Well sure, but the elevator's got something to cling to and draw power from. You could use simple electrical power generated from ground stations to move it up and down at any rate it chooses. Compare that to a rocket which has very real requirements in power and thrust which must be delivered on demand in amazing quantities and at speeds that defy the imagination and, just to top it all off, it must carry onboard all the equipment needed to generate said propulsion. It's much easier to scale a rock climbing wall with ropes than to use your latent telekinetic powers to levitate to the top, no?
That said, it's a very germane question. In fact, I don't think I've ever actually seen designs for just how a beanstalk elevator would work. Must go look for this now...
If someone annoys you, you take the tailings from your cheap iron ore, make iron balls the size of an the Arc de Triomphe, and drop them on their heads for a while
I believe it's referred to as 'kinetic bombardment'. No need for warheads or other explosive silliness!
I think you pack a really big spool of (very) thin nanotubes onto a vehicle built just for this mission. One end is anchored at the ground, probably with a lot of slack just in case. Now, this rocket will be wierd compared to other lauches. It will basically have to haul ass out to twice geosynchronous orbit (minus a bit; I imagine the rocket itself would be used as the first counterweight), not spending any time in LEO. Once there, the whole thing is in a stable orbit that doesn't move much in relation to the ground. Objects in GEO have the same angular velocity that they do on the ground despite having a much higher linear velocity. _Then_ they can use it to bootstrap thicker and heavier cables until it can support real cargoes.
The alternative is to build it in space and then, again starting with thin guide cables lowered down in the first place, pull it down into the correct orbit. This way is probably safer, faster, and more reliable, but it requires an existing industry in space. Which is just the sort of thing the elevator would let us do.
Believe it or not, that's basically the plan. They'd start with as thin a cable as possible (think human-hair thickness) and, once it's in a stable orbit, start using it to hoist thicker and thicker cables up to the point where it can actually carry payloads. Though I think they'd keep the cable on board the rocket and let it out rather than keep it on the ground and hoist it up.
Firstly, manned missions have been stalled because it costs $10,000 to $20,000 to put a single pound in orbit and people require an awful lot of support to go with them. Secondly, LEO is indeed the starting point for getting anywhere else. The Apollo approach of sending up the entire voyage from the ground and back in one module will never work for anything bigger. You have to send up parts and assemble them in space. Thirdly, pure exploration we can mostly do with automated probes. It's nice and informative, but not our goal, which is getting large populations of human beings off this rock. Be it colonizing other planets, space habitats, mining asteroids and comets, or whatever.
Exactly. The damage done by a broken orbital elevator depends almost entirely on where the break occurs. Red Mars had such a terrifically destructive event becuase A) the thing was far heavier than anyone is planning for use here and B) it was cut on the far side of its center of mass. Orbital mechanics dictated that it would go nowhere but down. If the thing had been broken on the other end of its center of mass, then (barring the piece that was severed) it would have gone _up_ instead. Which would make it a hassle to reestablish, but not the latitude-destroying event Robinson depicted so well.
The next issue will be how to let the voter verify his vote (in the case of a recount, or contested count) without being identified as having voted one way or another.
MD5 will work here as well. After the person has voted, they are prompted for a phrase. Anything will do; it doesn't have to be unique, just something a few characters long that they can remember. This phrase is combined with the voter registration number and the combination encrypted to form a unique identifier which is then given to the voter. Now you have a receipt identifier that nobody but the person who voted knows is theirs. Furthermore, they can even verify that they haven't been given a duplicate receipt by performing the same encryption on their own later on. Now, all these receipt IDs and the registered votes are made public on a website. If you know your receipt ID or both your voter id (public) and code phrase (private) then you can find your vote and verify it. Since nobody else knows that a given receipt ID is yours (just don't give out your code phrase!), your privacy is secured. Transparency with anonymity.
Well, the attorney doesn't go to jail if he violates some coding protocol whose documentation was made overly obscure, nor is he expected to abide by its rules 24/7. Anyway, it's a bad analogy. Lawyers are not expected to understand code to be allowed to use the computer. The population in general, however, is _supposed_ to be able to understand law, since ignorance is no excuse, right? So there's a real double standard: users of other technical products are not punished by law for failing to understand its every detail.
