Anecdotes like that describe EXACTLY why I don't live in that area. I like a somewhat more rural life, even if my effective wage is a lot lower than it could be, my cell doesn't work everywhere, and I can't get Chinese takeout at 2AM.:)
I hear ya, though. I guess it would be a safety issue. But not as severe as, say, all the lights going dark or staying on a particular setting or something.
The lights are still working autonomously, and probably become quickly irrelevant as people ignore the "you shouldn't pull into an intersection, even with a green light, unless there's enough room for you on the other side of it" rule.
At least once gridlock happens, the cars aren't moving fast enough for anyone (at least anyone who remains inside a car) to be seriously hurt. (grin)
My mention of "weather" as one of the obstacles to overcome had more to do with the parameters you need to solve to design a cable. If getting a cable wet a few hundred times a year is going to cause a problem with the chosen material, then you'd best not plan the first 100,000 feet or so of it with that material. My point was that removing the requirement of superconductivity made the rest of the problems easier to work with, though still FAR beyond material science as we know it today.
And, yes, there are also issues with "weather" in terms of wind/rain/etc causing stresses on the climbing module (elevator car) as well. Those risks can be mitigated, as you say, by simply not using the elevator on bad days. But the cable's gonna be hanging out there 24/7 for hopefully a VERY long time.
Wouldn't matter. The traffic lights were working fine, the problem was there was no central system that could take a larger view of traffic and sense that turning a light green a block away could prevent a gridlock issue at a specific intersection. Intelligent traffic control takes traffic that is approaching a heavily congested area and intentionally slows it down, while freeing up cars to LEAVE congested areas more quickly. They help prevent gridlock by making sure that once a specific light turns green you can actually drive through the intersection, and turns the light red BEFORE cars get caught in the middle of an intersection.
You see this kind of design a lot in well-designed roads in smaller towns. Busy towns will tend to have lots of stop signs coming in to town, but try to reduce stop signs when leaving town. The idea is to keep inbound traffic from filling the town faster than departing cars can leave by making sure cars that are leaving can do so as quickly as possible, while cars wanting to come in will be intentionally slowed down.
A meter maid has no more information about traffic flow at adjacent intersections than an autonomous single light would.
That 0.04% still represents a good chunk of distance to be covered. A fall is still fatal even if only the lower 0.0001% of the cable fails due to weather.
Now, maybe they'll have a different material near the bottom, one that is more weather-proof where the stuff further up is more radiation-proof. But you've still got to solve for the WHOLE cable. 99.96% of a complete cable is precisely as useful as 0%
Well, I'm not a scientist but several obvious ones come to mind.
For starters, you are going to have resistance greater than air through all but superconductive materials. Second, you're going to have trouble grounding it unless you have two cables, then you're going to need to keep the cables separated or shield them which means two discrete materials. Third, you'll have the issue of voltage surges through (as you've stated in your post) lightning strikes, static electricity, etc - very bad for electric motors.
Plus, they haven't sorted the cable part yet. The power problem is trivial compared to the cable, so the ideal here would be to free the cable designers of as many requirements as possible. "Strong enough to hold a crapload of miles of its own weight PLUS a payload and manage the various issues like wind, long-term exposure to UV/sunlight, rain, errant airliners, and vacuum long-term" is already a tall order beyond our technological limits by a pretty ridiculous margin at the moment. It's probably best not to limit the possible solutions to "also has to be a superconductor with separately superconducting ground line" if we can solve the power problem another way and just let the cable geniuses focus on the "supports its own weight, etc" problem.
Maybe someone will come up with a shielded carbon nanotube superconductor that also happens to be incredibly strong.
At that point, all this time spent on power transmission still has other applications anyway, so it's not really wasted.
You'd employ exactly the same technology you'd use to lower the empty elevator car normally. Probably turn the electric motor into a regenerative brake and beam the power back to Earth for storage to use on the next mission, or something.
