I would imagine the this would have to be very carefully built, as any stresses on the launch mechanism would transmit to the shaft, possibly collapsing it. ---------------
"Well maybe this is exatly the two opinions, why making this planet to a mudball by trying to leave it? Or how about concentrating energies to keep it another thousend years to place nearer to paradise."
Well, once I made sense of the mangled grammar above, I decided this was worth a reply...
Simply put, space is the only game you can play forever and keep winning. One planet does not contain enough resources or energy to allow for all human potentials to be realized. We desperately need the energy and materials of the entire Solar System to allow all of humanity to enjoy the freedoms that Americans take for granted.
Now, I don't mean every one on Earth should drive an SUV, live in a 10,000 sq ft house, talk on a cell phone, and shop at a strip mall. The most basic and important freedom that Americans have is the pursuit of happiness. If doing all that makes you happy, so be it. If it doesn't, do something else.
Now, back to the point: We need to go into space if more than a fraction of humanity is to have that great freedom for more than a fleeting moment in time. Technology requires energy in useful forms. On earth, this is sometimes a problem, when that energy comes from coal, oil, or nuclear power. Even hydroelectric, solar, wind, and tidal power aren't entirely benign. But more power than humans have ever used is available, right above our heads, in the form of a giant fusion reator we call the Sun.
Technology requires metals, plastics, industrial chemicals. The processing of materials on Earth leaves hazardous wastes that must be treated - but those materials are available in outer space in fantastic quanitites. And even if we tried, we couldn't "pollute space." Yes, there is a local problem with space junk that threatens the fragile spacecraft of today. When looking at space, one must consider the big picture - and it's huge.
This is only one of perhaps hundreds of thousands of planets in our galaxy - a galaxy that is but one of hundreds of millions in the universe. To say that we should concentrate our efforts here is folly at its worst.
The meek shall inherit the earth - the rest of us are going to the stars.
(Yes, I know I sound fanatical. That's because I am.) ---------------
... if you're NASA and want to stifle your opposition.
Look at this from NASA's, point of view. Let's say you want to keep the current pork-barrel shuttle launching. Anything that makes it cheaper to launch will cost your department jobs. So you come up with the bright idea to put nuclear material next to a BIG TANK OF FLAMMABLE HYDROGEN!. This will make environmentalists sh*t their pants, despite the fact that both of the SRBs survived the Challenger explosion (relatively) intact - look at the footage if you don't believe me (incidentally, nuclear boosters wouldn't have the O-ring problem... but I digress.)
OK, what does this accomplish? Simply, it puts the stigmata of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island on a new launch vehicle. And by saying that nuclear rockets can get into space with a single stage, it also puts a big glowing scarlett letter on other single stage to orbit concepts, which may or may not involve muclear rockets. Thus, the public outcry keeps anything new from being built by NASA, and makes people nervous about private initiatives. And hundreds of superfluous middle managers at Johnson Space center keep their jobs.
So, kudos to NASA for this bit of judo politics - you've just kept your own race on this stinking mudball for another generation.
It is said that getting to orbit is like climbing out of a well a thousand miles deep - most at NASA would build a stone roof over that well rather than see anyone else get out. ---------------
Others have made the point that the US Space Shuttle has horrendous maintainence costs: here's why
At the end of every Shuttle mission, the main engines are pulled and shipped to California. There, they are disassembled, rebuilt to specifications, and tested for 80% of their design life. Not exactly "reusable." This on top of the fact that every one of thousands of heat shield tiles needs to be inspected, and the damaged ones replaced.
I saw some report where they calculated that it would be cheaper to build one-use solid rocket boosters (the white rockets on the side of the brown fuel tank) rather than keep retrieving and reusing the current ones.... have to find that link.
The point is, it's often cheaper and safer to build something that only has to be used once. Having said that, I'll defend reusable vehicles for certain missions. The increase in capabilities is sometimes worth the added cost. ---------------
OK, unavoidable stupidity out of the way. Here's why we won't be using these as stopovers for a while yet - the radiation problem. See, the core of Jupiter is fluid metallic hydrogen, and it's spinning - this is responsible for Jupiter's enormous magnetic field strength - go here for numbers.
All of the moons listed are inner moons, so their surfaces are constanly under bombardment from energetic particles trapped by Jupiter's magnetic field. An astronaut on the surface of any one of them would recieve a lethal dose in no time flat.