Actually, I'd say the biggest problem is that nobody ever does a rewrite and clears out the cruft. There's always a ton of 'legacy code', much of which doesn't even remotely apply anymore. Maybe start putting expiration dates on bills? We could at least get rid of some of these "wife must precede her husband in the car by waving big red flags" (which really is on the books; I'll have to look it up to see where) or "no elephants allowed on the street" laws since who would pass it a second time around? Plus really controversial ones would have to be reconsidered all over again. Probably, politicians are such a bunch of schmucks they'd probably just photocopy the old one and sign it as is and get back to writing the latest freedom-sucking PATRIOT Act.
lawyer speak should be a severe sub-set of english to remove any ambiguitie
I said this very thing awhile back. First and foremost, it needs a well-defined order of operations and a decent equivalent of parentheticals. The use of commas to try and do it just doesn't cut the mustard.
Take this little piece of work.
No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained to the age of thirty five years, and been fourteen Years a resident within the United States.
Now there's a terrible ambiguity here. Does the 'at the time of adoption' apply to the 'natural born citizen' or 'citizen of the US' clause? Dunno, all we've got are commas. Since it does in fact apply to the latter, it should look like:
Only [(a natural born citizen) OR (a citizen of the United States at the time of the adoption of this Constitution)] shall be eligible to the office of President. Any person eligible to that office shall [(have attained to the age of thirty five years) AND (been fourteen Years a resident within the United States)].
There you go. An entity or modifier thereof is entirely encompassed within the brackets, leaving no room for games, especially ones with commas whose use actually changes slightly over the years. Throw in some other useful logical operators (especially XOR) and you've got yourself a reliable syntax.
Anyone want to take this to the logical extreme and make a true programming language out of it? It'd give new meaning to "Illegal operation" errors.
Oh dear god. I just visualized a piece of chain mail armor made out of cd's, AOL or otherwise. The mental image was actually pretty cool; anyone ever actually gone and made one?
Considering what I know about what he does for 'work' and paranoid suspicions about what he does for play, I don't think I'll be alone in saying that no amount of either will ever help poor Jack cease to be dull and ignorant as a brick to boot.
This is just about as good. His debate with Lawrence Lessig 2 years ago. He gave the same "I said VCRs would kill the movie industry and you can see that I was right" schpiel then, so it didn't surprise me much now. Everyone I know who's seen it, including certain exceedingly non-technical relatives of mine, came away thinking Valenti was a twit.
I hold the patents on absinthe, tartness, and fondness and your sig is infringing on my USPTO-given right to own everything. I'm also applying for the patent on Justice and, if granted, I will _not_ license it out to the US government. Really though, I doubt anyone will notice the difference.
Two words. Mini-series. The more I think about it, the better this idea gets. You get the best of both worlds (no pun intended) from movies and TV.
The Star Trek universe is quite deep. In 500 years or so of timeline stretching across dozens of planets, races, and empires, there's tons of room for storytelling. Pick some unexplored aspect of Trekdom and make a couple 2-hour shows about it. It's time enough to get indepth with the characters (moreso than in a movie), but not so long that you have to kill the show coming up with the same stupid plots over and over again in 180 friggin episodes. And since the story only lasts a fraction of the time (which you can of course stretch over any period of Trek-time), you're free to do whatever you want, up to and including killing off (permantly!) major characters for no other reason than because it's a good plot device.
I need to start keeping a list, but here's a small sample of ideas. The founding of the Borg Collective, the Dominion, or the Romulan Star Empire; I'm not too fond of these since they wouldn't really involve humans much. But how about the Klingon-Federation wars or the Orion Syndicate? The aftermath of First Contact and the impact of cheap space travel on Earth? How about some of the covert activities of Section 31 since the beginning of the Federation?
On top of that, if food grown from your own compost comprises a significant portion of your diet, then the quantity of artificial compounds being ingested decreases dramatically. A snake that eats its own tail doesn't exactly need to worry about preservatives, right? Food poisoning and blood loss, maybe...
one person consumed the mushrooms, kept the urine (mushrooms make you urinate) and gave the cup for the next to drink
So you could say they all get pissed? And these humanure guys get shit-faced every meal?
Seriously, what is it about human waste that inspires all the wisecracks? We don't get this many even on "Big Dumb Corporation Shoots Itself in Foot Again" articles.
I guess you have to sue Slashdot too, cause of the preferences page too, right?
