I've done some more reading as this stuff fascinates me. It appears that there have been some projects to study the possibility of reducing the radiation in the Van Allen belts. To me this seems fraught with danger, but if it works, it could potentially protect the tether.
The bigger challenge appears to be LEO objects colliding with the tether(s). Given the amount of garbage we've put up there, it seems to be pretty much inevitable - and the collision speeds would be measured in kms/second. There is simply no tether that could withstand that kind of thing.
I'm inclined to agree that this is still completely impractical. At least, until we can develop shielding (eg armour or deflection tech) and some kind of self-healing cable that could recover from a partial tear.
I just did some rudimentary math on this problem, and it appears that a bootstrap tether would not need to be terribly thick or heavy. If the claims made by Tsinghua are accurate, a tether as narrow as about 5cm diameter would be able to hold its own weight up to 35000Kms. The total weight would be enough to be sent in two or three rocket payloads, and the threat to earth of catastrophic collapse would be relatively minor in unpopulated areas.
I have to admit that the math is a bit beyond me. Its been a terribly long time since I did calculus, so I just assumed a linear decrease in the force of gravity out to the point of the geostationary counterweight. I also imagine that the counterweight would be held by 3 tethers instead of 1 to stop it from slipping or rotating, so overall, it would probably take 10-15 payloads to achieve a startup.
Cost-wise? Who knows. 100,000 Kms of carbon nanotube will be expensive... and the project management costs will be ridiculous... but I think that if Arther C Clarke was correct, this is the point that we stop laughing about it.
Uber is no saint here - they're profiting from bypassing a broken system (actually they're not profiting at the moment - they're slowly going broke).
However, Uber is not the evil enemy here either. They've simply identified a situation where the state has imposed restrictions on a marketplace, and the marketplace has become disproportionately expensive and prone to corruption.
The taxi drivers are not at fault. They have to charge ludicrous fees because the licenses are limited by the state and have become too expensive.
The problem is the flawed economic model around taxis. That is where we should be targeting our thoughts.
One state in Australia has offered to buy back the taxi licences - with some degradation of the value of the licence based on how long it has been owned, and how much profit has been drawn from it. This is the kind of solution that serves everyone best. It also opens the door for an intermediary licensing scheme that allows for a distinction between Uber and taxis but still permits the government to tax the drivers appropriately.
It saddens me that this post is scored 0, as I think you've accurately summed up the situation. Uber is what happens when the state imposes limits on a free market. By restricting the licences, the sequence of events is well known and documented:
1. The market becomes closed.
2. The licences become a commodity.
3. The value of those licences climbs disproportionately to the value of the service.
4. Gradually, the price of the service rises above CPI due to the prohibitively expensive licences.
5. As the cash flow exceeds the value, corruption and rorts are introduced to the system.
6. Eventually, someone reveals the problem. In this case, it is Uber.
One state in Australia has taken the courageous step of offering to buy back the taxi licences. I think that this is potentially the best possible outcome for all involved.
These arguments about untested drivers are not true in all countries. And the arguments about uninsured drivers are invalid - that is a self correcting problem. The state does not mandate insurance for surgeons. Why should it do it for drivers?
I am also immensely saddened that so many/. readers don't get this. We like to think that we're smarter than the average bear. Apparently not.
I have two step-children who fled their abusive father to come and live with me. Both of them were home-schooled for a time (about 12 months each). We learned a lot of powerful lessons from the first one, but even then, we faced huge challenges with the second one.
Some significant points:
1. Mum and/or Dad are not teachers. We're not qualified to be, and re-assurances from the homeschooling organisation are vacuous. Don't kid yourself about this. Being a teacher is a career choice, and there are very specific skillsets involved.
2. Mum and/or Dad don't want a teacher-student relationship with their child. You can't just throw a switch at 3pm and turn back into a parent. The child is not old/mature enough to process that changeover.
3. The child will lose out on a huge amount of 'non-curriculum learning'. Things like 'how to avoid the schoolyard bully', 'how to read a schedule and navigate to classrooms', 'how to meet project deadlines without parental intervention', 'how to negotiate the fickle friendships that happen in life', 'observe adult role models outside the family'. There are dozens of things like this.
4. There is research to support the position that children perform better when parents are 'hands off'. I can't remember the link, but one interesting one was posted to/. in the last 6 months.
