1) develop space-based industries (we've almost gotten started) 2) develop space-based colonies that are closed cycle ecologically 3) move some of these colonies to the outer solar system (necessitating both engines and energy independent of the sun) 4) After political frictions, some of the colonies take the slow road to less crowded spaces: stopping at a comet or two on the way out to pick up supplies they head for the nearest brown dwarf or other center of matter density.
Wash, rinse, and repeat.
N.B.: this is slow, and probably requires the development of practical fusion reactors. Most of the other technologies already exist, though lots of work needs to be done on closed cycle environments and a bit of work on "living in space". It seems likely that this will require rotational "gravity creation", which means that nothing small will work, but you won't get a stable colony out of a small population anyway.
N.B.: The SLOW ROAD! No high accelerations here. Those are too expensive. The ships will probably accelerate at 0.01g or less. This approach depends on their being lots of interstellar debris to scavange along the way.
It's pretty premature (at best) to call us a "spacefaring civilization".
We have the potential to become one. That's as far as it's reasonable to go. After we have a self-sufficient space-based colony, THEN we can legitimately be called a spacefaring civilization. Of course, that still doesn't imply interstellar civilization...but it's a good step along the way. (See MacroLife.)
If you'll re-read the story, you'll notice that that ship wasn't intended as a probe, it was intended as a minimalized colonization effort cum alien invasion (with a light-sail as a weapon to subdue the planet).
Also realize just how small it was. (At that, I find the ship in Accelerando by Charles Stross to be more believable.)
And yes, the energy and resources expended were non-trivial...they were sufficient to cause the civilization that built the "probe" to collapse. (OK, it was near collapse anyway. Perhaps they were just the final straw.)
That said, this isn't going to happen in ANY scenario before we have a large scale space-based industry. Once you get that... Well, a laser based propulsion is nice, but an ion-rocket is pretty good also. I still think it should be possible to hybridize the bussard ramjet and an on-board fission or fusion reactor to get a really efficient ion-rocket where you DON'T need to carry the mass that you intend to throw away along with you...or not most of it. Once you start drifting against the solar/cosmic wind, you should be able to pick up a number of electrically charged ions, accelerate them, and use them as jet. It's more a jet engine concept than a rocket, but it does depend on using electric fields to manipulate the ions. If so, then you just need to carry the fuel you're actually going to use, not the mass to throw away also. Plausibly this would be a good place to use anti-matter. (Yeah, it's expensive to make, and is bound to be a real bear to store...but you'll have a hard time beating the energy/pound.)
N.B.: Yes, I know that the bussard ram jet has been "proven" not to work. This is a different concept. Also, I'm not contemplating anything LIKE the accelerations that that talked about providing. I'm thinking of a large version having, say, 2 pounds of thrust when using on-board mass for high acceleration maneuvers.
(The quotes are because I didn't examine the proof carefully, so I don't know what it's assumptions are, and whether or not I accept the reasoning it used to move from step to step. The conclusion seems plausible, and we don't yet have a fusion reactor anyway, so it's difficult to guess what the real limits would be.)
However in our current situation CO2 is the biggest factor for a rise in temperature.
At the moment. But there are indications that methane may soon be a much bigger problem. I am aware of two plausible sources for this new methane:
One is the swaps below the permafrost...or where the permafrost was. These coud soon become prodigious emitters of methane as bacteria start digesting the previously frozen slush. This is released when the bacteria become active as the permafrost melts. This is a relatively slow process.
The other is the cathlates currently frozen below the surface of the ocean. Nobody seems to be quite sure what will set these off, but they could go much more quickly, and with immense volumes of methane. These appear to have been created by bacteria digesting the ooze on the seafloor and releasing methane that became trapped in a sort of ice, which has only been stable because the high pressure of the ocean decreases it's temperature of dissociation (into methane and sea water).
I've also heard in passing of other sources, but I don't remember them in any detail.
We have no reason to believe that the climate is a threat to our species. To our comfort, yes. It might well cause a population crash, so that, after mass starvation and destruction of civilization there would be fewer than 1% of the current population surviving. That's not a threat to the species, only to countries and individuals.
What's a threat to the species that that in the process of this natural problem, somebody might start an escalating war. Recent estimates put it that fewer than 100 atomic warheads hitting cities would suffice to cause a nuclear winter. Well, that's one way to solve global warming. And overpopulation. And plausibly the existence of humanity.
Well, if not for turning on the Air Conditioning, then certainly for not turning off the furnace. Yah, if you think the analogy fits uncomfortably close, then it's making it's point.
I've seen someone, probably you, post that several times. In that same time period I've seen in print references to claims (not studies) by various academics that the polar bear population is crashing.
