Ahh, replying to self - but worth while. Link to the relevant excerpt on Wireheading from from Larry Niven's "Ringworld Engineers" - I didn't realize it was from that series, one of my favorites.
This reminds me of an SF story, based on a real fact - direct electrical stimulation of the 'pleasure center' is possibly the most addictive mechanism that exists. Mice will literally stop eating and push the button for another 'stim' until they starve to death. So in the story there was an underground wirehead culture. It was illegal to have the wires put in, and most folks who did it didn't live that long. But a few managed to ration themselves and maintain a stable life. The protagonist was one such, and he was a private detective or something. I forget the rest of the story. But for letting people have a cheap high, there may not be anything better - once the wires are in place, you can be stoned for life on a 9V battery. Well not really stoned, not really happy, but definitely enjoying the pleasure. And it keeps you off the street - no need to go out for anything except groceries once in a while - or not. Like the mice, "who cares?" And then Darwin's rule applies.
Interestingly, some research shows that cocaine may be an excellent med for ADHD. Where it buzzes most people out, it settles the mind of ADDers and helps focus bringing them back into the 'real world', possibly better than any of the 'speed' drugs (Ritalin, Adderall, etc.) However research is limited.
Also (not particularly relevant), cocaine (and, IIRC, procaine and relatives) are the only anesthetics that are not central nervous system depressants.
Funny (giving up mod points to reply...) When I saw that 0.05%, I thought of it just the other way - to me it meant that we could launch a probe now that would arrive at the nearest star in ONLY 200 * 33 = 6600 years, using old-for-us technology. And that made me think that with a bit of thought and effort, maybe we could reduce that by an order of magnitude. And that was on the outer edge of something that the nations of earth might actually think was worth trying.
200 years would be better, of course. It's only two long human lifetimes. That's less than the time it took to build many of the old cathedrals, and much less than the time it took to build some ancient monuments.
Just checking the back of my envelope, an an RTG-powered ion propelled probe with a reasonable fuel load for a 500 year journey under constant acceleration, could be feasible. Constant acceleration, even 0.001% G adds up over time. Adding 0.009 m/s every second, times 86400 * 365.25 = 284018.4 m/s or 284 km/s - about 1/1000 the speed of light after just one year. After 100 years that's 28 km/s, or about 1/10 light speed. I'm too lazy to do the integrals, but this is looking like a plausible 200 year trip. The strength of the RTG would be dropping the whole time, but so would the mass. In fact, at those speeds I would think that rad hardening and other issues with high-speed particles would be the primary survival concern.
Of course, in order for the probe to 'stop' at the other end to do anything useful, it would have to turn around and decelerate for the same amount of time. And it would have to be smart enough to figure out a reasonable exploration orbit.
So for me, 0.05% was an optimistic number, not a pessimistic number. I can imagine the nations getting together to finance such a probe. In fact, I think it's within the financial capabilities of several individuals and many large businesses to finance the launch and the first 50 years of monitoring of such a probe. I'd give them naming rights to whatever they find at the other end.:) In fact, I'd strongly consider giving them a franchise (within some limits) to whatever they found.
I dumped RHEL and started using Ubuntu because it was easier to set up a simple desktop and also run various server apps for development, while RHEL seemed to be trying to take over more and more of the system with its own flavors. Now Ubuntu seems to have decided to go the same way. I'm still running 10.04 and trying to decide what to do.
Each of these companies, IMHO, seems to think that what they are doing is Important, Useful and even Visionary. I think it's more about justifying their own existence and expanding their brand. But (to stretch an analogy way too far), "He governs best who governs least". As these companies try to build their own little fortresses, they must inevitably give up more of the countryside, where trees and flowers and deer and bears can get by all by themselves, thank you very much.
I just want to run a reasonably secure, flexible operating system, and run a good 3D-oriented GUI (I'm a visual kind of guy). WRT this particular 'innovation', I regularly depend on 'tail -f' to watch log files on multiple remote systems (that happen to be running FreeBSD), sometimes filtering through several other programs to narrow down and transform the output. I fail to see what is wrong with the present system, and I don't see the point. I do confess I haven't done the research to really answer myself, but there are many aspects of 'the true *nix' that are that way for good reasons - call it the zen of OS. Sometimes the simplest is best.
If they want to do this, then it should be on the back end of the syslog output - tail the syslog into their fancy-schmancy binary system. This avoids disrupting all sorts of system tools, while providing everything that RHEL wants to accomplish.
In my case, I stopped using RHEL when it got to be too much of a PITA, and one too many changes that broke stuff that I was using. It's been a while now so I don't recall the details. IMHO a good OS maintains security and otherwise mostly stays the hell out of the way.