5. Some children need real parental nurturing to get over a major life crisis. Most children do not. If your child needs that kind of care, be very careful of breaking your relationship with them by spending 6 hours every day with them.
In both cases, after 12 months, the children returned to regular schooling to a) escape mum and/or dad; and b) get a life/friends. The second one needed a little more encouragement than the first.
Good luck with it! Its been a hard road, and its only two-three years after they returned to regular school that their behaviours are starting to normalise.
I'm running an Alienware M18X with an SSD instead of a traditional HDD and I have not experienced any problems yet. The only issue I have is that it weighs a ton! So heavy that its technically not allowed as carry-on luggage on the plane. I sneak it through anyway, but its an issue.
Being a software exporter, I was concerned by this post, so I went and read the material. Not all of it, but fairly large swathes of it. I'm actually a little bit disappointed that Slashdot would greenlight the original submission when the abstract is so sensational and misleading.
We encountered the same problem, so a few years ago, we started running two changelogs. One of them is the full changelog, with every ridiculously miniscule change listed. This is made available to customers, but not promoted to them.
The other is the 'enhancements only changelog' - or what we colloquially refer to as 'the readme'. It only contains feature enhancements or significant bug fixes.
+1
I'm astonished at the posts in this thread that have been modded up, but just don't get this point. This is about the only one I've seen so far that is truly insightful.
The NSA's dragnetting is why we can't have good things. It will progressively push all other countries to legislate that information on their citizens must be hosted inside their borders. And Brazil's approach is the right one. They won't go after their citizens, or the big bad NSA. They'll just go after the businesses themselves. For companies like Google, this will be an inconvenience, but for any small company wanting to do international business on the internet, their options just evaporated.
Here's hoping that they'll get some international law in place to declare the NSAs actions illegal - and some decent penalties applied at a 'per capita' rate.
We make software for Healthcare professionals. As you can imagine, the risk footprint is pretty ugly.
We have special testing programs that are targeted at protecting patient safety.
We also have insurance up the wazoo (a technical term). Our PI Insurance covers us for several millions of dollars per claim, and hundreds of millions for class actions. It is our single biggest insurance expense for the entire organisation.
I'm happy to say that in 18 years, we've never made a claim against it, and we've never been notified of any negative consequence on any patients.
Since the Windows 3, there have been complementary products to supplement Microsoft's short-sighted approach to their OS.
Who remembers products like ICS, and the early CD-writer plug ins for Explorer?
They're still around, and as good as ever.
This one provides a Start button for Windows 8. Its very cute...
The problem is, if this is the most significant/compelling difference between Windows 7 and Windows 8(.1), why would anyone buy it? Microsoft's obsession with rationalising their product set down to one-size-fits-all will ultimately result in them losing all markets instead of simply continuing to dominate one. We all knew that Bill Gates departure from the M$ helm would result in its downfall. Its just painful to watch someone die of cancer.
I agree with most of your assertions, but I think that there are grey areas, and that it is important to acknowledge them.
For example, if a friend of mine is having a conversation with a third person, I may sit in on the conversation without any intended malice. I may hear things that I might not otherwise hear. These things may alter my perceptions about 'how friendly is my friend'.
This is vastly different to bugging his house, but it is an example of me gathering information about the world around me. And I think the difference between the two is to do with a) being open and honest about the information gathering efforts; and b) respecting people's privacy, by allowing them to exclude me from their conversation - though that act would make me concerned about my 'how friendly is my friend'.
I think that there is a line between reasonable intelligence gathering and blatant spying - but that is not so well defined. Snowden has revealed behaviour by the US that is clearly over the line - I think that much is agreed. Whether it represents an act of war against allies, or is simply a bargaining chip at the next G20 summit is a debate that will never happen. Politicians are consummate professionals at not answering the questions that matter.
And that, I believe, is the point. Most western societies are fed up with their governments lying and deceiving them, but are hopelessly disempowered from changing anything. Governments are in the business of disempowering their people for their own good. I doubt that will change in our lifetimes.
Is it just me, or is the tone of this article and the use of superlatives suggesting that it was written by an Apple fanboy? Or worse, their marketing division?
The content may indeed be factual, but the tone makes me suspicious, and somewhat mistrustful of anything reported.
