This sounds like it needs to be counter exploited, and hard.
The only way to establish precident for enforcement of false copyright claims, is to have a phyrric entity serving in the public's interest do exactly what big content is doing, but directed at big content.
An example might be to create a software program that outputs every possible combination of notes permissible under the rules of standard musical notation, then file copyright on it. Using this copyrighted "song", file DMCA takedown notices of every single big media production featuring a musical score, claiming that they are profiting illegally from a partial inclusion of your copyrighted "song".
Keep spamming the shit out of eg, the CBS and pal's youtube offerings with dmca notices, exploit the one-sidedness of the reporting system in the same way they exploit it against far use and public domain assets, and keep after it in earnest.
After a few weeks of that, the big media giants will sue. When they do, they will use their lawyers to win, and in so doing, establish a poisonous precedent against this practice.
The only way to get the assfucks to work for you is to socially engineer them into painting themselves into a corner.
I suggest that we (ordinary people) endeavor to do exactly that.
I mean, really. What do these people think it will do, besides *restrict* technological innovation? That is defact the point with this kind of legislation.
In the case of licensing doctors, it is to *restrict* people with dodgy credentials performing surgeries, or proscribing medications. Ideally, this is to protect patients, as it helps regulate a standard QoS in that industry. Same with legal professionals. Likewise, that restriction reduces the number of people performing those services. This has two immediate effects: 1) it reduces supply for that service, increasing costs. 2)it reduces the number of people doing that work, naturally reducing the number of minds that would bring innovative ideas to those service industries.
The whole reason why the internet exploded with applications (both computational, and user service oriented) and service providers was *because* of that lack of regulation. The emergence of top players comes about as genuine success stories in an unregulated/minimally regulated system. If providers were abusive, people stopped using them, and other providers gobbled them up. The reason for this explosion of innovation was because literally *anyone* with an internet connection and some intelligence could contribute to, or create a new idea, and promote it. This is how free software thrives. Anyone with an internet connection can download a code repository, read it, and suggest improvements. It doesn't matter if you are a millionaire payboy, or an ammonia scented cleaning woman, if your suggested changes are sound, you have improved the collective work, and everyone benefits from your innovative idea.
Instigating this kind of licensing would block out the vast majority of users from legally engaging in this process. As such, their ideas, even if perfectly valid, and even game changing, are withheld from inclusion, because "they aren't licensed."
This applies to every level of internet culture and its distributed source of innovation. It is poison to the very infrastructure they want to control.
The addage "don't ascribe to malice what can be ascribed to ignorance." Is stretched very thin here. How can you create such legislation, knowing what the internet is, and NOT see how it is antithetically counter opposed to the very foundational source of that system's recourcefulness and robustness in terms of innovation?
Also FTA: there are large dunes of gypsum sand in the north polar region. Possibly there are large pans of the stuff, as the sand had to come from somewhere.
"Regular" means all the faces are the same. A soccerball is not a regular solid, because it is made from 2 different shapes.
A regular triangle has 3 identical sides, yes. However, this tesselates on a flat plane, and does not form a closed solid. This is why the triangles have to not be equilateral for a regular icosahedron.
A regular icosahedron is made from the same slightly acute angle triangular face on every face. This is why it is a regular solid.
I agree, the triangle based pattern would be more impressive. The prior AC, however, is just plain wrong.:)
The triangle based one, as upposed to the "buckyball soccerball" one would also be much more work, and would require leet geometry skillz. (Hence, the greater geek street cred.)
As the article mentions, it is the convection currents in the conductive material (molten mantle and outer core, in the case of earth) which produces the magnetic field.
You cannot have tectonic activity without subsurface convection, so initiating tectonic activities on mars defacto implies a magnetic field will become extant.
You should use gingersnap dough instead of gingerbread.
Gingersnaps are usually baked as a drop or ball cookie, like a peanut butter cookie is.
If you instead roll the dough out flat and even on the cookie sheet, and bake a little bit slower to avoid being burned on the outside and raw in the middle (drop baking temp down to something like 250 or 275F, instead of 350F, and bake a little longer) then when you remove the "super cookie" from the oven you can cut it with cookie cutters while it is still hot.
When it cools, it will be quite firm, and perfectly edible. Crispy and hard, actually, hence the name "ginger snap".
You have to cut on removal from the oven, and not before baking, because they are a drop cookie and expand while baking.
Personally, I think watson should be fed the political and military service records of all major world politicians, then be allowed to "comment" in the ticker bar during major presidential and other national level debates.
