Rotavators would require significantly less demanding materials and only require getting above atmosphere like SpaceShip One did recently. Then clamp on and ride the rest of the way to full orbital velocity (the tip would appear to hover briefly in sync with the Earth's rotation just above the atmosphere).
Linking up with the end of a tether that is travelling in a circle at one to three kilometers a second sounds a lot like the sort of thing that the "Star Wars" missile defense program has been trying to do (i.e. "shoot a bullet with a bullet"). I expect it would be just as reliable too.
Finding a country willing to let you launch: Priceless
Compensation for the millions of people claiming (rightly or not) to have been made ill by the resulting radioactive fallout: more than any country can afford.
... and that's just for one single mission, let alone doing it on a regular basis. Orion is just to messy to be worth considering, except under dire circumstances.
what would happen if a commercial airliner, or flock of seagulls, were to run into the cables, or even worse, the actual elevator? would the plane split into five pieces or would the cables snap and bring the satellite down on dallas?
The cable would snap, and everything above the cable's break-point would drift upwards and eventually leave Earth orbit entirely. Imagine you are twirling a ball on a rope around and around, and the rope breaks... the ball flies away.
Well there's your problem right there -- you can't take a space elevator to low earth orbit.
Of course you can. Just take the same space elevator that you would normally take to get to geosynchronous orbit, but stop your elevator car part of the way up.
Of course, once you hop off the elevator you will start falling back to Earth, so you will probably want to bring either some sort of rocket (to speed up your rotation to the point where you are in a stable orbit) or a parachute...
Then we could turn to the space elevator problem, presumably with some defect-free growth process already in hand.
What you propose is essentially what's being done. A small amount of money is being placed into theoretical research on Space Elevators, and that is what gets into the news because they are fun to think about, but the vast bulk of the money is (quite rightly) being spent on basic carbon nanotube materials research -- which is a good investment whether we end up building space elevators, or not.
As it is we're just pouring money into a money pit of a dream impossible with today's technology. Typical of our government... missle defense anyone?
Can you point to any actual figures about how much money is being wasted on research that has no application outside of Space Elevators? Or are you just assuming the worst, and bellyaching about the products of your imagination?
I am thinking of storm type winds blowing it off balance or making it resonate, the danger to aeroplanes, the disastrous consequences of breakage, etc. Why aren't these problems?
The considerations you listed aren't considered problems because there are fairly obvious solutions for each of them:
Locate the elevator in an area where storms don't occur
Locate the elevator in a no-fly zone, well away from flight paths
Design the elevator as a ribbon with a very low terminal velocity (think falling like newspaper, not falling like bricks), so that breakage doesn't cause any damage (outside of losing the ribbon itself, of course)
For more information on the engineering involved in building a space elevator, check out this book -- it goes into detailed explanations about your objections, as well as many others.
In short, there are big problems to be solved before you can build a space elevator, but those aren't them.
Now, the so-called liberals like Hillary Clinton, Diane Feinstein, or Al Gore, yes, they want to dominate.
Actually, what those three individuals have in common is that they are all politicians. Is it really surprising that people who want to exercise power are drawn into politics? Name any three Republican politicans, and you'll see that they also want to "dominate". (In fact, last time I checked, they already do)
It's not a liberal/conservative thing. I'm a liberal, and I don't want to "dominate" anything, I just want to see better, more responsible government.
Most reasonably intelligent people with a high-school education can figure out that something can be true or false, good advice or bad, independent of where it's coming from; it seems to be universities (and particular departments of universities) that convince people that the source of a particular viewpoint is more important than its content, and that some viewpoints are more valid than others.
Another way to look at it would be that there are multiple levels of understanding. With a coarse level of understanding, you look at an ants' nest and say "Ants' nests are bad! Ants bite!". Once you've been educated about ants, however, you become aware of all of their aspects, their place in nature, their benefits as well as their drawbacks, and it's not longer possible to have such a simplistic view about ants.
Meanwhile your friends, who still know nothing about ants, think you've gone kooky because you refuse to make blanket condemnations anymore.
In short, "reasonably intellignent people with a high-school eduction" may be good at convincing themselves that something is "good or bad, true or false", but that doesn't mean that they are right (or more accurately, that they are seeing the whole picture).
I'm sorry to see yet another product of public education. Mein Kampf sits on the shelves of every public library in the country, right beside Das Kapital, The Communist Manifesto and Chainman Mao's Little Red Book.