Actually just route commercial ships away from suspected pirates. Much like convoys were routed away from enemy submarines during WW2 when Ultra was up and running and decoding communications to and from the subs.
That worked for a while. Today the Somali mother ships are operating in essentially the entire northeastern Indian Ocean, from near the coast of India to the entry to the Suez Canal and 1000 miles south along the African coast. The alternative to the Suez Canal is the Cape of Good Hope, which adds perhaps $100,000 to the cost of fuel and lost time, and can be a very dangerous piece of ocean. It more than doubles the length of the trip from India to Europe. Also, almost the entire oil production of the Gulf nations from Saudi Arabia to Iran is within the present range of the pirate motherships, so those oil ships are under threat from the time they leave the dock.
This is less of a problem in the other piracy 'hot spot', the Straits of Malacca, but there are still very few good alternative deep-water routes through that area.
Perhaps the saddest thing about all this is that the Somali pirates are now funded and directed by the international crime cartels - some based in Europe (and IMHO probably Russia), who are making most of the money.
Legality of weapons aboard vessels varies for different countries. This applies both to the nation of registry, and the nation's territorial waters. Some nations will confiscate your boat if a weapon is found; some will require you to give them your weapons for 'safekeeping' while you are in the country (and often lose them while they are in 'safekeeping'), some don't ask, some don't care. When in international waters only the nation of registry matters - AFAIK there is no international law regarding arming of boats in international waters. IANAL, etc.
Sorry, I left the wrong impression. What I was saying was that the people of the many poor, overpopulated countries will increasingly want to come here, increasing the stress on the borders. That is the likely scenario.
The last bit about the US going down the tubes was a kind of throwaway line. It's pretty unlikely, but would make a pretty good SF story.
I expect this will probably get worse over the next decades. At present the US has, in addition to a fairly stable and high-tech economy by world standards, one of the lowest mean population densities. So sheer population pressure and all its relatives will be an increasing factor for the foreseeable future, in addition to all the others. And so the immigration policies and practices will continue to get more onerous.
OTOH, there's a finite chance that the US will become such a train wreck in the next 50 years that other countries will look at US citizens as a bunch of wetbacks trying to get out, to escape the grinding poverty in Chicago and New York!:P
In my somewhat-out-of-date experience, _well designed, planned and managed_ medium to large projects can often be more predictable than smaller ones, as the stochastic variation of the many small component projects (some run early, some run late) can average out.
Unfortunately there is also a body of evidence that the larger the project, the more likely it is to fail - as of the beginning of this century, at about $5 million the probability of failure was getting over 90%. I don't recall the definition of failure very well, but I think it was being so seriously over budget and behind schedule that the project got cancelled.
I ran one project where we got budget approved for six engineers and two years, for converting a multi-language, multi-platform system with several bleeding-edge components and (IIRC) 300,000 lines of code. And within a week the marketing team had promised delivery of a working system in two months to General Electric. Then our budget got cut to two people. This was essentially the final straw, and I left the company. I learned later that, with the connivance of the department at GE, the company delivered two non-working systems so the customer could sign off on delivery. Then they spent the two years hacking up a POS, not converting but merely porting things, smooshing things together and finally trying unsuccessfully to make it work. I think GE finally sued them.
SSL does not automatically solve the authentication problem. It's best to have some type of login form submission sequence, but digest authentication at least provides an authentication process that is encrypted end-to-end, and it happens before any web page is made visible. Digest plus SSL is a reasonable _minimum_ level of security for data that you want to keep private but aren't the crown jewels (IMHO).
Yep, just like that gun the evil villain is holding while his henchman ties Batman to the conveyor belt that takes 15 minutes to carry him up to the huge saw blade.:D Hmm. Maybe we should put the laser on a platform on the top of the building. Oh, I know - it will be New Year's, and it's secretly been installed inside the Times Square ball, so when it gets to the bottom the laser triggers and aims perfectly for the guy with the cell phone. Of course, the evil villain has a secret system for making a thunderstorm hover over the exact spot, building up an electrical charge. In fact, he advertises this as a rain-suppression system to protect the crowds from rain. But it will really zap the cell-phone guy, then (as we find out in a sub-plot where the good-guy nerd at National Weather Service figures it out and tells his girl friend) dump a huge deluge, causing flooding in downtown Manhattan just as the New Year's celebration begins!
I always wanted my hair permed!:D But of course all that hardware would be remotely controlled, along with the cloud seeding blimp to encourage the lightning to start at the right time.
Hmm. I wonder if we could get the victim to stand on a platform that just happens to be charged up to make it a better target.