Dude, what are you talking about? It says right at the top, "This page was generated by a Squadron of Albino Monkeys for Dyolf Knip". See, work for hire, plain and simple. Nothing dynamic about it.
The main download folder, "\Kazaa Lite\My Shared Folder\", is always shared no matter what. At least, I have absolutely no shared folders specified but people can still download from that directory. It's no biggie, I only clear it out or shut it down when I need the upload bandwidth for something else. Besides, it wouldn't be right for me to use P2P and then share nothing.
It is absolutely imperative to remember that just because a plan is blatantly stupid, obviously flawed, miserably doomed to failure from Day One, and altogether likely to accomplish exactly the opposite of its stated goal, there is not a government on this planet that will not happily try it if an organization giving them money swears it'll work.
Whoever said money talks obviously never had any. It doesn't talk, it whispers sweet nothings in your ear, softly, seductively, like the most desirable woman on earth, telling you all the things you really want to hear.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably an order of magnitude longer than it will take for some enterprising geek to break it.
That said, it's a very germane question. In fact, I don't think I've ever actually seen designs for just how a beanstalk elevator would work. Must go look for this now...
Is there a clever mnemonic for remembering the difference between the two? I'm always getting them mixed up and forgetting which one is real.
I believe it's referred to as 'kinetic bombardment'. No need for warheads or other explosive silliness!
The alternative is to build it in space and then, again starting with thin guide cables lowered down in the first place, pull it down into the correct orbit. This way is probably safer, faster, and more reliable, but it requires an existing industry in space. Which is just the sort of thing the elevator would let us do.
Believe it or not, that's basically the plan. They'd start with as thin a cable as possible (think human-hair thickness) and, once it's in a stable orbit, start using it to hoist thicker and thicker cables up to the point where it can actually carry payloads. Though I think they'd keep the cable on board the rocket and let it out rather than keep it on the ground and hoist it up.
Firstly, manned missions have been stalled because it costs $10,000 to $20,000 to put a single pound in orbit and people require an awful lot of support to go with them. Secondly, LEO is indeed the starting point for getting anywhere else. The Apollo approach of sending up the entire voyage from the ground and back in one module will never work for anything bigger. You have to send up parts and assemble them in space. Thirdly, pure exploration we can mostly do with automated probes. It's nice and informative, but not our goal, which is getting large populations of human beings off this rock. Be it colonizing other planets, space habitats, mining asteroids and comets, or whatever.
Exactly. The damage done by a broken orbital elevator depends almost entirely on where the break occurs. Red Mars had such a terrifically destructive event becuase A) the thing was far heavier than anyone is planning for use here and B) it was cut on the far side of its center of mass. Orbital mechanics dictated that it would go nowhere but down. If the thing had been broken on the other end of its center of mass, then (barring the piece that was severed) it would have gone _up_ instead. Which would make it a hassle to reestablish, but not the latitude-destroying event Robinson depicted so well.
Is there any other kind?
MD5 will work here as well. After the person has voted, they are prompted for a phrase. Anything will do; it doesn't have to be unique, just something a few characters long that they can remember. This phrase is combined with the voter registration number and the combination encrypted to form a unique identifier which is then given to the voter. Now you have a receipt identifier that nobody but the person who voted knows is theirs. Furthermore, they can even verify that they haven't been given a duplicate receipt by performing the same encryption on their own later on. Now, all these receipt IDs and the registered votes are made public on a website. If you know your receipt ID or both your voter id (public) and code phrase (private) then you can find your vote and verify it. Since nobody else knows that a given receipt ID is yours (just don't give out your code phrase!), your privacy is secured. Transparency with anonymity.
Actually, I'd say the biggest problem is that nobody ever does a rewrite and clears out the cruft. There's always a ton of 'legacy code', much of which doesn't even remotely apply anymore. Maybe start putting expiration dates on bills? We could at least get rid of some of these "wife must precede her husband in the car by waving big red flags" (which really is on the books; I'll have to look it up to see where) or "no elephants allowed on the street" laws since who would pass it a second time around? Plus really controversial ones would have to be reconsidered all over again. Probably, politicians are such a bunch of schmucks they'd probably just photocopy the old one and sign it as is and get back to writing the latest freedom-sucking PATRIOT Act.
