HOTOL might have been more cost-effective. The Russian space shuttle almost certainly would have been. The problem with the space shuttle was that false economies were made. Sometimes to save money you have to spend it. The shuttle was under-sized, under-powered and was forced to have dangerous piecemeal boosters for political reasons. By spending the money up-front, you'd have a cheaper, safer, more reliable shuttle which would doubtless still be in production, not scrapped.
It'll be interesting to see how first-stage alternatives go. One option is to use turbine-assisted ramjets, another is to use a ski-jump-assisted ramjet. These would replace some, but not all, of the current first rocket stage. The idea is the same in both cases - provided you can break 400 mph, the ramjet is capable of self-sustained acceleration. Break the sound barrier and it becomes a highly efficient device. Hydrogen-powered ramjets are good up to about mach 6. Not great, sure, but not bad either. Since the weight should be about 1/5th that required by a rocket to reach the same speed, that's a lot more payload you can suddenly carry. Ideally, you'd use a mix of a ramjet and a scramjet to completely replace the first rocket stage, again reducing weight and increasing the payload you can push into orbit.
Looks very much like the description of the alien vessel in Rendezvous with Rama, minus the airlock. If it had had the airlock as well, THAT might have stirred some interest.
I do not believe I am missing the point, since I state that the file sharers show a lack of understanding and that they are responsible for their own follies within reason.
If there is a clearer way I can put this, I'd be happy to try and rephrase.
It does, and the lack of understanding by filesharers doesn't excuse the lack of understanding by moguls or journals any more than the lack of understanding by moguls or journals excuses the lack of understanding by filesharers.
All are responsible for their own follies and all should be called to account for them -- within reason. ($1.5 million to a person who is never going to be capable of paying that isn't reasonable. Suing under-funded junior/primary schools for putting on musicals - a technical violation - is not a terribly ethical solution and reasonable solutions should be looked for.)
I point again to the "one law" thing of neither rich nor poor may sleep under bridges. It's equal but it's not equitable. Technical violations due to situations that are manufactured by moguls (such as low taxes for the rich leading to underfunding of schools and the arts) should be treated differently from violations that are not ultimately the fault of the "victim".
I'm seeing stories in the Washington Post, ABC News, the BBC, CNET, Wired and other sites. Which means yes she has had television and newspaper coverage, as well as coverage in trade journals.
The outrage is because the rules aren't being applied equitably (which is NOT the same as equally). It is unacceptable to allow a publisher to steal material from another but have that same publisher sue others for doing likewise. Freedom has to be a two-way street.
(For those wondering about the difference between equal and equitable, the quotation people usually refer to regarding one law for the rich and another for the poor continues "neither are permitted to steal bread or sleep under bridges". Technically, that is equal. But since the rich do not need to do either, it is not equitable.)
My understanding of copyright law is that the author should have suitable rights to obtain renumeration for their work for a fixed length of time, where "authorship" can include developing a piece, organizing data, etc.
"Fair use" depends on the product. Journals, IIRC, allow you to copy one article or 1/10th of the journal, whichever is shorter. Books, music and videos have much tighter restrictions.
Copyright may be transferred, so authors transfer the rights to the publisher, musicians to the label, and so on. I don't like that system, because it means that the creators often get little or no renumeration whereas the publishers often earn a good deal more. Publishers and labels are also notorious for failing to pay royalties.
J. K. Rowling should, according to the maths, be richer than the Queen of England. According to any actual research on the subject, she has less than a tenth of this. It's still a hell of a lot and it's hard to be too sympathetic to the mega-rich, but we're talking a few hundred million pounds that are "missing, presumed drunk" somewhere in the publishing house. If they can rip off her, given that she's no idiot and has a fair bit of influence, there's nobody alive they can't steal from and get clean away with it.
Given the attitude that appears to actually be necessary in publishing, it is unclear if there is any solution to the corruption that exists.
What is clear to me is that the corruption that does exist makes it impossible to identify what flaws exist in copyright. If the implementation is broken, the correctness of the specification is meaningless. And if the implementation is the only way to evaluate the specification, you have no means of telling what flaws exist in the specification.
Not only is it cheaper, but the longer she creates waves and headlines, the more the rights to the book/film will be worth whether she wins or loses. One appeal wouldn't be worth anything, happens all the time. But at this point, her fight has become rather more unusual, and the extreme variation will doubtless raise a few eyebrows in the publishing world - not because they'd question it, but because underdog stories (especially ones where conspiracy theories can be added by the editors) sell.
