True. But it'd cost them. If you subtract OS-sales from their bottom-line last year, they'd have been in the red. So to be able to do it they would need to cut costs. They could take it from the war-chest offcourse, but no company wants to operate in the red indefinitely.
Furthermore, it's not just the Desktop. They have 2 significant income-centres. One is dominating the desktop, the other is office. Office is similarily hard pressed as Vista, perhaps even more. Dropping Windows atleast has the drawback that most of your programs and games won't work. Dropping Office in favour of an open alternative has neither of those drawbacks.
And MS cannot set the price for Office and Windows to $0. Not the MS we know today anyway. Not with the cost-structure they have presently, or any similar to it. If they did that, they'd burn trough their war-chest at a rate that'd make even that chest (and it's huge!) look short-lived.
True. But this actually adds to Microsofts vulnerability.
We (as in Linux) support a lot of hardware because we ourselves wrote drivers for it. (well, in some cases the manufacturers did, but when the drivers are open source, they are part of "we".
Windows xp supports stuff very poorly -- but is rescued by the fact that the manufacturers themselves release binary blobs that work as drivers.
Which mean we can and will support any and all hardware we support today until the end of time, or more realistically, until nobody cares enough to bother porting the stuff as the kernel changes.
So, Windows-users are at the mercy of manufacturers, which have little incentive for quickly developing high-quality drivers for a piece of hardware they probably neither sell nor produce anymore. -- *they* would much prefer people bougth a *new* scanner/digicam/webcamera/younameit. So, Epson is taking its good time, releasing drivers at *all* 15 months after Vista is released, assuming the announced schedule holds, which I wouldn't assume, really. And that's for a product they used to produce up until 6 months ago. For somewhat older products they don't bother at all.
Microsoft could pick up the slack, start developing and maintaining drivers themselves, just like we do. But it'd cost them. And it ain't done overnigth.
A win for Linux. The new Dell with Ubuntu on it would support all of my wifes gadgets out-of-the-box, Vista supports half of them out-of-the-box, and drivers for the remaining 2 are promised in 8 months. Which ain't very satisfactory. Nor is she inclined to toss away a scanner and digital camera that she is perfectly happy with. None of them are old either, aproximately 1 year.
But there are several trends coming together. Each individual one may not count for much, but the sum total is still starting to look interesting.
The average price of new computers is falling.
The price of Windows, both in pure dollars and in requirements is rising sharply.
Linux is getting easier and easier for the non-geeks to use.
You can get pre-installed Linux from vendors people have heard of. This matters.
There's a large amount (though not as large as I'd like) of articles and news-coverage of consumer-hostile "features" in Vista.
There is a distinct lack of *advantage* for a consumer moving from XP to Vista, in other words, MS has done next to *nothing* worthwhile for a consumer in the last 5-6 years.
Vista has horrible hardware-support. Of the 5 usb-gadgets that my wife uses, 2 failed to work with Vista. For one, an Epson-scanner, the status is: "Drivers will be released in february". Meanwhile, Linux supports more hardware out-of-the-box than any other operating-system ever has. (though not more than XP plus additional drivers)
None of these are deal-breakers, really. And most people will certainly buy the "default" choice, Vista, without really giving it second thougths. But *some* will start thinking.
Linux certainly won't displace Windows on the desktop this year, or the next. But it'll continue doing what it's been doing quietly for years already: growing.
So, if I get you rigth, your passwords will consist of atmost 2 uppercase, atmost 3 numerics, and the rest lowercase.
In 3 positions you choose between 26 characters. In 3 positions you choose between 36 characters. In 2 positions you choose between 52 characters.
This gives you log2(26)*3 + log2(36)*3 + log2(52)*3 bits of entropy, assuming your letters and numbers are genuinely randomly selected (which is probably an unsound assumption, but nevermind) That is 40 bits of entropy.
2**40 tries for a guaranteed brute-force ain't very reassuring in a world where computers are at around 2**30 operations/second.
True, true, one "operation" in computer-sense ain't enough to test one potential password, not even close. But 2**10 seconds is only about 20 minutes, if one is satisfied with cracking your account in a month, one gets about 3000 clock-ticks for each try, which still is not enough, but it's starting to sound threathening. Especially when you consider that multi-core ain't exactly rare anymore, and who says only *one* machine needs to do the brute-forcing.
Realistically, with your choice of characters, your passwords would need to be 2-3 times as long (16-24 characters with 4-6 upper-chars and 6-9 numers) to be secure against a determined (or lucky!) attacker.
