Instead of using a laser to beam power up to the top, why not have a nuclear reactor up there instead?
Nuclear reactors in space are needed and are already being researched by the NASA Prometheus initiative. Conversely, beaming at the power required is a technology not even in its infancy. Using a nuclear reactor at the end of the elevator would provide enormous power, would be more cost effective, and would reduce the number of technological unknowns required to make a working space elevator.
I agree that we need tanks and armoured vehicles - the 3ID's report on Iraq solidly said that. But 3ID also said that they want more UAVs, they want a battlefield communications system that actually works when on the move, and they want more transport and better logistics systems that they could move on.
The biggest problem about the theoretical war with China is where it would be fought. There's no ground in between us. Yes, there could be some escalation over NK but they want that even less than we do. And yes, there could be some showdown over Taiwan. But, after that, what happens? Could we realistically occupy / invade mainland China? Conversely, could China even attempt to occupy us? They have no transport capability to move their giant army over here, let alone supply it, and on the flip side, we don't have anywhere near the transport we would need to put together an invasion army of the 10 million men we would need at a minimum. Heck, we don't even have an army that big. So, for the forseeable future, our naval superiority coupled with China's vast population makes a war on either side unthinkable because it is quite impossible. There can't be a war with China because there is no place to fight it. We can't invade them and they can't invade us. Of course if China decided to go for broke, invade Russia in hopes of gobbling up all of Asia and then Europe, well, that's a difference scenario, and I don't know if the Russian transport system could even support American help at least in the early stages of that conflict. Somewhere along the way the Russians would suck down a vodka, say it will be more radioactive but we'll deal with it, and drop the big one.
Now, as for the problem of NK, I agree that they would go nuke and probably open up first. But let's get to the original problem of NK artillery. Even if we have artillery to match, it seems to me that fighting an artillery duel with NK is probably the dumbest thing we could do.
Wouldn't it be much better to have a few Virginias loaded to the gills with cruise missiles parked off of NKs coast, so that as soon as NK even prepped for fire, we'd just flatten their artillery within a 1/2 hours flight time with cruise missiles? They might damage Seol severely, but, then their best asset would be neutralized.
Oh, the interdiction of artillery is something I see a decade down the road as laser based systems such as the Arrow become better / faster / more. A tumbling artillery shell seems easier to dispatch than relatively faster missile. I think a missile outruns a shell in the general case.
Here's the problem with Crusader. You've got 4.8 minutes of fire, and then you have to dedicate a transport aircraft to resupply it. So, you bottleneck the entire air force transport system just to keep the artillery supplied.
Instead, why not have the ammunition transport itself to the target? That's what missiles are for. In the very least, have a system for putting destruction on a target that doesn't tax an already overburdened transport system.
We simply do not have and can never have enough aircraft to support the Crusader system.. if you are going to build things with wings to carry ammunition, why not build things with wings that carry the ammunition straight to the enemy and skip the unloading step?
Your comparison of artillery vs guided missile neglects to include the cost of the air transport.
The problem with Crusader is not the system itself, its supply. The issue is, ultimately, how fast can you get explosives on a target. If you have a lot of crusaders pre-positioned, great, but, in today's army, there's not any prepositioning. We have a huge supply problem.
To keep a crusader supplied requires an aircraft to carry just one of its resupply vehicles. One aircraft per artillery battery means your effective speed to ammunition on target is bottlenecked by the aircraft, not the crusader.
If the transport aircraft is your bottleneck, then, why not have a system that replaces it or improves it. So, that leaves you with hellfire missiles on UAVs, and cruise missiles launched from ships. In both cases, you can have a huge number of rounds available outside of transporting them to the theater.
Pentium 4 seems to score better on all the benchmarks. I won't argue that the instruction set is butt ugly, but right now Pentium 4 is the fastest CPU in town... and, if you want all out elegance, you really can't top IBM's Power PC. It has all the registers you could ever want, easy 32 to 64 bit transition, simplified instruction set.. it's an assembler programmer's processor.
What's AMD have? Something in the middle... looks ugly like Intel, but not as fast.
The Virginia class submarine is better than the Seawolf and anything the russians have on paper or in the water.
The Crusader is stupid because it fires relatively slow rounds that can be interdicted in flight. Hellfire equipped UAVs on station can provide better artillery support.
Drones will observe the battlefield better than the Comanche, and you can send robots on suicide missions.
