Somehow, spending close to a billion dollars to put two crippled vehicles on Mars doesn't strike me as a good investment. From the get go, the rovers have been starved for power. Every morning, there's a power meeting to determine who gets how many of the few watts available to do science. "Do we creep a few inches or do we grind some rock? How many watts are we going to allocate to the heaters?" Early on, someone on the Rover team decided to go with solar panels and the result has been a craft that was far less than it could have been.
The original Viking missions went 7 years before petering out. The Voyagers which were launched in the early 70's finally died 30 years after they were launched. But now, JPL is happy if they get a few extra months over their initial 3 month plan. A billion bucks for 3 months of science...only Dr. Pangloss could be happy with that.
I wouldn't be so harsh if JPL didn't have any power options but the fact is they did. They could have sent a nuclear power source up there just as they did early on. But they lost their balls and figured it was politically safer to go with a crappy solar solution rather with a long term nuclear solution. Had they gone nuclear, they could have had enough power to move AND do science. With years of power, they could have covered a significant chunk of the Martian surface. Instead of creeping inch by inch, the Rovers could have moved foot by foot or gasp - yard by yard! Perhaps they could have even found the remains of Beagle and figured out what went wrong with it. As it is, they crow when they move 100 feet in a day.
I have a 73.4 GB Raptor and I would never go back to a slower drive. The drive was the best upgrade I've ever made. Word opens immediately, Excel saves multiple large spreadsheets immediately, folder contents display immediately.
For those who quibble about the word immediately, I mean faster than I can say "1" as if I'm counting. Before the upgrade, Word took 4-5 seconds to open, Excel could take as long as 15 seconds to put away all my files - which it did even while I was using them just in case it crashed which meant the machine would simply go away at random times while Excel backstopped itself. Excel still backstops itself but now it's so fast I don't notice it.
The Raptor is definitely worth it if you want snappy response while running Windows 2000.
You're right that they don't have to carry 3 people for the Ansari X Prize flights - ballast will do. Nonetheless, they're not even doing that on June 21. From the faq:
Based on the success of the June space flight attempt, SpaceShipOne will later compete for the Ansari X Prize, an international competition to create a reusable aircraft that can launch three passengers into sub-orbital space, return them safely home, then repeat the launch within two weeks with the same vehicle.
If you look at the project's test history, it's been incremental, usually testing just one change at a time. Going for 100K and 3 passengers in the same flight would be uncharacteristic given the pattern Rutan has laid down so far.
I just booked the last 5 rooms in one of the motels in Mojave. I'm taking a lot of kids to see this one.
The article may be factual but then again, it may not. I first saw a reference to this story on Fark and the link went to the Moscow Times.
Blair's assertion is very serious if it's true. But as Sagan used to say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. In my book, this one ranks as an extraordinary claim.
My first job as a sysadmin was on a Burroughs 7700. My employer sent me to a week long class on tuning the os to help the company deliver a turnkey app that met some performance specs. Didn't matter what I did to the working set/swap settings - the thing was pig slow. The older guys in the class who had admin experience on IBM 370's were constantly complaining that the Burroughs OS was doing a worse job deciding how to allocate RAM than they could and it was making them look bad because the boxes wouldn't deliver the throughput they had had with supposedly inferior IBM hardware. As you can imagine, it was a very contentious class.
My boss started worrying that we weren't going to be able to deliver what the company had contracted to deliver. He was the antithesis of a PHB and so he sat down and in a few hours wrote a small driver to emulate the overall task the project had to accomplish. No detail, just broad brush emulation. He was able to demonstrate with a few lines of code that nothing we could do would hit the delivery spec. Burroughs responded by doubling the amount of RAM on the box as well as installing RAM that was twice as fast as what they had initially delivered. The combination enabled us to turn off swapping and deliver a working product.