They could be wrong. You could be right. But before I'm going to believe something that appears dubious I'm going to see references to reputable studies. So... can you offer any?
I'm not certain whether you're joking or not, so, just in case... Have you examined the magnitude of the postulated effects?
Yes, those are plausible real effects. No, they aren't of an order of magnitude to be a sizable PART of an explanation. (I may be slightly overstating things here...perhaps.)
If you've got a stationary point on the surface of the globe, then any part of the elevator that extends past geo counts as ballast...true, it's more effective than ballast at GEO, and perhaps some other term is needed. Also note that this puts the cable under a constant tension. (Is this good? Bad? You want a bit of constant tension, but too much increases the strain. And you can't really avoid it, so additional tension is probably a bad thing.)
So, yes, there are designs that move nearly all the ballast above GEO, essentially increasing the length of the cable...but you still need to balance mass lifted with mass lowered, or you move the center of mass of the elevator down towards the earth to an amount proportional to both the mass of the elevator and the amount lifted. Still...it's possible that if you give it sufficient rest periods between loads lifted it would return to a resting position...I'm not sure what would happen to the momentum. I'd need to figure it carefully (which is beyond me), but on first glance it looks like the elevator would be rotated in a counter-orbital direction and lowered slightly...of course that causes it to speed up and move forwards in it's orbital position...
I suppose this could be handled by having two elevators on opposite sides of the planet, anchored solidly to the crust, and having large weights above GEO on both, so that there's a constant tension...and then lifting equal masses from both. That should keep momentum stable...or maybe you could do it with just one elevator if you lifted at times 12 hours apart...
I find that I can't figure the results. My mental models aren't complete enough, and I never did run the math myself. The easy answer is to lower and raise equal masses. If you don't, you're pumping momentum out of the system, and I'm not sure where it's coming from. The obvious place is from the elevator's orbit, but if you fudge that somehow,... perhaps it comes from the earth-moon orbit? And if you can manage that, then you could obviously lift a very great amount of mass before it made any noticable difference. Or perhaps you're slowing the rotation of the earth? Another system where we could pump a lot of momentum before we noticed the difference. (Which doesn't make it a good idea. When I was younger we used to believe that people could never pollute the ocean enought to need worrying about. When my parents were younger people believed that the forests were an unending resource, so we didn't need to worry about how they were (ab)used.)
This doesn't mean that you can't lift huge masses, it just means that you need to lower equal masses. Pull in an asteroid and lower that. That'll give you a HUGE amount to lower. (You'll need to be doing that kind of thing regularly anyway to get the material to build the cable from.) Or lift it from the moon with a catapult. (Somehow I'm less worried about transferring momentum away from the earth to the moon.)
For that matter, I can see good arguments for capturing any asteroid that has an orbit that comes anywhere NEAR the earth. All of the "earth crossers". But I think most of them should probably be converted into pinwheels near their current position. They just need their orbits regularized into something more useful. Then they could be used as momentum transfer devices to speed interplanetary tranport at low energy cost. (But, again, if the traffic out doesn't balance the traffic in, the orbits of the transfer hubs will decay. Ion jets can correct this a little bit, but they have their limits.)
A space elevator depends on a HUGE ballast mass in orbit, so that when you lift something, the orbit doesn't decay very much, and when you lower something the orbital height isn't increased very much. But over the long term they need to balance. That's also true with all of the other workable sky-hooks that I can think of.
It's the conservation of momentum (or possibly angular momentum). No way out using science as we know it.
There are reasonable arguments for why Apple might not want DRM...
Unfortunately, I always remember the Apple ][ file formats...with a Basic that couldn't easily be saved as text. There were good arguments for the strange disk format. You got more storage on each floppy. But to not be ABLE to save to an ASCII file on a standard format... well, I'm a bit dubious when Apple says it doesn't want DRM.
OTOH, it's also true that the DRM contract WAS forced on them by the media. And that Apple fought to simplify things.
So, well, to me it's a toss-up. The evidence is equivocal. Certainly the studios fought to insist in their contract that their music be DRMed. That doesn't really prove that Apple didn't want SOME level of DRM.
Capitalism can work fine as an economic system when it's not supported by governmental fiat-monopolies.
Well, I should back-pedal a bit on that...it can work as well as any other economic system we've devised. Once you start allowing fiat-monopolies (copyrights, patents, trademarks, etc.) things quickly get more comples, and it's not honest to call the resulting system capitalism. Also, the evidence for capitalism working fine is limited. It's limited to low density populations living in areas with poor transportation. This naturally results in all companies being of limited size.
I'm specifically NOT including cases where governmental troops suppress the populace into subservience to the company as examples of capitalism working fine. Those are example where it has DRASTICALLY FAILED. (You don't need to read much history to find lots of those cases.)