Now, once we have adequate shielding (saw an interesting scheme to use material from one othe outer moons for this), we could land on or orbit a manned probe and send rovers out on the surface, and subs on Europa. ---------------
This has been one of those Real Soon Now (tm) projects for years, for a simple reason - assuming your solar cells are made of silicon or something of similar density, the mass of an SPS (solar power satellite) big enough to generate useful amounts of power is prohibitive.
Here's my calculations: Assuming a solar cell 1m to a side and 1mm thick, we get: 0.001m^3/cell * 2330 kg/m^3 (the density of silicon from Webelements ) = 2.33 kg per cell.
The solar irradiance at Earth's orbit is 1367.6 W/m^2 (from NASA National Space Science Data Center ). We currently have solar cells that can convert solar energy to electrical energy at about 30% efficiency in the labs. So, we'll assume that these can be made in bulk sometime in the near future. That yields 1367.6 * 0.3 = 410.28 W/m^2.
That seems like a lot, but consider - it four 100 watt light bulbs, or your computer (no monitor), if you have a system like mine. Lets say we aim for a generating capacity nearer to your average nuclear plant - 2 megawatts. Then we need 2,000,000 / 410.28 = 4,875 panels. At 2.33 kg each that's 11.4 metric tonnes. Not a huge amount, but then you have to add about that much in support structures, repair equipment, and the microwave emmitter, of course.
You will note that I have ignored losses in transmission, etc after the power is converted from solar to electrical. That is because these conversions are all very efficient, compared to the solar/electrical conversion, so they don't change any mass calculations by that much.
So how many SPS units would we need to power the world? From the CIA World FactBook , the US in 1998 used 3.365 trillion kWh, equivalent to a continous 384 million kW. We would therefore need about 200 thousand of the 2 megawatt stations considered above, for the US alone. If we wanted to be generous and extend this technology to the rest of the globe, we need over 2 million stations of this size.
Now, this is clearly not economical, not with launch costs in the neighborhood of $500/kg for the Shuttle (some dumb boosters can haul more for only $100/kg), but there is still hope. John S. Lewis, in his book Mining The Sky shows that building SPS units is economical, if you don't have to launch the mass of the solar cells. Instead, you bootstrap - launch a processing facility to a target Near Earth Object, set down and start making solar cells. The facility would have to be unmanned, but it would in a few years time produce enough cells to build a SPS.
One thing's for sure: You sure won't see any of this from NASA. They'd like it if you gave them the trillions of dollars it would take to build one of these, so they could fail miserably and call the whole idea impossible.
you'd have piles of money going into the solution of problems that were solved as much as 35 years ago
Well, no. Seeing as how the technical challenges of building a booster as big as a Sat V were overcome in my father's time, all we'd have to do is spend less than $100m (as aerospace goes, this is nothing) on tools, dies, and materials. And this is NASA, remember, the people who took the DCX and blew it up. The Russians have a booster (Energya) that costs less, lifts more, and can be launched in a blizzard. It's only flown twice, mostly because there isn't anything that big to launch anymore. (Soviet Navy wanted to fly 100+ tonne spy sats because they couldn't build them smaller)
If you wanted to jump-start the economy, you'd privatize space. Disband NASA, or turn it into something more like NACA, it's predecessor in the 1910s and 20s that helped early air travel take off (no pun intended:^).
As it is, we have Goldin saying one thing while JSC does another, we have high-level admin folks sneering at aerospace startups, and we're ignoring cheap, reusable launch vehicles while we try to build the "bext big thing". Can you imagine where air travel would be today if NACA had discouraged startups like Douglas or Boeing? Or if they had waited to build airplanes until they had jet engines?
Offering prizes is a good idea, as it will stimulate interest in the private sector. But nothing will get done until the NASA monopoly ends. ---------------
Well, others have toasted this guy well enough, but I'd just like to add one point:
The "possibility of recovery in case of failure" which he states the X-33 as having is non-existant.
With the engine design of the X-33/VentureStar, if you lose one, you cannot perform a de-orbit burn. This means you get to watch the pretty blue planet go by underneath while doing short thruster burns to kick your apogee (closest approach) into the atmosphere. That could take a while. A DC-XA type vehicle would use clusters of independent engines - lose one, two, three, or any number less than the half the full suite, and you can still land.