Fast forward to 2004 and I'm working on Excel spreadsheets that have 60-70 sheets in a workbook. Saving the book is a bitch - 15-20 second wait after I hit ctrl-S. Every so often, Excel just goes away as it performs a prophylactic background save just in case Excel dies. 15-20 second pauses because the software has become so bloated that saving a 2-3 meg document is an excuse to flog the poor drive into a seek frenzy. The drive, which was about 4 years old, finally gave up the ghost. Its replacement has an 8 meg cache separate from the 512meg Windows manages - that "little" 8 meg junk of RAM belongs to hard drive alone. Night and day performance difference. The Excel swap frenzies that were induced by a simple ctrl-s are gone. 3 meg documents save in under a second - just what you'd expect from a drive that has a transfer speed in excess of 60 mbytes/sec.
My sense is that swap has always been a kludge. It's an attempt to squeeze more data into a machine that has only so much space. The working set graphs look pretty but they seldom describe what is happening day to day. Trading 2 nanosecond response for a 5 millisecond seek is seldom going to be a good trade. Bottom line from that OS class 35 years ago? Keep your working set size less than your physical memory and your machine will remain responsive. Just what the old IBM Geezers were saying in the first place.
The problem you raise is analogous to the leader being on a straight while the train is on a curve. The leader pours it on but the train, by necessity, must go more slowly. In a situation like that, the cars are going to semi-decouple as they spread out. They're somewhat autonomous but not completely so.
Similarly, if the lead pulls some manuever that's inappropriate for the train, the train members are going to have to retake control of their vehicles.
One way to handle it would be to transmit a motion history down the train. The history would be a series of commands that encapsulate what the "average" car did at a given spot on the road. So when the 100th car reaches a particular point, part of what it would do would depend on what's happening up ahead and another part would be determined by what the predecessors had done at that spot. So if the leader swerves for some unknown reason (take a piss, avoid a sudden obstacle) the news is trasmitted down the train that says "Something's happened - you need to take control but in the meantime, your car will slow down and do whatever it's predecessor did, albeit at a slower pace." The vehicle will continue to slow down until you resume control, and if you're asleep eventually come to a complete stop. The combination of slowing things down and still maintaining linkage should give enough time for followers to figure out what they want to do.
Geese handle the leader peel off by milling around until one of the geese steps up and leads the formation. I think people would behave similarly - traffic would suddenly congest until people sorted themselves out.
Interestingly, cars grouping like this will make things easier for cops. Snag the lead speeder and they've snagged the train. Imagine a Clint Eastwood voice asking "Do You Feel Lucky?" when you allow the leader to speed up the train. Hmmm, imagine the leader is a cop who purposely speeds to snag followers who are willing to speed.
Toyota has taken Berkeley's PATH idea and done it one better. PATH requires that highways be modified to accomodate the computer controlled lead car. Toyota's idea does away with needing special highways and leaves the lead driver with the driving chore. It's not a bad tradeoff in that you just need two cars with the technology for the idea to work which will make adoption that much faster. No need to wait for cash-strapped governmental agencies to realize this is a good idea - you just do it. I don't know how many times I've been stuck in traffic thinking that I've wanted my car just to do what the car ahead of me is doing so I can do something else. As for the lead driver, whenever he's had enough, he can peel off and let someone else take on the chore - just like geese dynamically choose who will lead the formation.
Some key benefits to the idea of letting one person drive a gaggle of cars are
You can design the cars to densely tailgate each other to take advantage of slipstreaming. That buys you significant gains in gas mileage since most of a car's power at highway speeds is spent just moving air out of the way.
Cars can move at much higher speeds since human reaction times are removed from the chain. Right now, if you're in a line 100 cars long, it takes at least 50 seconds from the time the first car in line moves before the 100th car gets moving. With this technology, when the first car moves, all the cars move. When the first car stops, all the cars stop.
It allows for self-assembling trains. Fixed rail is well, fixed. Cars go wherever anyone wants to go when they want to go. By allowing one person to drive, and everyone else to follow, you'll have long strings of cars (just like you have train cars) that can peel off when they wish and can join when they wish. You get most of the efficiency of trains without having to coerce people into living in certain areas or travel to certain destinations.