Speaking of poor education, perhaps you research what the word 'news' means, and how it differs from 'books that are acceptable to have in a library'.
This all maybe inflammtory and hateful, but it is truthful about the reality of the situation. both sides have there slants represented on the web. It serves no purpose to censor one and not the other. Sadly most news reporting in the media today is biased in one way or the other.
Not "most news reporting", all news reporting is biased in one way or the other. That's a simple fact of life -- unless you are omniscient, you are only going to be able to report on the events that (a) you know about, and (b) you think are newsworthy, and your world view is going to effect how you report. That much is obvious and inevitable.
But it doesn't mean that therefore all biases are equivalent, and all reporting is equally valid -- that's clearly not the case, otherwise there would be no difference between fiction and non-fiction, because even people making things up out of whole cloth would just be "reflecting their own bias" which was "just as valid as any other".
So clearly there must be a way to evaluate the usefulness and reliability of a news source, and determine that news source X is more or less useful than news source Y. news.google.com at some point has to make these decisions about what is and is not "proper" news, and while you can disagree with their decisions, it's silly to say that they don't need to be made.
For example, my newspaper kept referring to the may 1 protests as immigrant rights protests, when they really should have said illegal immigrant. rights protests. Little changes like that can make a big difference when read. I don't think many writers realize this though.
I think they realized that the phrase "illegal immingrants' rights protests" would have been misleading, because it would have implied that the protests were illegal, when they weren't.
In that continent, sex is the primary reason for the spread of AIDS
What percentage of that sex is voluntary? Women forced into prostitution, rape victims and wives don't usually have the option of refusing sex. Hell, in some particularly screwed-up societies, it's believed that having sex with a virgin will cure you of AIDS... so you end up with many children being raped by people with AIDS. How is recommending abstinence going to help them?
Seriously, you *really* think that people suddenly 'become more intelligent' when they are reading?
Don't you think so? At the very least, reading helps you learn to read better. And if you assume that the reading material contains useful information, then the reader will end up knowing more after having read it. (yes, I understand that "knowing more" and "becoming more intelligent" are not necessarily the same thing... but you can't use intelligence effectively without knowledge, so the effect is the same)
Seriously, do you really think reading doesn't make people more intelligent?
Your posts read like an ellitist professor who simply doesn't like television...
And your posts read like a knee-jerk anti-intellectual know-nothing who never learned who to spell 'elitist'...
If someone had a program in place to identify and prosecute those who would injure American citizens, and someone else decided to render that program unusable, whom do you think would be more likely guilty of treason?
Depends. Was the program legal and Constitutional? Or was the program itself criminal?
Television as a medium can only show entertainment. As such, all messages shown on television are shaped into entertainment.
That is all very fascinating, but this was an article posted in New Scientist Magazine's online forum web site, and then linked to by Slashdot's web site. At what point did television become involved here?
the biggest obstacle is public perception of anything with "nuclear" in the name
Nah, that's not such a big obstacle... you can fix that simply by choosing a different name. For example, when everybody was having a snit about "Food Irradiation", they simply relabeled it "cold pasteurization", and presto, problem solved.
As for what to call this technology? I think "hydrogen power plant" would be a fine name. But this all assumes it can be made to actually work... that is the big obstacle.
Yup, you'll lose access to MySpace, but it's all about making the right sacrifices!
You'll also lose access to Slashdot, Amazon, Google, Yahoo, Freshmeat, SourceForge, eBay, MapQuest, etc. You might as well move back to CompuServe, circa 1982.
Except that's no solution at all, because the whole point of the Internet is to be a single unified network where you can conveniently access all the data that is out there.
What would happen is you'd make your g33ks-only Internet, and spend about one day there before you realized that all the stuff you wanted (email, web sites, files, etc) didn't exist on that network, so you'd go back to "the real Internet" to get them (or have your machine log on to both networks at once). At which point you'd be right back where you are now.
Once you allow local code execution, even in an OS-level sandbox, you've halfway lost the battle. Now the attacker has the ability to make arbitrary system calls, access any resources that the sandboxed application would need, and has in general a MUCH stronger place to work from.