Actually, this company isn't developing propulsion. Propulsion is an electric motor. This company is demonstrating energy transmission. LaserMotive is even skeptical about the concept of a space elevator, but participated because they wanted prize money to fund further development of energy transmission for more, shall we say, earthly profitable pursuits.
Long before this could be used for an elevator (due to the lack of "baloneyum" as someone else put it), this technology will probably be perfected and in use for getting power to areas where cables aren't practical, and even under very controlled circumstances maybe even beaming power down from orbit or other interesting applications that have been talked about since the 60s or earlier.
Plus, frikkin' satellites, with frikkin' death ray laser beams!
If I understand it, I have significant access to my friends' data on Facebook. When *I* sign up for an account, the app not only has access to my data, but any and all data I have access to. So you might not have given access to your data, but a friend might.
Plus, doesn't Facebook use Flash on a few of their ads? With the old crossdomain setting, Facebook's advertisers could also have gained access to your data.
Don't post anything on Facebook you aren't comfortable telling your friends, your boss, your wife, or any random stranger.
Possibly. MythBusters did a test where they took relatively large but not ungainly array of flat mirrors and rigged them into a parabolic array, and set some dry wood on fire with it. I think it involved a few dozen small mirrors, but they were all pre-calibrated to aim at the same point.
Assuming bright sunlight approximately straight up in the sky (so everyone in the audience has access to some sunlight they can aim), Clarke's story might be considered "plausible" on the MythBusters scale. If you have 50,000 fans in the stadium all with 4-square-foot mirrors (2' x 2'), you'd only need a few hundred of them, maybe a thousand, to aim accurately in order to cause the ref some serious harm. Even if only 5% of your audience could guess at their aim with any level of accuracy, I think your ref would have a pretty tough time of it. Issue welding goggles with the mirrors, and it's probably barbecue time.
Hmm, I ought to send that one in. Seeing them try to scale this one up could be fun.
400W is only the test unit, and probably had almost no payload. A mirror capable of generating 400W of focused light is probably going to be too heavy for the small test platform they were testing with.
The purpose of this was a scale test of a proposed much larger (and therefore useful) elevator box that could carry some payload, and that would need to be powered by a necessarily much larger ground-based laser.
If and when this ever reaches the point where they are talking about putting people or useful cargo onboard, the only thing I'm unclear on (because I don't have the time or the knowledge to do all the maths) is whether we'd be talking in megawatts or gigawatts. Probably megawatts.
It's probable that any mirror large enough to focus sunlight in useful quantities to raise a payload would be too large to be raised as part of that payload, regardless of scale. Even if it's possible, it cuts severely into theoretical payload. Leave the mirrors on the ground and you can use all that saved weight for payload.
Small methane processing plant = more energy for the motors. Remember to load up on beans before you go onboard, and fit your flatulence intercept unit on your butt before you close up your spacesuit.
Well, they're basing the tests on a helicopter, so the beam is relatively small. So for the test, they could easily beam the power from somewhere other than the anchor point. Having the beam come from a different direction wouldn't invalidate the important concept of "can beam power from ground to power the platform".
Not to mention, this test is based on a laser capable of delivering 400 watts of power to the target using infrared. Your average aluminum helicopter skin isn't going to vaporize under those conditions. Heck, I doubt you'd even scorch the paint.
In the "real world" use of this, the suspension unit is going to be much further away and specifically designed with protective shielding. In fact, the endpoint might have solar panels pointed back to Earth so any "stray" IR could be caught and used at the station - though it's far more likely they'd have a solar panel up there, too, and beam IR down to the elevator once it reaches a certain point and the beam from Earth starts dissipating too much.
I disagree. The anti-piracy group has a much larger bribe/payola budget than the conservative christian groups.
Now, maybe kiddie porn will go before piracy, because "think of the chilluns" can always get a bill passed and they'll have some precedents to make an anti-piracy one easy to pa$$ after that. But regular consenting-adult porn will be pretty far down the list of priorities because there's not as much immediate profit in it.