There are plenty of scenarios where the concept won't help - or could be misused/abused...
Having said that, those shortcomings do not invalidate the concept.
Whenever there are two police officers present, they would need to conspire to turn off their cameras (or delete the footage). That can still happen, but the likelihood will reduce significantly for each additional officer. And it only takes one officer with a healthy conscience to keep their camera rolling.
I don't think that there is a silver bullet, but steps that reduce the odds of miscarriages of justice are a step in the right direction.
As a side note, I'm pleased to see a general trend toward allowing citizens to record police activity. Hopefully, that will be adopted more widely over the coming years.
You may well be right (I don't know the constitution well enough), but I suspect that the previous poster's sentiment may still be valid.
The NSW police would have to petition the State Government to get the laws changed.
Having said all of that, the laws in Australia that relate to firearms give the police quite broad powers. And IMHO, the appropriate steps for police/governments around the world is to legislate 3D printable weapons regulations that relate to the other laws in their jurisdictions.
We cynical folks in/. know that those laws won't stop all the 3D guns from being printed. However, that is the way things are done in our modern society. The government legislates, the police (attempt to) enforce. If and when the problem starts to get out of control, the police are granted heavier powers and they go on a 'blitz'.
I'm quietly pleased to see the police dotting their i's and crossing their t's on this one. The first thing any good scientist would do to validate the stories on the internet is 'build one and test it to see what happens'. Let's hope that no-one publishes a 3D printable nuke, eh?
Seems we're suffering from a bit of Climate Change Fatigue... which suggests that the less than 1% of credible scientists who doubt AGW have managed to sow enough seeds of dramatic dissent for the rest of us to lose interest.
Or perhaps, it is something a little simpler in the human psyche. Whilst we bemoan politicians who have no more future vision than the end of their current term, it seems that we too are particularly short-sighted about the future of this planet. I suspect that the majority of us look little further than how we're going to satisfy the physical aspects of Maslow's Heirarchy of needs.
When our life expectancies are extended to 1000 years (or more), and we face the very real prospect of living on the planet we are currently terraforming, we may take a slightly different view. Somehow, I doubt it. Most of the people alive today will live to see an increase of 4-6 degrees C... and yet, we're far more interested in gun control and the Kardashians.
I feel sad for our children (and their children) when I think about the world they will inherit from us.
Ummm... yeah, about that 'inefficient, outdated systems'...
Can we please get some specifics about that?
Since when does outdated equate to inefficient? Anybody who upgraded to IE10 from IE8, or to Windows Vista from XP will probably have a few words to say in this space.
Or alternatively, you could look at the scenario of a middle sized financial institution where I used to work about 12 years ago. They were looking at upgrading from NT to 2000. It was going to cost them in the order of $32M to upgrade about 6000 desktops. This included some hardware upgrades, but also sociability testing on apps, a few software upgrades, deployment, retraining, etc. Senior Management said 'what is the payback for this $32M project'. IT said 'Microsoft told us if we didn't do it, they'd stop supporting us.' After a while the howls of derisive laughter died down and management said 'No, really... what's the benefit to the company'. There was none. Nada... zip. Outdated did not equate to inefficient. Eventually, they realised that Microsoft had them over a barrel, and decided to act. What did they do? They hired 5 top notch NT gurus at a the princely sum of $200k per year each and told them to support NT in our environment. $1M in staff costs is cheaper than $6M in depreciation on their $32M investment.
In the end, they were able to delay the upgrade a couple of years and leapfrog straight to XP. Saved bajillions of dollars.
It occurs to me that China might be a lot more involved in this situation than we know.
People keep talking about NK being the 'little punk bully' in the playground and China being the 'big brother', but I suspect that China is orchestrating a large portion of what is going on. They are shrewd diplomats, and it would serve them well to use NK as a pawn to test the US's military capabilities and resolve.
This is all taking place on the edges of China's radar envelope, so it is giving their military the perfect opportunity to study detection of American stealth technology.
Slashdot Mirror
I've done some more reading as this stuff fascinates me. It appears that there have been some projects to study the possibility of reducing the radiation in the Van Allen belts. To me this seems fraught with danger, but if it works, it could potentially protect the tether.