This incarnation of Toyota's may not make it to market but, with tort reform, some variation of this tech is going to happen. The advantages are just too great for it not to happen.
but since the plants make money they'd probably be built anyway
They don't make money. From the faq, it doesn't appear that a 500 barrel/day plant will make without tax credits.
Is moneythe plant economically viable? The plant is still in the startup phase, but we expect to meet our revenue projections when the plant is operating at capacity. We are counting on legislative assistance in the form of production tax credits, which stimulated other new technology innovation such as wind power. In addition, looking forward, the next generation of plants will be larger, giving us economies of scale and other economic benefits.
Fine and dandy if you're writing for humans who are reading for content. On the other hand, the AP Biology essay rubric assigns points based on how many keywords appear in a response. It doesn't score the essay for sense.
A friend of mine who teaches Biology said that she saw some pretty bad essays which she would have given a poor grade to because the english was atrocious but she had to follow the grading rubric and give high scores to because the keywords were present.
The DirecWay website you reference neglects to say how fast the upload/download speeds are. Everywhere it might say how fast the link is, it just says "Fast download" which I read as marketing-speak for "we're faster than dialup but not by much..."
If the link isn't much faster than dialup, the guy trying to setup the link may find he has enough electricity to drive all his access points but the pipe to the sky is so skinny he may as well not have bothered.
The measuring instrument, a radiometer, is simple, a black plate under a glass dome. Like asphalt in summer, the black plate turns hot as it absorbs the sun's energy. Its temperature tells the amount of sunlight that has shone on it.
Therefore, it's actually more efficient to burn the fossil fuels directly.
You're right if you're burning or cracking fossil fuel to make the hydrogen. However, if you use nuclear power or windmills to generate the power to form the hydrogen, then hydrogen is cleaner.
Your post got me to thinking - if the dinosaurs had been sentient, what evidence would they have left behind that they had built cities, space programs etc.? Would a reptilian Vesuvius survive for 60 million years? Would we recognize it as such if we found it?
Benedict Arnold was a traitor - he betrayed his country and his people for money.
These CEOs are traitors - they are betrying their country and their people for money.
So were you a traitor when you bought that Korean RAM over the homegrown variety? How about when you bought that Toyota or Honda? Were you a traitor then?
The CEO's are going for the best value just like you.
Re:Question still isn't answered.
on
Robocones
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· Score: 1
since it gives facts that one may deduce something from
Well that was my point - you can't deduce the answer to the original question from the numbers the poster gave. It's a bit like asking how many people were killed while talking on a cell phone and responding with the number of people who were driving a Ford.
Question still isn't answered.
on
Robocones
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
The question was "how many workers are injured deploying/retrieving hazard markers?" Your answer starts out telling us who got killed by occupational title. Then you tell us what kind of machine did the killing. Then in bold letters you tell us that in 318 out of 465 equipmnet fatalities, a worker on foot was struck by a vehicle. Hmm, what was the worker doing? Was he deploying a hazard cone, standing around or gasp, working?
Your post is an example of flooding someone with unrelated statistics and pretending that it answers the original question.
I agree that boost phase makes for an easier target. I was merely saying that it's not clear how hard a target the other phases will turn out to be until we test. Punching a hole in a descending warhead will, if nothing else, screw up the aerodynamics of the capsule. The Space Shuttle Columbia can give you a good idea as to what that can do.
The airborne's range is classified but this faq suggests "hundreds of kilometers" which handles North Korea.
I'm not sure what deterrent you speak of with regards to North Korea. Our troops are stretched thin - the only credible threat we've got to keep North Korea's million man army in place is nuclear and the willingness to use it. We certainly don't have the manpower in place. That's always been the case - we've been outnumbered ever since WWII wound down. General Marshall once complained about the back seat hawks in Washington telling him to give the Soviets hell by saying it was pretty hard to give someone hell if he's got 200 divisions to you've got 1 1/2.
