drugs. If it causes more harm than good, then taking money away from it will actually make anti-harm programs seem more effective, even though we don't actually improve the efficiency of anti-harm programs.
So Apollo, as relatively harmless Cold War cock waving, may have helped reduce poverty by taking money (on both sides) away from other, more destructive (poverty causing) forms of Cold War cock waving.
I honestly don't know the design process (before my time), but my suspicion based on vague conversations with people who were around back then, is that Hubble was designed to be serviceable because it is in a shuttle orbit, i.e., the mandate to be on the shuttle drove these design decisions, not the other way round.
From what I recall of that era, Hubble was always human serviceable. However, when the shuttle development was delayed, it was going to be launched on an expendable launcher, but when it was delayed, it was mandated to switch back to the shuttle. Which caused more delays to rework the telescope to make it compatible with the shuttle. Then when they were ready in 1986, Challenger happened, suspending the shuttle program for two years, and then lowering the flight-rate when they returned to service.
But people have been pushing for an large optical space telescope decades before Hubble. Hubble's core concept (a human serviceable large mirror LEO telescope, called LST, I think) dates from the late '60s, early '70s. (Indeed, the original LST was meant to launch in 1979.) So there were probably various proposals during the '70s, some wanting human-serviceable, some wanting throw-away (Called LOT?). During that debate, obviously the guys wanting human-serviceable 'scopes recruited the shuttle proponents to their side. That debate, and the inevitable acrimony, is probably what some people remember, but the shuttle-team never forced human-serviceability onto Hubble. Hubble just was the human-serviceable proposal, which won funding thanks to the shuttle. (I suspect that they only got funding from Congress for any large mirror space telescope because it involved the shuttle. The entire program was cancelled at least once in the mid-'70s. Without the shuttle connection, they would have been limited to OAO-scale 'scopes for at least another decade.)
The same factions still existed during the follow-up proposals to Hubble. The human-serviceable side had ideas for expanding Hubble with a new (external) primary mirror. Essentially turning the whole of Hubble into a secondary. The non-serviceable side obviously proposed what became James Webb, and used the cost-overruns and delays of Hubble, and the approaching end of the shuttle program, to win. (Finally they'd show those HSF idiots how to do a cost-effective and well-run program... Heh heh heh... sigh...)
I know that on the designs I've partipated in, we didn't like LEO
But if you look at the observatories that preceded Hubble, during the '60s, '70s and even '80s, they were almost all LEO. It was only in the '90s that we started to see them use the ESL-points and solar orbits. Hubble wasn't unusual for the era. And I believe all rival proposals were LEO anyway. I think Ulysses was the first BEO observatory, other than planetary probes. (Ironically, Ulysses was launched on the Shuttle.)
even back when we had the option of launching on the shuttle, we'd prefer to use something else and be somewhere else.
Different era. You knew the shuttle as a fat useless pig. Hubble was proposed in the '70s when it was sexy and new.
ISS is not a great science platform for the same reasons, plus vibration and very limited power.
(Limited power? It always surprises me to hear that, given the ridiculous size of those arrays. Have they really budgeted so little for science missions? Dicks.)
I don't think it would be too difficult to isolate an observatory module from the main station's vibrations. I think the bigger issue is the amount of cruft that co-orbits with the ISS, and pointing being even more restricted than Hubble. That said, it did surprise me that they didn't build a small crew-tended observatory module (a la the Cupola.) It doesn't have to be huge and expensive, just somewhere to test novel instruments without waiting for a whole new flagship observatory.
"Hubble would have been there had it not been for the mandate that it ride the shuttle."
Hubble was serviceable, hence it needed to be in LEO. It had nothing to do with being launched on the shuttle. Plenty of probes have been launched beyond LEO from the shuttle, they just use an upper-stage (just as they would if launched from anything else.)
I think you've missed bertok's point.
He3 is a waste product from D-D fusion. And D-D and D-T fusion are much easier than He-3 fusion. So if we ever achieve commercial He3 fusion, we'll have already had D-D fusion for decades. And since He3 fusion requires higher temperatures/pressures (ie, better confinement), the same technology would make D-D and D-T fusion more efficient/compact. Which means that even as He3 fusion displaces D-D/D-T for big power-stations, they'll move into entirely new markets (such as mobile power plants. Ships/etc.) And the process repeats, each time you improve He3, you improve D-D/D-T fusion even more.
But it's more than that. If we have fusion, it would be massively useful in space. So if we have the infrastructure on the moon necessary to mine the extremely trace amounts of He3 from the regolith, we'd have a lot of fusion power plants on the moon. And He3 is a waste product of D-D fusion...
So even after Earth bans D-D fusion, it would be cheaper and easier to do anything else in space and just export the He3 waste from their own fusion plants, than to mine He3 from the regolith.
He3 just isn't a reason for going to the moon. (And I say this as a space fanboi.)
Pedantically (which is all I seem to be doing lately), the anchor would be beyond L1/L2. There needs to be enough mass past the stationary orbit to balance the weight of the down-cable, and the payloads, plus a bit more to keep the system under tension.
By definition a space elevator orbits whatever you attach it to. Otherwise, it falls.
By definition, a space elevator is in a super-orbit.That is, it's centre of mass is moving faster than the natural orbital velocity for the centre-of-mass' distance from the parent mass. It would move into a higher eccentric orbit (or escape) were it not for the application of a force in addition to gravity. Specifically being being attached to the ground by a insanely long cable. Which keeps the whole system stable, under tension.