Unfortunately, a lot of people don't understand that "the internet is not.com". I run a couple of web sites for organizations, and I have to get the.com as well as the.org for any domains, because 20-30% of visitors come to the.com one, and if I don't snag the.com immediately I'll get complaints that the organization I support is a front for porn or ad sites.
I once tried to give out a.org address to someone, and they asked (I am not making this up), "so that's xyz dot org dot com?" - I finally gave up and made it a habit to grab the.org AND.com for any org I set up.
PS: annualcreditreport.gov does work. It redirects to the FTC, which has links to annualcreditreport.com. Annualcreditreport.com is a non-Governmental organization, set up in response to demands from the government that consumers get annual free access to their credit reports. So giving them a.gov URL would be inappropriate.
Freecreditreport.com, on the other hand, belongs to consumerinfo.com, and is a pay-for site that is desperately trying to pretend to be the FTC-mandated free credit check service, but is in fact a "free trial with automatic renewal at $15 a month after seven days" service. As with many such services, good luck canceling it before you get whacked $15 a month for the rest of your life.
And, of course, you can't stop such a service by non-payment. I mean, after all, it's run by Experian. Imagine what your credit report would look like if you tried to stop a payment to a credit reporting agency. Might as well slash your wrists now and save the agony.
I saw that. And, no, it isn't cheap. But if you're in the market for a GPS unit it isn't a HUGE leap up.
The Astro is $500 on Amazon and a GPSMap without the dog thingie is in the $300-350 range, so you're talking about a $100-150 markup for the dog thingie and the extra receiving gear and software in the base unit.
I honestly don't know how widespread they are. For all I know, all 50 states and most of Canada have them. I've never really noticed them when I travel, but then again I rarely drive in such a manner that I'd have reason to (grin).
Looking at Wikipedia, though, it looks like they are in pretty broad use, which is a good thing.
The only thing that stinks about adoption of them on any kind of secondary road is it pretty much eliminates any sort of safe lane for bicycling. So, for example, on Route 1 they would be nice for keeping cars in-lane, but they would take up most of the breakdown lane on my commute and I'd have to ride in the road rather than in the side lane. On a 50MPH narrow 2-lane, that's no fun.
ComCast equipment staying up during a power hit? (sound of long, sustained laughter) Whooh, thanks. I needed that. Laughter really is the best medicine.
Sorry, I have all my gear on a UPS but when we get a power hit I have to wait at least 15 minutes, then call ComCast's "automated attendant" on my cell phone and browse through all the loverly options until I get a "send a wakeup signal to your cable modem" and take that option.
I've never had that problem, but I've drifted over a couple of times for other reasons (another driver cutting into my lane without seeing me, debris in my lane, pulling over early to slow down for a particularly short offramp, etc). And, lemmetellya, those things get your attention in a HURRY.
They also cut them all the way across the road if there's a particularly nasty curve in construction or something ahead, usually in a group of three. "BRAAAP! BRAAAP! BRAAAP!" and you know "something very unusual is immediately ahead of me, I'd better slow the hell down and get my squinty eyeballs at 12 o'clock".
They aren't a panacea, but they are easy and cheap to implement, and they seem effective at alleviating driver inattention during one of the early warning signs of it.
Eliminate "liability insurance" entirely. If you are found at fault, YOU pay for all damages out of your own pocket, distracted or not. That would help with not only distracted drivers, but attentive-but-dangerous activities like tailgating, aggressive lane changes, etc. No deductibles, no premiums to worry about, just pay for the damage you do out of your own pocket.
Slashdot Mirror
Anecdotes like that describe EXACTLY why I don't live in that area. I like a somewhat more rural life, even if my effective wage is a lot lower than it could be, my cell doesn't work everywhere, and I can't get Chinese takeout at 2AM. :)
I hear ya, though. I guess it would be a safety issue. But not as severe as, say, all the lights going dark or staying on a particular setting or something.