OK, so we've made it into the atmosphere. Our complicated X-33 has a problem with one of the gazillion hydraulic lines that operate the control surfaces. Now we get to land in whatever patch of ground we can find... But the DC-XA has hydraulics too. That's OK. Remember, it's symmetrical, so you can do thruster burns to rotate around, meaning you could land with only one working flap. It'd be tricky, and you'd probably get motion sick, but you'd still land at Canaveral, or wherever. Simply not possible with the lifting body design of the X-33.
Well, it's time to set this baby down. Our X-33 pilot can't extend his nose gear, so he's going to die when his ship smacks into the ground and snaps in half, igniting any fuel left in the tanks. It'd make a pretty nice big fireball for the folks at CNN to broadcast live. The DC-XA is still alright, because a full-scale design would use more than four landing legs - lose up to half of them, and you still stand up after landing.
This hypothetical scenario illustrates the fundamental principle behind the DC-XA: you can indeed have it good, fast, and cheap, if you stop designing spacecraft in a conventional manner. DC-X was built in less than two years for under $60 million. This is an amount of money that would simply be a drop in the bucket of a conventional aerospace program. The failure of the X-33 shows that the Cold War-era paradigm of spending billions upon billions to accomplish a mission simply will not work anymore. Better to let competition in the free market dictate which design is used. Personally, I think the descendants of the X-33 and DC-XA could coexist in a commercial space market, since the designs have different capabilities.
One design will, most probably, turn out to be the most efficient, most reliable, and therefore the most successful, at some time. Technology will always drive both designs, and many others, off of paper and into flying hardware. New developments will change what flies and what doesn't. But only if the current aerospace monopolies release their stranglehold on the industry.
There have been at least three previous cases of Ebola in North America - specifically, in Washington, D.C.
In Novemeber and October of 1989, the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) was called in to contain an outbreak of Ebola at a monkey-handling facility in Reston, Virginia.
Several workers at the facility were exposed to animals infected with Ebola. However, none of the workers showed any symptoms associated with Ebola (i.e. they didn't keel over and die). At this time it is known whether the strain of Ebola they were infected with, named Ebola Reston, is fatal to humans.
For a good read, check out The Hot Zone by Richard Preston.
...which is why we need the fair use laws to protect from large corporations.
The end result of freedom from copy restrictions is not a mono-culture, but many thousands of micro-cultures.
Think about the root of the word "culture" - it stems from "cult." Now think about the cults you belong to - they;re not called cults these days, but that's essentially what they are.
Our identity as individuals is shaped by the connections we form with others - Lion's Club Member, SCA, Republican, American, Socialist. It doesn't matter what the group is, as long as it holds value to you.
What the corporations seek to do is turn everyone in the world into revenue streams - they've done it already with musicians, and most of them don't realize it. The corporate monoculture is exactly what fair use and copy-making are countering.
The problem is, as you have pointed out, that as hard as the corps try to make us into drones, the opposition to them is trying to "free" the consumer from technology. What these Neo-Luddites fail to realize is that technology is not the problem, and abolishing it will solve nothing. Only a fundamental change in views will. The corporate mindset is a distant descendent of the worst inherent in slave-trade capitalists - the ones who made their money off of the sweat of others. The Luddite mindset is a knee-jerk fear of anything new.
There *must* be a better way. These mindless giants (corporations and anti-corp terrorists) threaten everything that is good about copyright and technology.
So what next? We force hardware stores to stop selling bolt cutters, because "most" of the people buying them are going to cut the lock off your bike and steal it?
Don't laugh, the analogy is there. And what's worse is, it's not even your bike. Sure, you bought and paid for it, but when you did, you signed a slip of paper saying you wouldn't let anyone else ride it. That's the point Gilmore is trying to make. The restrictions on copy-making technology are being made for the benefit of large coroporate interests, in the name of the consumer.
This is *not* about theft. It's about the right of consumers to use what they have paid for in a legal manner.
Yes, the people who work for these companies have a right to earn a living. Gilmore recognizes that people do this best when they are making something new, not searching for more ways to sustain an artifical scarcity.
If there was some credence to your claim that "most of the uses are not legitimate" then I might believe you.
I don't know about you, but I'm personally happy to know that other civilizations can't hear us...
Any civilization advanced enough to reach us is advanced enough to wipe us out. Look what happened in our own history when the Europeans reached the Americas.