I think you're assuming a half-assed implementation of a sandbox, e.g. one that allows the sandboxed app to make arbitrary system calls. A proper sandbox will ensure that the software running within the sandbox has no way to access anything except what it absolutely needs to access in order to display the file. As an oversimplified/extreme example, an effective sandbox implementation could run the viewer this way:
Boot a guest OS in a virtualization environment
Transfer the data file to the guest OS's file system
Launch viewer application inside guest OS
When the user quits the viewer app, terminate the virtualization environment and discard any changes that were made to the guest OS's file system
That sounds like a lot of overhead, but it's just a simple example of what is possible: with a bit of thought, a system that gives the same security benefits without so much overhead could be designed. The benefit of doing it this way is that it would work with any viewer application, and unless there was a security hole in the virtualization app (which is possible but much less likely than the possibility of any of a hundred complex viewer apps having a hole), it would be guaranteed never to compromise the host OS, no matter how buggy the viewer apps are.
Unfortunately, it does matter, because the security of a sandbox is compromised by every legitimate access requirement that an application might have. That's why Microsoft refused to sandbox ActiveX... they saw the restrictions a sandbox would impose on an application as too great a cost.
For the general case, you are right... but we're not trying to solve the general case here, only the special case of viewer programs for untrusted data files. By definition, a viewer program only needs to read a data file and display its contents to the GUI. It never needs to write to the hard disk, access the network, install software, etc. Therefore it is possible to run the viewer program in a very restricted/secure environment where such actions are disallowed.
Slashdot Mirror
Linking up with the end of a tether that is travelling in a circle at one to three kilometers a second sounds a lot like the sort of thing that the "Star Wars" missile defense program has been trying to do (i.e. "shoot a bullet with a bullet"). I expect it would be just as reliable too.
Compensation for the millions of people claiming (rightly or not) to have been made ill by the resulting radioactive fallout: more than any country can afford.
The cable would snap, and everything above the cable's break-point would drift upwards and eventually leave Earth orbit entirely. Imagine you are twirling a ball on a rope around and around, and the rope breaks... the ball flies away.
Yes, lightning is a definite hazard for a space elevator.
The solution: locate the space elevator in a lightning-free area.
Of course you can. Just take the same space elevator that you would normally take to get to geosynchronous orbit, but stop your elevator car part of the way up.
Of course, once you hop off the elevator you will start falling back to Earth, so you will probably want to bring either some sort of rocket (to speed up your rotation to the point where you are in a stable orbit) or a parachute...
Well, specifically, no storms powerful enough to damage a space elevator or its base station... details here
I hope you won't mind living in a houseboat...
What you propose is essentially what's being done. A small amount of money is being placed into theoretical research on Space Elevators, and that is what gets into the news because they are fun to think about, but the vast bulk of the money is (quite rightly) being spent on basic carbon nanotube materials research -- which is a good investment whether we end up building space elevators, or not.
As it is we're just pouring money into a money pit of a dream impossible with today's technology. Typical of our government... missle defense anyone?
Can you point to any actual figures about how much money is being wasted on research that has no application outside of Space Elevators? Or are you just assuming the worst, and bellyaching about the products of your imagination?
If the base were to detach from the ground it would accelerate away from the Earth, not toward it.
That said, the base wouldn't detach from the ground. The ribbon would break long before there was enough force to lift the base from its foundations.
The considerations you listed aren't considered problems because there are fairly obvious solutions for each of them:
For more information on the engineering involved in building a space elevator, check out this book -- it goes into detailed explanations about your objections, as well as many others.
In short, there are big problems to be solved before you can build a space elevator, but those aren't them.
I'm living on my own money, and liberal. Your test doesn't work.
Actually, what those three individuals have in common is that they are all politicians. Is it really surprising that people who want to exercise power are drawn into politics? Name any three Republican politicans, and you'll see that they also want to "dominate". (In fact, last time I checked, they already do)
It's not a liberal/conservative thing. I'm a liberal, and I don't want to "dominate" anything, I just want to see better, more responsible government.
Another way to look at it would be that there are multiple levels of understanding. With a coarse level of understanding, you look at an ants' nest and say "Ants' nests are bad! Ants bite!". Once you've been educated about ants, however, you become aware of all of their aspects, their place in nature, their benefits as well as their drawbacks, and it's not longer possible to have such a simplistic view about ants.
Meanwhile your friends, who still know nothing about ants, think you've gone kooky because you refuse to make blanket condemnations anymore.
In short, "reasonably intellignent people with a high-school eduction" may be good at convincing themselves that something is "good or bad, true or false", but that doesn't mean that they are right (or more accurately, that they are seeing the whole picture).
Speaking of poor education, perhaps you research what the word 'news' means, and how it differs from 'books that are acceptable to have in a library'.