Shine a UV laser beam from near the top of a high building (with the lightning rods disconnected from the ground) to the guy with the phone. That could ionize a conductive path to the victim, which the lightning could follow on its way through the victim to the ground. Use the cell phone signal as the trigger to greatly increase the beam strength (to give the friggin' cell phone a role in this Rube Goldberg scheme). Also maybe shine another one straight up into the storm.
Complicated? Of course not. Simple as pie.:D All in a day's work. Why, I have a portable 100 watt UV laser right here in my back pocket!
Various reasons - energy efficiency, trains are more likely to be able to go _right where you want to be_ rather than some flat spot 30 miles out of town, etc. And if we assume that one more transport-class airport would have to be built, that's more land area than the entire rail system required. (Case in point - Dallas/Fort Worth Airport is, IIRC, more acreage than a four-lane freeway from Dallas to Washington DC. Same with the big one in Montreal.) Also trains are more comfortable by at least an order of magnitude.
I'll let others comment, but I think that if the Earth did not rotate, and the Moon were not there, and the Sun's energy were evenly distributed around the equator, that the atmospheric motion would be entirely North and South (as well as vertical - elevation). There would be no easterly or westerly trade winds, no jet streams.
I mention the distribution of the Sun's energy only because if the Earth always faced one side to the Sun, then the thermal gradient from the near side to the far side would drive some hellish winds.
But I had forgotten about the Coriolis Effect. So I may be completely full of it, or maybe what I've been saying is expressed in the Coriolis effect, or maybe it's in addition to it. I can't say offhand, and it's bed time.:)
Through Columbus (an entrepreneur funded by a government), we learned about new places. But through exploration and exploitation of those places, we revolutionized every aspect of human life, with effects (good and bad) still echoing through society. China could have done that, but after Zheng He's dramatic expeditions, evidently the Chinese decided they had learned enough, and withdrew from the exploration and exploitation phase - and thereby lost the position of most powerful and influential economic and political power in the world. Had they done what the Europeans did, the peoples of Asia, Africa, the Americas, even possibly the peoples of Europe, might be speaking Mandarin today.
It's all very well and good to send out sensors to learn things - but the fundamental driving force of all life is to expand, explore, adapt, populate and grow. The alternative is generally stagnation and eventual death. To my mind, almost the entire purpose of robotic exploration is to provide the information needed to expand the human presence into the Universe. Otherwise it comes down to the equivalent of the ancient Greeks staring at pretty pictures and arguing over whether the Earth is flat or round.
While I agree with your overall point - space is not easy, baby steps, etc. - the question of whether we are ready to prepare for a permanent off-Earth colonization process is one that is best answered by letting those who are most interested work to prepare a justifiable 'business plan' with a reasonable chance of success, and provide government where appropriate. (The support of Ferdinand and Isabella for Columbus' first expedition made Spain for a time the wealthiest nation on Earth. Of course it also disrupted the European financial system...)
Note that essentially all of the early European explorers were essentially entrepreneurial individuals and entities - early VC companies that used a mix of private and public funds to finance the construction of ships and equipment to allow them to take the trips across the ocean to the "Indies", to Africa, to the Indian Ocean, etc. It wasn't until the overall lay of the land was somewhat known, and the availability of financially interesting resources was established, that the governments took anything more than passing interest - and then the military and naval expeditions started, as the various nations worked to stake out their claims.
So, let Elon Musk, Robert Bigelow, and the many others, work to put together a reasonable case for their coming expeditions, and provide government financing when it seems likely to provide an economic and political return. As I alluded above, given an opportunity for a dozen people to move to Mars, with a 50/50 chance of living 1 year and 0 possibility of return, there are at least 1000s of people who would volunteer for each of the 12 slots - even if part of the deal was mandatory sterilization to prevent dead babies. Think of it - the chance to be the first, or the only, Terrans to land and live on Mars. Heck, I might even take that deal. An entire planet is a hell of a monument to the first ones there.
I think there are many people who, given a 50/50 chance of living a year, would accept the challenge to go to Mars. It doesn't matter whether you think they are idiotic - they don't agree. In fact, I would bet that there are enough such people reading this thread to populate such a mission. And twice as many if there were a reasonable probability for follow-up missions bringing additional explorers/settlers/whatever you want to call them. And given the capability to launch the inaugural mission, it would not be that much more difficult to launch follow-up missions to provide enough supplies to last one year. And it's within the range of possibility that within that year, enough would have been learned to make a permanent, mostly-self-sustaining colony feasible. I won't argue that mars is the right place but given our present level of technical, engineering and other expertise, it is not out of the realm of possibility.