See the problem yet ? And note how this problem gets worse every year. Every 4 years you'll need to add another character to all of your passwords, aslong as current trends continue. This very obviously isn't sustainable.
Even if users wheren't morons, passwords are nearing the end of (if not already past) the end of their usefulness.
Brute-force crackers gets stronger all the time. The number of accounts a typical user has grows all the time, and the ability to remember passwords don't. 64 bit keys aren't really secure anymore, and that is a truly-random 8-character password, or a truly random 12-character password consisting of lower UPPER and numeric characters. Could you remember a dozen different passwords of the type Qw4Z7oPlKdfG5 ? Most people can't and won't.
And as I said, 64 bit can be brute-forced in many circumstances. Atleasst 80, preferably 128 would be better. Want to random dozens of truly random 25-character passwords ? This obvioudly ain't a long-term answer...
Atleast the kind of collection that precludes actual use. Collecting unopened beer-cans, so the beer will spoil, is silly and serves no purpose. Saving and taking care of something *without* degrading use is however valuable. It's a good thing there are people in the world who cares for and maintains old (otherwise "junk") cars, planes, boats, paintings, stamps, books, whatever.
For example, most tcp-implementations use slow-start, which mean they will, regardless of latency, start with a small window, and then if that goes trough, gradually increase the window-size until no improvement is experienced anymore.
This makes a huge difference for example if your application transfers many small files, each over its own tcp-connection, which FTP will do but which I'm aware of no other commonly used file-transfer application doing. It's no accident that they use ftp as the example-protocol, while ignoring the simple fix for that case: Make a large zip or tgz-file and transfer that one large file rather than the huge collection of tiny files.
Indeed this fix is so well-known that there are ftp-servers with built in support for it: you can do "get directory.tgz" and the ftp-server will, on the fly, make a tgz and send it to you, instead of the myriad files inside that directory.
The worst though, is, like I mentioned, links that have packet-loss unrelated to congestion. Most tcp-implementations I'm aware of will interpret packet-loss as congestion, and react by throttling back. Which is disastrous if really, the packet-loss is unrelated to congestion. A good heristic for separating these two cases from eachother would indeed help a lot. (potentially several orders of magnitude), but that is a very rare situation. The more common response to links that are inherently packet-lossy is to build in error-correction on lower-levels. Satelite-links, for example, commonly do this. Instead of a 10Mbps link with 1% of all packets getting corrupted you get a 7Mbps link where 0.001% of all packets get corrupted.
For modern tcp-stacks at reasonable speeds and latencies, it shouldn't happen. We certainly had no problems at all of this type when, for example, mirroring Debian transatlantically at 100Mbps. To the contrary, if we hadn't had traffic-prioritizing the single ftp-connection would've degraded other uses of the network for the duration.
Uhm, let me guess, your knowledge of TCP is based on Trumpet Winsock for Windows 3.11 ?
Modern tcp-stacks most certainly scale the window and certainly don't "mis-interpret" high latency as congestion. (they do however interpret high packet-loss as congestion, which is a reasonable guesstimate most of the time, but *DOES* break down on links that, for example, have a constant packet-loss of a few percent (regardless of traffic-levels)
By "can afford it" I mean that the income is high enough that if you genuinely wanted the thing more than other stuff you could easily live without, you'd be able to buy it, without significantly lowering your overall living-standard.
That doesn't mean you could afford it without sacrificing anything. As you say, many people live close to their financial borders (and would even if those borders where to expand)
But anyone with a $25K+ car *could* buy a $12K item, simply by exchanging the car for one half the value. For example. Anyone who smokes could finance the thing simply by quitting, and so on. Ain't saying people will -- to the contrary, I already said that for 99% it won't be worth it. But they *could* if the really wanted to.
$60K I'd definitely call middle-class. In general, most people can afford to spend about 10% of their income frivolously, a higher percentage if you earn well, and a lower if you are poor, with that ballpark-figure, $12K would only be possible every 2 years for a $60K family. (yes "it depends", it always does !)
Most of the middle-class in any western country *can* affort to spend $12K for any damn thing they please. If it's worth it is another matter entirely. For 99% of the population that's gonna be a no.
Tech tends to fall like a lead-stone in price over time though, can you remember when a simple DVD-player was $3000 ? It's not that many years ago. You know, one of those sucky ones with no network, no divX, no mp3, no jpg, no video-cd compatibility and 10-second lag for layer-changing....
We used to have a $3000 0.8Mpix digital camera at work. Concluding that digital cameras will never appeal to the mass-market based on that would've been the wrong conclusion though....
