It's mainly a mindset thing. Right now there is an illusion that it costs billions of dollars and huge corporations to do anything in space.
That's probably not true. Check out Space X for example. Or Armadillo. The illusion needs shattering.
There's nothing inherently expensive about space (the fuel costs for putting something into space are under $50 per kg of payload for example)- it's just that right now there are so few launches that it's cheapest to throw the whole rocket away after each launch. Because it's so expensive, practically nobody goes. Catch 22.
The point is not that the spammers can't send spam if you tell them not to; the point is that if they do it then you should be able to forward the email to the authorities and they should get stomped by law enforcement.
There seems to be a huge confusion in this thread between whitelisting, opt-in, opt-out etc. etc.
Noteably, whitelisting is a special form of opt-in, but opt-in is not whitelisting. (All lions are cats, but not all cats are lions).
There is little to choose between opt-in and opt-out in general, but some examples of opt-out are spectacularly stupid; as we shall soon see with the new American spam laws...
Opt-in only is the most retarded idea I've ever heard for the problem of spam aside from the email tax (buhahahahaha). It's throwing out the baby, the bathwater, and a whole bunch of other shit to solve a comparably minor problem.
What we have here is a failure to communicate.
Opt-in is the general name for any scheme where you have to express a positive preference for any class, source or type of email you can receive. It does NOT mean that you have to say that you only allow mail from a small shortlist of people; although that is one specific, narrow, and not very useful form of opt-in.
Incidentally, your posting doesn't actually include any useful definition of 'legitimate email'; so I am unable to say how 'good' your definition actually is, unless you think that 'job offers' are the only form of acceptable unsolicited email. Hardly a general rule I would have said.
I don't think you should count on space elevators yet though. The materials to build them don't currently exist, and there are lots of potential problems, they may never be practical.
The underlying costs of rocketry are very low; the fuel costs are below $50/kg (if you stick to hydrocarbon/LOX fuel). Currently the low costs are masked behind the incredibly low launch rate. The low launch rate means that currently expendable rockets are the cheapest way to go into space. The partly reusable Space Shuttle is no cheaper, because of similar reasons. The market size does not currently support fully reusable vehicles.
Still, as (if) the launch rate goes up then the costs of rocketry will gradually begin to approach the cost of the fuel; as is currently happening in the airline business.
It's tempting to think that a new technology like space elevators will solve all of the problems. However, elevators have limited life, tend to be cut by micrometeorites and space junk and are going to be more expensive than rockets to initially construct for the foreseeable future- but may get rapidly cheaper. Initially, the Space Elevator is going to be, surprisingly, little cheaper than rocketry due to the high construction costs; even if somebody works out how to actually build them.
It's obvious that spamsters will attempt to abuse any system that allows email from strangers.
More generally. Spammers will attempt to abuse any system. Period.
You're missing the point I make though. I'm really saying that 'association' is such a vague concept as to be completely without utility as a way of deciding whether a mail is spam or not.
Your examples are perfectly valid cases in which people contacted you out of the blue, but you seem to be thinking that my position is pro opt-in. I neither think opt-in nor opt-out has any merit on its own.
My position is that banning of bulk unsolicited email is required. Email that is solicited, or is not bulk does not require restrictions.
I would define legitimate email as email from someone that has personal knowledge of you and wants to communicate something to you.
Knowing somebodies name or email address is personal knowledge of them. Having personal intent to contact someone doesn't preclude them wanting to send them commercial advertisements.
In other words, you are not just a random address in a database.
And you would prove this how?
Could be a potential employer
Ok, so spam for head hunting purposes is Ok? No. Rubbish definition.
Opt-in or opt-out is irrelevant. Spam is not about that; it's a complete red-herring.
It's about people sending mail to millions of people, without the recipients being able to express a general preference at all.