I'm wondering if the massive number of changes in amounts awarded will result in someone deciding that the system needs to be fixed.
Bwahahahahahaha! Lawyers and judges get paid for the retrials and appeals, so they've no interest in a system that works the first time. Politicians daren't appear "soft" on crime, even though it's seriously pushing it to call what happened a crime. It will be presented that way by the RIAA if anyone in Congress questions the extreme amounts. And the general public just created a Congress that's too paralyzed to do anything, so even if there was someone brave enough, they can't.
(I won't argue with whether a paralyzed Congress is better or worse than a functional one, but I will argue that being unable to do right is not the same as unwilling to - which is how they are most of the time, admittedly.)
It may be a way, but it is an inferior way. A better system is to maintain neutrality (ie: no bias towards or away from any specific source or destination) but to impose fairness. The most trivial form of fairness is to round-robin between inputs. One input, one packet. And simply rotate round. This ensures that nobody can flood the network (the excess packets would block the sender but nobody else). More advanced forms of fairness involve things like Hierarchical Fair Service Curve (to give everyone equal access) plus Electronic Congestion Notification (forcing the sender to throttle back if network-flooding). Where an ISP is dealing with many lines of varying rates, then Class-Based Queueing is likely the way to go - simply create one class per line and give it a soft limit equal to the bandwidth paid for. That way, users never go below what they bought, but can exploit any unused bandwidth available if it's a quiet time.
The fact is, ISPs have options that don't infringe on neutrality. ISPs choose to infringe on neutrality because they can then sell you something they have no intention of delivering. They can then massively over-subscribe legally. They're not obligated to deliver a damn thing and there is nothing that you can do about it. It's not as if you can switch.
There would be no real benefit in chip fab in space. Once the crystals had formed, they could be brought to Earth with no significant risk of disrupting the wafer - the lattice is more than strong enough.
The costs of building a mining facility on the moon would likely to be cost-prohibitive (the moon is mostly silicates and other very light elements and the gravity would be problematic).
Certain metals on Earth's surface only exist because they existed in asteroids and meteorites - the natural purely terrestrial deposits are all way too deep underground. (Uranium is likely one of those.)
I could see mining asteroids for heavier metals being viable after a while. Not at present, but well within our lifetimes. There's about 20 years of uranium left. No new deposits will be found on Earth - ore from the formation of the planet will all be well below the mantle and is likely largely in the core. None of that is reachable.
Within 50-100 years, I would imagine asteroid mining to be not only viable but actually cheaper for certain elements.
You get surprisingly good return for your investment. If the US had no preventative medicine and had lacked universal health care, then the moment Mexico had started suffering a major flu outbreak, the US would have suffered too. (Irony Mode Off.)
The poor often don't eat well, often don't have good accommodation, and often are subject to stresses that impact their immune systems. This makes the poor one of the best attack vectors a virus or a bacterium could have. Which is why virtually every epidemic and pandemic ever suffered has started with them and spread via them. The poor and the dysfunctional will have just as many geniuses as the rest of society, but if they don't get the education needed, that talent is wasted, and all the things that can come from such talent (one idea in the right place at the right time can spark an industry employing millions) are left to rot on the vine of the merely possible.
Quality of welfare (as opposed to quantity alone, you have to have both) is a brilliant way to invest money for a society. The lack of quality and the lack of quantity needed to make the quality matter can cripple a society. If 70% of the population are below the poverty threshold, then 70% of your industrialists can't afford to build industries. 70% of your inventors can't invent. 70% of your discoverers can't discover. Most countries could quite easily double their GDP within 5-10 years, but don't because although it's worth the investment, it's not worth the cost in votes.
The Airbus A380 cost $11 billion. The space station is a lot more than 10x as complex. So, dollar for dollar, the space-station has actually been cheaper per problem solved. The Three Gorges Dam cost $25 billion to build, has led to the first cetacean extinction since whaling ended, and the cost of repairing the rest of the environmental damage may well be more than the ISS and dam combined.
My problems with the ISS are that not enough was spent on it (spending more to get more is perfectly legit, and sensible if the ramp-up costs are high and you stay below the point of diminishing returns). If we'd spent twice as much and built it the way it should have been built, we'd have five to ten times the benefits. Cost per benefit reduced by a fifth, mankind gets massive rewards, all for less than a banker-induced crisis.
Personally, I'd rather the nation spent money on things that would likely benefit humanity rather than cripple it. Gripe for a few months over higher taxes or gripe for a decade over a catastrophic recession. A few months can be dealt with.