1. The tether NASA melted was trying to be both structural and current-carrying. THAT is why it melted. CNTs (depending on how you shape them) have an electrical conductivity somewhere between that of graphite and that of diamond (moderate to nil).
2. The tether could most certainly be rigid - it's a straight line connecting GEO and the surface of the Earth. Tidal forces (from the moon and the sun) _may_ induce some sway - but this can most certainly be dealt with by appropriate movement of the balance mass beyond GEO.
3. Not according to my freshman engineering statics class - don't think of it as a large tower, think of it as a very large, flat bridge.
4. You put it in any equatorial country - I prefer South America, because of the Andes, but Africa would do fine. The tether goes straight up, so as long as it isn't within 10km of a border on the ground, nobody can do anything about it.
So, it isn't impossible at all to imagine. I personally think we won't, but not because we can't. The possibility of it crashing to Earth (and thus making a hundreds-of-kilometers-long crater) will guarantee that permits will be very hard to get.
Now, constructing such a tether (I prefer the term 'beanstalk' myself) on Mars would be more feasible - the Martian gravity, being lighter, gives us the advantage of being able to use contemporary materials. The CNTs discussed in the article have incredible tensile strengths, but only in lengths of less than a meter, currently. Additionally, Phobos and Deimos, if moved to Mars synchronous orbit (Mars GEO), would provide an ideal source of materials and a base for construction.
Even considering the above, however, it is unlikely that a beanstalk will be built on Earth. Besides the difficulty in making one in our 9.8m/s^2 gravity, beanstalks are also confined to a two-dimensional plane, because of the need to connect to a point on the equator.
I'd refer you to a webpage with more specifics, but it isn't done yet.
Howard Swan (fenris@nmt.edu)
Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot stay in the cradle
forever.
-Konstantin Tsiolkovskii
Similar in basic function to MRAM, NonVolatileFerroelectric RAM uses ceramic materials with interesting magnetic properties to store information. By tweaking the impurities in the ceramic, you can get volatile or nonvolatile components. Only problem is getting ceramic thin films to adhere to the substrate and each other.
Slashdot Mirror
I would imagine the this would have to be very carefully built, as any stresses on the launch mechanism would transmit to the shaft, possibly collapsing it.
---------------
"Well maybe this is exatly the two opinions, why making this planet to a mudball by trying to leave it? Or how about concentrating energies to keep it another thousend years to place nearer to paradise."
Well, once I made sense of the mangled grammar above, I decided this was worth a reply...
Simply put, space is the only game you can play forever and keep winning. One planet does not contain enough resources or energy to allow for all human potentials to be realized. We desperately need the energy and materials of the entire Solar System to allow all of humanity to enjoy the freedoms that Americans take for granted.
Now, I don't mean every one on Earth should drive an SUV, live in a 10,000 sq ft house, talk on a cell phone, and shop at a strip mall. The most basic and important freedom that Americans have is the pursuit of happiness. If doing all that makes you happy, so be it. If it doesn't, do something else.
Now, back to the point: We need to go into space if more than a fraction of humanity is to have that great freedom for more than a fleeting moment in time. Technology requires energy in useful forms. On earth, this is sometimes a problem, when that energy comes from coal, oil, or nuclear power. Even hydroelectric, solar, wind, and tidal power aren't entirely benign. But more power than humans have ever used is available, right above our heads, in the form of a giant fusion reator we call the Sun.
Technology requires metals, plastics, industrial chemicals. The processing of materials on Earth leaves hazardous wastes that must be treated - but those materials are available in outer space in fantastic quanitites. And even if we tried, we couldn't "pollute space." Yes, there is a local problem with space junk that threatens the fragile spacecraft of today. When looking at space, one must consider the big picture - and it's huge.
This is only one of perhaps hundreds of thousands of planets in our galaxy - a galaxy that is but one of hundreds of millions in the universe. To say that we should concentrate our efforts here is folly at its worst.
The meek shall inherit the earth - the rest of us are going to the stars.
(Yes, I know I sound fanatical. That's because I am.)
---------------
... if you're NASA and want to stifle your opposition.