The lights are still working autonomously, and probably become quickly irrelevant as people ignore the "you shouldn't pull into an intersection, even with a green light, unless there's enough room for you on the other side of it" rule.
At least once gridlock happens, the cars aren't moving fast enough for anyone (at least anyone who remains inside a car) to be seriously hurt. (grin)
OK, then how do we attach a new end to the cable?
My mention of "weather" as one of the obstacles to overcome had more to do with the parameters you need to solve to design a cable. If getting a cable wet a few hundred times a year is going to cause a problem with the chosen material, then you'd best not plan the first 100,000 feet or so of it with that material. My point was that removing the requirement of superconductivity made the rest of the problems easier to work with, though still FAR beyond material science as we know it today.
And, yes, there are also issues with "weather" in terms of wind/rain/etc causing stresses on the climbing module (elevator car) as well. Those risks can be mitigated, as you say, by simply not using the elevator on bad days. But the cable's gonna be hanging out there 24/7 for hopefully a VERY long time.
Right. A failure of this system is not an issue of safety, just of horrible, horrible inconvenience.
Wouldn't matter. The traffic lights were working fine, the problem was there was no central system that could take a larger view of traffic and sense that turning a light green a block away could prevent a gridlock issue at a specific intersection. Intelligent traffic control takes traffic that is approaching a heavily congested area and intentionally slows it down, while freeing up cars to LEAVE congested areas more quickly. They help prevent gridlock by making sure that once a specific light turns green you can actually drive through the intersection, and turns the light red BEFORE cars get caught in the middle of an intersection.
You see this kind of design a lot in well-designed roads in smaller towns. Busy towns will tend to have lots of stop signs coming in to town, but try to reduce stop signs when leaving town. The idea is to keep inbound traffic from filling the town faster than departing cars can leave by making sure cars that are leaving can do so as quickly as possible, while cars wanting to come in will be intentionally slowed down.
A meter maid has no more information about traffic flow at adjacent intersections than an autonomous single light would.
Ummm...
Errr... ... occasionally.
(blushes)
That 0.04% still represents a good chunk of distance to be covered. A fall is still fatal even if only the lower 0.0001% of the cable fails due to weather.
Now, maybe they'll have a different material near the bottom, one that is more weather-proof where the stuff further up is more radiation-proof. But you've still got to solve for the WHOLE cable. 99.96% of a complete cable is precisely as useful as 0%
Well, I'm not a scientist but several obvious ones come to mind.
For starters, you are going to have resistance greater than air through all but superconductive materials. Second, you're going to have trouble grounding it unless you have two cables, then you're going to need to keep the cables separated or shield them which means two discrete materials. Third, you'll have the issue of voltage surges through (as you've stated in your post) lightning strikes, static electricity, etc - very bad for electric motors.
Plus, they haven't sorted the cable part yet. The power problem is trivial compared to the cable, so the ideal here would be to free the cable designers of as many requirements as possible. "Strong enough to hold a crapload of miles of its own weight PLUS a payload and manage the various issues like wind, long-term exposure to UV/sunlight, rain, errant airliners, and vacuum long-term" is already a tall order beyond our technological limits by a pretty ridiculous margin at the moment. It's probably best not to limit the possible solutions to "also has to be a superconductor with separately superconducting ground line" if we can solve the power problem another way and just let the cable geniuses focus on the "supports its own weight, etc" problem.
Maybe someone will come up with a shielded carbon nanotube superconductor that also happens to be incredibly strong.
At that point, all this time spent on power transmission still has other applications anyway, so it's not really wasted.
Compared to riding into space on a rocket? I'll take "giant laser" for 10,000,000,000, Alex.
You'd employ exactly the same technology you'd use to lower the empty elevator car normally. Probably turn the electric motor into a regenerative brake and beam the power back to Earth for storage to use on the next mission, or something.