You have to remember that a lot of the critics are the people wanting to put inflatable brothels in space. Aside from the fact that ultra-violet does nasty things to rubber that might reduce the profit margin (permanently), these are sick minds we're talking about. The moon would be far better for that.
I don't know about making CPUs in space, but certainly if you made the silicon crystals in space you would have a major advantage. The microgravity would mean fewer flaws. The yield, as a percent, is very high as it is, but it's still too low to go to wafer-scale infrastructure. (Wafer-scale IS used, but not at the kinds of densities used in domestic electronics. A wafer-scale RAM chip at current densities would give you between 16-32 terabytes and require none of the support electronics required on a typical RAM card, for example. A wafer-scale CPU would turn Intel's dream of an 80-core CPU into a 512-core CPU. And so on.)
The cost would obviously be much higher, done this way. You'd be looking at 200x current prices per gigabyte. However, that would not be a major problem in the supercomputer field, and I'm not all that sure it'd be a problem in the extreme gamer market.
There are masses of molecules that cannot survive on Earth, so you're not even limited to metals. Anything with a crystalline structure would benefit automatically from the lack of gravity. Anything intended for space that can be damaged by launch (for example, a space telescope's mirror can be deformed by the acceleration forces) would benefit not only from the environment being easier, but also benefit from the lack of stress placed on it to get it into space.
Not so much an expiration date, more a timeframe in which the risk of a catastrophic collision with something was acceptably low. I guess that since it has already collided with stuff, NASA figures that the event has happened and it's good for another decade.
Yes, but it was the Russians who has figured those out. And they had a horrible problem with mutant moss. (It formed a trades union and demanded equal rights for microbial organisms.)
It's more a case of "if they don't support the published standard, maybe they can use something that does fully support all the stuff they want and only have to write one tiny bit of code". I think I can trust these developers to handle one tag.
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HOTOL might have been more cost-effective. The Russian space shuttle almost certainly would have been. The problem with the space shuttle was that false economies were made. Sometimes to save money you have to spend it. The shuttle was under-sized, under-powered and was forced to have dangerous piecemeal boosters for political reasons. By spending the money up-front, you'd have a cheaper, safer, more reliable shuttle which would doubtless still be in production, not scrapped.
It'll be interesting to see how first-stage alternatives go. One option is to use turbine-assisted ramjets, another is to use a ski-jump-assisted ramjet. These would replace some, but not all, of the current first rocket stage. The idea is the same in both cases - provided you can break 400 mph, the ramjet is capable of self-sustained acceleration. Break the sound barrier and it becomes a highly efficient device. Hydrogen-powered ramjets are good up to about mach 6. Not great, sure, but not bad either. Since the weight should be about 1/5th that required by a rocket to reach the same speed, that's a lot more payload you can suddenly carry. Ideally, you'd use a mix of a ramjet and a scramjet to completely replace the first rocket stage, again reducing weight and increasing the payload you can push into orbit.
Looks very much like the description of the alien vessel in Rendezvous with Rama, minus the airlock. If it had had the airlock as well, THAT might have stirred some interest.
I do not believe I am missing the point, since I state that the file sharers show a lack of understanding and that they are responsible for their own follies within reason.
If there is a clearer way I can put this, I'd be happy to try and rephrase.
It does, and the lack of understanding by filesharers doesn't excuse the lack of understanding by moguls or journals any more than the lack of understanding by moguls or journals excuses the lack of understanding by filesharers.
All are responsible for their own follies and all should be called to account for them -- within reason. ($1.5 million to a person who is never going to be capable of paying that isn't reasonable. Suing under-funded junior/primary schools for putting on musicals - a technical violation - is not a terribly ethical solution and reasonable solutions should be looked for.)
I point again to the "one law" thing of neither rich nor poor may sleep under bridges. It's equal but it's not equitable. Technical violations due to situations that are manufactured by moguls (such as low taxes for the rich leading to underfunding of schools and the arts) should be treated differently from violations that are not ultimately the fault of the "victim".
Where is my "double standard"? I stipulated that the law should be equitable as well as equal. You can't get less double-standard than that!
I'm seeing stories in the Washington Post, ABC News, the BBC, CNET, Wired and other sites. Which means yes she has had television and newspaper coverage, as well as coverage in trade journals.
The outrage is because the rules aren't being applied equitably (which is NOT the same as equally). It is unacceptable to allow a publisher to steal material from another but have that same publisher sue others for doing likewise. Freedom has to be a two-way street.