Look at this from NASA's, point of view. Let's say you want to keep the current pork-barrel shuttle launching. Anything that makes it cheaper to launch will cost your department jobs. So you come up with the bright idea to put nuclear material next to a BIG TANK OF FLAMMABLE HYDROGEN!. This will make environmentalists sh*t their pants, despite the fact that both of the SRBs survived the Challenger explosion (relatively) intact - look at the footage if you don't believe me (incidentally, nuclear boosters wouldn't have the O-ring problem... but I digress.)
OK, what does this accomplish? Simply, it puts the stigmata of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island on a new launch vehicle. And by saying that nuclear rockets can get into space with a single stage, it also puts a big glowing scarlett letter on other single stage to orbit concepts, which may or may not involve muclear rockets. Thus, the public outcry keeps anything new from being built by NASA, and makes people nervous about private initiatives. And hundreds of superfluous middle managers at Johnson Space center keep their jobs.
So, kudos to NASA for this bit of judo politics - you've just kept your own race on this stinking mudball for another generation.
It is said that getting to orbit is like climbing out of a well a thousand miles deep - most at NASA would build a stone roof over that well rather than see anyone else get out.
---------------
Others have made the point that the US Space Shuttle has horrendous maintainence costs: here's why
At the end of every Shuttle mission, the main engines are pulled and shipped to California. There, they are disassembled, rebuilt to specifications, and tested for 80% of their design life. Not exactly "reusable." This on top of the fact that every one of thousands of heat shield tiles needs to be inspected, and the damaged ones replaced.
I saw some report where they calculated that it would be cheaper to build one-use solid rocket boosters (the white rockets on the side of the brown fuel tank) rather than keep retrieving and reusing the current ones.... have to find that link.
The point is, it's often cheaper and safer to build something that only has to be used once. Having said that, I'll defend reusable vehicles for certain missions. The increase in capabilities is sometimes worth the added cost.
---------------
All your moonbase are belong to US!
OK, unavoidable stupidity out of the way. Here's why we won't be using these as stopovers for a while yet - the radiation problem. See, the core of Jupiter is fluid metallic hydrogen, and it's spinning - this is responsible for Jupiter's enormous magnetic field strength - go here for numbers.
All of the moons listed are inner moons, so their surfaces are constanly under bombardment from energetic particles trapped by Jupiter's magnetic field. An astronaut on the surface of any one of them would recieve a lethal dose in no time flat.
Now, once we have adequate shielding (saw an interesting scheme to use material from one othe outer moons for this), we could land on or orbit a manned probe and send rovers out on the surface, and subs on Europa.
---------------
Ok, a slight error: Your average nuclear power plant is closer to 2 GIGAwatts, rather than 2 megawatts.
---------------
This has been one of those Real Soon Now (tm) projects for years, for a simple reason - assuming your solar cells are made of silicon or something of similar density, the mass of an SPS (solar power satellite) big enough to generate useful amounts of power is prohibitive.
Here's my calculations:
Assuming a solar cell 1m to a side and 1mm thick, we get: 0.001m^3/cell * 2330 kg/m^3 (the density of silicon from Webelements ) = 2.33 kg per cell.
The solar irradiance at Earth's orbit is 1367.6 W/m^2 (from NASA National Space Science Data Center ). We currently have solar cells that can convert solar energy to electrical energy at about 30% efficiency in the labs. So, we'll assume that these can be made in bulk sometime in the near future. That yields 1367.6 * 0.3 = 410.28 W/m^2.
That seems like a lot, but consider - it four 100 watt light bulbs, or your computer (no monitor), if you have a system like mine. Lets say we aim for a generating capacity nearer to your average nuclear plant - 2 megawatts. Then we need 2,000,000 / 410.28 = 4,875 panels. At 2.33 kg each that's 11.4 metric tonnes. Not a huge amount, but then you have to add about that much in support structures, repair equipment, and the microwave emmitter, of course.
You will note that I have ignored losses in transmission, etc after the power is converted from solar to electrical. That is because these conversions are all very efficient, compared to the solar/electrical conversion, so they don't change any mass calculations by that much.
So how many SPS units would we need to power the world? From the CIA World FactBook , the US in 1998 used 3.365 trillion kWh, equivalent to a continous 384 million kW. We would therefore need about 200 thousand of the 2 megawatt stations considered above, for the US alone. If we wanted to be generous and extend this technology to the rest of the globe, we need over 2 million stations of this size.