All you need are hexagons and pentagons with equal length faces. Automatically assemble into a closed, regular shell. (Looks exactly like a soccer ball.) No leet geometry skillz required.
A sheet of fresh gingerbread, some cookie cutters, and a pastry bag full of stiff ftosting, and off you go.
(Personally, I would use gingersnap cookie dough, as ginger snaps are sturdier than ginger bread. This would negate most of the need for a cardboard support.)
Smashing titan into mars would probably be a bad thing. (A very, very bad thing. That is, unless you like the idea of scattering huge chunks of rock into space. See for instance, the collision simulation for the hypothesis of earth's moon's formation.)
Better, would be to go ahead and nudge the moon out of saturns orbit, have it fall into the inner solar system, sweep a wide orbit of the sun, then fall into orbit around mars.
Best to use a trans ecliptic orbit, so that the falling body doesn't adversely effect other inner planet systems.
Once in martian orbit, titan's gravity would cause intense mantle heating of the red planet. It is likely that titan's atmosphere would freeze and snow out after being dislodged from saturn's orbit, due to the lack of tidal heating while it transits. Mars' tidal forces would be miniscule compared to saturn's, though being in the habitable zone might be enough to heat titan enough to reconstitute the atmosphere. Unknown.
It is concievable that with both bodies in the habitable zone, that both bodies could be actively terraformed.
Titan is presumed to have a silicate core, and not an iron nickle one like mars and earth. This means that it wouldn't disrupt the new martian magnetosphere. (Like our moon doesn't.)
Mars is more massive than titan, and if the atmosphere reconstitutes, mars might just rip it off titan.
I said, the atmosphere would inflat *as a consequence* of plate techtonics.
Plate techtonics is the result of convection currents in the mantle.
Convection currents in the mantle create the geomagnetic dynamo.
The geomagnetic dynamo creates a strong planetary magnetic field.
Venus lacks a magnetic field because it is too hot at the planet's surface to have mantle convection. This, no dynamo, and no magnetic field.
Mars lacks sufficient mantle heat to power mantle convection, thus no dynamo, and no magnetic field.
Kickstarting the mantle of mars with some gogo juice (in the form of nasty dirty radioactive waste and or dirty uranium bombs in specific locations) would kickstart mantle activity, causing convection, causing techtonic activity, which releases the chemically bound water vapor, at the same time that the magnetic field appears.
Are we talking just a thin crust, or are we talking "gypsum quarry" size formations?
The reason I ask, is gypsum contains absurd quantities of chemically bound water. If mars has a higher calcium ion concentration than earth does, and had liquid oceans at one time, it is possible that with the carbon dioxide rich atmosphere and lack of techtonic plate movement that a sizable quantity of the ocean turned into "concrete" rather than drying up.
This would mean that much of the light elements (hydrogen, etc) might have escaped being blown off the atmosphere.
This is exciting news for science fiction writers that like to dream about terraforming. Creating techtonic activity would create the geomagnetic dynamo the planet needs, and as a consequence of the subduction and volcanism, huge quantities of water vapor would be expelled as a volcanic gas.
About all the planet would need would be ammonia, for the missing nitrogen. (Doesn't titan have an ammonia atmosphere? Wink, nudge.)
This does not mean the planet would go from lifeless desert to habitable overnight, as the gasses relased would be inhospitable to oxygen dependant life like us, but certain algae species like chlorella can survive in 100% C02 atmospheric concentrations as long as there is sunlight and water. Chlorella is well researched, fully genomically sequenced, and already has engineered varieties. A strain intended to rapidly convert the atmosphere to something a bit less toxic would actually be fairly plausible.
Part of the question was about preventing the students from switching to other applications (like ur-quan masters), which the internet gateway solution would not fix. It would however prevent them from cheating during test day.
It is convenient to boot from a teeny tiny usb stick for some things.
If you don't expect your workstations to be heterogenous, or that you will need to change which fileserver you are storing your boot images on, then bare metal is the way to go.
This person explicitly stated this was a school setting. The actual fileserver that hosts the image file has a fairly good chance of being changed, or needing to be changed quickly. It is more convenient to just reformat and reimage a few hundred sticks (how big is the lab again?) With the new configuration than it would be to audit and ensure the boot prom in all your kiosks is kosher, especially if the change is temporary.
Yes, I know you can push a configuration to coreboot remotely. I also know this is a school setting, and children are involved.