Oh come of it. It wasn't funny 5 years ago and it certainly isn't now. The population on Slashdot is aproximately equally likely to be in a relationship as any other population of similarily-aged people. Even CmdrTaco himself got married for crying out loud.
Dropping launch-costs from $50.000/lbs to $500/lbs would however be a very significant step towards *making* us more capable of doing all that stuff. Particularily since one of the first cargoes hoisted on the first space-elevator would probably be: "Space-elevator 2"
If a person requires 100.000kgs of space-station to live in, that's $50million in lifting-costs at Liftports target price. Which makes it impractical for most of us. (but take note: there are individuals paying $20million for a short week-long *visit* to space today!
Visiting would be popular first, long before we ever got real settlers. A week-long visit as a tourist to a space-hotel migth require lifting 250kg of cargo, which would be $125.000 at Liftports target-price. That is expensive, but there are thousands of people who would be able and willing to pay it, just as there are dozens of people who are today trying to get into space at a price-point 2 orders of magnitude higher.
It does. But only the bottom ~15km has significant wind-loads. That is a *very* small part of a 50.000km+ long cable. Thus the cable can be, if needed, strengthended and/or stabilised in this region without it adding much mass to the overall structure.
Yeah. Hookers in zero-g would be quite popular I think. For those *with* a SO, a love-hotel would certainly also be.
Seriously though, people demonstrably pay $20 million to visit cramped space-stations today. It's not much of a stretch to assume that the number of people willing to pay would increase if the price fell.
You need to go fast to make the entire thing cost-efficient. The entire point is providing cheaper access to space.
The ribbon has a fixed capacity for carrying cargo, let's say it can carry 10e3 kgs of cargo.
Distance to geosynch is 36000km, so if you where moving at 36km/h you'd need 1000 hours, or about 41.5 days. A naive calculation would mean this allows only 10 launches/year for a total of 10e4 kgs to orbit. Which is no longer cost-effective, it's about what a single saturn-V can lift. Furthermore, if the cargo is humans, it gets worse, because they'll need consumables (food, air etc) for that month, which further cuts back on useful cargo.
Now, in reality it's better than that because gravity decreases as the cargo ascends, by the time the cargo has climbed one earth-radius, the force on the cable is only 1/4th of what it was when the cargo launched.
Still, it doesn't change the basic fact that going twice as fast allows for launching twice as often, which makes it a lot easier to finance the thing.
Their design calls for 200km/h, and a so on the order of a week to orbit.
Climbing vertically alon a tape at 200km/h is nontrivial, especially at a full G, but it gets easier as the cargo gets higher, because gravity decreases.
True. But you can never prove a negative in general, so the fact that you can't disprove God is hardly surprising, and not really indicative of anything.
Sure noise has a strong negative influence on health, this is very well established and not controversial in the least.
Prolonged exposure to noise causes increase in aggression, elevated blood-pressure, increased risk of tinnitus (which again often leads to depression and/or anxiety), and increased risk of heart and circulatory problems, besides the obvious one of hearing-loss if the noise-levels are very high.
Noise in your rest-periods is the most damaging, and sudden unexpected noises are worse than constant ones.
You can trivialize anything if you try hard enough. Mature nanotech is "nothing more than fancy manipulations of matter". Curing HIV requires "nothing more than killing a few virii".
True, computers do not change physics. But that is an unreasonable criteria, *NOTHING* "changes physics". Same goes for your other examples. Computers fail to change the melting-point of iron for the fairly fundamental reason that *nothing* changes the melting-point of iron.
All interesting problems require several puzzle-pieces to be solved. Manned extra-solar missions require a *lot* of puzzle-pieces, modern computers are *CERTAINLY* going to be one of them when/if it happens.
It may be true that advancing is getting harder. But nevertheless we're accelerating.
What period saw the most change in technological capability, in your opinion ? 1700-1799 or 1900-1999 ? I don't think there's even any contest.
Sure, you can argue that this will stop. But then you'll need to explain why. The trend seems the same shorter term. 1977 - 2007 had *much* more change in technological capability than say 1947-1977.
You say "except computational devices", as if that was some minor detail of our technological capability. While infact it's perhaps the most crucial component at all. Machines for dealing with information. I'd say computers are certainly the most significant invention since the engine, perhaps even more fundamental than that.