I said this very thing awhile back. First and foremost, it needs a well-defined order of operations and a decent equivalent of parentheticals. The use of commas to try and do it just doesn't cut the mustard.
Take this little piece of work.
No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained to the age of thirty five years, and been fourteen Years a resident within the United States.
Now there's a terrible ambiguity here. Does the 'at the time of adoption' apply to the 'natural born citizen' or 'citizen of the US' clause? Dunno, all we've got are commas. Since it does in fact apply to the latter, it should look like:
Only [(a natural born citizen) OR (a citizen of the United States at the time of the adoption of this Constitution)] shall be eligible to the office of President. Any person eligible to that office shall [(have attained to the age of thirty five years) AND (been fourteen Years a resident within the United States)].
There you go. An entity or modifier thereof is entirely encompassed within the brackets, leaving no room for games, especially ones with commas whose use actually changes slightly over the years. Throw in some other useful logical operators (especially XOR) and you've got yourself a reliable syntax.
Anyone want to take this to the logical extreme and make a true programming language out of it? It'd give new meaning to "Illegal operation" errors.
Sure. It is The One. It can change whatever it wants. Can remake the intestines as it sees fit.
Oooh, even better. A "Temporary liberation of freedoms"!
Oh dear god. I just visualized a piece of chain mail armor made out of cd's, AOL or otherwise. The mental image was actually pretty cool; anyone ever actually gone and made one?
Considering what I know about what he does for 'work' and paranoid suspicions about what he does for play, I don't think I'll be alone in saying that no amount of either will ever help poor Jack cease to be dull and ignorant as a brick to boot.
This is just about as good. His debate with Lawrence Lessig 2 years ago. He gave the same "I said VCRs would kill the movie industry and you can see that I was right" schpiel then, so it didn't surprise me much now. Everyone I know who's seen it, including certain exceedingly non-technical relatives of mine, came away thinking Valenti was a twit.
I hold the patents on absinthe, tartness, and fondness and your sig is infringing on my USPTO-given right to own everything. I'm also applying for the patent on Justice and, if granted, I will _not_ license it out to the US government. Really though, I doubt anyone will notice the difference.
The Star Trek universe is quite deep. In 500 years or so of timeline stretching across dozens of planets, races, and empires, there's tons of room for storytelling. Pick some unexplored aspect of Trekdom and make a couple 2-hour shows about it. It's time enough to get indepth with the characters (moreso than in a movie), but not so long that you have to kill the show coming up with the same stupid plots over and over again in 180 friggin episodes. And since the story only lasts a fraction of the time (which you can of course stretch over any period of Trek-time), you're free to do whatever you want, up to and including killing off (permantly!) major characters for no other reason than because it's a good plot device.
I need to start keeping a list, but here's a small sample of ideas. The founding of the Borg Collective, the Dominion, or the Romulan Star Empire; I'm not too fond of these since they wouldn't really involve humans much. But how about the Klingon-Federation wars or the Orion Syndicate? The aftermath of First Contact and the impact of cheap space travel on Earth? How about some of the covert activities of Section 31 since the beginning of the Federation?
On top of that, if food grown from your own compost comprises a significant portion of your diet, then the quantity of artificial compounds being ingested decreases dramatically. A snake that eats its own tail doesn't exactly need to worry about preservatives, right? Food poisoning and blood loss, maybe...
So you could say they all get pissed? And these humanure guys get shit-faced every meal?
Seriously, what is it about human waste that inspires all the wisecracks? We don't get this many even on "Big Dumb Corporation Shoots Itself in Foot Again" articles.
You named your hamster Bubba? Damn, I thought I was the only one who'd ever done that. We'll see how dedicated you are if you name the next one Spike.
Dude, what are you talking about? It says right at the top, "This page was generated by a Squadron of Albino Monkeys for Dyolf Knip". See, work for hire, plain and simple. Nothing dynamic about it.
The main download folder, "\Kazaa Lite\My Shared Folder\", is always shared no matter what. At least, I have absolutely no shared folders specified but people can still download from that directory. It's no biggie, I only clear it out or shut it down when I need the upload bandwidth for something else. Besides, it wouldn't be right for me to use P2P and then share nothing.
Whoever said money talks obviously never had any. It doesn't talk, it whispers sweet nothings in your ear, softly, seductively, like the most desirable woman on earth, telling you all the things you really want to hear.