Now, this is clearly not economical, not with launch costs in the neighborhood of $500/kg for the Shuttle (some dumb boosters can haul more for only $100/kg), but there is still hope. John S. Lewis, in his book Mining The Sky shows that building SPS units is economical, if you don't have to launch the mass of the solar cells. Instead, you bootstrap - launch a processing facility to a target Near Earth Object, set down and start making solar cells. The facility would have to be unmanned, but it would in a few years time produce enough cells to build a SPS.
One thing's for sure: You sure won't see any of this from NASA. They'd like it if you gave them the trillions of dollars it would take to build one of these, so they could fail miserably and call the whole idea impossible.
---------------
you'd have piles of money going into the solution of problems that were solved as much as 35 years ago
:^).
Well, no. Seeing as how the technical challenges of building a booster as big as a Sat V were overcome in my father's time, all we'd have to do is spend less than $100m (as aerospace goes, this is nothing) on tools, dies, and materials. And this is NASA, remember, the people who took the DCX and blew it up. The Russians have a booster (Energya) that costs less, lifts more, and can be launched in a blizzard. It's only flown twice, mostly because there isn't anything that big to launch anymore. (Soviet Navy wanted to fly 100+ tonne spy sats because they couldn't build them smaller)
If you wanted to jump-start the economy, you'd privatize space. Disband NASA, or turn it into something more like NACA, it's predecessor in the 1910s and 20s that helped early air travel take off (no pun intended
As it is, we have Goldin saying one thing while JSC does another, we have high-level admin folks sneering at aerospace startups, and we're ignoring cheap, reusable launch vehicles while we try to build the "bext big thing". Can you imagine where air travel would be today if NACA had discouraged startups like Douglas or Boeing? Or if they had waited to build airplanes until they had jet engines?
Offering prizes is a good idea, as it will stimulate interest in the private sector. But nothing will get done until the NASA monopoly ends.
---------------
Well, others have toasted this guy well enough, but I'd just like to add one point: The "possibility of recovery in case of failure" which he states the X-33 as having is non-existant.
With the engine design of the X-33/VentureStar, if you lose one, you cannot perform a de-orbit burn. This means you get to watch the pretty blue planet go by underneath while doing short thruster burns to kick your apogee (closest approach) into the atmosphere. That could take a while. A DC-XA type vehicle would use clusters of independent engines - lose one, two, three, or any number less than the half the full suite, and you can still land.
OK, so we've made it into the atmosphere. Our complicated X-33 has a problem with one of the gazillion hydraulic lines that operate the control surfaces. Now we get to land in whatever patch of ground we can find... But the DC-XA has hydraulics too. That's OK. Remember, it's symmetrical, so you can do thruster burns to rotate around, meaning you could land with only one working flap. It'd be tricky, and you'd probably get motion sick, but you'd still land at Canaveral, or wherever. Simply not possible with the lifting body design of the X-33.
Well, it's time to set this baby down. Our X-33 pilot can't extend his nose gear, so he's going to die when his ship smacks into the ground and snaps in half, igniting any fuel left in the tanks. It'd make a pretty nice big fireball for the folks at CNN to broadcast live. The DC-XA is still alright, because a full-scale design would use more than four landing legs - lose up to half of them, and you still stand up after landing.
This hypothetical scenario illustrates the fundamental principle behind the DC-XA: you can indeed have it good, fast, and cheap, if you stop designing spacecraft in a conventional manner. DC-X was built in less than two years for under $60 million. This is an amount of money that would simply be a drop in the bucket of a conventional aerospace program. The failure of the X-33 shows that the Cold War-era paradigm of spending billions upon billions to accomplish a mission simply will not work anymore. Better to let competition in the free market dictate which design is used. Personally, I think the descendants of the X-33 and DC-XA could coexist in a commercial space market, since the designs have different capabilities.
One design will, most probably, turn out to be the most efficient, most reliable, and therefore the most successful, at some time. Technology will always drive both designs, and many others, off of paper and into flying hardware. New developments will change what flies and what doesn't. But only if the current aerospace monopolies release their stranglehold on the industry.
Deja vu
OK, yes, I am an idiot. This is what happens when you have five windows open at once, trying to read /.
There have been at least three previous cases of Ebola in North America - specifically, in Washington, D.C.
In Novemeber and October of 1989, the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) was called in to contain an outbreak of Ebola at a monkey-handling facility in Reston, Virginia.