The difference between physical theory and actual mature product is also large. The 1907 man may know about batteries, radio-waves, perhaps even digital encoding of information and display-technology (though that's pushing it!), but there's a long way from having heard of batteries and radios, and to a modern mobile-phone. Beside "it's a hand-held battery-powered telephone that works by radio" doesn't even *begin* to cover what a modern mobile phone actually does. (though that explanation may be sufficient to move it from "magick" to "insanely high-tech")
It's not possible to write totally unambigously. Furthermore, trying to hard, by explicitly stating things which are common sense makes the situation *worse* because there's a tendency to be more loopholes in 10000-word laws than in 1000-word laws. Furthermore increased complexity of law benefits those with the most resources, because they're the ones with the most hope of finding and understanding every last detail.
No. Even then the judges don't appreciate it. They may in certain cases have to put up with it for sligthly longer, to guard against the possibility that judgements are overturned on appeal as a result of rushing things.
Still, willfully ignoring the spirit of law or the orders of the judge, while nominally complying with the *letter* of it, is a great way to annoy most judges. It's unlikely to benefit you in the medium term, and not something I'd recommend.
Witness SCO. True, it does take ridicolosuly long times in the US court-system before the shit really starts hitting the fan, and that is regrettable, because it means *stalling* can indeed be effective for literally a *decade* which imho is totally unacceptable.
But inevitably, the shit *will* hit the fan. And when it does, it tends to end up grinding the abuser into very fine dust-particles. SCO will certainly go bust. Only a pity that they don't have more money. As it is, those investing in SCO will (collectively) lose every cent they invested. That is as it should be. Only a pity that didn't happen 5 years ago. It allowed some people to get out with a rest-value, probably some people even got out with a profit, those that sold very soon after the initial filing of the case, before it became obvious how full of crap it is.
Still, the lesson is likely to be instructive. I doubt we'll see repeat-performances soon. We may see a variant where patents are used instead of copyrigths, though.
There are other examples like that, particularily in WW-II there was a lot of cat-and-mouse.
For example, the Allies where capable of reading most of the german encrypted transmissions, but wanted the germans to keep thinking these where secure, otherwise they migth change encryption-system to another more difficult to crack one.
This lead to a lot of operations that must've seemed silly to everyone involved that didn't know or suspect the truth.
Observation-planes where sent to locations where it was *known* that german boats where, with orders saying essentially: "circle close enough that the germans spot you, then return home", so that the germans would believe they where spotted by the planes, rather than the reality -- that the broken codes had told the Allies their precise location and heading
Code-books where *deliberatedly* "lost", in atleast one case officers (who'd been taugth that the code-books where literally life-and-death important not to lose) where forced at gunpoint to "lose" code-books. The reason ? Trough listening in on Enigma-encrypted communications, the allies knew that the germans could already read a certain code. So they wanted an "excuse" to stop using that code. The lost code-books gave that excuse, while giving the germans nothing they didn't already have.
I agree it's not very compelling. That's why I put one "could" argue, and "hypothethically speaking" in there, precisely because I'm not very convinced that there is indeed much harm (if any) of this sort occuring.
In reality, it's more like someone spends a lot of marketing-money and time creating demand for some device with a certain design, thereafter other freeriders copy it for cheap and undercut the original manufacturer.
I'm not convinced this is *negative* for society as a whole, mind you, but it certainly is negative for the affected brand.
Should be most prominent in areas where marketing and/or design are high and actual production-costs are low, relative to the sale-price. And this seems to indeed be the case.
Cosmetics, for example, a typical $100/litre soap (or moisture-cream or whatever) isn't, in content, much different from the product sold for an order of magnitude less. The cosmetics-industry spends almost an order of magnitude more on marketing than they do on product-development. Which mean if you can make a similar product and freeride on someone elses marketing, you can make a tidy profit with little effort.
The likely effect of allowing more similar products -- as long as it is clearly marked as being just that -- would be a decrease in marketing-spendings, and a lowering of cosmetic-spendings overall. Which would be a good thing, actually.
I agree. It is perfectly ok to use cops to put an end to illegal activities. That's (one of) their jobs afterall. Now, some activities which are currently illegal *shouldn't* be, but that's a different kettle entirely.
A problem with current copyrigth-law is that it makes essentially everyone a criminal. Which means the RIAA, and other large copyrigth-holders do essentially have the power to decide who gets punished and who not, according to their own private freely selectable criteria.
Copyrigth-law should be changed so that this is no longer the case. Even just for US-law to be more like Norwegian would be a good start. Here it is explicitly allowed to make copies of copyrigthed material for your own use, and for close friends and family. Which mean you can perfectly legally burn a CD with your girlfriends favourite songs for her, or let her have copies of them on her iPod, or borrow a CD in the library and copy it for your own use.