Not "most news reporting", all news reporting is biased in one way or the other. That's a simple fact of life -- unless you are omniscient, you are only going to be able to report on the events that (a) you know about, and (b) you think are newsworthy, and your world view is going to effect how you report. That much is obvious and inevitable.
But it doesn't mean that therefore all biases are equivalent, and all reporting is equally valid -- that's clearly not the case, otherwise there would be no difference between fiction and non-fiction, because even people making things up out of whole cloth would just be "reflecting their own bias" which was "just as valid as any other".
So clearly there must be a way to evaluate the usefulness and reliability of a news source, and determine that news source X is more or less useful than news source Y. news.google.com at some point has to make these decisions about what is and is not "proper" news, and while you can disagree with their decisions, it's silly to say that they don't need to be made.
For example, my newspaper kept referring to the may 1 protests as immigrant rights protests, when they really should have said illegal immigrant. rights protests. Little changes like that can make a big difference when read. I don't think many writers realize this though.
I think they realized that the phrase "illegal immingrants' rights protests" would have been misleading, because it would have implied that the protests were illegal, when they weren't.
What percentage of that sex is voluntary? Women forced into prostitution, rape victims and wives don't usually have the option of refusing sex. Hell, in some particularly screwed-up societies, it's believed that having sex with a virgin will cure you of AIDS... so you end up with many children being raped by people with AIDS. How is recommending abstinence going to help them?
Don't you think so? At the very least, reading helps you learn to read better. And if you assume that the reading material contains useful information, then the reader will end up knowing more after having read it. (yes, I understand that "knowing more" and "becoming more intelligent" are not necessarily the same thing... but you can't use intelligence effectively without knowledge, so the effect is the same)
Seriously, do you really think reading doesn't make people more intelligent?
Your posts read like an ellitist professor who simply doesn't like television...
And your posts read like a knee-jerk anti-intellectual know-nothing who never learned who to spell 'elitist'...
Dude isn't exaggerating
Depends. Was the program legal and Constitutional? Or was the program itself criminal?
It's also impossible to brazenly break the law and flout the Constitution if you can't keep it secret.
That is all very fascinating, but this was an article posted in New Scientist Magazine's online forum web site, and then linked to by Slashdot's web site. At what point did television become involved here?
Nah, that's not such a big obstacle... you can fix that simply by choosing a different name. For example, when everybody was having a snit about "Food Irradiation", they simply relabeled it "cold pasteurization", and presto, problem solved.
As for what to call this technology? I think "hydrogen power plant" would be a fine name. But this all assumes it can be made to actually work... that is the big obstacle.
You'll also lose access to Slashdot, Amazon, Google, Yahoo, Freshmeat, SourceForge, eBay, MapQuest, etc. You might as well move back to CompuServe, circa 1982.
Except that's no solution at all, because the whole point of the Internet is to be a single unified network where you can conveniently access all the data that is out there.
What would happen is you'd make your g33ks-only Internet, and spend about one day there before you realized that all the stuff you wanted (email, web sites, files, etc) didn't exist on that network, so you'd go back to "the real Internet" to get them (or have your machine log on to both networks at once). At which point you'd be right back where you are now.
I think you're assuming a half-assed implementation of a sandbox, e.g. one that allows the sandboxed app to make arbitrary system calls. A proper sandbox will ensure that the software running within the sandbox has no way to access anything except what it absolutely needs to access in order to display the file. As an oversimplified/extreme example, an effective sandbox implementation could run the viewer this way:
That sounds like a lot of overhead, but it's just a simple example of what is possible: with a bit of thought, a system that gives the same security benefits without so much overhead could be designed. The benefit of doing it this way is that it would work with any viewer application, and unless there was a security hole in the virtualization app (which is possible but much less likely than the possibility of any of a hundred complex viewer apps having a hole), it would be guaranteed never to compromise the host OS, no matter how buggy the viewer apps are.
Unfortunately, it does matter, because the security of a sandbox is compromised by every legitimate access requirement that an application might have. That's why Microsoft refused to sandbox ActiveX... they saw the restrictions a sandbox would impose on an application as too great a cost.
For the general case, you are right... but we're not trying to solve the general case here, only the special case of viewer programs for untrusted data files. By definition, a viewer program only needs to read a data file and display its contents to the GUI. It never needs to write to the hard disk, access the network, install software, etc. Therefore it is possible to run the viewer program in a very restricted/secure environment where such actions are disallowed.