(For those wondering about the difference between equal and equitable, the quotation people usually refer to regarding one law for the rich and another for the poor continues "neither are permitted to steal bread or sleep under bridges". Technically, that is equal. But since the rich do not need to do either, it is not equitable.)
My understanding of copyright law is that the author should have suitable rights to obtain renumeration for their work for a fixed length of time, where "authorship" can include developing a piece, organizing data, etc.
"Fair use" depends on the product. Journals, IIRC, allow you to copy one article or 1/10th of the journal, whichever is shorter. Books, music and videos have much tighter restrictions.
Copyright may be transferred, so authors transfer the rights to the publisher, musicians to the label, and so on. I don't like that system, because it means that the creators often get little or no renumeration whereas the publishers often earn a good deal more. Publishers and labels are also notorious for failing to pay royalties.
J. K. Rowling should, according to the maths, be richer than the Queen of England. According to any actual research on the subject, she has less than a tenth of this. It's still a hell of a lot and it's hard to be too sympathetic to the mega-rich, but we're talking a few hundred million pounds that are "missing, presumed drunk" somewhere in the publishing house. If they can rip off her, given that she's no idiot and has a fair bit of influence, there's nobody alive they can't steal from and get clean away with it.
Given the attitude that appears to actually be necessary in publishing, it is unclear if there is any solution to the corruption that exists.
What is clear to me is that the corruption that does exist makes it impossible to identify what flaws exist in copyright. If the implementation is broken, the correctness of the specification is meaningless. And if the implementation is the only way to evaluate the specification, you have no means of telling what flaws exist in the specification.
Not only is it cheaper, but the longer she creates waves and headlines, the more the rights to the book/film will be worth whether she wins or loses. One appeal wouldn't be worth anything, happens all the time. But at this point, her fight has become rather more unusual, and the extreme variation will doubtless raise a few eyebrows in the publishing world - not because they'd question it, but because underdog stories (especially ones where conspiracy theories can be added by the editors) sell.
A couple more rounds and she'll be hot property.
I'm wondering if the massive number of changes in amounts awarded will result in someone deciding that the system needs to be fixed.
Bwahahahahahaha! Lawyers and judges get paid for the retrials and appeals, so they've no interest in a system that works the first time. Politicians daren't appear "soft" on crime, even though it's seriously pushing it to call what happened a crime. It will be presented that way by the RIAA if anyone in Congress questions the extreme amounts. And the general public just created a Congress that's too paralyzed to do anything, so even if there was someone brave enough, they can't.
(I won't argue with whether a paralyzed Congress is better or worse than a functional one, but I will argue that being unable to do right is not the same as unwilling to - which is how they are most of the time, admittedly.)
Is it ok to use wizards, if witches aren't allowed?
It may be a way, but it is an inferior way. A better system is to maintain neutrality (ie: no bias towards or away from any specific source or destination) but to impose fairness. The most trivial form of fairness is to round-robin between inputs. One input, one packet. And simply rotate round. This ensures that nobody can flood the network (the excess packets would block the sender but nobody else). More advanced forms of fairness involve things like Hierarchical Fair Service Curve (to give everyone equal access) plus Electronic Congestion Notification (forcing the sender to throttle back if network-flooding). Where an ISP is dealing with many lines of varying rates, then Class-Based Queueing is likely the way to go - simply create one class per line and give it a soft limit equal to the bandwidth paid for. That way, users never go below what they bought, but can exploit any unused bandwidth available if it's a quiet time.
The fact is, ISPs have options that don't infringe on neutrality. ISPs choose to infringe on neutrality because they can then sell you something they have no intention of delivering. They can then massively over-subscribe legally. They're not obligated to deliver a damn thing and there is nothing that you can do about it. It's not as if you can switch.
You can't fill a void, but you can fill a *void, provided it points to a valid address.
There would be no real benefit in chip fab in space. Once the crystals had formed, they could be brought to Earth with no significant risk of disrupting the wafer - the lattice is more than strong enough.
The costs of building a mining facility on the moon would likely to be cost-prohibitive (the moon is mostly silicates and other very light elements and the gravity would be problematic).
Certain metals on Earth's surface only exist because they existed in asteroids and meteorites - the natural purely terrestrial deposits are all way too deep underground. (Uranium is likely one of those.)