Also, this could let you have different boot personalities for the kiosk, by givng out different kinds of sticks. They make these things in novelty colors now you know. Could easily set it ip so "red stick" is for the testing env kiosk, "yellow stick" is limited to say, a wordprocessing workstation with local network mapped storage and printers, and "green stick" has internet fascilities enabled, etc.
The difference is just which image gets tftp'd, but it would make it easier to control what the students are doing with the kiosks.
This bluetooth chip would draw a whopping.057mAh at 1.5v, or.0285mAh at 3v. (Assuming a 2500mAh AA cell type, with 10 years of power draw.)
You can easily generate this using biologically inplanted power sources, or from a standard solar powered calculator's photocell, or even from a thin film thermocoupler.
This would allow for ubiquitous bluetooth devices in a lot of surfaces, including things you would never consider to have need of a network stack.
Hell, you could power this stack on an AM crystal radio!
Or, if it really needs to talk to the internet for some very special reason, put it behind a very configurable gateway.
Block all traffic types except port 80 http, and then restrict which ip addresses inbound packets can come from. Tada. Can't use google. Instant 404 error.
This won't stop them from playing uhrkan masters using the.deb they smuggled in, assuming they have the user rights to install. (Failing that they could smuggle in a binary blob version) but it would help prevent cheating.
What I had always considered to be ideal for a kiosk system where you don't want users pwning your workstations is to use a minimalist boot kernel on a usb stick, have the workstation tftp a system image to ram, then boot that.
This would make maintenance as easy as turning the system off, and on again, and would centralize maintenance of the system image.
Initial bootup network activity would spike with all the clients pulling the ramdisk volumes, but you could make the actual kiosk as naked as you wanted that way. No internal hdd to hide stuff on, no optical drive, and only 1 usb port that needs the key inserted because it is the boot volume.
If you go a bit further, and make sure the ctrl alt f1 seq can't be pressed at the hardware level from the kiosk, even better.
I was referring to what happens when something big (like an orbital cargo tug) fails to dock smoothly with the transfer station, causing the station to lose ballistic control, and get punted like a tetherball into the planet's surface.
The cable will remain taught in this catastrophe, and won't just float down nicely.
If it isn't on the equator, it will have an impact on the earth's axial tilt. This is a bad thing. Look up precession to see why. A space elevator would most certainly be a long term investment, and building such an investment in such a location pretty much garantees local dependence on the investment economically, and a strong disincentive to terminate the investment when problems eventually begin to manifest. See, eg, current problems with fossil fuels.
Charged cable == bad?
This admittedly is a design consideration, but we are talking voltages here that make high voltage transfer lines look like wire on christmas lights. The cable will present with a very strong static charge, which while not going anywhere without a drain, can saturate electronics that make use of a floating ground. This is why it poses a problem to the carriage. It's an electronics fault, not an electrocution risk.
Accident:
I wasn't referring to a line breakage type accident. That would just have cable fall lifelessly to the ground, and launch the transfer station in geo orbit out into space. (Especially if it was full of cargo).
I was referring to what happens if the station on the end of the tether loses ballistic control, and suddenly becomes a huge, high speed tetherball. (For instance, something big, like a spaceship runs into it, or somebody suddenly releases a bunch of cargo, creating thrust against the station.) The station falling to earth would be bad enough. Falling to earth while being swung hard on a several hundred kilometer lever with several tons of kinetic energy behind it? Even worse.
Not your lawn:
I happen to live on this planet, than you. Please don't blow it up or make it uninhabitable. Thanks.
Slashdot Mirror
This sounds like it needs to be counter exploited, and hard.
The only way to establish precident for enforcement of false copyright claims, is to have a phyrric entity serving in the public's interest do exactly what big content is doing, but directed at big content.
An example might be to create a software program that outputs every possible combination of notes permissible under the rules of standard musical notation, then file copyright on it. Using this copyrighted "song", file DMCA takedown notices of every single big media production featuring a musical score, claiming that they are profiting illegally from a partial inclusion of your copyrighted "song".
Keep spamming the shit out of eg, the CBS and pal's youtube offerings with dmca notices, exploit the one-sidedness of the reporting system in the same way they exploit it against far use and public domain assets, and keep after it in earnest.
After a few weeks of that, the big media giants will sue. When they do, they will use their lawyers to win, and in so doing, establish a poisonous precedent against this practice.
The only way to get the assfucks to work for you is to socially engineer them into painting themselves into a corner.