The bigger challenge appears to be LEO objects colliding with the tether(s). Given the amount of garbage we've put up there, it seems to be pretty much inevitable - and the collision speeds would be measured in kms/second. There is simply no tether that could withstand that kind of thing.
I'm inclined to agree that this is still completely impractical. At least, until we can develop shielding (eg armour or deflection tech) and some kind of self-healing cable that could recover from a partial tear.
I just did some rudimentary math on this problem, and it appears that a bootstrap tether would not need to be terribly thick or heavy. If the claims made by Tsinghua are accurate, a tether as narrow as about 5cm diameter would be able to hold its own weight up to 35000Kms. The total weight would be enough to be sent in two or three rocket payloads, and the threat to earth of catastrophic collapse would be relatively minor in unpopulated areas.
I have to admit that the math is a bit beyond me. Its been a terribly long time since I did calculus, so I just assumed a linear decrease in the force of gravity out to the point of the geostationary counterweight. I also imagine that the counterweight would be held by 3 tethers instead of 1 to stop it from slipping or rotating, so overall, it would probably take 10-15 payloads to achieve a startup.
Cost-wise? Who knows. 100,000 Kms of carbon nanotube will be expensive... and the project management costs will be ridiculous... but I think that if Arther C Clarke was correct, this is the point that we stop laughing about it.
And all the Moo players say 'Oh wow... why didn't I start in that system? Have to colonise that one first.'
I'm not sure that I agree with this position.
Uber is no saint here - they're profiting from bypassing a broken system (actually they're not profiting at the moment - they're slowly going broke).
However, Uber is not the evil enemy here either. They've simply identified a situation where the state has imposed restrictions on a marketplace, and the marketplace has become disproportionately expensive and prone to corruption.
The taxi drivers are not at fault. They have to charge ludicrous fees because the licenses are limited by the state and have become too expensive.
The problem is the flawed economic model around taxis. That is where we should be targeting our thoughts.
One state in Australia has offered to buy back the taxi licences - with some degradation of the value of the licence based on how long it has been owned, and how much profit has been drawn from it. This is the kind of solution that serves everyone best. It also opens the door for an intermediary licensing scheme that allows for a distinction between Uber and taxis but still permits the government to tax the drivers appropriately.
+1.
/. readers don't get this. We like to think that we're smarter than the average bear. Apparently not.
It saddens me that this post is scored 0, as I think you've accurately summed up the situation. Uber is what happens when the state imposes limits on a free market. By restricting the licences, the sequence of events is well known and documented:
1. The market becomes closed.
2. The licences become a commodity.
3. The value of those licences climbs disproportionately to the value of the service.
4. Gradually, the price of the service rises above CPI due to the prohibitively expensive licences.
5. As the cash flow exceeds the value, corruption and rorts are introduced to the system.
6. Eventually, someone reveals the problem. In this case, it is Uber.
One state in Australia has taken the courageous step of offering to buy back the taxi licences. I think that this is potentially the best possible outcome for all involved.
These arguments about untested drivers are not true in all countries. And the arguments about uninsured drivers are invalid - that is a self correcting problem. The state does not mandate insurance for surgeons. Why should it do it for drivers?
I am also immensely saddened that so many
I have two step-children who fled their abusive father to come and live with me. Both of them were home-schooled for a time (about 12 months each). We learned a lot of powerful lessons from the first one, but even then, we faced huge challenges with the second one. /. in the last 6 months.
Some significant points:
1. Mum and/or Dad are not teachers. We're not qualified to be, and re-assurances from the homeschooling organisation are vacuous. Don't kid yourself about this. Being a teacher is a career choice, and there are very specific skillsets involved.
2. Mum and/or Dad don't want a teacher-student relationship with their child. You can't just throw a switch at 3pm and turn back into a parent. The child is not old/mature enough to process that changeover.
3. The child will lose out on a huge amount of 'non-curriculum learning'. Things like 'how to avoid the schoolyard bully', 'how to read a schedule and navigate to classrooms', 'how to meet project deadlines without parental intervention', 'how to negotiate the fickle friendships that happen in life', 'observe adult role models outside the family'. There are dozens of things like this.
4. There is research to support the position that children perform better when parents are 'hands off'. I can't remember the link, but one interesting one was posted to
5. Some children need real parental nurturing to get over a major life crisis. Most children do not. If your child needs that kind of care, be very careful of breaking your relationship with them by spending 6 hours every day with them.