These are activities that *CANNOT* be prevented without resorting to a police-state anyway. That's a cost *much* too high, even if one where of the opinion that preventing them would be desireable in the first place
On the other hand, I find it perfectly acceptable to punish people who make money selling illegal copies of someone elses creative work. I don't see any reason that needs to be allowed.
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True. But it'd cost them. If you subtract OS-sales from their bottom-line last year, they'd have been in the red. So to be able to do it they would need to cut costs. They could take it from the war-chest offcourse, but no company wants to operate in the red indefinitely.
Furthermore, it's not just the Desktop. They have 2 significant income-centres. One is dominating the desktop, the other is office. Office is similarily hard pressed as Vista, perhaps even more. Dropping Windows atleast has the drawback that most of your programs and games won't work. Dropping Office in favour of an open alternative has neither of those drawbacks.
And MS cannot set the price for Office and Windows to $0. Not the MS we know today anyway. Not with the cost-structure they have presently, or any similar to it. If they did that, they'd burn trough their war-chest at a rate that'd make even that chest (and it's huge!) look short-lived.
True. But this actually adds to Microsofts vulnerability.
We (as in Linux) support a lot of hardware because we ourselves wrote drivers for it. (well, in some cases the manufacturers did, but when the drivers are open source, they are part of "we".
Windows xp supports stuff very poorly -- but is rescued by the fact that the manufacturers themselves release binary blobs that work as drivers.
Which mean we can and will support any and all hardware we support today until the end of time, or more realistically, until nobody cares enough to bother porting the stuff as the kernel changes.
So, Windows-users are at the mercy of manufacturers, which have little incentive for quickly developing high-quality drivers for a piece of hardware they probably neither sell nor produce anymore. -- *they* would much prefer people bougth a *new* scanner/digicam/webcamera/younameit. So, Epson is taking its good time, releasing drivers at *all* 15 months after Vista is released, assuming the announced schedule holds, which I wouldn't assume, really. And that's for a product they used to produce up until 6 months ago. For somewhat older products they don't bother at all.
Microsoft could pick up the slack, start developing and maintaining drivers themselves, just like we do. But it'd cost them. And it ain't done overnigth.
A win for Linux. The new Dell with Ubuntu on it would support all of my wifes gadgets out-of-the-box, Vista supports half of them out-of-the-box, and drivers for the remaining 2 are promised in 8 months. Which ain't very satisfactory. Nor is she inclined to toss away a scanner and digital camera that she is perfectly happy with. None of them are old either, aproximately 1 year.
None of these are deal-breakers, really. And most people will certainly buy the "default" choice, Vista, without really giving it second thougths. But *some* will start thinking.
Linux certainly won't displace Windows on the desktop this year, or the next. But it'll continue doing what it's been doing quietly for years already: growing.
So, if I get you rigth, your passwords will consist of atmost 2 uppercase, atmost 3 numerics, and the rest lowercase.
In 3 positions you choose between 26 characters. In 3 positions you choose between 36 characters. In 2 positions you choose between 52 characters.
This gives you log2(26)*3 + log2(36)*3 + log2(52)*3 bits of entropy, assuming your letters and numbers are genuinely randomly selected (which is probably an unsound assumption, but nevermind) That is 40 bits of entropy.
2**40 tries for a guaranteed brute-force ain't very reassuring in a world where computers are at around 2**30 operations/second.
True, true, one "operation" in computer-sense ain't enough to test one potential password, not even close. But 2**10 seconds is only about 20 minutes, if one is satisfied with cracking your account in a month, one gets about 3000 clock-ticks for each try, which still is not enough, but it's starting to sound threathening. Especially when you consider that multi-core ain't exactly rare anymore, and who says only *one* machine needs to do the brute-forcing.
Realistically, with your choice of characters, your passwords would need to be 2-3 times as long (16-24 characters with 4-6 upper-chars and 6-9 numers) to be secure against a determined (or lucky!) attacker.
See the problem yet ? And note how this problem gets worse every year. Every 4 years you'll need to add another character to all of your passwords, aslong as current trends continue. This very obviously isn't sustainable.
Even if users wheren't morons, passwords are nearing the end of (if not already past) the end of their usefulness.
Brute-force crackers gets stronger all the time. The number of accounts a typical user has grows all the time, and the ability to remember passwords don't. 64 bit keys aren't really secure anymore, and that is a truly-random 8-character password, or a truly random 12-character password consisting of lower UPPER and numeric characters. Could you remember a dozen different passwords of the type Qw4Z7oPlKdfG5 ? Most people can't and won't.