I could see mining asteroids for heavier metals being viable after a while. Not at present, but well within our lifetimes. There's about 20 years of uranium left. No new deposits will be found on Earth - ore from the formation of the planet will all be well below the mantle and is likely largely in the core. None of that is reachable.
Within 50-100 years, I would imagine asteroid mining to be not only viable but actually cheaper for certain elements.
You get surprisingly good return for your investment. If the US had no preventative medicine and had lacked universal health care, then the moment Mexico had started suffering a major flu outbreak, the US would have suffered too. (Irony Mode Off.)
The poor often don't eat well, often don't have good accommodation, and often are subject to stresses that impact their immune systems. This makes the poor one of the best attack vectors a virus or a bacterium could have. Which is why virtually every epidemic and pandemic ever suffered has started with them and spread via them. The poor and the dysfunctional will have just as many geniuses as the rest of society, but if they don't get the education needed, that talent is wasted, and all the things that can come from such talent (one idea in the right place at the right time can spark an industry employing millions) are left to rot on the vine of the merely possible.
Quality of welfare (as opposed to quantity alone, you have to have both) is a brilliant way to invest money for a society. The lack of quality and the lack of quantity needed to make the quality matter can cripple a society. If 70% of the population are below the poverty threshold, then 70% of your industrialists can't afford to build industries. 70% of your inventors can't invent. 70% of your discoverers can't discover. Most countries could quite easily double their GDP within 5-10 years, but don't because although it's worth the investment, it's not worth the cost in votes.
The Airbus A380 cost $11 billion. The space station is a lot more than 10x as complex. So, dollar for dollar, the space-station has actually been cheaper per problem solved. The Three Gorges Dam cost $25 billion to build, has led to the first cetacean extinction since whaling ended, and the cost of repairing the rest of the environmental damage may well be more than the ISS and dam combined.
My problems with the ISS are that not enough was spent on it (spending more to get more is perfectly legit, and sensible if the ramp-up costs are high and you stay below the point of diminishing returns). If we'd spent twice as much and built it the way it should have been built, we'd have five to ten times the benefits. Cost per benefit reduced by a fifth, mankind gets massive rewards, all for less than a banker-induced crisis.
Personally, I'd rather the nation spent money on things that would likely benefit humanity rather than cripple it. Gripe for a few months over higher taxes or gripe for a decade over a catastrophic recession. A few months can be dealt with.
You have to remember that a lot of the critics are the people wanting to put inflatable brothels in space. Aside from the fact that ultra-violet does nasty things to rubber that might reduce the profit margin (permanently), these are sick minds we're talking about. The moon would be far better for that.
Well, let's see. There was the... ummmm.... and the.... urrrr..... What about.... no, wait, that wouldn't work either.
Give me 100 billion and I will research this "self-deluded blindness through greed" phenomenon.
I don't know about making CPUs in space, but certainly if you made the silicon crystals in space you would have a major advantage. The microgravity would mean fewer flaws. The yield, as a percent, is very high as it is, but it's still too low to go to wafer-scale infrastructure. (Wafer-scale IS used, but not at the kinds of densities used in domestic electronics. A wafer-scale RAM chip at current densities would give you between 16-32 terabytes and require none of the support electronics required on a typical RAM card, for example. A wafer-scale CPU would turn Intel's dream of an 80-core CPU into a 512-core CPU. And so on.)
The cost would obviously be much higher, done this way. You'd be looking at 200x current prices per gigabyte. However, that would not be a major problem in the supercomputer field, and I'm not all that sure it'd be a problem in the extreme gamer market.
There are masses of molecules that cannot survive on Earth, so you're not even limited to metals. Anything with a crystalline structure would benefit automatically from the lack of gravity. Anything intended for space that can be damaged by launch (for example, a space telescope's mirror can be deformed by the acceleration forces) would benefit not only from the environment being easier, but also benefit from the lack of stress placed on it to get it into space.
Budget cuts.
Not so much an expiration date, more a timeframe in which the risk of a catastrophic collision with something was acceptably low. I guess that since it has already collided with stuff, NASA figures that the event has happened and it's good for another decade.
Yes, but it was the Russians who has figured those out. And they had a horrible problem with mutant moss. (It formed a trades union and demanded equal rights for microbial organisms.)
It's more a case of "if they don't support the published standard, maybe they can use something that does fully support all the stuff they want and only have to write one tiny bit of code". I think I can trust these developers to handle one tag.
It doesn't support drag-n-drop properly, for starters. A lot of webapps I'm using at the mo use this, which means I can't use Chrome with them.