If you mean the Patriot, it's a last line of defense and it's of limited uitility if you're defending against nukes. If you want to kill the Patriot and you have some nukes, it's not a tough trick to pull. Killing an airborne laser is much harder using the same weapons.
Long story short, we're not sure what airborne laser can and can't do until we get them flying. My hunch is that the weapon will fall somewhere between the holy grail its promoters are saying it'll be and totally worthless as some of its detractors are claiming. If I'm right, and we have enough time to debug it, it could turn out to be a useful tool to have in our arsenal.
Your argument is half right and half wrong. You're right that an ABM defense against a massive nuclear strike is pointless. I'm not sure, but you may also be right that a laser will be effective only against boost phase missiles. I think the answer to that will depend on the geometry of the shot. If the slew rate is low enough, you may be able to hit a fast moving target. That's going to require testing to determine.
You're wrong that since ICBMs are so expensive, only a few countries will be able to field them and if they can, they'll be in sufficient quantities to overwhelm ABMD.
Poster boy case is Kim Jong II. He's sufficiently deranged that he's poured huge amounts into developing both nukes and the missiles to deliver them. It's not clear if he has an ICBM but as it turns out, he doesn't need them. All he needs is to be able to threaten South Korea or Japan which he can with the missiles he currently has. China has a some 500 missiles pointed at Taiwan. Though she probably won't launch against Los Angeles, she could easily launch against Taiwan and claim it was an internal affair. If we don't act to neutralize those kinds of threats, Taiwan and Japan won't have much option but to develop their own nukes. I'm one who thinks the fewer nuke-bearing countries there are, the better off everyone is.
An airborne laser system, if it can be made to work, serves to nuetralize those threats.
You're also wrong that you have to be flying over the hostile country to take out the missile. You only need to be able to see the missile to kill it. Line of sight at 35,000 feet lets you see over 230 miles, which more than covers North Korea if you place planes in both the Yellow and Japan sea.
Missile defense just has to kill some missiles to be worth the cost - it doesn't have to kill all the missiles. In Rick Atkinson's, In the Company of Soldiers, he writes of a couple of incidents where the Patriot stopped Iraqi missiles from hitting massed Americans. Though the Patriots did not perform well during Desert Storm, they appear to have improved markedly over the intervening 10 years. Granted air borne and Patriots are different beasts but my point is that given time and lots of real testing as opposed to the shit testing the Air Force has been peddling for the Alaskan ABMD, an air borne laser may prove to be a very good weapon to possess.
When people talk about gravity, they're actually talking about this curving of spacetime due to the presence of mass.
When Kepler figured out the planetary orbits, he envisioned invisible brooms sweeping the planets towards the sun. When I read "gravity is just curved spacetime" I think of Kepler's brooms as they both seem to say about as much.
Saying "mass warps spacetime" doesn't explain how it pulls that stunt anymore than answering who was pushing Kepler's brooms.
Just how does mass warp space? How does space know the mass is around? What particle is gravity's carrier? If there is a gravity particle, how come planets don't speed up as they plow into them orbiting the sun? And how come it gets to escape black holes but no other particles can come out and play?
I find it really weird that here we are 400 years after Kepler and Newton figured out planetary motion and we still don't know what the heck makes it work. We can describe gravity's effects but we can't say how it does the trick.
Though you were joking, these kinds of jobs are exactly the kind of job that won't get outsourced. A good friend of mine owns a plumbing business and he's done very well. Like any business, if you're smart and diligent, you can do well.
The trick is to avoid industries that are easily shipped offshore. This morning's paper had an article about drug testing going overseas because it's cheaper. At an Apple's developer's conference years ago, I saw a presentation by a radiologist that involved shipping x-rays over an ISDN line. That technology has made it possible to ship the radiologist's job overseas as well.
It's tough to squeeze a mechanic or a plumber through a data pipe, no matter how fat the pipe.