Actually, this company isn't developing propulsion. Propulsion is an electric motor. This company is demonstrating energy transmission. LaserMotive is even skeptical about the concept of a space elevator, but participated because they wanted prize money to fund further development of energy transmission for more, shall we say, earthly profitable pursuits.
Long before this could be used for an elevator (due to the lack of "baloneyum" as someone else put it), this technology will probably be perfected and in use for getting power to areas where cables aren't practical, and even under very controlled circumstances maybe even beaming power down from orbit or other interesting applications that have been talked about since the 60s or earlier.
Plus, frikkin' satellites, with frikkin' death ray laser beams!
If I understand it, I have significant access to my friends' data on Facebook. When *I* sign up for an account, the app not only has access to my data, but any and all data I have access to. So you might not have given access to your data, but a friend might.
Plus, doesn't Facebook use Flash on a few of their ads? With the old crossdomain setting, Facebook's advertisers could also have gained access to your data.
Don't post anything on Facebook you aren't comfortable telling your friends, your boss, your wife, or any random stranger.
Surely you can't be serious?
True, if I were the helicopter pilot I'd want to be wearing some good sunglasses just in case. ;)
Possibly. MythBusters did a test where they took relatively large but not ungainly array of flat mirrors and rigged them into a parabolic array, and set some dry wood on fire with it. I think it involved a few dozen small mirrors, but they were all pre-calibrated to aim at the same point.
Assuming bright sunlight approximately straight up in the sky (so everyone in the audience has access to some sunlight they can aim), Clarke's story might be considered "plausible" on the MythBusters scale. If you have 50,000 fans in the stadium all with 4-square-foot mirrors (2' x 2'), you'd only need a few hundred of them, maybe a thousand, to aim accurately in order to cause the ref some serious harm. Even if only 5% of your audience could guess at their aim with any level of accuracy, I think your ref would have a pretty tough time of it. Issue welding goggles with the mirrors, and it's probably barbecue time.
Hmm, I ought to send that one in. Seeing them try to scale this one up could be fun.
400W is only the test unit, and probably had almost no payload. A mirror capable of generating 400W of focused light is probably going to be too heavy for the small test platform they were testing with.
The purpose of this was a scale test of a proposed much larger (and therefore useful) elevator box that could carry some payload, and that would need to be powered by a necessarily much larger ground-based laser.
If and when this ever reaches the point where they are talking about putting people or useful cargo onboard, the only thing I'm unclear on (because I don't have the time or the knowledge to do all the maths) is whether we'd be talking in megawatts or gigawatts. Probably megawatts.
It's probable that any mirror large enough to focus sunlight in useful quantities to raise a payload would be too large to be raised as part of that payload, regardless of scale. Even if it's possible, it cuts severely into theoretical payload. Leave the mirrors on the ground and you can use all that saved weight for payload.
Small methane processing plant = more energy for the motors. Remember to load up on beans before you go onboard, and fit your flatulence intercept unit on your butt before you close up your spacesuit.
Well, they're basing the tests on a helicopter, so the beam is relatively small. So for the test, they could easily beam the power from somewhere other than the anchor point. Having the beam come from a different direction wouldn't invalidate the important concept of "can beam power from ground to power the platform".
Not to mention, this test is based on a laser capable of delivering 400 watts of power to the target using infrared. Your average aluminum helicopter skin isn't going to vaporize under those conditions. Heck, I doubt you'd even scorch the paint.
In the "real world" use of this, the suspension unit is going to be much further away and specifically designed with protective shielding. In fact, the endpoint might have solar panels pointed back to Earth so any "stray" IR could be caught and used at the station - though it's far more likely they'd have a solar panel up there, too, and beam IR down to the elevator once it reaches a certain point and the beam from Earth starts dissipating too much.
I disagree. The anti-piracy group has a much larger bribe/payola budget than the conservative christian groups.
