Easy enough for conspiracy theories to form, given that HAARP's scientific purpose is meaningless to most laypeople and that it is operated by air force, navy and DARPA.
After all, why would the military be funding an innocent research institution? Easy to believe it is some sort of super-weapon.
My vague understanding is that military is really interested because HAARP studies ionosphereic effects on radio propagation, which is a subject of importance in long-range and high-altitude radar systems.
Let's do some maths. This isn't a construction station, it's a residential station - the only times an EVA will be needed are repairs when things go wrong that can't be fixed from the inside, like failed connections on the solar panels. As the EVA is going to be conducted next to the station at all times, you don't even need an MMU and propellant - you can just climb ladders and use tether ropes. So all you lose is the residual air in the airlock going out. That's a slight loss, but not huge - a supply rocket could bring a few tanks of compressed oxygen to last many, many such EVAs.
Supplies would still be needed. It wouldn't be practical to manufacture everything from recycled materials - there will be some things which require huge production lines (microchips, drugs), but those are needed in small quantities that you could, if you had some reason, make it work with a rocket every ten years. It'd be ridiculously expensive to build something large enough to be so sustainable, but if money were no object it could be done. I can't think of a good reason to, though - if you wanted a home in the middle of nowhere far from any dangerously common people, you could more affordably build a nuclear-powered heated city in Antartica or Siberia.
EVAs only on very rare occasions for repairs, and the only cargo coming in or out are the resupply rockets. The idea isn't to last forever - it's to last a decade or so per rocket.
If prostitution were legalised, I expect demand for those sex slaves would go down to the point it was no longer a commercially viable criminal enterprise. Trafficking covertly and maintaining security around the slave doesn't come cheap.
Allegorical particually, because they have to take two stories running together and still avoid any holes or conflict. This easily results in a situation where characters do something that seems incredibly stupid in the 'top layer' shallow story, because it permits a deeper meaning.
Continuing with In Time as an analogy, it is the reason the mathematics were never addressed, the history never described, the supposed shortages never properly explained and the mechanics deliberately ignored. The presence of these elements would have strengthened the 'shallow' story about a futuristic society where lifespan is traded like money, but would have detracted from the 'deep' story examining the oppression that results from excessive economic inequality and the manner in which wealth and power interrelate. The needs of the two stories were in conflict. So the shallow story is left with gaping holes over which fans are left to speculate: Could the kill-switch be hacked? Can time be minted like money by government action via manufacturing those boxes? What happens if someone loses an arm? Would there really be a severe resources shortage without a population control program? Why did the world use a time-trading system rather than something like a breeding license? What political debate lead to this solution? How is it that a government department exists for the express purpose of perpetuating poverty - and is this their 'official' purpose, or do they overate covertly?
The next logical step would be legal harassment, either via lobbying efforts ("Senator, Mozilla's block could cost the US advertising industry hundreds of millions, and potentially tens of billions lost off the economy due to decreased purchasing!") or direct attacks (Sue the Mozilla foundation for interference in contract).
You can put the first two of those down to just sacrifices for the allegory. The introduction actually instructed the audience to do just this, by explaining that it didn't matter how the situation came about. More serious concerns abound:
- Everyone gets one free year at birth. - The clock starts ticking at age 26.
What this means is that even if the protagonists win, destroy the rich and redistribute the wealth then it achieves very little. There is no possible way, mathematically, that the average lifespan can ever exceed 27. Can't happen. So the most they might be able to do is create a fair utopia... where everyone drops dead at 27.
Now, if time were a fiat currency and there was a government agency that could 'mint' a few googol-years into boxes and distribute them, that would work. But the central premise of the film is that there is no source of new time except births: That's why the rich had to deliberately maintain the slum areas with a 27yr typical life in order to 'farm' the time from the poverty-stricken population there.
And none of this deals with the original problem: The time-trading system was imposed to deal with crippling resource shortages. Even if the 27-year limit is somehow overcome, what do you get? A world where people live forever, and geometric growth. Fun.
Generally the officers making arrests or searching homes are not trained computer forensics experts, so they can't be expected to know what is and isn't of potential interest. The policy then is to just take everything vaguely computer-related just in case, and have the specialists back at the station look at it all to find the real evidence.