It would be really nice if the Osprey would work, but it simply doesn't.
The Raptor is being procured. If it can beat robots in fly offs, then, more power to it.
Some things the military has procured, in terms of upgrades, include better Patriot missile batteries, the new 747 mounted anti-missile laser... all sorts of stuff.
The govermnent already funds way more medical research than does NASA. Health care in the United States costs more than a trillion a year. If they can't deliver all of these miracles you promise with the money that they have, they can't do it all.
Testing everything on the ground is silly because you cannot duplicate either Mars or Deep Space on earth. NASA didn't get lucky - they did it right by design. If you can reprogram the craft while it is in flight, and have a robust capability to do so, then that is way more useful than a Mars simulation on the ground.
I think the piece is more of an artistic rebuttal of the assertion that these high energy transmission lines are safe for humans and animals.
If you've got an EM field that is powerful enough to light up 1000 light bulbs, it seems intuitive that there is enough energy to cause harm to humans living at similar distances.
It is interesting that you tout the removal of lead from gasoline as a clear cut triumph of science, but the reality is far mixed.
The removal of leaded gasoline helped destroy detroit and the american manufacturing base. So, yeah, we are breathing cleaner air, and saving the lives of a few thousand people for it, but, the price has been that millions of people had their lives destroyed because the retooling required to make engines that effectively run on leadless gasoline helped undermine american manufacturing sovereignty.
Had Richard Nixon not founded the EPA, we might have actually had avoided the destruction of the American middle class. So, yeah, you can science is an absolute, lead is clearly bad. But, relentlessly implementing without a sober examination of the actual cost of doing so is simply, um, bad science. Why not have a cost benefit breakdown for environmental legislation - isn't that, um, scientific?
Um, Galileo was considered a heretic not because he was a scientist, but because he couldn't back a lot of his own claims up, and, because he also called the Pope an idiot.
Similarly, much ado is made of how Copernicus had to "fight the power" of the church because he dared to propose the earth went around sun, but in reality tables produced from Copernicus's circular orbits were less accurate than their Ptolemiac predecessors.
The other thing that people forget is that science is a tool, not a means to an end. Science teaches us how to make things and how to better exploit the world around us. To say that there is an innate value system built around science is absurd. At the end of the day, there's little difference between Martha Stewart teaching how to put little curly cues on a cake, and a scientist teaching how to make an atom split. It's just an exotic Home Depot, and nothing more. As such, science must always take a back seat to political considerations and the popular will.
It must always tell the truth, to be sure, but we are under no obligation to abide by it or accept that what it teaches is useful or even valuable.
Your idea is not yours. Did you get student loans to get your Phd? Did you get government grants? Universities are subsidized very highly by the taxpayers of industrialized nations so much that one could make the argument that all academic research belongs solely in the public domain.
Do you think that Grandma really needs to have her tax dollars subsidize your research so you can cash in?
Look, if you want to have a completely free market research system, you can, but that means all government grants for research should end. If you are so good that your ideas will be profitable, you wouldn't need government to protect them.
Oh, and by the way, the Constitution says: "for a limited time..." I bet that with India pumping out 1,000,000 Phds a year, American companies could get rid of IP and find plenty of people to do your research.
A blueprint is a set of instructions one gives to builders to make a building or a ship. In that sense, source code is a blueprint and the builders happen to be the compiler and the linker or interpreter.
Yes but we Americans are so good the Indians are volunteering to be exploited. They want to be indentured servants, they want to trade their own culture and national sovereignty away so they can get that cushy IT contract for Coca Cola or that Human Resources outsourcing for GE. Meanwhile, all the shareholders of both companies are safely in the US and the... oh my gosh, UK.. oh wait a second, my oh my you crafty Brits.. you just traded a military empire for the behind the scenes economic one.
Is playing third world countries off against each other to force ever lower salaries. The US is the greatest organization ever made. We made ourselves rich, and now the rest of the world wants a piece, so now, we get to play with our dough, doing nothing, while we say: "oh, Indian can do it for $10, but the Chinese can do it for $9, can you match!"
After India has its little boom and starts to get pricey, then, we will start training computer programmers and doctors in Latin America and Africa.
Hah! In the meantime, when you take my job as a programmer, just keep in mind that when I'm pumping gas I'll still be making more than you! And if you think you are going to get more, we Americans will replace you with people from Africa, then from Latin America, and then we will build robots, and then make robots to build our robots for us, and we won't need you any more.