Err, my error. The energy cost is about 1 gallon per passenger to move a 100 ton train at 2000 mph.
Putting the tube underground buys you some security and right of way. Security in that an evacuated tube would be tough to defend vs. a tunnel that isn't advertising its presence and is behind several 10s of feet of dirt.
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The original Viking missions went 7 years before petering out. The Voyagers which were launched in the early 70's finally died 30 years after they were launched. But now, JPL is happy if they get a few extra months over their initial 3 month plan. A billion bucks for 3 months of science...only Dr. Pangloss could be happy with that.
I wouldn't be so harsh if JPL didn't have any power options but the fact is they did. They could have sent a nuclear power source up there just as they did early on. But they lost their balls and figured it was politically safer to go with a crappy solar solution rather with a long term nuclear solution. Had they gone nuclear, they could have had enough power to move AND do science. With years of power, they could have covered a significant chunk of the Martian surface. Instead of creeping inch by inch, the Rovers could have moved foot by foot or gasp - yard by yard! Perhaps they could have even found the remains of Beagle and figured out what went wrong with it. As it is, they crow when they move 100 feet in a day.
As long as the U.S. Patent Office hands patents out like candy, this is going to continue. The fault lies in Washington, not Seattle.
but we get more beaver than anyone else on the planet.
When I was a kid, "getting beaver" meant peeking upskirt. It was a big deal - something to brag about when I was 10 or 11.
Given how empty Canada is, I guess that's what it still means.
You'd think this place was run by /. editors or sumptin.
For those who quibble about the word immediately, I mean faster than I can say "1" as if I'm counting. Before the upgrade, Word took 4-5 seconds to open, Excel could take as long as 15 seconds to put away all my files - which it did even while I was using them just in case it crashed which meant the machine would simply go away at random times while Excel backstopped itself. Excel still backstops itself but now it's so fast I don't notice it.
The Raptor is definitely worth it if you want snappy response while running Windows 2000.
I just booked the last 5 rooms in one of the motels in Mojave. I'm taking a lot of kids to see this one.
Blair's assertion is very serious if it's true. But as Sagan used to say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. In my book, this one ranks as an extraordinary claim.
My boss started worrying that we weren't going to be able to deliver what the company had contracted to deliver. He was the antithesis of a PHB and so he sat down and in a few hours wrote a small driver to emulate the overall task the project had to accomplish. No detail, just broad brush emulation. He was able to demonstrate with a few lines of code that nothing we could do would hit the delivery spec. Burroughs responded by doubling the amount of RAM on the box as well as installing RAM that was twice as fast as what they had initially delivered. The combination enabled us to turn off swapping and deliver a working product.
Fast forward to 2004 and I'm working on Excel spreadsheets that have 60-70 sheets in a workbook. Saving the book is a bitch - 15-20 second wait after I hit ctrl-S. Every so often, Excel just goes away as it performs a prophylactic background save just in case Excel dies. 15-20 second pauses because the software has become so bloated that saving a 2-3 meg document is an excuse to flog the poor drive into a seek frenzy. The drive, which was about 4 years old, finally gave up the ghost. Its replacement has an 8 meg cache separate from the 512meg Windows manages - that "little" 8 meg junk of RAM belongs to hard drive alone. Night and day performance difference. The Excel swap frenzies that were induced by a simple ctrl-s are gone. 3 meg documents save in under a second - just what you'd expect from a drive that has a transfer speed in excess of 60 mbytes/sec.
My sense is that swap has always been a kludge. It's an attempt to squeeze more data into a machine that has only so much space. The working set graphs look pretty but they seldom describe what is happening day to day. Trading 2 nanosecond response for a 5 millisecond seek is seldom going to be a good trade. Bottom line from that OS class 35 years ago? Keep your working set size less than your physical memory and your machine will remain responsive. Just what the old IBM Geezers were saying in the first place.