I mean I get maybe 80-200 pieces of spam a day; but I bet you anything if I started to indicate my preference to not get it, by replying to it or clicking on the opt-out, I'd get even more spam. In practice that means I don't have any way of specifying it at all.
Don't you want to be able to receive legitimate e-mail from people you haven't met yet?
Define 'legitimate' and I will tell you. Actually, don't bother, I can tell that your definition would almost certainly suck.
Perhaps someone wants to write you a note about your web site. Or maybe someone read an article that you wrote and would like to discuss it. Or maybe an old friend from high school wants to send you an e-mail out of the blue.
Perhaps this 'someone' who wants to write a note about my website found it via automated search and wants to send me mail about this amazing new product they have 'discovered'? This 'old friend' suddenly wants to send me an e-mail out 'of the blue'. Uh huh. And how did they find me exactly? How do I know they are who they say the are? Looking online, reading my email, I'm clearly the most popular guy ever! And all of these high school friends of mine, girls wearing hardly any clothes all want to be my friend. Funny that, I went to a single sex school... and it wasn't a high school.
If there was one or more centralised repositories for recording preferences for email, and the spammers actually used it, it wouldn't matter if it was opt-in or opt-out at all. I wouldn't care. The point is that there is no such thing, even if there was the spammers wouldn't use it, and the current pretense that all spam has opt-out is just that, pure pretense.
It seems to me you just haven't got it, you haven't even understood the merest outline of the problem.
Re:Aerospace analysts are always too optimistic
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The Guinness Book of World Records, which is meticulous in verifying records, lists the SR-71 as the Fastest Jet. They have a separate category for the Mig-25, Fastest Combat Jet.
In other words they weren't sure either.
According to this, the SR-71's top speed is over Mach 3.2.
I just checked, it just says over mach 3.0... clearly it's the fastest over long distances.
Its actual top speed is still classified.
Not so much any more. The operating manual limits it to mach 3.2; you should download it and check it out. So far as I know, the highest measured speed of the SR-71 is below that of the Mig-25 foxbat; but the two are very close. Of course, the SR-71 can cruise at mach 3, so over long distance it easily trounces the Mig, but over short distances it seems that the Mig just edges it; by a precious few miles per hour. I think that Guinness didn't know which one was faster, but I'm not aware of any evidence that the SR-71 was actually faster. There are plenty of rumours of course...
Re:Aerospace analysts are always too optimistic
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Neither of those were air-breathing aircraft though.
Ah hem. The MIG-25 used jet engines...
Ok, so it trashed its engines each time it did mach 3.2:-), but nevertherless as I understand it, it just barely holds the record over the SR-71. The difference is that the SR-71 can keep up it's speed for hours; whereas the MIG-25 needs an engine rebuild after a few minutes at those speeds.
The big problem with 'satellite' is that this currently means geosynchronous satellite. That is about 38000km away, which at the speed of light means a round trip ping time of 38000*4 (out to the satellite and back, twice).
That's a about 0.5 seconds on top of what you would normally get with DSL (minimum ping time with DSL is about 20-40 ms).
The bandwidth is fine; but 0.5 seconds is easily enough to be irritating. Still, if you've got nothing else, you'll survive, unless you're trying to play Quake III.
Re:35 min. NY to LA passenger flights? Keep dreami
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They weren't that old though; their airframes were less than half of their estimated maximum lifespan. It was more to do with the fact that there were so few of them because they weren't all that popular in the first place; that was pushing up their maintenance costs- and nobody except British Airways made them pay, so they would have been maintaining them on their own. And after the crash, they suddenly weren't as popular, so even BA couldn't make them pay. If BA itself had been financially stronger they would have ridden it out, but post 911 there was no chance.
Ah hem. Space tourism is already here... you know, Dennis Tito?
Flying cars? Depends what you mean by 'car'- plenty of millionaires run helicopters; as I say depends.
End of Moore's law? We'll see.
Practical fusion energy? Good news on that front! After more than 50 years of it being 50 years away, it's now only 30 years away!