In both cases, after 12 months, the children returned to regular schooling to a) escape mum and/or dad; and b) get a life/friends. The second one needed a little more encouragement than the first.
Good luck with it! Its been a hard road, and its only two-three years after they returned to regular school that their behaviours are starting to normalise.
I'm running an Alienware M18X with an SSD instead of a traditional HDD and I have not experienced any problems yet. The only issue I have is that it weighs a ton! So heavy that its technically not allowed as carry-on luggage on the plane. I sneak it through anyway, but its an issue.
Speed and heat have been no issue at all.
This.
Being a software exporter, I was concerned by this post, so I went and read the material. Not all of it, but fairly large swathes of it. I'm actually a little bit disappointed that Slashdot would greenlight the original submission when the abstract is so sensational and misleading.
We encountered the same problem, so a few years ago, we started running two changelogs. One of them is the full changelog, with every ridiculously miniscule change listed. This is made available to customers, but not promoted to them.
The other is the 'enhancements only changelog' - or what we colloquially refer to as 'the readme'. It only contains feature enhancements or significant bug fixes.
Begun the drone wars have
+1
I'm astonished at the posts in this thread that have been modded up, but just don't get this point. This is about the only one I've seen so far that is truly insightful. The NSA's dragnetting is why we can't have good things. It will progressively push all other countries to legislate that information on their citizens must be hosted inside their borders. And Brazil's approach is the right one. They won't go after their citizens, or the big bad NSA. They'll just go after the businesses themselves. For companies like Google, this will be an inconvenience, but for any small company wanting to do international business on the internet, their options just evaporated. Here's hoping that they'll get some international law in place to declare the NSAs actions illegal - and some decent penalties applied at a 'per capita' rate.
OK. It doesn't sound like you're trolling, so I'll give a more useful post this time:
Check out this site. It has some really good material and references about the science behind this stuff.
You might also find this interview with one of the key scientists interesting.
I don't profess to be a climate change guru, but this stuff looks reasonably legit to me.
[citation needed]
I'd mod this up if I had points...
We make software for Healthcare professionals. As you can imagine, the risk footprint is pretty ugly.
We have special testing programs that are targeted at protecting patient safety.
We also have insurance up the wazoo (a technical term). Our PI Insurance covers us for several millions of dollars per claim, and hundreds of millions for class actions. It is our single biggest insurance expense for the entire organisation.
I'm happy to say that in 18 years, we've never made a claim against it, and we've never been notified of any negative consequence on any patients.
Since the Windows 3, there have been complementary products to supplement Microsoft's short-sighted approach to their OS.
Who remembers products like ICS, and the early CD-writer plug ins for Explorer?
They're still around, and as good as ever.
This one provides a Start button for Windows 8. Its very cute...
The problem is, if this is the most significant/compelling difference between Windows 7 and Windows 8(.1), why would anyone buy it? Microsoft's obsession with rationalising their product set down to one-size-fits-all will ultimately result in them losing all markets instead of simply continuing to dominate one. We all knew that Bill Gates departure from the M$ helm would result in its downfall. Its just painful to watch someone die of cancer.
Well played, sir.
I agree with most of your assertions, but I think that there are grey areas, and that it is important to acknowledge them.
For example, if a friend of mine is having a conversation with a third person, I may sit in on the conversation without any intended malice. I may hear things that I might not otherwise hear. These things may alter my perceptions about 'how friendly is my friend'.
This is vastly different to bugging his house, but it is an example of me gathering information about the world around me. And I think the difference between the two is to do with a) being open and honest about the information gathering efforts; and b) respecting people's privacy, by allowing them to exclude me from their conversation - though that act would make me concerned about my 'how friendly is my friend'.
I think that there is a line between reasonable intelligence gathering and blatant spying - but that is not so well defined. Snowden has revealed behaviour by the US that is clearly over the line - I think that much is agreed. Whether it represents an act of war against allies, or is simply a bargaining chip at the next G20 summit is a debate that will never happen. Politicians are consummate professionals at not answering the questions that matter.
And that, I believe, is the point. Most western societies are fed up with their governments lying and deceiving them, but are hopelessly disempowered from changing anything. Governments are in the business of disempowering their people for their own good. I doubt that will change in our lifetimes.