And as I said, 64 bit can be brute-forced in many circumstances. Atleasst 80, preferably 128 would be better. Want to random dozens of truly random 25-character passwords ? This obvioudly ain't a long-term answer...
Atleast the kind of collection that precludes actual use. Collecting unopened beer-cans, so the beer will spoil, is silly and serves no purpose. Saving and taking care of something *without* degrading use is however valuable. It's a good thing there are people in the world who cares for and maintains old (otherwise "junk") cars, planes, boats, paintings, stamps, books, whatever.
It doesn't, in general. There are edge-cases.
For example, most tcp-implementations use slow-start, which mean they will, regardless of latency, start with a small window, and then if that goes trough, gradually increase the window-size until no improvement is experienced anymore.
This makes a huge difference for example if your application transfers many small files, each over its own tcp-connection, which FTP will do but which I'm aware of no other commonly used file-transfer application doing. It's no accident that they use ftp as the example-protocol, while ignoring the simple fix for that case: Make a large zip or tgz-file and transfer that one large file rather than the huge collection of tiny files.
Indeed this fix is so well-known that there are ftp-servers with built in support for it: you can do "get directory.tgz" and the ftp-server will, on the fly, make a tgz and send it to you, instead of the myriad files inside that directory.
The worst though, is, like I mentioned, links that have packet-loss unrelated to congestion. Most tcp-implementations I'm aware of will interpret packet-loss as congestion, and react by throttling back. Which is disastrous if really, the packet-loss is unrelated to congestion. A good heristic for separating these two cases from eachother would indeed help a lot. (potentially several orders of magnitude), but that is a very rare situation. The more common response to links that are inherently packet-lossy is to build in error-correction on lower-levels. Satelite-links, for example, commonly do this. Instead of a 10Mbps link with 1% of all packets getting corrupted you get a 7Mbps link where 0.001% of all packets get corrupted.
For modern tcp-stacks at reasonable speeds and latencies, it shouldn't happen. We certainly had no problems at all of this type when, for example, mirroring Debian transatlantically at 100Mbps. To the contrary, if we hadn't had traffic-prioritizing the single ftp-connection would've degraded other uses of the network for the duration.
Uhm, let me guess, your knowledge of TCP is based on Trumpet Winsock for Windows 3.11 ?
Modern tcp-stacks most certainly scale the window and certainly don't "mis-interpret" high latency as congestion. (they do however interpret high packet-loss as congestion, which is a reasonable guesstimate most of the time, but *DOES* break down on links that, for example, have a constant packet-loss of a few percent (regardless of traffic-levels)
By "can afford it" I mean that the income is high enough that if you genuinely wanted the thing more than other stuff you could easily live without, you'd be able to buy it, without significantly lowering your overall living-standard.
That doesn't mean you could afford it without sacrificing anything. As you say, many people live close to their financial borders (and would even if those borders where to expand)
But anyone with a $25K+ car *could* buy a $12K item, simply by exchanging the car for one half the value. For example. Anyone who smokes could finance the thing simply by quitting, and so on. Ain't saying people will -- to the contrary, I already said that for 99% it won't be worth it. But they *could* if the really wanted to.
$60K I'd definitely call middle-class. In general, most people can afford to spend about 10% of their income frivolously, a higher percentage if you earn well, and a lower if you are poor, with that ballpark-figure, $12K would only be possible every 2 years for a $60K family. (yes "it depends", it always does !)
Most of the middle-class in any western country *can* affort to spend $12K for any damn thing they please. If it's worth it is another matter entirely. For 99% of the population that's gonna be a no.
Tech tends to fall like a lead-stone in price over time though, can you remember when a simple DVD-player was $3000 ? It's not that many years ago. You know, one of those sucky ones with no network, no divX, no mp3, no jpg, no video-cd compatibility and 10-second lag for layer-changing....
We used to have a $3000 0.8Mpix digital camera at work. Concluding that digital cameras will never appeal to the mass-market based on that would've been the wrong conclusion though....
Oh come of it. It wasn't funny 5 years ago and it certainly isn't now. The population on Slashdot is aproximately equally likely to be in a relationship as any other population of similarily-aged people. Even CmdrTaco himself got married for crying out loud.
We certainly aren't, as you say, yet.