Now, maybe kiddie porn will go before piracy, because "think of the chilluns" can always get a bill passed and they'll have some precedents to make an anti-piracy one easy to pa$$ after that. But regular consenting-adult porn will be pretty far down the list of priorities because there's not as much immediate profit in it.
Unfortunately, a lot of people don't understand that "the internet is not .com". I run a couple of web sites for organizations, and I have to get the .com as well as the .org for any domains, because 20-30% of visitors come to the .com one, and if I don't snag the .com immediately I'll get complaints that the organization I support is a front for porn or ad sites.
I once tried to give out a .org address to someone, and they asked (I am not making this up), "so that's xyz dot org dot com?" - I finally gave up and made it a habit to grab the .org AND .com for any org I set up.
PS: annualcreditreport.gov does work. It redirects to the FTC, which has links to annualcreditreport.com. Annualcreditreport.com is a non-Governmental organization, set up in response to demands from the government that consumers get annual free access to their credit reports. So giving them a .gov URL would be inappropriate.
Freecreditreport.com, on the other hand, belongs to consumerinfo.com, and is a pay-for site that is desperately trying to pretend to be the FTC-mandated free credit check service, but is in fact a "free trial with automatic renewal at $15 a month after seven days" service. As with many such services, good luck canceling it before you get whacked $15 a month for the rest of your life.
And, of course, you can't stop such a service by non-payment. I mean, after all, it's run by Experian. Imagine what your credit report would look like if you tried to stop a payment to a credit reporting agency. Might as well slash your wrists now and save the agony.
If they're trying to protect us from criminals and scammers, wouldn't BLOCKING .gov be a better solution? (snare drum)
I saw that. And, no, it isn't cheap. But if you're in the market for a GPS unit it isn't a HUGE leap up.
The Astro is $500 on Amazon and a GPSMap without the dog thingie is in the $300-350 range, so you're talking about a $100-150 markup for the dog thingie and the extra receiving gear and software in the base unit.
I honestly don't know how widespread they are. For all I know, all 50 states and most of Canada have them. I've never really noticed them when I travel, but then again I rarely drive in such a manner that I'd have reason to (grin).
Looking at Wikipedia, though, it looks like they are in pretty broad use, which is a good thing.
The only thing that stinks about adoption of them on any kind of secondary road is it pretty much eliminates any sort of safe lane for bicycling. So, for example, on Route 1 they would be nice for keeping cars in-lane, but they would take up most of the breakdown lane on my commute and I'd have to ride in the road rather than in the side lane. On a 50MPH narrow 2-lane, that's no fun.
ComCast equipment staying up during a power hit? (sound of long, sustained laughter) Whooh, thanks. I needed that. Laughter really is the best medicine.
Sorry, I have all my gear on a UPS but when we get a power hit I have to wait at least 15 minutes, then call ComCast's "automated attendant" on my cell phone and browse through all the loverly options until I get a "send a wakeup signal to your cable modem" and take that option.
I've never had that problem, but I've drifted over a couple of times for other reasons (another driver cutting into my lane without seeing me, debris in my lane, pulling over early to slow down for a particularly short offramp, etc). And, lemmetellya, those things get your attention in a HURRY.
They also cut them all the way across the road if there's a particularly nasty curve in construction or something ahead, usually in a group of three. "BRAAAP! BRAAAP! BRAAAP!" and you know "something very unusual is immediately ahead of me, I'd better slow the hell down and get my squinty eyeballs at 12 o'clock".
They aren't a panacea, but they are easy and cheap to implement, and they seem effective at alleviating driver inattention during one of the early warning signs of it.
Eliminate "liability insurance" entirely. If you are found at fault, YOU pay for all damages out of your own pocket, distracted or not. That would help with not only distracted drivers, but attentive-but-dangerous activities like tailgating, aggressive lane changes, etc. No deductibles, no premiums to worry about, just pay for the damage you do out of your own pocket.