N.B.: I'm not insisting that the populace was always right when it got so angry that it was willing to rise in a mob and attack a company. I'm merely asserting that capitalism had failed. Usually the specific remedies advocated by the populace were short-sighted. This doesn't mean that they system was working, it means that BOTH (all?) sides were wrong.
E.g., the luddites. They were treated very unfairly, in many diverse ways. The "solution" of destroying the machines wasn't a proper way out, but neither was the governmental exclusion of the folk from the lands that they had held for generations. Neither was the arbitrays increase of the rents until they couldn't pay. Some people got very rich by using the power of governmental force to abuse others. This was a failure of something that can't rightfully be called capitalism, but is usually considered to be such. Once assymetric governmental force is invoked, you don't have capitalism. (Governmentally mandated "cooling-down" periods may well not be violations of capitalism, but if one side is assymetrically penalised, then they violate it.)
P.S.: Capitalism isn't all that great. It's just the best that can be done in an anarchistic state, or in a state where the government doesn't get involved with economics. One could argue that all taxes represent governmental interference...but while that's true, it is also omnipresent. So you'll never see pure capitalism unless you vist the Kalahari bushmen (perhaps) or deal in illegalities (drugs, theft, etc.). Note that quasi-governmental groups start forming immediately, and they impose "taxes" of their own.
So one will never see pure capitalism. Ever. It's an abstraction, like a mathematical point. I'm not sure, though, that it's as useful an abstraction. It seems to me quite plausible that it represents cutting economics along a non-optimal partition.
Sorry, that one won't work. You need to haul as much mass down through a space elevator as you lift up. This is something that needs to be built in space.
OTOH, that doesn't mean it's impractical. The most obvious approach is to build some large mirrors and convert an asteroid into an ark. Then fill it using ices from low gravity moons and/or asteroids in the outer solar system. It's still going to need lots of work using fusion and/or fission rockets, but it's much more doable. A lot of the work could be done by robots or telefactors.
Still, this approach means that it won't be practical until we have a reasonable amount of space-based industry. And for developing THAT a space-elevator would be a good tool...but so would several other lower cost-to-build devices, such as pinwheels*. (They aren't quite as efficient, and they still have the rule that you need to balance mass imports and exports, but they're a lot cheaper to build, and their failure modes are less threatening. Also, I believe that time - to - orbit is substantially less.)
* A pinwheel is a multi-armed rotating orbital thing consisting of a massive weight in orbit to which are attached several long cables...long enough to reach into the upper stratosphere. At the end of each arm is a "hook" to which loads are attached and from which they are dropped. It's fed by cargo planes that can reach up to where it reaches down... though probably only ballistically. Loads dropped probably are "lifting body"s, but specially designed planes should also be able to catch cargo pods as they are released. (It's less tricky than in-flight refueling...though not by much.) Quite possibly the cargo planes would need a "rocket assist" (jato?) to maintain altitude if their timing were slightly off.
P.S.: I suspect that the arms might need to have ion jets to maintain velocity...but this is my guess. I don't know the engineering design.
While that's the usual case, it's not always true.
Always remember: Most research doesn't work out. Over half of proposed new developments die at every stage of development. (Well, that's probably an artifact of how the stages were defined...but there were, I think, 6 of them.)
OTOH, the occasional research that pays off is where all new developments come from, whether faster RAM or new devices for increasing power availability.
Still, you're right to remember that this device is at the "laboratory bench" stage. It probably won't make it to production. But it might! If it does, it will be quite significant. (Just how much so depends on costs and efficiencies, and it's too early to even guess...and would be even if the article were more specific about current values for those features.)
You're right that most of the hoopla is about things that won't pan out. Do remember that. Also, however, remember that some of them DO!
Actually, I believe the heat from most auto-heaters is waste heat from the exhaust. (I trust they use a heat exchanger!) If so, then having the heater on may actually make the engine a bit more efficient.
So the question becomes "How much range does this electric car have?" (If the batteries are good enough, then on-site storage DOES become an option, at least as a hefty ballast load.)
I wonder how much charge a tanker-truck sized truck could carry as cargo? This might actually be cheaper than maintaining lines if the losses were lower than line loss. (Don't know how to figure that?) (And depending on how expensive the batteries were.)
Also, the obvious way to go, if one can work out the mechanics, is to charge the vehicles by swapping batteries. It might not be the best...but also it might. This would, however, require: a) standardization of size, shape, and connections, and b) a meter built into the battery which would display how many watt-hours it was storing. This probably won't happen because any economic benefit would probably be marginal, and also because getting companies to agree on a standard is...dubious.
If things worked out the way you are supposing, then BSD or equiv. would be the preferred license rather than the GPL. People may not insist on being paid in cash, but they insist on being paid...except for a few. Many are willing to accept a "quid pro quo" of I'll share my code with you if you share your code with me, but few are willing to say "Here's my code, take it and do what you want. I don't want anything back."