Dropping launch-costs from $50.000/lbs to $500/lbs would however be a very significant step towards *making* us more capable of doing all that stuff. Particularily since one of the first cargoes hoisted on the first space-elevator would probably be: "Space-elevator 2"
If a person requires 100.000kgs of space-station to live in, that's $50million in lifting-costs at Liftports target price. Which makes it impractical for most of us. (but take note: there are individuals paying $20million for a short week-long *visit* to space today!
Visiting would be popular first, long before we ever got real settlers. A week-long visit as a tourist to a space-hotel migth require lifting 250kg of cargo, which would be $125.000 at Liftports target-price. That is expensive, but there are thousands of people who would be able and willing to pay it, just as there are dozens of people who are today trying to get into space at a price-point 2 orders of magnitude higher.
It does. But only the bottom ~15km has significant wind-loads. That is a *very* small part of a 50.000km+ long cable. Thus the cable can be, if needed, strengthended and/or stabilised in this region without it adding much mass to the overall structure.
Yeah. Hookers in zero-g would be quite popular I think. For those *with* a SO, a love-hotel would certainly also be. Seriously though, people demonstrably pay $20 million to visit cramped space-stations today. It's not much of a stretch to assume that the number of people willing to pay would increase if the price fell.
You need to go fast to make the entire thing cost-efficient. The entire point is providing cheaper access to space.
The ribbon has a fixed capacity for carrying cargo, let's say it can carry 10e3 kgs of cargo.
Distance to geosynch is 36000km, so if you where moving at 36km/h you'd need 1000 hours, or about 41.5 days. A naive calculation would mean this allows only 10 launches/year for a total of 10e4 kgs to orbit. Which is no longer cost-effective, it's about what a single saturn-V can lift. Furthermore, if the cargo is humans, it gets worse, because they'll need consumables (food, air etc) for that month, which further cuts back on useful cargo.
Now, in reality it's better than that because gravity decreases as the cargo ascends, by the time the cargo has climbed one earth-radius, the force on the cable is only 1/4th of what it was when the cargo launched.
Still, it doesn't change the basic fact that going twice as fast allows for launching twice as often, which makes it a lot easier to finance the thing.
Their design calls for 200km/h, and a so on the order of a week to orbit.
Climbing vertically alon a tape at 200km/h is nontrivial, especially at a full G, but it gets easier as the cargo gets higher, because gravity decreases.
True. But you can never prove a negative in general, so the fact that you can't disprove God is hardly surprising, and not really indicative of anything.
Sure noise has a strong negative influence on health, this is very well established and not controversial in the least.
Prolonged exposure to noise causes increase in aggression, elevated blood-pressure, increased risk of tinnitus (which again often leads to depression and/or anxiety), and increased risk of heart and circulatory problems, besides the obvious one of hearing-loss if the noise-levels are very high.
Noise in your rest-periods is the most damaging, and sudden unexpected noises are worse than constant ones.
You can trivialize anything if you try hard enough. Mature nanotech is "nothing more than fancy manipulations of matter". Curing HIV requires "nothing more than killing a few virii".
True, computers do not change physics. But that is an unreasonable criteria, *NOTHING* "changes physics". Same goes for your other examples. Computers fail to change the melting-point of iron for the fairly fundamental reason that *nothing* changes the melting-point of iron.
All interesting problems require several puzzle-pieces to be solved. Manned extra-solar missions require a *lot* of puzzle-pieces, modern computers are *CERTAINLY* going to be one of them when/if it happens.
It may be true that advancing is getting harder. But nevertheless we're accelerating.
What period saw the most change in technological capability, in your opinion ? 1700-1799 or 1900-1999 ? I don't think there's even any contest.
Sure, you can argue that this will stop. But then you'll need to explain why. The trend seems the same shorter term. 1977 - 2007 had *much* more change in technological capability than say 1947-1977.
You say "except computational devices", as if that was some minor detail of our technological capability. While infact it's perhaps the most crucial component at all. Machines for dealing with information. I'd say computers are certainly the most significant invention since the engine, perhaps even more fundamental than that.
The difference between physical theory and actual mature product is also large. The 1907 man may know about batteries, radio-waves, perhaps even digital encoding of information and display-technology (though that's pushing it!), but there's a long way from having heard of batteries and radios, and to a modern mobile-phone. Beside "it's a hand-held battery-powered telephone that works by radio" doesn't even *begin* to cover what a modern mobile phone actually does. (though that explanation may be sufficient to move it from "magick" to "insanely high-tech")It's not possible to write totally unambigously. Furthermore, trying to hard, by explicitly stating things which are common sense makes the situation *worse* because there's a tendency to be more loopholes in 10000-word laws than in 1000-word laws. Furthermore increased complexity of law benefits those with the most resources, because they're the ones with the most hope of finding and understanding every last detail.