Several workers at the facility were exposed to animals infected with Ebola. However, none of the workers showed any symptoms associated with Ebola (i.e. they didn't keel over and die). At this time it is known whether the strain of Ebola they were infected with, named Ebola Reston, is fatal to humans.
For a good read, check out The Hot Zone by Richard Preston.
...which is why we need the fair use laws to protect from large corporations.
The end result of freedom from copy restrictions is not a mono-culture, but many thousands of micro-cultures.
Think about the root of the word "culture" - it stems from "cult." Now think about the cults you belong to - they;re not called cults these days, but that's essentially what they are.
Our identity as individuals is shaped by the connections we form with others - Lion's Club Member, SCA, Republican, American, Socialist. It doesn't matter what the group is, as long as it holds value to you.
What the corporations seek to do is turn everyone in the world into revenue streams - they've done it already with musicians, and most of them don't realize it. The corporate monoculture is exactly what fair use and copy-making are countering.
The problem is, as you have pointed out, that as hard as the corps try to make us into drones, the opposition to them is trying to "free" the consumer from technology. What these Neo-Luddites fail to realize is that technology is not the problem, and abolishing it will solve nothing. Only a fundamental change in views will. The corporate mindset is a distant descendent of the worst inherent in slave-trade capitalists - the ones who made their money off of the sweat of others. The Luddite mindset is a knee-jerk fear of anything new.
There *must* be a better way. These mindless giants (corporations and anti-corp terrorists) threaten everything that is good about copyright and technology.
So what next? We force hardware stores to stop selling bolt cutters, because "most" of the people buying them are going to cut the lock off your bike and steal it?
Don't laugh, the analogy is there. And what's worse is, it's not even your bike. Sure, you bought and paid for it, but when you did, you signed a slip of paper saying you wouldn't let anyone else ride it. That's the point Gilmore is trying to make. The restrictions on copy-making technology are being made for the benefit of large coroporate interests, in the name of the consumer.
This is *not* about theft. It's about the right of consumers to use what they have paid for in a legal manner.
Yes, the people who work for these companies have a right to earn a living. Gilmore recognizes that people do this best when they are making something new, not searching for more ways to sustain an artifical scarcity.
If there was some credence to your claim that "most of the uses are not legitimate" then I might believe you.
Any civilization advanced enough to reach us is advanced enough to wipe us out. Look what happened in our own history when the Europeans reached the Americas.
Howard Swan (fenris@nmt.edu)
2. The tether could most certainly be rigid - it's a straight line connecting GEO and the surface of the Earth. Tidal forces (from the moon and the sun) _may_ induce some sway - but this can most certainly be dealt with by appropriate movement of the balance mass beyond GEO.
3. Not according to my freshman engineering statics class - don't think of it as a large tower, think of it as a very large, flat bridge.
4. You put it in any equatorial country - I prefer South America, because of the Andes, but Africa would do fine. The tether goes straight up, so as long as it isn't within 10km of a border on the ground, nobody can do anything about it.
So, it isn't impossible at all to imagine. I personally think we won't, but not because we can't. The possibility of it crashing to Earth (and thus making a hundreds-of-kilometers-long crater) will guarantee that permits will be very hard to get.
Now, constructing such a tether (I prefer the term 'beanstalk' myself) on Mars would be more feasible - the Martian gravity, being lighter, gives us the advantage of being able to use contemporary materials. The CNTs discussed in the article have incredible tensile strengths, but only in lengths of less than a meter, currently. Additionally, Phobos and Deimos, if moved to Mars synchronous orbit (Mars GEO), would provide an ideal source of materials and a base for construction.
Even considering the above, however, it is unlikely that a beanstalk will be built on Earth. Besides the difficulty in making one in our 9.8m/s^2 gravity, beanstalks are also confined to a two-dimensional plane, because of the need to connect to a point on the equator.
I'd refer you to a webpage with more specifics, but it isn't done yet.
Howard Swan (fenris@nmt.edu)
Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot stay in the cradle forever. -Konstantin Tsiolkovskii
Similar in basic function to MRAM, NonVolatileFerroelectric RAM uses ceramic materials with interesting magnetic properties to store information. By tweaking the impurities in the ceramic, you can get volatile or nonvolatile components. Only problem is getting ceramic thin films to adhere to the substrate and each other.
H. Swan
NMIMT
Materials Engineering