That said, this doesn't imply that patents are a good idea, or that copyrights should last over 20 years.
Personally, I do see justification for something similar to patents, but the current "patent system" is a large net liability. So large that it's harm totally swamps all benefits.
Were I to consider how the patent system should be reformed, I'd start by repealing all changes, including any laws upon which court decisions were based, since 1900...or possibly 1850. And I would require that separate invention of a patent be clear evidence that the patent is "sufficiently obvious" that NOBODY should be allowed to hold a monopoly on the invention. I would also require that damages for violation of a patent should be calculated from the time that a court decides that the patent was, indeed, violated. And I would prohibits "patent pools" that excluded non-patent holders from joining or descriminated against their joining, as in charging extortionate fees. (What a reasonable fee is may be calculated based upon a percentage of the average income as revealed in the prior decade's tax returns, and should not be more, on the average, than the amount required to cover administrative costs.) Also a patent should be good for 3 years and be indefinitely renewable for additional 3 year terms...but the filing fee should cube each time it is renewed...and the initial filing fee may not be less than $5.
Possibly other limitations would be necessary...I haven't constructed a flow-chart and searched for holes in the logic.
Macs work just fine with three button mice. They don't come with them standard, but once you get one it works fine, and is very useful. I NEVER use the default Apple mouse. It's too inconvenient.
(OTOH, I must admit that the Mac is my wife's computer...but she uses two of the three buttons, when she remembers.)
Apple has made a lot of bad decisions, and I don't like the OSX gui, but they didn't throw away the three-button mouse capability. They don't advertise it, because Apple is into sleek, smooth, and simple(-minded), but they also didn't throw away Unix features that they didn't need to in order to present the image they wanted to present.
You're thinking criminal law. This is civil. I believe here the rule is "The perponderence of the evidence". That's because it's written to benefit those who hire lawyers rather then merely the government. (Well, there *ARE* other explanations...but they don't wash in the modern legal system.)
Yah... but Macs are more expensive, and BSD is too difficult. (Well, I haven't tried BSD, but that's its rep.)
Reader Rabbit doesn't work on Linux, as far as I know. I also don't know of any schools that use it. Linux does have several educational packages...generally the teacher would need to prepare the inputs as a part of her lesson prep. It probably wouldn't be much (any?) more difficult than such is already.
You don't really WANT a prepackaged thing like Reader Rabbit in a school room. You want something more adaptable and controlable...or you're better off just skipping the computer. Reader Rabbit is fine for a home situation...well, I suppose it is. It's been on the market for decades. (OTOH, my ideas of the program may be well dated. I'm remembering a version for the Apple Mac LC(2? 3?).)
Still, I have seen a few, a very few, commercial programs that I though worth the space they would occupy in a schoolroom. None of them are still published. They weren't entertaining enough for the home market.
If there is any good educational software being published now, I don't know of it. So Linux is as good a choice as any. There is rudimentary educational software (flashcards, etc.) There are programming languages. There are web browsers. Etc. Not perfect for the lower grades of primary school, but starting to get better as you get to junior high, and definitely what you need in high school or college.
Check the linked patent then. It specifically mentions schools as a target (though, admittedly, it doesn't highlight them).
FWIW, *DON'T* read the patent if you're a programmer. Reading patents on software can lay you open to increased fines. I just did a find on schools, and it specifically mentions schools as a target for the patent. I can't claim to know what the patent covers, since I intentionally didn't read it.
It probably *wouldn't* work in a missle. Or in an artillery shell. There are good reasons why circuit boards for those applications are special. (OTOH...roughly the same design should work, with the wires glued down, etc. Possibly encase the whole thing in plastic, if the heat build-up wouldn't be excessive.)
Still, your point is valid. It relates to both "The Mythical Man-Month" and knowing what problem you're trying to solve. And, of course, wanting to get the job done, rather than to put in hours that you get paid for. Don't overstress that last point (easy to do), but remember it's presence.
In my personal experience, if I well understand the problem I'm attempting to solve, and am doing it alone, then it's MUCH easier than if I'm only dealing with a fraction of the problem, and don't understand the real goals. Not saying that there aren't incompetents, but most of the one's I've encountered have been managers...and who knows what they were REALLY trying to accomplish. They never got blamed, so perhaps they weren't incompetent, merely heartless.
Slashdot Mirror
My preferred "4th solution":
1) develop space-based industries (we've almost gotten started)
2) develop space-based colonies that are closed cycle ecologically
3) move some of these colonies to the outer solar system (necessitating both engines and energy independent of the sun)
4) After political frictions, some of the colonies take the slow road to less crowded spaces: stopping at a comet or two on the way out to pick up supplies they head for the nearest brown dwarf or other center of matter density.