I suggest that we (ordinary people) endeavor to do exactly that.
I mean, really. What do these people think it will do, besides *restrict* technological innovation? That is defact the point with this kind of legislation.
In the case of licensing doctors, it is to *restrict* people with dodgy credentials performing surgeries, or proscribing medications. Ideally, this is to protect patients, as it helps regulate a standard QoS in that industry. Same with legal professionals. Likewise, that restriction reduces the number of people performing those services. This has two immediate effects: 1) it reduces supply for that service, increasing costs. 2)it reduces the number of people doing that work, naturally reducing the number of minds that would bring innovative ideas to those service industries.
The whole reason why the internet exploded with applications (both computational, and user service oriented) and service providers was *because* of that lack of regulation. The emergence of top players comes about as genuine success stories in an unregulated/minimally regulated system. If providers were abusive, people stopped using them, and other providers gobbled them up. The reason for this explosion of innovation was because literally *anyone* with an internet connection and some intelligence could contribute to, or create a new idea, and promote it. This is how free software thrives. Anyone with an internet connection can download a code repository, read it, and suggest improvements. It doesn't matter if you are a millionaire payboy, or an ammonia scented cleaning woman, if your suggested changes are sound, you have improved the collective work, and everyone benefits from your innovative idea.
Instigating this kind of licensing would block out the vast majority of users from legally engaging in this process. As such, their ideas, even if perfectly valid, and even game changing, are withheld from inclusion, because "they aren't licensed."
This applies to every level of internet culture and its distributed source of innovation. It is poison to the very infrastructure they want to control.
The addage "don't ascribe to malice what can be ascribed to ignorance." Is stretched very thin here. How can you create such legislation, knowing what the internet is, and NOT see how it is antithetically counter opposed to the very foundational source of that system's recourcefulness and robustness in terms of innovation?
Stifle innovation? Really? Ya think?
Also FTA: there are large dunes of gypsum sand in the north polar region. Possibly there are large pans of the stuff, as the sand had to come from somewhere.
"Regular" means all the faces are the same. A soccerball is not a regular solid, because it is made from 2 different shapes.
A regular triangle has 3 identical sides, yes. However, this tesselates on a flat plane, and does not form a closed solid. This is why the triangles have to not be equilateral for a regular icosahedron.
A regular icosahedron is made from the same slightly acute angle triangular face on every face. This is why it is a regular solid.
I agree, the triangle based pattern would be more impressive. The prior AC, however, is just plain wrong. :)
The triangle based one, as upposed to the "buckyball soccerball" one would also be much more work, and would require leet geometry skillz. (Hence, the greater geek street cred.)
I have done so digitally several times.
Produces a soccer ball. See for instance, this unfolded pattern.
http://montrealzen.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/unfolded-soccer-ball-2.jpg
Notice that all the shapes have equal length faces.
Uhm... initiating tectonic activity would *create* a planetary magnetic field.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamo_theory
As the article mentions, it is the convection currents in the conductive material (molten mantle and outer core, in the case of earth) which produces the magnetic field.
You cannot have tectonic activity without subsurface convection, so initiating tectonic activities on mars defacto implies a magnetic field will become extant.
I have explained this 3 times now.
You should use gingersnap dough instead of gingerbread.
Gingersnaps are usually baked as a drop or ball cookie, like a peanut butter cookie is.
If you instead roll the dough out flat and even on the cookie sheet, and bake a little bit slower to avoid being burned on the outside and raw in the middle (drop baking temp down to something like 250 or 275F, instead of 350F, and bake a little longer) then when you remove the "super cookie" from the oven you can cut it with cookie cutters while it is still hot.
When it cools, it will be quite firm, and perfectly edible. Crispy and hard, actually, hence the name "ginger snap".
You have to cut on removal from the oven, and not before baking, because they are a drop cookie and expand while baking.
Personally, I think watson should be fed the political and military service records of all major world politicians, then be allowed to "comment" in the ticker bar during major presidential and other national level debates.
Hilarity would ensue!
Yeah, true that. (Shrug)
Now, if they asked for a regular icosahedron set, that requires some leet geometry, because the triangles are not equilateral. :)
All you need are hexagons and pentagons with equal length faces. Automatically assemble into a closed, regular shell.
(Looks exactly like a soccer ball.) No leet geometry skillz required.
A sheet of fresh gingerbread, some cookie cutters, and a pastry bag full of stiff ftosting, and off you go.