As a reasonable thought experiment, let's hypothesize the classic Nemesis event - we discover a huge asteroid will definitely strike Earth in 30 years, or 100 years, and will wipe out almost all life for 100 years. Given such a stimulus, I think the probability of establishing one or many self-sustaining colonies off Earth would suddenly look a lot more practical. Necessity is the mother of invention - and also of initiative. Of course, one would hope that at the same time, significant efforts would also be made to figure out how to establish a survival base here on Earth as well. Competition for resources between those two would be... interesting... But I think that other than the financial resources, there needn't be much competition between them - they are both reasonable solutions, and "Let's do both!!" (Or, rather, some folks would go for space, others would build habitats in the deep mines, perhaps underwater, etc. - and some of them might survive.)
Now, merely change the term '30 years' to 'some unknown time in the future, possibly 30,000 to one million years', and the probability of the Nemesis event gets much closer to 1. So all we are debating is whether we are ready to begin the process. It's not whether we should, it's when. Of course, this is all "blue sky" thinking.:D
Oh - one bit I did not address - in the case of the Moon, as noted, the moon's orbit gradually gets slower and the diameter gets larger. I'm not correctly addressing this in the case of the atmosphere, which means that I have not properly or completely addressed your question about the conservation of momentum. I'll speculate that this might be expressed in a slight difference in the elevation of the overall height of the atmosphere, and/or a slight increase in the loss of gases to space, or a slight net cooling (e.g. lower pressure at altitude). IOW, I have no clue.:)
Oh, God you're going to make me do the arithmetic!:) I'm much better at hand-waving than equations. Perhaps someone more adept than I can explain this is more precise terms. In the meantime, if I can stipulate my statement that the atmosphere acts analogously to kind of diffuse moon, I think the following (from Wikipedia article on the Moon, can help explain how the angular momentum is exchanged to slow the Earth's rotation and the Moon's orbit. And thus, something similar happens with the atmosphere. (But I hasten to add that I can not say that this effect is greater than, or even in the same magnitude, as the thermal effects of the Sun. I did say 'part of' the effect...:) )
Gravitational coupling between the Moon and the bulge nearest the Moon acts as a torque on the Earth's rotation, draining angular momentum and rotational kinetic energy from the Earth's spin.[94][96] In turn, angular momentum is added to the Moon's orbit, accelerating it, which lifts the Moon into a higher orbit with a longer period. As a result, the distance between the Earth and Moon is increasing, and the Earth's spin slowing down.[96] Measurements from lunar ranging experiments with laser reflectors left during the Apollo missions have found that the Moon's distance to the Earth increases by 38 mm per year[97] (though this is only 0.10 ppb/year of the radius of the Moon's orbit). Atomic clocks also show that the Earth's day lengthens by about 15 microseconds every year,[98] slowly increasing the rate at which UTC is adjusted by leap seconds. Left to run its course, this tidal drag would continue until the spin of the Earth and the orbital period of the Moon matched. However, the Sun will become a red giant long before that, engulfing the Earth.
So, if the atmosphere can be analogized to the moon in the way I described, the same effect applies. IMHO one of the strong evidences is that there is an overall net directionality of the atmosphere - near the tropics the winds go east to west as the Earth goes west to east; the lesser volume of wind in the temperate latitudes goes west to east, and the even smaller winds near the arctic are again east to west. This fits with the idea that the air is being dragged along by the Earth. This same pattern is true on Jupiter as well. To my mind, the thermal effects are more strongly visible in the Hadley, Ferrell and Polar cells where the hot air at the equator rises, then cools and falls between the tropic and temperate zones, and a similar effect occurs between the temperate and polar regions. That's probably much stronger than the rotational drag but IANA atmospheric physicist.
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Ahh, replying to self - but worth while. Link to the relevant excerpt on Wireheading from from Larry Niven's "Ringworld Engineers" - I didn't realize it was from that series, one of my favorites.
This reminds me of an SF story, based on a real fact - direct electrical stimulation of the 'pleasure center' is possibly the most addictive mechanism that exists. Mice will literally stop eating and push the button for another 'stim' until they starve to death. So in the story there was an underground wirehead culture. It was illegal to have the wires put in, and most folks who did it didn't live that long. But a few managed to ration themselves and maintain a stable life. The protagonist was one such, and he was a private detective or something. I forget the rest of the story. But for letting people have a cheap high, there may not be anything better - once the wires are in place, you can be stoned for life on a 9V battery. Well not really stoned, not really happy, but definitely enjoying the pleasure. And it keeps you off the street - no need to go out for anything except groceries once in a while - or not. Like the mice, "who cares?" And then Darwin's rule applies.