Wash, rinse, and repeat.
N.B.: this is slow, and probably requires the development of practical fusion reactors. Most of the other technologies already exist, though lots of work needs to be done on closed cycle environments and a bit of work on "living in space". It seems likely that this will require rotational "gravity creation", which means that nothing small will work, but you won't get a stable colony out of a small population anyway.
N.B.: The SLOW ROAD! No high accelerations here. Those are too expensive. The ships will probably accelerate at 0.01g or less. This approach depends on their being lots of interstellar debris to scavange along the way.
It's pretty premature (at best) to call us a "spacefaring civilization".
We have the potential to become one. That's as far as it's reasonable to go. After we have a self-sufficient space-based colony, THEN we can legitimately be called a spacefaring civilization. Of course, that still doesn't imply interstellar civilization...but it's a good step along the way. (See MacroLife.)
If you'll re-read the story, you'll notice that that ship wasn't intended as a probe, it was intended as a minimalized colonization effort cum alien invasion (with a light-sail as a weapon to subdue the planet).
Also realize just how small it was. (At that, I find the ship in Accelerando by Charles Stross to be more believable.)
And yes, the energy and resources expended were non-trivial...they were sufficient to cause the civilization that built the "probe" to collapse. (OK, it was near collapse anyway. Perhaps they were just the final straw.)
That said, this isn't going to happen in ANY scenario before we have a large scale space-based industry. Once you get that... Well, a laser based propulsion is nice, but an ion-rocket is pretty good also. I still think it should be possible to hybridize the bussard ramjet and an on-board fission or fusion reactor to get a really efficient ion-rocket where you DON'T need to carry the mass that you intend to throw away along with you...or not most of it. Once you start drifting against the solar/cosmic wind, you should be able to pick up a number of electrically charged ions, accelerate them, and use them as jet. It's more a jet engine concept than a rocket, but it does depend on using electric fields to manipulate the ions. If so, then you just need to carry the fuel you're actually going to use, not the mass to throw away also. Plausibly this would be a good place to use anti-matter. (Yeah, it's expensive to make, and is bound to be a real bear to store...but you'll have a hard time beating the energy/pound.)
N.B.: Yes, I know that the bussard ram jet has been "proven" not to work. This is a different concept. Also, I'm not contemplating anything LIKE the accelerations that that talked about providing. I'm thinking of a large version having, say, 2 pounds of thrust when using on-board mass for high acceleration maneuvers.
(The quotes are because I didn't examine the proof carefully, so I don't know what it's assumptions are, and whether or not I accept the reasoning it used to move from step to step. The conclusion seems plausible, and we don't yet have a fusion reactor anyway, so it's difficult to guess what the real limits would be.)
However in our current situation CO2 is the biggest factor for a rise in temperature.
At the moment. But there are indications that methane may soon be a much bigger problem. I am aware of two plausible sources for this new methane:
One is the swaps below the permafrost...or where the permafrost was. These coud soon become prodigious emitters of methane as bacteria start digesting the previously frozen slush. This is released when the bacteria become active as the permafrost melts. This is a relatively slow process.
The other is the cathlates currently frozen below the surface of the ocean. Nobody seems to be quite sure what will set these off, but they could go much more quickly, and with immense volumes of methane. These appear to have been created by bacteria digesting the ooze on the seafloor and releasing methane that became trapped in a sort of ice, which has only been stable because the high pressure of the ocean decreases it's temperature of dissociation (into methane and sea water).
I've also heard in passing of other sources, but I don't remember them in any detail.
We have no reason to believe that the climate is a threat to our species. To our comfort, yes. It might well cause a population crash, so that, after mass starvation and destruction of civilization there would be fewer than 1% of the current population surviving. That's not a threat to the species, only to countries and individuals.
What's a threat to the species that that in the process of this natural problem, somebody might start an escalating war. Recent estimates put it that fewer than 100 atomic warheads hitting cities would suffice to cause a nuclear winter. Well, that's one way to solve global warming. And overpopulation. And plausibly the existence of humanity.
Well, if not for turning on the Air Conditioning, then certainly for not turning off the furnace.
Yah, if you think the analogy fits uncomfortably close, then it's making it's point.
What's your source?
I've seen someone, probably you, post that several times. In that same time period I've seen in print references to claims (not studies) by various academics that the polar bear population is crashing.
They could be wrong. You could be right. But before I'm going to believe something that appears dubious I'm going to see references to reputable studies. So... can you offer any?
I'm not certain whether you're joking or not, so, just in case...
Have you examined the magnitude of the postulated effects?