Human capable AI? See Moore's law.
Re:35 min. NY to LA passenger flights? Keep dreami
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Well, the true answer is buried in the accounts of BA, and they refuse to open them enough to prove it, but it sounds plausible; and they claim it made a atleast a couple of tens of million of pounds for them; not super big bucks, but profit.
The reason they gave it up was because Air France weren't able to run it profitably, 911 and the French Concorde crash tanked the airline market in general and the SST market specifically and the manufacturers weren't exactly ecstatic about continuing to have to maintain the aircraft. Just a few too many strikes and you're out.
Re:35 min. NY to LA passenger flights? Keep dreami
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The Concorde went under because no one wanted to pay that kind of transatlantic fare, which meant the plane was always operating in the red.
Actually, BA operated Concorde in the black for more than 15 years. It was the manufactures that took a major bath.
Re:Aerospace analysts are always too optimistic
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The fasted plane ever publically acknowledged, the SR-71 blackbird
Um, actually, the Mig 25 Foxbat was slightly faster, also the X-15 was mach 6...
Isn't that what the US Congress just gave to Iraq?
Yeah, right. In your dreams. Iraq was primarily a play for the Iraqi oil supply.
the elevator could easily be powered from space, where the cost would be zero
How many times can you make the same mistake? Solar panels cost money to buy. Solar panels cost money to launch (even up an elevator). Solar panels wear out. This means that the energy is not free. It may be cheaper, but certainly not cost free.
Carbon is cheap.
Many owners of diamonds would disagree with you.
It's the processing that's expensive, and that can, and will, be made cheaper.
Sure. How much cheaper exactly? Even if it goes down by an order of magnitude, that's still $2 billion for even the seed elevator. That's still atleast as expensive as a launch vehicle, and that's just the seed elevator, very flimsy indeed.
Yeah, but free speech is not unlimited. For example incitement to racial hatred or violence is usually illegal.
Still, in this case I think it's pretty stupid. You're role-playing a gangster. Going around gratuitously killing lots of people is what gangsters do. I mean you can equal well argue that the game promotes dangerous driving or mowing down pedestrians. The cartoon level of violence that the game portrays is hardly different, probably far less graphic than reading a book. And it's not as if Haitians are outrageously picked on in the game, as far as I can recall, pretty much everyone get's topped at one time or another in the game.
Doesn't matter. If you have two systems, one of which has a recurring cost, and one has a one-time upfront cost only, the recurring cost system is going to lose, in the long run.
Not necessarily. It depends, quite a bit on all kinds of things. For example, a launch vehicle is going to be cheaper to build in the first place. The recurring costs are only one, small part of the picture.
I don't care if you can say "well, they can get it down to $10/kg" - whatever it is, the space elevator can get it under that. The elevator starts from $0/kg, and adds on the up front cost alone.
I don't care if the elevator per launch costs were to be negative- it still wouldn't necessarily beat launch vehicles.
The energy cost alone is about $10/kg. Then you cannot neglect the amortisation cost of the elevator. The physical structure of an elevator cable looks like it will cost multibillion dollars. The nanotubes are not cheap-currently thousands of dollars per gram. You need 20 tonnes to make even the seed elevator. Further, the elevator has a lifespan- running cars up it will wear it out, over time, there are bound to be maintenance costs, the elevators will be occasionally cut by micrometeorites and space junk (and the estimates are that this will happen often, perhaps every few years.) Also, it takes 2 weeks to get to the top of the cable, a reusable launch vehicle may be able to turn around every day.
You're picking one number, less than 10% of the likely cost, and claiming that because it is lower for space elevators that space elevators will win out. I'm sorry- but your argument is faulty.
Governments give away money all the time. We call them "grants". They don't expect them to be paid back.
Yeah, right, how many multi-billion dollar grants do you know of?
And Brad Edwards "space scientist" (it's amazing what passes for journalism these days) seems well less than sturdy.