(Personally, I would use gingersnap cookie dough, as ginger snaps are sturdier than ginger bread. This would negate most of the need for a cardboard support.)
Nasa says there are dunes of the stuff. So, more than just a crusty deposition in rock fissures.
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2011/08dec_slamdunk/
As for starting tectonic activity, a large orbiting body would start it up through mechanical heating. We are talking science fiction here.
Titan is larger than earth's moon.
Mars is smaller than the Earth.
Smashing titan into mars would probably be a bad thing. (A very, very bad thing. That is, unless you like the idea of scattering huge chunks of rock into space. See for instance, the collision simulation for the hypothesis of earth's moon's formation.)
Better, would be to go ahead and nudge the moon out of saturns orbit, have it fall into the inner solar system, sweep a wide orbit of the sun, then fall into orbit around mars.
Best to use a trans ecliptic orbit, so that the falling body doesn't adversely effect other inner planet systems.
Once in martian orbit, titan's gravity would cause intense mantle heating of the red planet. It is likely that titan's atmosphere would freeze and snow out after being dislodged from saturn's orbit, due to the lack of tidal heating while it transits. Mars' tidal forces would be miniscule compared to saturn's, though being in the habitable zone might be enough to heat titan enough to reconstitute the atmosphere. Unknown.
It is concievable that with both bodies in the habitable zone, that both bodies could be actively terraformed.
Titan is presumed to have a silicate core, and not an iron nickle one like mars and earth. This means that it wouldn't disrupt the new martian magnetosphere. (Like our moon doesn't.)
Mars is more massive than titan, and if the atmosphere reconstitutes, mars might just rip it off titan.
Reading comprehension is difficult for you?
I said, the atmosphere would inflat *as a consequence* of plate techtonics.
Plate techtonics is the result of convection currents in the mantle.
Convection currents in the mantle create the geomagnetic dynamo.
The geomagnetic dynamo creates a strong planetary magnetic field.
Venus lacks a magnetic field because it is too hot at the planet's surface to have mantle convection. This, no dynamo, and no magnetic field.
Mars lacks sufficient mantle heat to power mantle convection, thus no dynamo, and no magnetic field.
Kickstarting the mantle of mars with some gogo juice (in the form of nasty dirty radioactive waste and or dirty uranium bombs in specific locations) would kickstart mantle activity, causing convection, causing techtonic activity, which releases the chemically bound water vapor, at the same time that the magnetic field appears.
If you want to get all touchy feely in your story, this would be a good constructive use of the earth's nuclear arsenal.
Plate techtonics is at least partially powered by radiological decay.
That was ice.
This is gypsum. Gypsum is a conretion type sedimentary rock made of chemically bound water, sulfuric acid, and calcium ions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gypsum
It is mostly water by molar weight.
If heated in the mantle by subduction, it would thermally decompose into calcium sulfide, sulfur dioxide, and copoius quantities of water vapor.
If the formations are "large, and very deep", it would go a long way toward explaining where the ocean went.
If you want oil, go to titan.
Lakes of liquid ethane.
Transport cost might be a bit more than you bargained for... what with operating a tanker in orbit of a gas giant and all......
Are we talking just a thin crust, or are we talking "gypsum quarry" size formations?
The reason I ask, is gypsum contains absurd quantities of chemically bound water. If mars has a higher calcium ion concentration than earth does, and had liquid oceans at one time, it is possible that with the carbon dioxide rich atmosphere and lack of techtonic plate movement that a sizable quantity of the ocean turned into "concrete" rather than drying up.
This would mean that much of the light elements (hydrogen, etc) might have escaped being blown off the atmosphere.
This is exciting news for science fiction writers that like to dream about terraforming. Creating techtonic activity would create the geomagnetic dynamo the planet needs, and as a consequence of the subduction and volcanism, huge quantities of water vapor would be expelled as a volcanic gas.
About all the planet would need would be ammonia, for the missing nitrogen. (Doesn't titan have an ammonia atmosphere? Wink, nudge.)
This does not mean the planet would go from lifeless desert to habitable overnight, as the gasses relased would be inhospitable to oxygen dependant life like us, but certain algae species like chlorella can survive in 100% C02 atmospheric concentrations as long as there is sunlight and water. Chlorella is well researched, fully genomically sequenced, and already has engineered varieties. A strain intended to rapidly convert the atmosphere to something a bit less toxic would actually be fairly plausible.
Reading comprehension fail.
Part of the question was about preventing the students from switching to other applications (like ur-quan masters), which the internet gateway solution would not fix. It would however prevent them from cheating during test day.