Yes, those are plausible real effects. No, they aren't of an order of magnitude to be a sizable PART of an explanation. (I may be slightly overstating things here...perhaps.)
Who do you *EXPECT* to have a Star Trek poster on their wall???
If you go looking for an environment with Star Trek posters, you're going to find Star Trek fans.
If you've got a stationary point on the surface of the globe, then any part of the elevator that extends past geo counts as ballast...true, it's more effective than ballast at GEO, and perhaps some other term is needed. Also note that this puts the cable under a constant tension. (Is this good? Bad? You want a bit of constant tension, but too much increases the strain. And you can't really avoid it, so additional tension is probably a bad thing.)
... perhaps it comes from the earth-moon orbit? And if you can manage that, then you could obviously lift a very great amount of mass before it made any noticable difference. Or perhaps you're slowing the rotation of the earth? Another system where we could pump a lot of momentum before we noticed the difference. (Which doesn't make it a good idea. When I was younger we used to believe that people could never pollute the ocean enought to need worrying about. When my parents were younger people believed that the forests were an unending resource, so we didn't need to worry about how they were (ab)used.)
So, yes, there are designs that move nearly all the ballast above GEO, essentially increasing the length of the cable...but you still need to balance mass lifted with mass lowered, or you move the center of mass of the elevator down towards the earth to an amount proportional to both the mass of the elevator and the amount lifted. Still...it's possible that if you give it sufficient rest periods between loads lifted it would return to a resting position...I'm not sure what would happen to the momentum. I'd need to figure it carefully (which is beyond me), but on first glance it looks like the elevator would be rotated in a counter-orbital direction and lowered slightly...of course that causes it to speed up and move forwards in it's orbital position...
I suppose this could be handled by having two elevators on opposite sides of the planet, anchored solidly to the crust, and having large weights above GEO on both, so that there's a constant tension...and then lifting equal masses from both. That should keep momentum stable...or maybe you could do it with just one elevator if you lifted at times 12 hours apart...
I find that I can't figure the results. My mental models aren't complete enough, and I never did run the math myself. The easy answer is to lower and raise equal masses. If you don't, you're pumping momentum out of the system, and I'm not sure where it's coming from. The obvious place is from the elevator's orbit, but if you fudge that somehow,
This doesn't mean that you can't lift huge masses, it just means that you need to lower equal masses. Pull in an asteroid and lower that. That'll give you a HUGE amount to lower. (You'll need to be doing that kind of thing regularly anyway to get the material to build the cable from.) Or lift it from the moon with a catapult. (Somehow I'm less worried about transferring momentum away from the earth to the moon.)
For that matter, I can see good arguments for capturing any asteroid that has an orbit that comes anywhere NEAR the earth. All of the "earth crossers". But I think most of them should probably be converted into pinwheels near their current position. They just need their orbits regularized into something more useful. Then they could be used as momentum transfer devices to speed interplanetary tranport at low energy cost. (But, again, if the traffic out doesn't balance the traffic in, the orbits of the transfer hubs will decay. Ion jets can correct this a little bit, but they have their limits.)
That's the way it works.
A space elevator depends on a HUGE ballast mass in orbit, so that when you lift something, the orbit doesn't decay very much, and when you lower something the orbital height isn't increased very much. But over the long term they need to balance. That's also true with all of the other workable sky-hooks that I can think of.
It's the conservation of momentum (or possibly angular momentum). No way out using science as we know it.
There are reasonable arguments for why Apple might not want DRM...
Unfortunately, I always remember the Apple ][ file formats...with a Basic that couldn't easily be saved as text. There were good arguments for the strange disk format. You got more storage on each floppy. But to not be ABLE to save to an ASCII file on a standard format... well, I'm a bit dubious when Apple says it doesn't want DRM.
OTOH, it's also true that the DRM contract WAS forced on them by the media. And that Apple fought to simplify things.
So, well, to me it's a toss-up. The evidence is equivocal. Certainly the studios fought to insist in their contract that their music be DRMed. That doesn't really prove that Apple didn't want SOME level of DRM.
Capitalism can work fine as an economic system when it's not supported by governmental fiat-monopolies.
Well, I should back-pedal a bit on that...it can work as well as any other economic system we've devised. Once you start allowing fiat-monopolies (copyrights, patents, trademarks, etc.) things quickly get more comples, and it's not honest to call the resulting system capitalism. Also, the evidence for capitalism working fine is limited. It's limited to low density populations living in areas with poor transportation. This naturally results in all companies being of limited size.
I'm specifically NOT including cases where governmental troops suppress the populace into subservience to the company as examples of capitalism working fine. Those are example where it has DRASTICALLY FAILED. (You don't need to read much history to find lots of those cases.)