Plus is can financially and personally cripple the suspect, applying more pressure for them to agree to a plea bargain. Prosecutors love that bit.
I can find a lot of information about CO contamination in the hydrogen causing trouble (A serious issue as hydrogen is made from hydrocarbons, and it's very hard to get them completly CO-free) - apparently the maximum allowable on the fuel side is 1ppm. Finding information on the oxygen side is harder, as it hasn't been as serious a concern - air generally contains little carbon monoxide, unless you happen to be in the middle of a busy road. Still, a couple of papers seem to confirm (I'm far out of my league here) that it can happen in PEM cells.
The problem would be solved on the fuel side by electrolysis as a production process, but the energy needs are so high it wouldn't currently be cost effective - and even if it were, you'd need to build the generation facility right next to power station.
That could work very well with renewables though, as production could be switched from off to full in seconds. Wind picks up, make hydrogen. Wind goes down, shut down the hydrogen plant to direct power to housing instead.
Why unavoidable? It's a closed system - enclosed by inch-thick steel plate. Condensing water from the air and funneling it back into the taps would take a lot of energy, but that is available. Losses would exist, but could be taken down to liters-per-year. Easily enough to keep several years of stockpiles, and occasionally send a launch to replace what is lost.
No, I'm just saying that a closed system is almost possible. Not completly possible, but close enough that with enough time and money invested in engineering the need for external resupply could be reduced to just an occasional launch.
Worse than that. It's not just impure hydrogen that kills them - it's impure oxygen too. Nitrogen in the air is harmless, but carbon monoxide will trash a PEM cell. And if you are driving on a road next to old petrol-burners, there is going to be plenty of that around.
There are only two ways to store hydrogen: Pressurised, and using the exotic foamy method. I don't know how the exotic foamy method works, but I understand it involves very expensive alloys of very rare metals. And pressurised will explode, twice. First when the high-pressure tank ruptures, and again if the resulting cloud of hydrogen ignites in the confined space of the vehicle.
But with two critical flaws: - Expensive. Making hydrogen from water costs a fortune, and making it from fossil fuels defeats the objective. - Difficult to store. Doing so safely (As in 'Can survive traffic accidents without cratering the road') requires exotic and even more expensive alloys.
A good closed cycle life support system could work. Power is near-limitless from solar. Minaturised manufacturering and recycling can be done. If you want minimal-maintainance, the main concern would be altitude: Something so big would eventually deorbit due to drag, so LEO isn't going to cut it. There would still be a need for occasional replacement parts and top-ups for any air escaping from pinhole leaks or accidents, but if it were designed for sustainability you could probably get by with a rocket every ten years or so.
Probably more practical to just use your billions to set up a gated community somewhere so inhospitable no-one else wishes to venture close - even Siberia or Antartica can be made a bubble-domed paradise if you've enough money for construction and a nuclear reactor for heating. And if any of the commoners do venture close, that's what landmines are for.
I liked In Time. It was stupid, but in a fun way - I spent the whole movie finding all of the many, many plot holes and manners in which the premise was ignored.
If you want to screw with them, do it the legal way. 1. Get netbook. 2. Harvest the MAC addresses of phones nearby as you travel. 3. Broadcast the usual queries, but spoofing the harvested MACs and ESSID lists.
Thus their marketting database is swiftly polluted and becomes much less valuable.
It goes the other way too. Firefox is without h264 support because, though the consortium is willing to give the mozilla foundation a no-fee license to the patents, they won't permit automatic licensing to anyone who wants to fork the project - and thus can't be compatible with the open-source development model. Thus no h264 on Firefox, and no WebM on Safari. Couple with similar situations over audio codecs, and if you want to use html5 video you'll have to supply two encodes.
WebM is caught up in the patent fights right now. Safari isn't going to support either WebM or WebP, because WebM is a chief competitor to h264, and Apple own key patents on h264.
There are no business reasons not to support APNG - it's simply too niche for companies to much care about right now.
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Easy enough for conspiracy theories to form, given that HAARP's scientific purpose is meaningless to most laypeople and that it is operated by air force, navy and DARPA.
After all, why would the military be funding an innocent research institution? Easy to believe it is some sort of super-weapon.