Your dream of becoming a first world nation based solely on exports is a false one.
They would have built their own country up by developing their own domestic infrasture the same way Americans did. Instead, they have to hock off their labor force as cheap to other countries because they no initiative to do anything with their own.
India's and the rest of the third world's export market to the US is a bigger get rich quick scheme than even US corporations foist upon the world. If the people in India want to work so cheap that they will provide the goods and services of the United States for the price that we dole out on welfare, for a currency backed by nothing, then we should let them.
Chop chop little buckaroos, build me more stuff. I got $5, I want a car. The chinese will do it for $4. Can you match!
I never said that what DJ's did was easy, I'm just saying that it isn't music. Hence, if you want to know about music, you should talk to a musician. Both are in the music business and both have roles to play.
Similarly, network administration is a difficult field, but it isn't programming. Both are in the computer field, but one is network administration, and the other is computer programming.
So, if you want to call yourself a programmer, then programming, and if you want to call yourself a musician, then, play an instrument and make music. There are plenty of DJs that play music, I'm sure, and there are plenty of network admins that program, but, since experience matters, you tend to want to prefer, for programming, someone that programs exclusively, just as much as you would want someone who plays music, exclusively.
It's nothing to be insulted about, it's just reality.
At the end of the day, a good dj picks songs, and a good musician makes them. The difference between DJs and rappers versus good classically trained musicians is the same difference between VB wizard boys and fluent systems programmers.
Both can make entertaining works, but the latter invested more to get more skill, and they need to be taken more seriously because they have earned it.
If you want to see someone be good at making rhymes and picking songs for you, rap is good. But if you want someone that really understands music, then, you need someone who actually knows how to play a real musical instrument.
Slashdot Mirror
Instead of using a laser to beam power up to the top, why not have a nuclear reactor up there instead?
Nuclear reactors in space are needed and are already being researched by the NASA Prometheus initiative. Conversely, beaming at the power required is a technology not even in its infancy. Using a nuclear reactor at the end of the elevator would provide enormous power, would be more cost effective, and would reduce the number of technological unknowns required to make a working space elevator.
I agree that we need tanks and armoured vehicles - the 3ID's report on Iraq solidly said that. But 3ID also said that they want more UAVs, they want a battlefield communications system that actually works when on the move, and they want more transport and better logistics systems that they could move on.
The biggest problem about the theoretical war with China is where it would be fought. There's no ground in between us. Yes, there could be some escalation over NK but they want that even less than we do. And yes, there could be some showdown over Taiwan. But, after that, what happens? Could we realistically occupy / invade mainland China? Conversely, could China even attempt to occupy us? They have no transport capability to move their giant army over here, let alone supply it, and on the flip side, we don't have anywhere near the transport we would need to put together an invasion army of the 10 million men we would need at a minimum. Heck, we don't even have an army that big. So, for the forseeable future, our naval superiority coupled with China's vast population makes a war on either side unthinkable because it is quite impossible. There can't be a war with China because there is no place to fight it. We can't invade them and they can't invade us. Of course if China decided to go for broke, invade Russia in hopes of gobbling up all of Asia and then Europe, well, that's a difference scenario, and I don't know if the Russian transport system could even support American help at least in the early stages of that conflict. Somewhere along the way the Russians would suck down a vodka, say it will be more radioactive but we'll deal with it, and drop the big one.
Now, as for the problem of NK, I agree that they would go nuke and probably open up first. But let's get to the original problem of NK artillery. Even if we have artillery to match, it seems to me that fighting an artillery duel with NK is probably the dumbest thing we could do.
Wouldn't it be much better to have a few Virginias loaded to the gills with cruise missiles parked off of NKs coast, so that as soon as NK even prepped for fire, we'd just flatten their artillery within a 1/2 hours flight time with cruise missiles? They might damage Seol severely, but, then their best asset would be neutralized.
Our military is rapid response. That's why crusader is bad. We have a colonial army.
If North Korea started to make serious bones about attacking us, we would attack first.
If we got into a war with China, it would be nuclear.
Oh, the interdiction of artillery is something I see a decade down the road as laser based systems such as the Arrow become better / faster / more. A tumbling artillery shell seems easier to dispatch than relatively faster missile. I think a missile outruns a shell in the general case.