No. Even then the judges don't appreciate it. They may in certain cases have to put up with it for sligthly longer, to guard against the possibility that judgements are overturned on appeal as a result of rushing things.
Still, willfully ignoring the spirit of law or the orders of the judge, while nominally complying with the *letter* of it, is a great way to annoy most judges. It's unlikely to benefit you in the medium term, and not something I'd recommend.
Witness SCO. True, it does take ridicolosuly long times in the US court-system before the shit really starts hitting the fan, and that is regrettable, because it means *stalling* can indeed be effective for literally a *decade* which imho is totally unacceptable.
But inevitably, the shit *will* hit the fan. And when it does, it tends to end up grinding the abuser into very fine dust-particles. SCO will certainly go bust. Only a pity that they don't have more money. As it is, those investing in SCO will (collectively) lose every cent they invested. That is as it should be. Only a pity that didn't happen 5 years ago. It allowed some people to get out with a rest-value, probably some people even got out with a profit, those that sold very soon after the initial filing of the case, before it became obvious how full of crap it is.
Still, the lesson is likely to be instructive. I doubt we'll see repeat-performances soon. We may see a variant where patents are used instead of copyrigths, though.
As a general rule, judges don't appreciate people playing games to obey the *letter* of the law while breaking the spirit of it.
There are other examples like that, particularily in WW-II there was a lot of cat-and-mouse.
For example, the Allies where capable of reading most of the german encrypted transmissions, but wanted the germans to keep thinking these where secure, otherwise they migth change encryption-system to another more difficult to crack one.
This lead to a lot of operations that must've seemed silly to everyone involved that didn't know or suspect the truth.
Observation-planes where sent to locations where it was *known* that german boats where, with orders saying essentially: "circle close enough that the germans spot you, then return home", so that the germans would believe they where spotted by the planes, rather than the reality -- that the broken codes had told the Allies their precise location and heading
Code-books where *deliberatedly* "lost", in atleast one case officers (who'd been taugth that the code-books where literally life-and-death important not to lose) where forced at gunpoint to "lose" code-books. The reason ? Trough listening in on Enigma-encrypted communications, the allies knew that the germans could already read a certain code. So they wanted an "excuse" to stop using that code. The lost code-books gave that excuse, while giving the germans nothing they didn't already have.
I agree it's not very compelling. That's why I put one "could" argue, and "hypothethically speaking" in there, precisely because I'm not very convinced that there is indeed much harm (if any) of this sort occuring.
In reality, it's more like someone spends a lot of marketing-money and time creating demand for some device with a certain design, thereafter other freeriders copy it for cheap and undercut the original manufacturer.
I'm not convinced this is *negative* for society as a whole, mind you, but it certainly is negative for the affected brand.
Should be most prominent in areas where marketing and/or design are high and actual production-costs are low, relative to the sale-price. And this seems to indeed be the case.
Cosmetics, for example, a typical $100/litre soap (or moisture-cream or whatever) isn't, in content, much different from the product sold for an order of magnitude less. The cosmetics-industry spends almost an order of magnitude more on marketing than they do on product-development. Which mean if you can make a similar product and freeride on someone elses marketing, you can make a tidy profit with little effort.
The likely effect of allowing more similar products -- as long as it is clearly marked as being just that -- would be a decrease in marketing-spendings, and a lowering of cosmetic-spendings overall. Which would be a good thing, actually.
I agree. It is perfectly ok to use cops to put an end to illegal activities. That's (one of) their jobs afterall. Now, some activities which are currently illegal *shouldn't* be, but that's a different kettle entirely.
A problem with current copyrigth-law is that it makes essentially everyone a criminal. Which means the RIAA, and other large copyrigth-holders do essentially have the power to decide who gets punished and who not, according to their own private freely selectable criteria.
Copyrigth-law should be changed so that this is no longer the case. Even just for US-law to be more like Norwegian would be a good start. Here it is explicitly allowed to make copies of copyrigthed material for your own use, and for close friends and family. Which mean you can perfectly legally burn a CD with your girlfriends favourite songs for her, or let her have copies of them on her iPod, or borrow a CD in the library and copy it for your own use.
These are activities that *CANNOT* be prevented without resorting to a police-state anyway. That's a cost *much* too high, even if one where of the opinion that preventing them would be desireable in the first place
On the other hand, I find it perfectly acceptable to punish people who make money selling illegal copies of someone elses creative work. I don't see any reason that needs to be allowed.