My vague understanding is that military is really interested because HAARP studies ionosphereic effects on radio propagation, which is a subject of importance in long-range and high-altitude radar systems.
Let's do some maths. This isn't a construction station, it's a residential station - the only times an EVA will be needed are repairs when things go wrong that can't be fixed from the inside, like failed connections on the solar panels. As the EVA is going to be conducted next to the station at all times, you don't even need an MMU and propellant - you can just climb ladders and use tether ropes. So all you lose is the residual air in the airlock going out. That's a slight loss, but not huge - a supply rocket could bring a few tanks of compressed oxygen to last many, many such EVAs.
Supplies would still be needed. It wouldn't be practical to manufacture everything from recycled materials - there will be some things which require huge production lines (microchips, drugs), but those are needed in small quantities that you could, if you had some reason, make it work with a rocket every ten years. It'd be ridiculously expensive to build something large enough to be so sustainable, but if money were no object it could be done. I can't think of a good reason to, though - if you wanted a home in the middle of nowhere far from any dangerously common people, you could more affordably build a nuclear-powered heated city in Antartica or Siberia.
EVAs only on very rare occasions for repairs, and the only cargo coming in or out are the resupply rockets. The idea isn't to last forever - it's to last a decade or so per rocket.
If prostitution were legalised, I expect demand for those sex slaves would go down to the point it was no longer a commercially viable criminal enterprise. Trafficking covertly and maintaining security around the slave doesn't come cheap.
Because hard work down the line doesn't translate into higher exam scores today.
What one person calls barter, another can call tax evasion.
Allegorical particually, because they have to take two stories running together and still avoid any holes or conflict. This easily results in a situation where characters do something that seems incredibly stupid in the 'top layer' shallow story, because it permits a deeper meaning.
Continuing with In Time as an analogy, it is the reason the mathematics were never addressed, the history never described, the supposed shortages never properly explained and the mechanics deliberately ignored. The presence of these elements would have strengthened the 'shallow' story about a futuristic society where lifespan is traded like money, but would have detracted from the 'deep' story examining the oppression that results from excessive economic inequality and the manner in which wealth and power interrelate. The needs of the two stories were in conflict. So the shallow story is left with gaping holes over which fans are left to speculate: Could the kill-switch be hacked? Can time be minted like money by government action via manufacturing those boxes? What happens if someone loses an arm? Would there really be a severe resources shortage without a population control program? Why did the world use a time-trading system rather than something like a breeding license? What political debate lead to this solution? How is it that a government department exists for the express purpose of perpetuating poverty - and is this their 'official' purpose, or do they overate covertly?
The next logical step would be legal harassment, either via lobbying efforts ("Senator, Mozilla's block could cost the US advertising industry hundreds of millions, and potentially tens of billions lost off the economy due to decreased purchasing!") or direct attacks (Sue the Mozilla foundation for interference in contract).
You can put the first two of those down to just sacrifices for the allegory. The introduction actually instructed the audience to do just this, by explaining that it didn't matter how the situation came about. More serious concerns abound:
- Everyone gets one free year at birth.
- The clock starts ticking at age 26.
What this means is that even if the protagonists win, destroy the rich and redistribute the wealth then it achieves very little. There is no possible way, mathematically, that the average lifespan can ever exceed 27. Can't happen. So the most they might be able to do is create a fair utopia... where everyone drops dead at 27.
Now, if time were a fiat currency and there was a government agency that could 'mint' a few googol-years into boxes and distribute them, that would work. But the central premise of the film is that there is no source of new time except births: That's why the rich had to deliberately maintain the slum areas with a 27yr typical life in order to 'farm' the time from the poverty-stricken population there.
And none of this deals with the original problem: The time-trading system was imposed to deal with crippling resource shortages. Even if the 27-year limit is somehow overcome, what do you get? A world where people live forever, and geometric growth. Fun.
Generally the officers making arrests or searching homes are not trained computer forensics experts, so they can't be expected to know what is and isn't of potential interest. The policy then is to just take everything vaguely computer-related just in case, and have the specialists back at the station look at it all to find the real evidence.
Plus is can financially and personally cripple the suspect, applying more pressure for them to agree to a plea bargain. Prosecutors love that bit.