Here's the problem with Crusader. You've got 4.8 minutes of fire, and then you have to dedicate a transport aircraft to resupply it. So, you bottleneck the entire air force transport system just to keep the artillery supplied.
Instead, why not have the ammunition transport itself to the target? That's what missiles are for. In the very least, have a system for putting destruction on a target that doesn't tax an already overburdened transport system.
We simply do not have and can never have enough aircraft to support the Crusader system.. if you are going to build things with wings to carry ammunition, why not build things with wings that carry the ammunition straight to the enemy and skip the unloading step?
Your comparison of artillery vs guided missile neglects to include the cost of the air transport.
The problem with Crusader is not the system itself, its supply. The issue is, ultimately, how fast can you get explosives on a target. If you have a lot of crusaders pre-positioned, great, but, in today's army, there's not any prepositioning. We have a huge supply problem.
To keep a crusader supplied requires an aircraft to carry just one of its resupply vehicles. One aircraft per artillery battery means your effective speed to ammunition on target is bottlenecked by the aircraft, not the crusader.
If the transport aircraft is your bottleneck, then, why not have a system that replaces it or improves it. So, that leaves you with hellfire missiles on UAVs, and cruise missiles launched from ships. In both cases, you can have a huge number of rounds available outside of transporting them to the theater.
Pentium 4 seems to score better on all the benchmarks. I won't argue that the instruction set is butt ugly, but right now Pentium 4 is the fastest CPU in town... and, if you want all out elegance, you really can't top IBM's Power PC. It has all the registers you could ever want, easy 32 to 64 bit transition, simplified instruction set.. it's an assembler programmer's processor.
What's AMD have? Something in the middle... looks ugly like Intel, but not as fast.
The Virginia class submarine is better than the Seawolf and anything the russians have on paper or in the water.
The Crusader is stupid because it fires relatively slow rounds that can be interdicted in flight. Hellfire equipped UAVs on station can provide better artillery support.
Drones will observe the battlefield better than the Comanche, and you can send robots on suicide missions.
It would be really nice if the Osprey would work, but it simply doesn't.
The Raptor is being procured. If it can beat robots in fly offs, then, more power to it.
Some things the military has procured, in terms of upgrades, include better Patriot missile batteries, the new 747 mounted anti-missile laser... all sorts of stuff.
The govermnent already funds way more medical research than does NASA. Health care in the United States costs more than a trillion a year. If they can't deliver all of these miracles you promise with the money that they have, they can't do it all.
Testing everything on the ground is silly because you cannot duplicate either Mars or Deep Space on earth. NASA didn't get lucky - they did it right by design. If you can reprogram the craft while it is in flight, and have a robust capability to do so, then that is way more useful than a Mars simulation on the ground.
I think the piece is more of an artistic rebuttal of the assertion that these high energy transmission lines are safe for humans and animals.
If you've got an EM field that is powerful enough to light up 1000 light bulbs, it seems intuitive that there is enough energy to cause harm to humans living at similar distances.
It is interesting that you tout the removal of lead from gasoline as a clear cut triumph of science, but the reality is far mixed.
The removal of leaded gasoline helped destroy detroit and the american manufacturing base. So, yeah, we are breathing cleaner air, and saving the lives of a few thousand people for it, but, the price has been that millions of people had their lives destroyed because the retooling required to make engines that effectively run on leadless gasoline helped undermine american manufacturing sovereignty.
Had Richard Nixon not founded the EPA, we might have actually had avoided the destruction of the American middle class. So, yeah, you can science is an absolute, lead is clearly bad. But, relentlessly implementing without a sober examination of the actual cost of doing so is simply, um, bad science. Why not have a cost benefit breakdown for environmental legislation - isn't that, um, scientific?
Um, Galileo was considered a heretic not because he was a scientist, but because he couldn't back a lot of his own claims up, and, because he also called the Pope an idiot.
Similarly, much ado is made of how Copernicus had to "fight the power" of the church because he dared to propose the earth went around sun, but in reality tables produced from Copernicus's circular orbits were less accurate than their Ptolemiac predecessors.
The other thing that people forget is that science is a tool, not a means to an end. Science teaches us how to make things and how to better exploit the world around us. To say that there is an innate value system built around science is absurd. At the end of the day, there's little difference between Martha Stewart teaching how to put little curly cues on a cake, and a scientist teaching how to make an atom split. It's just an exotic Home Depot, and nothing more. As such, science must always take a back seat to political considerations and the popular will.