The problem you raise is analogous to the leader being on a straight while the train is on a curve. The leader pours it on but the train, by necessity, must go more slowly. In a situation like that, the cars are going to semi-decouple as they spread out. They're somewhat autonomous but not completely so.
Similarly, if the lead pulls some manuever that's inappropriate for the train, the train members are going to have to retake control of their vehicles.
One way to handle it would be to transmit a motion history down the train. The history would be a series of commands that encapsulate what the "average" car did at a given spot on the road. So when the 100th car reaches a particular point, part of what it would do would depend on what's happening up ahead and another part would be determined by what the predecessors had done at that spot. So if the leader swerves for some unknown reason (take a piss, avoid a sudden obstacle) the news is trasmitted down the train that says "Something's happened - you need to take control but in the meantime, your car will slow down and do whatever it's predecessor did, albeit at a slower pace." The vehicle will continue to slow down until you resume control, and if you're asleep eventually come to a complete stop. The combination of slowing things down and still maintaining linkage should give enough time for followers to figure out what they want to do.
Geese handle the leader peel off by milling around until one of the geese steps up and leads the formation. I think people would behave similarly - traffic would suddenly congest until people sorted themselves out.
Interestingly, cars grouping like this will make things easier for cops. Snag the lead speeder and they've snagged the train. Imagine a Clint Eastwood voice asking "Do You Feel Lucky?" when you allow the leader to speed up the train. Hmmm, imagine the leader is a cop who purposely speeds to snag followers who are willing to speed.
Some key benefits to the idea of letting one person drive a gaggle of cars are
- You can design the cars to densely tailgate each other to take advantage of slipstreaming. That buys you significant gains in gas mileage since most of a car's power at highway speeds is spent just moving air out of the way.
- Cars can move at much higher speeds since human reaction times are removed from the chain. Right now, if you're in a line 100 cars long, it takes at least 50 seconds from the time the first car in line moves before the 100th car gets moving. With this technology, when the first car moves, all the cars move. When the first car stops, all the cars stop.
- It allows for self-assembling trains. Fixed rail is well, fixed. Cars go wherever anyone wants to go when they want to go. By allowing one person to drive, and everyone else to follow, you'll have long strings of cars (just like you have train cars) that can peel off when they wish and can join when they wish. You get most of the efficiency of trains without having to coerce people into living in certain areas or travel to certain destinations.
This incarnation of Toyota's may not make it to market but, with tort reform, some variation of this tech is going to happen. The advantages are just too great for it not to happen.They don't make money. From the faq, it doesn't appear that a 500 barrel/day plant will make without tax credits.
A friend of mine who teaches Biology said that she saw some pretty bad essays which she would have given a poor grade to because the english was atrocious but she had to follow the grading rubric and give high scores to because the keywords were present.
If the link isn't much faster than dialup, the guy trying to setup the link may find he has enough electricity to drive all his access points but the pipe to the sky is so skinny he may as well not have bothered.
You're right if you're burning or cracking fossil fuel to make the hydrogen. However, if you use nuclear power or windmills to generate the power to form the hydrogen, then hydrogen is cleaner.
Would you really trust porn software to behave? Think of the virus potential. Don't even mention Trojan ....
Your post got me to thinking - if the dinosaurs had been sentient, what evidence would they have left behind that they had built cities, space programs etc.? Would a reptilian Vesuvius survive for 60 million years? Would we recognize it as such if we found it?
These CEOs are traitors - they are betrying their country and their people for money.
So were you a traitor when you bought that Korean RAM over the homegrown variety? How about when you bought that Toyota or Honda? Were you a traitor then?
The CEO's are going for the best value just like you.
Well that was my point - you can't deduce the answer to the original question from the numbers the poster gave. It's a bit like asking how many people were killed while talking on a cell phone and responding with the number of people who were driving a Ford.
Your post is an example of flooding someone with unrelated statistics and pretending that it answers the original question.
The airborne's range is classified but this faq suggests "hundreds of kilometers" which handles North Korea.