I can find a lot of information about CO contamination in the hydrogen causing trouble (A serious issue as hydrogen is made from hydrocarbons, and it's very hard to get them completly CO-free) - apparently the maximum allowable on the fuel side is 1ppm. Finding information on the oxygen side is harder, as it hasn't been as serious a concern - air generally contains little carbon monoxide, unless you happen to be in the middle of a busy road. Still, a couple of papers seem to confirm (I'm far out of my league here) that it can happen in PEM cells.
The problem would be solved on the fuel side by electrolysis as a production process, but the energy needs are so high it wouldn't currently be cost effective - and even if it were, you'd need to build the generation facility right next to power station.
That could work very well with renewables though, as production could be switched from off to full in seconds. Wind picks up, make hydrogen. Wind goes down, shut down the hydrogen plant to direct power to housing instead.
Why unavoidable? It's a closed system - enclosed by inch-thick steel plate. Condensing water from the air and funneling it back into the taps would take a lot of energy, but that is available. Losses would exist, but could be taken down to liters-per-year. Easily enough to keep several years of stockpiles, and occasionally send a launch to replace what is lost.
No, I'm just saying that a closed system is almost possible. Not completly possible, but close enough that with enough time and money invested in engineering the need for external resupply could be reduced to just an occasional launch.
Worse than that. It's not just impure hydrogen that kills them - it's impure oxygen too. Nitrogen in the air is harmless, but carbon monoxide will trash a PEM cell. And if you are driving on a road next to old petrol-burners, there is going to be plenty of that around.
There are only two ways to store hydrogen: Pressurised, and using the exotic foamy method. I don't know how the exotic foamy method works, but I understand it involves very expensive alloys of very rare metals. And pressurised will explode, twice. First when the high-pressure tank ruptures, and again if the resulting cloud of hydrogen ignites in the confined space of the vehicle.
But with two critical flaws:
- Expensive. Making hydrogen from water costs a fortune, and making it from fossil fuels defeats the objective.
- Difficult to store. Doing so safely (As in 'Can survive traffic accidents without cratering the road') requires exotic and even more expensive alloys.
Orbital velocity at atmospheric heights?
That's going to hurt.
A good closed cycle life support system could work. Power is near-limitless from solar. Minaturised manufacturering and recycling can be done. If you want minimal-maintainance, the main concern would be altitude: Something so big would eventually deorbit due to drag, so LEO isn't going to cut it. There would still be a need for occasional replacement parts and top-ups for any air escaping from pinhole leaks or accidents, but if it were designed for sustainability you could probably get by with a rocket every ten years or so.
Because the earth has other people on it.
Probably more practical to just use your billions to set up a gated community somewhere so inhospitable no-one else wishes to venture close - even Siberia or Antartica can be made a bubble-domed paradise if you've enough money for construction and a nuclear reactor for heating. And if any of the commoners do venture close, that's what landmines are for.
I liked In Time. It was stupid, but in a fun way - I spent the whole movie finding all of the many, many plot holes and manners in which the premise was ignored.
Does it matter? It'll keep out the script kiddies, but it's hardly difficult to defear.
How about an app that changes the MAC to something new and random every time the interface has been disconnected longer than three minutes?
If you want to screw with them, do it the legal way.
1. Get netbook.
2. Harvest the MAC addresses of phones nearby as you travel.
3. Broadcast the usual queries, but spoofing the harvested MACs and ESSID lists.
Thus their marketting database is swiftly polluted and becomes much less valuable.
It goes the other way too. Firefox is without h264 support because, though the consortium is willing to give the mozilla foundation a no-fee license to the patents, they won't permit automatic licensing to anyone who wants to fork the project - and thus can't be compatible with the open-source development model. Thus no h264 on Firefox, and no WebM on Safari. Couple with similar situations over audio codecs, and if you want to use html5 video you'll have to supply two encodes.
WebP is just the I-frame format of WebM.
WebM is caught up in the patent fights right now. Safari isn't going to support either WebM or WebP, because WebM is a chief competitor to h264, and Apple own key patents on h264.
There are no business reasons not to support APNG - it's simply too niche for companies to much care about right now.