It must always tell the truth, to be sure, but we are under no obligation to abide by it or accept that what it teaches is useful or even valuable.
I want the Positronic brain! Stick that baby in my head and I'm good to go for a perfect score on the GRE!
Your idea is not yours. Did you get student loans to get your Phd? Did you get government grants? Universities are subsidized very highly by the taxpayers of industrialized nations so much that one could make the argument that all academic research belongs solely in the public domain.
Do you think that Grandma really needs to have her tax dollars subsidize your research so you can cash in?
Look, if you want to have a completely free market research system, you can, but that means all government grants for research should end. If you are so good that your ideas will be profitable, you wouldn't need government to protect them.
Oh, and by the way, the Constitution says: "for a limited time..." I bet that with India pumping out 1,000,000 Phds a year, American companies could get rid of IP and find plenty of people to do your research.
A blueprint is a set of instructions one gives to builders to make a building or a ship. In that sense, source code is a blueprint and the builders happen to be the compiler and the linker or interpreter.
If so, then that would be a real good reason to replace OS/X with it.
Yes but we Americans are so good the Indians are volunteering to be exploited. They want to be indentured servants, they want to trade their own culture and national sovereignty away so they can get that cushy IT contract for Coca Cola or that Human Resources outsourcing for GE. Meanwhile, all the shareholders of both companies are safely in the US and the... oh my gosh, UK.. oh wait a second, my oh my you crafty Brits.. you just traded a military empire for the behind the scenes economic one.
Is playing third world countries off against each other to force ever lower salaries. The US is the greatest organization ever made. We made ourselves rich, and now the rest of the world wants a piece, so now, we get to play with our dough, doing nothing, while we say: "oh, Indian can do it for $10, but the Chinese can do it for $9, can you match!"
After India has its little boom and starts to get pricey, then, we will start training computer programmers and doctors in Latin America and Africa.
Hah! In the meantime, when you take my job as a programmer, just keep in mind that when I'm pumping gas I'll still be making more than you! And if you think you are going to get more, we Americans will replace you with people from Africa, then from Latin America, and then we will build robots, and then make robots to build our robots for us, and we won't need you any more.
Your dream of becoming a first world nation based solely on exports is a false one.
If India worked so hard...
They would have built their own country up by developing their own domestic infrasture the same way Americans did. Instead, they have to hock off their labor force as cheap to other countries because they no initiative to do anything with their own.
India's and the rest of the third world's export market to the US is a bigger get rich quick scheme than even US corporations foist upon the world. If the people in India want to work so cheap that they will provide the goods and services of the United States for the price that we dole out on welfare, for a currency backed by nothing, then we should let them.
Chop chop little buckaroos, build me more stuff. I got $5, I want a car. The chinese will do it for $4. Can you match!
I never said that what DJ's did was easy, I'm just saying that it isn't music. Hence, if you want to know about music, you should talk to a musician. Both are in the music business and both have roles to play.
Similarly, network administration is a difficult field, but it isn't programming. Both are in the computer field, but one is network administration, and the other is computer programming.
So, if you want to call yourself a programmer, then programming, and if you want to call yourself a musician, then, play an instrument and make music. There are plenty of DJs that play music, I'm sure, and there are plenty of network admins that program, but, since experience matters, you tend to want to prefer, for programming, someone that programs exclusively, just as much as you would want someone who plays music, exclusively.
It's nothing to be insulted about, it's just reality.
all the radiation from the sun is going to kill us, as will the earth's radiocative core!
Get out of town, dood.
At the end of the day, a good dj picks songs, and a good musician makes them. The difference between DJs and rappers versus good classically trained musicians is the same difference between VB wizard boys and fluent systems programmers.
Both can make entertaining works, but the latter invested more to get more skill, and they need to be taken more seriously because they have earned it.
If you want to see someone be good at making rhymes and picking songs for you, rap is good. But if you want someone that really understands music, then, you need someone who actually knows how to play a real musical instrument.
and kill them both.
:-)
Hey, somebody has to plug C++!
My bad, the phrase that pays is "Linux Development"
Here's a link:
Microsoft adword slams Linux
Microsoft is running an adwords on Google for if you search on "Linux Development Grants". I imagine it costs them $1 a click or so....