Brad Edwards has published very legitimate papers on Space Elevators based on a grant from NASA. I've read them; they are excellent work, and they're freely available on the NASA website; he certainly is a well respected space scientist, I cannot comment on his ex-partner.
Just because it doesn't have wep doesn't quite mean that they're unsecured.
Yes. I once set up a system using VPN- the wireless network was wide open; well, I did have WEP turned on, as if that matters:-)
But cracking wep didn't do you a lot of good, the wireless router plugged straight into a firewall- and it was set up with extremely paranoid filtering rules- nothing, not even DNS, nothing except VPN packets got through that.
The biggest weakness is the users machines- if somebody hacked one of those via the wireless network, and they installed a keystroke recorder, potentially they could record the users VPN password and get in to the protected network that way- however that's true of any VPN client on the internet too, which is generally not considered especially risky. Users were told to employ personal firewalls.
That $500/kg does not come from the recurring cost of launching materials. It comes from the cost of the space elevator.
Yes. In addition what I'm saying is that the up-front cost of a fully reusable space vehicle and a space elevator is about the same.
There's a huge difference.
No. The vast majority of the cost of the rocket comes from the R&D stage of the vehicle; which is a one-time upfront cost. Bending metal is fairly cheap.
You still have to use propellant., which will always cost money, and the only way you get it down to $50/kg is if the market is there to drive economies of scale
No. Look. The typical propellent/payload ratio for a launch vehicle is comfortably under 50:1, usually nearer to 20:1, but let's use 50:1. Let's assume you use hydrocarbon fuel. About 60% of the mass of fuel is LOX- LOX is pennies per pound. Kerosene, perhaps a dollar or two. So the rocket fuel cost is well under $50/kg. That's not a significant fraction of the price. Absolutely no economies of scale are required. Got it?
In other words, the cost goes down over time. Or, it starts off much, much lower if the government doesn't care about getting the money back.
Uh huh. Governments that don't care about money- now we're into science fiction.:-)
Conventional rocketry can only get so cheap, because fundamentally, you're wasting energy.
Irrelevant. For a rocket, the cost of the fuel/energy per kg of payload is astonishingly low, way down at O($10/kg). The current cost of rocketry, O($1000/kg), is due to other things, primarily because of the low launch rate making the rocket itself expensive and making fully reusable rockets too expensive to develop. Really, the cost of rocketry is because of the standing armies of people necessary to launch- the number of people you need doesn't go up much at all as the launch rate goes up; so the cost amortises away very well.
With the space elevator, $50/kg is a joke.
Yes. But not in the way you mean...
All the costs that the NIAC proposal gives ($100/kg) are that high because they are repaying the cost of the elevator.
That figure is old. The last figure I had from Brad Edwards was above $500/kg. It critically depends on the usage rate; just like rockets. You need to repay the huge loan. $100/kg probably assumes 100% usage, but you can't assume 100% usage of the elevator- where's the market?
The space elevator circumvents this because fundamentally, its cost/weight is virtually zero
It's not. The cost of money is not zero. In a fairly real sense both the space elevator and the rocket are currently, in a fairly real sense, bridges to nowhere. How much traffic would you expect?
Slashdot Mirror
That's probably not true. Check out Space X for example. Or Armadillo. The illusion needs shattering.
There's nothing inherently expensive about space (the fuel costs for putting something into space are under $50 per kg of payload for example)- it's just that right now there are so few launches that it's cheapest to throw the whole rocket away after each launch. Because it's so expensive, practically nobody goes. Catch 22.
There seems to be a huge confusion in this thread between whitelisting, opt-in, opt-out etc. etc.
Noteably, whitelisting is a special form of opt-in, but opt-in is not whitelisting. (All lions are cats, but not all cats are lions).
There is little to choose between opt-in and opt-out in general, but some examples of opt-out are spectacularly stupid; as we shall soon see with the new American spam laws...