N.B.: I'm not insisting that the populace was always right when it got so angry that it was willing to rise in a mob and attack a company. I'm merely asserting that capitalism had failed. Usually the specific remedies advocated by the populace were short-sighted. This doesn't mean that they system was working, it means that BOTH (all?) sides were wrong.
E.g., the luddites. They were treated very unfairly, in many diverse ways. The "solution" of destroying the machines wasn't a proper way out, but neither was the governmental exclusion of the folk from the lands that they had held for generations. Neither was the arbitrays increase of the rents until they couldn't pay. Some people got very rich by using the power of governmental force to abuse others. This was a failure of something that can't rightfully be called capitalism, but is usually considered to be such. Once assymetric governmental force is invoked, you don't have capitalism. (Governmentally mandated "cooling-down" periods may well not be violations of capitalism, but if one side is assymetrically penalised, then they violate it.)
P.S.: Capitalism isn't all that great. It's just the best that can be done in an anarchistic state, or in a state where the government doesn't get involved with economics. One could argue that all taxes represent governmental interference...but while that's true, it is also omnipresent. So you'll never see pure capitalism unless you vist the Kalahari bushmen (perhaps) or deal in illegalities (drugs, theft, etc.). Note that quasi-governmental groups start forming immediately, and they impose "taxes" of their own.
So one will never see pure capitalism. Ever. It's an abstraction, like a mathematical point. I'm not sure, though, that it's as useful an abstraction. It seems to me quite plausible that it represents cutting economics along a non-optimal partition.
Sorry, that one won't work. You need to haul as much mass down through a space elevator as you lift up. This is something that needs to be built in space.
... though probably only ballistically. Loads dropped probably are "lifting body"s, but specially designed planes should also be able to catch cargo pods as they are released. (It's less tricky than in-flight refueling...though not by much.) Quite possibly the cargo planes would need a "rocket assist" (jato?) to maintain altitude if their timing were slightly off.
OTOH, that doesn't mean it's impractical. The most obvious approach is to build some large mirrors and convert an asteroid into an ark. Then fill it using ices from low gravity moons and/or asteroids in the outer solar system. It's still going to need lots of work using fusion and/or fission rockets, but it's much more doable. A lot of the work could be done by robots or telefactors.
Still, this approach means that it won't be practical until we have a reasonable amount of space-based industry. And for developing THAT a space-elevator would be a good tool...but so would several other lower cost-to-build devices, such as pinwheels*. (They aren't quite as efficient, and they still have the rule that you need to balance mass imports and exports, but they're a lot cheaper to build, and their failure modes are less threatening. Also, I believe that time - to - orbit is substantially less.)
* A pinwheel is a multi-armed rotating orbital thing consisting of a massive weight in orbit to which are attached several long cables...long enough to reach into the upper stratosphere. At the end of each arm is a "hook" to which loads are attached and from which they are dropped. It's fed by cargo planes that can reach up to where it reaches down
P.S.: I suspect that the arms might need to have ion jets to maintain velocity...but this is my guess. I don't know the engineering design.
While that's the usual case, it's not always true.
Always remember: Most research doesn't work out. Over half of proposed new developments die at every stage of development. (Well, that's probably an artifact of how the stages were defined...but there were, I think, 6 of them.)
OTOH, the occasional research that pays off is where all new developments come from, whether faster RAM or new devices for increasing power availability.
Still, you're right to remember that this device is at the "laboratory bench" stage. It probably won't make it to production. But it might! If it does, it will be quite significant. (Just how much so depends on costs and efficiencies, and it's too early to even guess...and would be even if the article were more specific about current values for those features.)
You're right that most of the hoopla is about things that won't pan out. Do remember that. Also, however, remember that some of them DO!
Shocks. As in "I need to get a shock." "I'll be right with you, as soon as I get a bit of a shock." etc.
Actually, I believe the heat from most auto-heaters is waste heat from the exhaust. (I trust they use a heat exchanger!) If so, then having the heater on may actually make the engine a bit more efficient.
So the question becomes "How much range does this electric car have?" (If the batteries are good enough, then on-site storage DOES become an option, at least as a hefty ballast load.)
I wonder how much charge a tanker-truck sized truck could carry as cargo? This might actually be cheaper than maintaining lines if the losses were lower than line loss. (Don't know how to figure that?) (And depending on how expensive the batteries were.)
Also, the obvious way to go, if one can work out the mechanics, is to charge the vehicles by swapping batteries. It might not be the best...but also it might. This would, however, require:
a) standardization of size, shape, and connections, and
b) a meter built into the battery which would display how many watt-hours it was storing.
This probably won't happen because any economic benefit would probably be marginal, and also because getting companies to agree on a standard is...dubious.
Sorry, but that doesn't (quite) fly.