Is it just me, or is the tone of this article and the use of superlatives suggesting that it was written by an Apple fanboy? Or worse, their marketing division?
The content may indeed be factual, but the tone makes me suspicious, and somewhat mistrustful of anything reported.
There are plenty of scenarios where the concept won't help - or could be misused/abused...
Having said that, those shortcomings do not invalidate the concept.
Whenever there are two police officers present, they would need to conspire to turn off their cameras (or delete the footage). That can still happen, but the likelihood will reduce significantly for each additional officer. And it only takes one officer with a healthy conscience to keep their camera rolling.
I don't think that there is a silver bullet, but steps that reduce the odds of miscarriages of justice are a step in the right direction.
As a side note, I'm pleased to see a general trend toward allowing citizens to record police activity. Hopefully, that will be adopted more widely over the coming years.
And we're not doing it now with Apple products?
+1
You may well be right (I don't know the constitution well enough), but I suspect that the previous poster's sentiment may still be valid.
/. know that those laws won't stop all the 3D guns from being printed. However, that is the way things are done in our modern society. The government legislates, the police (attempt to) enforce. If and when the problem starts to get out of control, the police are granted heavier powers and they go on a 'blitz'.
The NSW police would have to petition the State Government to get the laws changed.
Having said all of that, the laws in Australia that relate to firearms give the police quite broad powers. And IMHO, the appropriate steps for police/governments around the world is to legislate 3D printable weapons regulations that relate to the other laws in their jurisdictions.
We cynical folks in
I'm quietly pleased to see the police dotting their i's and crossing their t's on this one. The first thing any good scientist would do to validate the stories on the internet is 'build one and test it to see what happens'. Let's hope that no-one publishes a 3D printable nuke, eh?
Seems we're suffering from a bit of Climate Change Fatigue... which suggests that the less than 1% of credible scientists who doubt AGW have managed to sow enough seeds of dramatic dissent for the rest of us to lose interest.
Or perhaps, it is something a little simpler in the human psyche. Whilst we bemoan politicians who have no more future vision than the end of their current term, it seems that we too are particularly short-sighted about the future of this planet. I suspect that the majority of us look little further than how we're going to satisfy the physical aspects of Maslow's Heirarchy of needs.
When our life expectancies are extended to 1000 years (or more), and we face the very real prospect of living on the planet we are currently terraforming, we may take a slightly different view. Somehow, I doubt it. Most of the people alive today will live to see an increase of 4-6 degrees C... and yet, we're far more interested in gun control and the Kardashians.
I feel sad for our children (and their children) when I think about the world they will inherit from us.
Ummm... yeah, about that 'inefficient, outdated systems'...
Can we please get some specifics about that?
Since when does outdated equate to inefficient? Anybody who upgraded to IE10 from IE8, or to Windows Vista from XP will probably have a few words to say in this space.
Or alternatively, you could look at the scenario of a middle sized financial institution where I used to work about 12 years ago. They were looking at upgrading from NT to 2000. It was going to cost them in the order of $32M to upgrade about 6000 desktops. This included some hardware upgrades, but also sociability testing on apps, a few software upgrades, deployment, retraining, etc. Senior Management said 'what is the payback for this $32M project'. IT said 'Microsoft told us if we didn't do it, they'd stop supporting us.' After a while the howls of derisive laughter died down and management said 'No, really... what's the benefit to the company'. There was none. Nada... zip. Outdated did not equate to inefficient. Eventually, they realised that Microsoft had them over a barrel, and decided to act. What did they do? They hired 5 top notch NT gurus at a the princely sum of $200k per year each and told them to support NT in our environment. $1M in staff costs is cheaper than $6M in depreciation on their $32M investment.
In the end, they were able to delay the upgrade a couple of years and leapfrog straight to XP. Saved bajillions of dollars.
It occurs to me that China might be a lot more involved in this situation than we know.
People keep talking about NK being the 'little punk bully' in the playground and China being the 'big brother', but I suspect that China is orchestrating a large portion of what is going on. They are shrewd diplomats, and it would serve them well to use NK as a pawn to test the US's military capabilities and resolve.
This is all taking place on the edges of China's radar envelope, so it is giving their military the perfect opportunity to study detection of American stealth technology.