What we have here is a failure to communicate.
Opt-in is the general name for any scheme where you have to express a positive preference for any class, source or type of email you can receive. It does NOT mean that you have to say that you only allow mail from a small shortlist of people; although that is one specific, narrow, and not very useful form of opt-in.
Incidentally, your posting doesn't actually include any useful definition of 'legitimate email'; so I am unable to say how 'good' your definition actually is, unless you think that 'job offers' are the only form of acceptable unsolicited email. Hardly a general rule I would have said.
The underlying costs of rocketry are very low; the fuel costs are below $50/kg (if you stick to hydrocarbon/LOX fuel). Currently the low costs are masked behind the incredibly low launch rate. The low launch rate means that currently expendable rockets are the cheapest way to go into space. The partly reusable Space Shuttle is no cheaper, because of similar reasons. The market size does not currently support fully reusable vehicles.
Still, as (if) the launch rate goes up then the costs of rocketry will gradually begin to approach the cost of the fuel; as is currently happening in the airline business.
It's tempting to think that a new technology like space elevators will solve all of the problems. However, elevators have limited life, tend to be cut by micrometeorites and space junk and are going to be more expensive than rockets to initially construct for the foreseeable future- but may get rapidly cheaper. Initially, the Space Elevator is going to be, surprisingly, little cheaper than rocketry due to the high construction costs; even if somebody works out how to actually build them.
More generally. Spammers will attempt to abuse any system. Period.
You're missing the point I make though. I'm really saying that 'association' is such a vague concept as to be completely without utility as a way of deciding whether a mail is spam or not.
Your examples are perfectly valid cases in which people contacted you out of the blue, but you seem to be thinking that my position is pro opt-in. I neither think opt-in nor opt-out has any merit on its own.
My position is that banning of bulk unsolicited email is required. Email that is solicited, or is not bulk does not require restrictions.
Knowing somebodies name or email address is personal knowledge of them. Having personal intent to contact someone doesn't preclude them wanting to send them commercial advertisements.
In other words, you are not just a random address in a database.
And you would prove this how?
Could be a potential employer
Ok, so spam for head hunting purposes is Ok? No. Rubbish definition.
It's about people sending mail to millions of people, without the recipients being able to express a general preference at all.
I mean I get maybe 80-200 pieces of spam a day; but I bet you anything if I started to indicate my preference to not get it, by replying to it or clicking on the opt-out, I'd get even more spam. In practice that means I don't have any way of specifying it at all.
Don't you want to be able to receive legitimate e-mail from people you haven't met yet?
Define 'legitimate' and I will tell you. Actually, don't bother, I can tell that your definition would almost certainly suck.
Perhaps someone wants to write you a note about your web site. Or maybe someone read an article that you wrote and would like to discuss it. Or maybe an old friend from high school wants to send you an e-mail out of the blue.
Perhaps this 'someone' who wants to write a note about my website found it via automated search and wants to send me mail about this amazing new product they have 'discovered'? This 'old friend' suddenly wants to send me an e-mail out 'of the blue'. Uh huh. And how did they find me exactly? How do I know they are who they say the are? Looking online, reading my email, I'm clearly the most popular guy ever! And all of these high school friends of mine, girls wearing hardly any clothes all want to be my friend. Funny that, I went to a single sex school... and it wasn't a high school.
If there was one or more centralised repositories for recording preferences for email, and the spammers actually used it, it wouldn't matter if it was opt-in or opt-out at all. I wouldn't care. The point is that there is no such thing, even if there was the spammers wouldn't use it, and the current pretense that all spam has opt-out is just that, pure pretense.
It seems to me you just haven't got it, you haven't even understood the merest outline of the problem.
In other words they weren't sure either.
According to this, the SR-71's top speed is over Mach 3.2.
I just checked, it just says over mach 3.0... clearly it's the fastest over long distances.
Its actual top speed is still classified.