If things worked out the way you are supposing, then BSD or equiv. would be the preferred license rather than the GPL. People may not insist on being paid in cash, but they insist on being paid...except for a few. Many are willing to accept a "quid pro quo" of I'll share my code with you if you share your code with me, but few are willing to say "Here's my code, take it and do what you want. I don't want anything back."
That said, this doesn't imply that patents are a good idea, or that copyrights should last over 20 years.
Personally, I do see justification for something similar to patents, but the current "patent system" is a large net liability. So large that it's harm totally swamps all benefits.
Were I to consider how the patent system should be reformed, I'd start by repealing all changes, including any laws upon which court decisions were based, since 1900...or possibly 1850. And I would require that separate invention of a patent be clear evidence that the patent is "sufficiently obvious" that NOBODY should be allowed to hold a monopoly on the invention. I would also require that damages for violation of a patent should be calculated from the time that a court decides that the patent was, indeed, violated. And I would prohibits "patent pools" that excluded non-patent holders from joining or descriminated against their joining, as in charging extortionate fees. (What a reasonable fee is may be calculated based upon a percentage of the average income as revealed in the prior decade's tax returns, and should not be more, on the average, than the amount required to cover administrative costs.) Also a patent should be good for 3 years and be indefinitely renewable for additional 3 year terms...but the filing fee should cube each time it is renewed...and the initial filing fee may not be less than $5.
Possibly other limitations would be necessary...I haven't constructed a flow-chart and searched for holes in the logic.
Macs work just fine with three button mice. They don't come with them standard, but once you get one it works fine, and is very useful. I NEVER use the default Apple mouse. It's too inconvenient.
(OTOH, I must admit that the Mac is my wife's computer...but she uses two of the three buttons, when she remembers.)
Apple has made a lot of bad decisions, and I don't like the OSX gui, but they didn't throw away the three-button mouse capability. They don't advertise it, because Apple is into sleek, smooth, and simple(-minded), but they also didn't throw away Unix features that they didn't need to in order to present the image they wanted to present.
You're thinking criminal law. This is civil. I believe here the rule is "The perponderence of the evidence". That's because it's written to benefit those who hire lawyers rather then merely the government. (Well, there *ARE* other explanations...but they don't wash in the modern legal system.)
Yah... but Macs are more expensive, and BSD is too difficult. (Well, I haven't tried BSD, but that's its rep.)
Reader Rabbit doesn't work on Linux, as far as I know. I also don't know of any schools that use it. Linux does have several educational packages...generally the teacher would need to prepare the inputs as a part of her lesson prep. It probably wouldn't be much (any?) more difficult than such is already.
You don't really WANT a prepackaged thing like Reader Rabbit in a school room. You want something more adaptable and controlable...or you're better off just skipping the computer. Reader Rabbit is fine for a home situation...well, I suppose it is. It's been on the market for decades. (OTOH, my ideas of the program may be well dated. I'm remembering a version for the Apple Mac LC(2? 3?).)
Still, I have seen a few, a very few, commercial programs that I though worth the space they would occupy in a schoolroom. None of them are still published. They weren't entertaining enough for the home market.
If there is any good educational software being published now, I don't know of it. So Linux is as good a choice as any. There is rudimentary educational software (flashcards, etc.) There are programming languages. There are web browsers. Etc. Not perfect for the lower grades of primary school, but starting to get better as you get to junior high, and definitely what you need in high school or college.
Check the linked patent then. It specifically mentions schools as a target (though, admittedly, it doesn't highlight them).
FWIW, *DON'T* read the patent if you're a programmer. Reading patents on software can lay you open to increased fines. I just did a find on schools, and it specifically mentions schools as a target for the patent. I can't claim to know what the patent covers, since I intentionally didn't read it.
You can't be really evil, evil so much that your customers hate you, without market dominance to such a degree that it counts as monopoly.
Therefore Apple will not become the next "Big Evil".
It probably *wouldn't* work in a missle. Or in an artillery shell. There are good reasons why circuit boards for those applications are special. (OTOH...roughly the same design should work, with the wires glued down, etc. Possibly encase the whole thing in plastic, if the heat build-up wouldn't be excessive.)
Still, your point is valid. It relates to both "The Mythical Man-Month" and knowing what problem you're trying to solve. And, of course, wanting to get the job done, rather than to put in hours that you get paid for. Don't overstress that last point (easy to do), but remember it's presence.
In my personal experience, if I well understand the problem I'm attempting to solve, and am doing it alone, then it's MUCH easier than if I'm only dealing with a fraction of the problem, and don't understand the real goals. Not saying that there aren't incompetents, but most of the one's I've encountered have been managers...and who knows what they were REALLY trying to accomplish. They never got blamed, so perhaps they weren't incompetent, merely heartless.