I'm not sure what deterrent you speak of with regards to North Korea. Our troops are stretched thin - the only credible threat we've got to keep North Korea's million man army in place is nuclear and the willingness to use it. We certainly don't have the manpower in place. That's always been the case - we've been outnumbered ever since WWII wound down. General Marshall once complained about the back seat hawks in Washington telling him to give the Soviets hell by saying it was pretty hard to give someone hell if he's got 200 divisions to you've got 1 1/2.
If you mean the Patriot, it's a last line of defense and it's of limited uitility if you're defending against nukes. If you want to kill the Patriot and you have some nukes, it's not a tough trick to pull. Killing an airborne laser is much harder using the same weapons.
Long story short, we're not sure what airborne laser can and can't do until we get them flying. My hunch is that the weapon will fall somewhere between the holy grail its promoters are saying it'll be and totally worthless as some of its detractors are claiming. If I'm right, and we have enough time to debug it, it could turn out to be a useful tool to have in our arsenal.
You're wrong that since ICBMs are so expensive, only a few countries will be able to field them and if they can, they'll be in sufficient quantities to overwhelm ABMD.
Poster boy case is Kim Jong II. He's sufficiently deranged that he's poured huge amounts into developing both nukes and the missiles to deliver them. It's not clear if he has an ICBM but as it turns out, he doesn't need them. All he needs is to be able to threaten South Korea or Japan which he can with the missiles he currently has. China has a some 500 missiles pointed at Taiwan. Though she probably won't launch against Los Angeles, she could easily launch against Taiwan and claim it was an internal affair. If we don't act to neutralize those kinds of threats, Taiwan and Japan won't have much option but to develop their own nukes. I'm one who thinks the fewer nuke-bearing countries there are, the better off everyone is.
An airborne laser system, if it can be made to work, serves to nuetralize those threats.
You're also wrong that you have to be flying over the hostile country to take out the missile. You only need to be able to see the missile to kill it. Line of sight at 35,000 feet lets you see over 230 miles, which more than covers North Korea if you place planes in both the Yellow and Japan sea.
Missile defense just has to kill some missiles to be worth the cost - it doesn't have to kill all the missiles. In Rick Atkinson's, In the Company of Soldiers, he writes of a couple of incidents where the Patriot stopped Iraqi missiles from hitting massed Americans. Though the Patriots did not perform well during Desert Storm, they appear to have improved markedly over the intervening 10 years. Granted air borne and Patriots are different beasts but my point is that given time and lots of real testing as opposed to the shit testing the Air Force has been peddling for the Alaskan ABMD, an air borne laser may prove to be a very good weapon to possess.
When Kepler figured out the planetary orbits, he envisioned invisible brooms sweeping the planets towards the sun. When I read "gravity is just curved spacetime" I think of Kepler's brooms as they both seem to say about as much.
Saying "mass warps spacetime" doesn't explain how it pulls that stunt anymore than answering who was pushing Kepler's brooms.
Just how does mass warp space? How does space know the mass is around? What particle is gravity's carrier? If there is a gravity particle, how come planets don't speed up as they plow into them orbiting the sun? And how come it gets to escape black holes but no other particles can come out and play?
I find it really weird that here we are 400 years after Kepler and Newton figured out planetary motion and we still don't know what the heck makes it work. We can describe gravity's effects but we can't say how it does the trick.
The trick is to avoid industries that are easily shipped offshore. This morning's paper had an article about drug testing going overseas because it's cheaper. At an Apple's developer's conference years ago, I saw a presentation by a radiologist that involved shipping x-rays over an ISDN line. That technology has made it possible to ship the radiologist's job overseas as well.
It's tough to squeeze a mechanic or a plumber through a data pipe, no matter how fat the pipe.
Putting the tube underground buys you some security and right of way. Security in that an evacuated tube would be tough to defend vs. a tunnel that isn't advertising its presence and is behind several 10s of feet of dirt.