Not so much any more. The operating manual limits it to mach 3.2; you should download it and check it out. So far as I know, the highest measured speed of the SR-71 is below that of the Mig-25 foxbat; but the two are very close. Of course, the SR-71 can cruise at mach 3, so over long distance it easily trounces the Mig, but over short distances it seems that the Mig just edges it; by a precious few miles per hour. I think that Guinness didn't know which one was faster, but I'm not aware of any evidence that the SR-71 was actually faster. There are plenty of rumours of course...
Ah hem. The MIG-25 used jet engines...
Ok, so it trashed its engines each time it did mach 3.2 :-), but nevertherless as I understand it, it just barely holds the record over the SR-71. The difference is that the SR-71 can keep up it's speed for hours; whereas the MIG-25 needs an engine rebuild after a few minutes at those speeds.
That's a about 0.5 seconds on top of what you would normally get with DSL (minimum ping time with DSL is about 20-40 ms).
The bandwidth is fine; but 0.5 seconds is easily enough to be irritating. Still, if you've got nothing else, you'll survive, unless you're trying to play Quake III.
They weren't that old though; their airframes were less than half of their estimated maximum lifespan. It was more to do with the fact that there were so few of them because they weren't all that popular in the first place; that was pushing up their maintenance costs- and nobody except British Airways made them pay, so they would have been maintaining them on their own. And after the crash, they suddenly weren't as popular, so even BA couldn't make them pay. If BA itself had been financially stronger they would have ridden it out, but post 911 there was no chance.
Flying cars? Depends what you mean by 'car'- plenty of millionaires run helicopters; as I say depends.
End of Moore's law? We'll see.
Practical fusion energy? Good news on that front! After more than 50 years of it being 50 years away, it's now only 30 years away!
Human capable AI? See Moore's law.
The reason they gave it up was because Air France weren't able to run it profitably, 911 and the French Concorde crash tanked the airline market in general and the SST market specifically and the manufacturers weren't exactly ecstatic about continuing to have to maintain the aircraft. Just a few too many strikes and you're out.
Actually, BA operated Concorde in the black for more than 15 years. It was the manufactures that took a major bath.
Um, actually, the Mig 25 Foxbat was slightly faster, also the X-15 was mach 6...
Oh well that's ok then :-)
Guaranteed success is assured!
1/2 :-)
1/2 :-(
Yeah, right. In your dreams. Iraq was primarily a play for the Iraqi oil supply.
the elevator could easily be powered from space, where the cost would be zero
How many times can you make the same mistake? Solar panels cost money to buy. Solar panels cost money to launch (even up an elevator). Solar panels wear out. This means that the energy is not free. It may be cheaper, but certainly not cost free.
Carbon is cheap.
Many owners of diamonds would disagree with you.
It's the processing that's expensive, and that can, and will, be made cheaper.
Sure. How much cheaper exactly? Even if it goes down by an order of magnitude, that's still $2 billion for even the seed elevator. That's still atleast as expensive as a launch vehicle, and that's just the seed elevator, very flimsy indeed.
Still, in this case I think it's pretty stupid. You're role-playing a gangster. Going around gratuitously killing lots of people is what gangsters do. I mean you can equal well argue that the game promotes dangerous driving or mowing down pedestrians. The cartoon level of violence that the game portrays is hardly different, probably far less graphic than reading a book. And it's not as if Haitians are outrageously picked on in the game, as far as I can recall, pretty much everyone get's topped at one time or another in the game.
It only allowed VPN packets to flow to one particular VPN server at one specific IP address. The firewall rules were very paranoid.
Not necessarily. It depends, quite a bit on all kinds of things. For example, a launch vehicle is going to be cheaper to build in the first place. The recurring costs are only one, small part of the picture.
I don't care if you can say "well, they can get it down to $10/kg" - whatever it is, the space elevator can get it under that. The elevator starts from $0/kg, and adds on the up front cost alone.