Two.
Two people reflexively modded up a familiar meme. Not "slashdot", not "humanity". Two.
If you want to be concerned about humanity and fucking slashdot is your go-to example, you have not been paying attention.
It seems to me that the main game is what we used to get as a playable demo. A few hours of free but limited game-play to give you a taste of the full unlocked game. Now those two-to-four hours are the full game.
If over 50% of your players finish your whole AAA game on the release day, you're doing it wrong.
Except it isn't a sign of strength. It makes the Putin regime look weak. "These guys used to kill journalists without fear of consequences, now they can't intimidate three little girls?"
People will feel increasingly emboldened to speak out (at least privately). Particularly people in regional government, police, judges, etc. It eats into the margin of error for mishandling a crisis; things that would have worked before will only increase opposition (for example, if they poison Kasparov, there'll be outrage, but if they release him, it proves they are weak. Manufactured corruption charges won't be believed, and a judge just might feel bold enough to throw them out.)
Imagine what he can build now.
I was under the (incorrect) belief that the original poster had used the phrase correctly. h4rr4r corrected me,
And now, thanks to h4rr4r, you're under the incorrect belief that two similar English phrases can't have different meanings in different contexts. God forbid he every encounter a full-blown double entendre, he'll have a stroke.
I'm glad you have learned about circular reasoning, but you needn't let it prevent you from using simple English words correctly just because a half-educated jerk on the internet shouted at you.
You are incorrectly confusing the name of an obscure logical fallacy with a simple English phrase.
The name of the logical fallacy itself comes from an archaic use of "beg" meaning assume/demand, still seen in "begging your pardon", "the committee begs to report", "beg to differ". Specifically, to take for granted without justification. Moreso, whenever anyone uses it in the context of the logical fallacy, they almost always use it to name the fallacy. "That argument is 'Begging The Question'."
OTOH, "which begs the question" is a simple, vastly more common English phrase which means just what it says. It's not even a colloquialism, since it requires no prior knowledge to interpret. And it's impossible to misunderstand which sense the poster meant, without being wilfully obtuse.
and think they could have changed to entire series to that universe and been more entertaining.
Isn't that true for every ST series? (Hell, most SF series.)
but relying on filtering software to keep your kids safe is abdicating the school's responsibility
The school may have idiotic political riders attached to its State/Federal funding grants. Or it may have been required by idiotic governing bodies. Or the idiot dean believes it's necessary to protect the school. In any of those cases, a low-paid, barely trained, this-isn't-my-job-I-just-got-roped-in, school IT manager is not in a position to override those requirements.
... then your school should be teaching kids how to use the Internet safely.
They should do this anyway. And not just kids, staff too. Especially staff.
Hmmm, perhaps as a motivating factor, graded access. Lowest level is white-list-only, available to anyone. Those who've done the half-hour "school internet policy" session get all-but-black-list access, and all access logged. Staff and students who do a higher-level extracurricular class get unfiltered access, but still logged. The most skilled dozen students in the school also get recruited to help the IT manager with low-level admin duties. The most skilled dozen staff members are used to maintain the filters, police the usage logs, etc, and perhaps sit on an IT policy advisory committee (which serves as an IT-aware buffer against the IT-ignorant dean/school-board.)
In the US system, third parties are worthless. You need to change the voting system before you can meaningfully vote for a third party. And the only way to do that is to elect enough candidates willing to change the system, and you can only elect them through the existing two-party system. So that has to be your focus. However, no "third party" is that organised.
[If you want to try. Organise at the local level, where your voice is proportionately louder. Find areas where a few hundred votes can change an election. Advocate for a change to Approval Voting, or IRV, or "Best Two" Multi-Party Primaries, or a similar system, gather like-minded people from both major parties who agree to vote as a block within their respective major party, pledge them to whichever candidate at the primary level supports your cause. Once you have enough to change the local system, it should be self-sustaining, and you can move outwards to more areas. Eventually you get a whole state, with success bringing wider support and independent copy-cat efforts...]
While Congress has extremely low (single digit) approval figures, incumbents typically retain an advantage over their rivals in those same polls. "I hate Congress", but "my Congressman is the exception". Hence nothing radically changes.
IMO, we need fewer third parties like the Greens and more Tea Parties, formal factions acting within existing parties at the Primary level. A way of focusing votes on issues that matter. The problem isn't too many vested interests, but too few. [I'm not saying the Tea Party is better than the Greens. I'm actually a lefty. I mean it's a better method for achieving change. In the US system, third parties are worthless.]
Instead of making token gestures with lame online petitions, both parties should already have an anti-TSA "Party", each faction wielding thousands of votes for anti-TSA pledging candidates at Primary elections (or against pro-TSA candidates.) After all, hatred for the TSA can come from both left and right ideologies. (As well as the vast non-ideological middle who are just sick of being hassled.)
The only problem with Ribbon was that they didn't go far enough. Tabbed toolbars is cute and all, but tabbed work-spaces would have been better.
Ie, if each tab changed not just the available tools, but changes the entire way the whole document is displayed and worked on. A "Design" tab should use visual metaphors for the structure of the document. A "Write" tab would focus on... well, getting out of the way. While a "File" tab should pull back to the meta level of the document as an object.
The problem wasn't that they changed the UI, it was that they changed things without adding any new functionality for the user.