Literary context, it's your friend.
It is convenient to boot from a teeny tiny usb stick for some things.
If you don't expect your workstations to be heterogenous, or that you will need to change which fileserver you are storing your boot images on, then bare metal is the way to go.
This person explicitly stated this was a school setting. The actual fileserver that hosts the image file has a fairly good chance of being changed, or needing to be changed quickly. It is more convenient to just reformat and reimage a few hundred sticks (how big is the lab again?) With the new configuration than it would be to audit and ensure the boot prom in all your kiosks is kosher, especially if the change is temporary.
Yes, I know you can push a configuration to coreboot remotely. I also know this is a school setting, and children are involved.
Also, this could let you have different boot personalities for the kiosk, by givng out different kinds of sticks. They make these things in novelty colors now you know. Could easily set it ip so "red stick" is for the testing env kiosk, "yellow stick" is limited to say, a wordprocessing workstation with local network mapped storage and printers, and "green stick" has internet fascilities enabled, etc.
The difference is just which image gets tftp'd, but it would make it easier to control what the students are doing with the kiosks.
tinfoil hat time!
This bluetooth chip would draw a whopping .057mAh at 1.5v, or .0285mAh at 3v. (Assuming a 2500mAh AA cell type, with 10 years of power draw.)
You can easily generate this using biologically inplanted power sources, or from a standard solar powered calculator's photocell, or even from a thin film thermocoupler.
This would allow for ubiquitous bluetooth devices in a lot of surfaces, including things you would never consider to have need of a network stack.
Hell, you could power this stack on an AM crystal radio!
Or simply don't expose it to the internet.
Or, if it really needs to talk to the internet for some very special reason, put it behind a very configurable gateway.
Block all traffic types except port 80 http, and then restrict which ip addresses inbound packets can come from. Tada. Can't use google. Instant 404 error.
This won't stop them from playing uhrkan masters using the .deb they smuggled in, assuming they have the user rights to install. (Failing that they could smuggle in a binary blob version) but it would help prevent cheating.
What I had always considered to be ideal for a kiosk system where you don't want users pwning your workstations is to use a minimalist boot kernel on a usb stick, have the workstation tftp a system image to ram, then boot that.
This would make maintenance as easy as turning the system off, and on again, and would centralize maintenance of the system image.
Initial bootup network activity would spike with all the clients pulling the ramdisk volumes, but you could make the actual kiosk as naked as you wanted that way. No internal hdd to hide stuff on, no optical drive, and only 1 usb port that needs the key inserted because it is the boot volume.
If you go a bit further, and make sure the ctrl alt f1 seq can't be pressed at the hardware level from the kiosk, even better.
The charge problem is one of a saturated floating ground on the carriage's electronics, not an electrocution hazard. :)
I wasn't referring to tether breakage.
I was referring to what happens when something big (like an orbital cargo tug) fails to dock smoothly with the transfer station, causing the station to lose ballistic control, and get punted like a tetherball into the planet's surface.
The cable will remain taught in this catastrophe, and won't just float down nicely.
Not on equator:
If it isn't on the equator, it will have an impact on the earth's axial tilt. This is a bad thing. Look up precession to see why. A space elevator would most certainly be a long term investment, and building such an investment in such a location pretty much garantees local dependence on the investment economically, and a strong disincentive to terminate the investment when problems eventually begin to manifest. See, eg, current problems with fossil fuels.
Charged cable == bad?
This admittedly is a design consideration, but we are talking voltages here that make high voltage transfer lines look like wire on christmas lights. The cable will present with a very strong static charge, which while not going anywhere without a drain, can saturate electronics that make use of a floating ground. This is why it poses a problem to the carriage. It's an electronics fault, not an electrocution risk.
Accident:
I wasn't referring to a line breakage type accident. That would just have cable fall lifelessly to the ground, and launch the transfer station in geo orbit out into space. (Especially if it was full of cargo).
I was referring to what happens if the station on the end of the tether loses ballistic control, and suddenly becomes a huge, high speed tetherball. (For instance, something big, like a spaceship runs into it, or somebody suddenly releases a bunch of cargo, creating thrust against the station.) The station falling to earth would be bad enough. Falling to earth while being swung hard on a several hundred kilometer lever with several tons of kinetic energy behind it? Even worse.
Not your lawn:
I happen to live on this planet, than you. Please don't blow it up or make it uninhabitable. Thanks.