I don't care if the elevator per launch costs were to be negative- it still wouldn't necessarily beat launch vehicles.
The energy cost alone is about $10/kg. Then you cannot neglect the amortisation cost of the elevator. The physical structure of an elevator cable looks like it will cost multibillion dollars. The nanotubes are not cheap-currently thousands of dollars per gram. You need 20 tonnes to make even the seed elevator. Further, the elevator has a lifespan- running cars up it will wear it out, over time, there are bound to be maintenance costs, the elevators will be occasionally cut by micrometeorites and space junk (and the estimates are that this will happen often, perhaps every few years.) Also, it takes 2 weeks to get to the top of the cable, a reusable launch vehicle may be able to turn around every day.
You're picking one number, less than 10% of the likely cost, and claiming that because it is lower for space elevators that space elevators will win out. I'm sorry- but your argument is faulty.
Governments give away money all the time. We call them "grants". They don't expect them to be paid back.
Yeah, right, how many multi-billion dollar grants do you know of?
Brad Edwards has published very legitimate papers on Space Elevators based on a grant from NASA. I've read them; they are excellent work, and they're freely available on the NASA website; he certainly is a well respected space scientist, I cannot comment on his ex-partner.
Yes. I once set up a system using VPN- the wireless network was wide open; well, I did have WEP turned on, as if that matters :-)
But cracking wep didn't do you a lot of good, the wireless router plugged straight into a firewall- and it was set up with extremely paranoid filtering rules- nothing, not even DNS, nothing except VPN packets got through that.
The biggest weakness is the users machines- if somebody hacked one of those via the wireless network, and they installed a keystroke recorder, potentially they could record the users VPN password and get in to the protected network that way- however that's true of any VPN client on the internet too, which is generally not considered especially risky. Users were told to employ personal firewalls.
Yes. In addition what I'm saying is that the up-front cost of a fully reusable space vehicle and a space elevator is about the same.
There's a huge difference.
No. The vast majority of the cost of the rocket comes from the R&D stage of the vehicle; which is a one-time upfront cost. Bending metal is fairly cheap.
You still have to use propellant., which will always cost money, and the only way you get it down to $50/kg is if the market is there to drive economies of scale
No. Look. The typical propellent/payload ratio for a launch vehicle is comfortably under 50:1, usually nearer to 20:1, but let's use 50:1. Let's assume you use hydrocarbon fuel. About 60% of the mass of fuel is LOX- LOX is pennies per pound. Kerosene, perhaps a dollar or two. So the rocket fuel cost is well under $50/kg. That's not a significant fraction of the price. Absolutely no economies of scale are required. Got it?
In other words, the cost goes down over time. Or, it starts off much, much lower if the government doesn't care about getting the money back.
Uh huh. Governments that don't care about money- now we're into science fiction. :-)
Irrelevant. For a rocket, the cost of the fuel/energy per kg of payload is astonishingly low, way down at O($10/kg). The current cost of rocketry, O($1000/kg), is due to other things, primarily because of the low launch rate making the rocket itself expensive and making fully reusable rockets too expensive to develop. Really, the cost of rocketry is because of the standing armies of people necessary to launch- the number of people you need doesn't go up much at all as the launch rate goes up; so the cost amortises away very well.
With the space elevator, $50/kg is a joke.
Yes. But not in the way you mean...
All the costs that the NIAC proposal gives ($100/kg) are that high because they are repaying the cost of the elevator.
That figure is old. The last figure I had from Brad Edwards was above $500/kg. It critically depends on the usage rate; just like rockets. You need to repay the huge loan. $100/kg probably assumes 100% usage, but you can't assume 100% usage of the elevator- where's the market?
The space elevator circumvents this because fundamentally, its cost/weight is virtually zero
It's not. The cost of money is not zero. In a fairly real sense both the space elevator and the rocket are currently, in a fairly real sense, bridges to nowhere. How much traffic would you expect?