Interestingly, some research shows that cocaine may be an excellent med for ADHD. Where it buzzes most people out, it settles the mind of ADDers and helps focus bringing them back into the 'real world', possibly better than any of the 'speed' drugs (Ritalin, Adderall, etc.) However research is limited.
Also (not particularly relevant), cocaine (and, IIRC, procaine and relatives) are the only anesthetics that are not central nervous system depressants.
Funny (giving up mod points to reply...) When I saw that 0.05%, I thought of it just the other way - to me it meant that we could launch a probe now that would arrive at the nearest star in ONLY 200 * 33 = 6600 years, using old-for-us technology. And that made me think that with a bit of thought and effort, maybe we could reduce that by an order of magnitude. And that was on the outer edge of something that the nations of earth might actually think was worth trying.
200 years would be better, of course. It's only two long human lifetimes. That's less than the time it took to build many of the old cathedrals, and much less than the time it took to build some ancient monuments.
Just checking the back of my envelope, an an RTG-powered ion propelled probe with a reasonable fuel load for a 500 year journey under constant acceleration, could be feasible. Constant acceleration, even 0.001% G adds up over time. Adding 0.009 m/s every second, times 86400 * 365.25 = 284018.4 m/s or 284 km/s - about 1/1000 the speed of light after just one year. After 100 years that's 28 km/s, or about 1/10 light speed. I'm too lazy to do the integrals, but this is looking like a plausible 200 year trip. The strength of the RTG would be dropping the whole time, but so would the mass. In fact, at those speeds I would think that rad hardening and other issues with high-speed particles would be the primary survival concern.
Of course, in order for the probe to 'stop' at the other end to do anything useful, it would have to turn around and decelerate for the same amount of time. And it would have to be smart enough to figure out a reasonable exploration orbit.
So for me, 0.05% was an optimistic number, not a pessimistic number. I can imagine the nations getting together to finance such a probe. In fact, I think it's within the financial capabilities of several individuals and many large businesses to finance the launch and the first 50 years of monitoring of such a probe. I'd give them naming rights to whatever they find at the other end. :) In fact, I'd strongly consider giving them a franchise (within some limits) to whatever they found.
I dumped RHEL and started using Ubuntu because it was easier to set up a simple desktop and also run various server apps for development, while RHEL seemed to be trying to take over more and more of the system with its own flavors. Now Ubuntu seems to have decided to go the same way. I'm still running 10.04 and trying to decide what to do.
Each of these companies, IMHO, seems to think that what they are doing is Important, Useful and even Visionary. I think it's more about justifying their own existence and expanding their brand. But (to stretch an analogy way too far), "He governs best who governs least". As these companies try to build their own little fortresses, they must inevitably give up more of the countryside, where trees and flowers and deer and bears can get by all by themselves, thank you very much.
I just want to run a reasonably secure, flexible operating system, and run a good 3D-oriented GUI (I'm a visual kind of guy). WRT this particular 'innovation', I regularly depend on 'tail -f' to watch log files on multiple remote systems (that happen to be running FreeBSD), sometimes filtering through several other programs to narrow down and transform the output. I fail to see what is wrong with the present system, and I don't see the point. I do confess I haven't done the research to really answer myself, but there are many aspects of 'the true *nix' that are that way for good reasons - call it the zen of OS. Sometimes the simplest is best.
If they want to do this, then it should be on the back end of the syslog output - tail the syslog into their fancy-schmancy binary system. This avoids disrupting all sorts of system tools, while providing everything that RHEL wants to accomplish.
In my case, I stopped using RHEL when it got to be too much of a PITA, and one too many changes that broke stuff that I was using. It's been a while now so I don't recall the details. IMHO a good OS maintains security and otherwise mostly stays the hell out of the way.
It does work. It makes it easier for radar to see him. ;)
Actually just route commercial ships away from suspected pirates. Much like convoys were routed away from enemy submarines during WW2 when Ultra was up and running and decoding communications to and from the subs.
That worked for a while. Today the Somali mother ships are operating in essentially the entire northeastern Indian Ocean, from near the coast of India to the entry to the Suez Canal and 1000 miles south along the African coast. The alternative to the Suez Canal is the Cape of Good Hope, which adds perhaps $100,000 to the cost of fuel and lost time, and can be a very dangerous piece of ocean. It more than doubles the length of the trip from India to Europe. Also, almost the entire oil production of the Gulf nations from Saudi Arabia to Iran is within the present range of the pirate motherships, so those oil ships are under threat from the time they leave the dock.
This is less of a problem in the other piracy 'hot spot', the Straits of Malacca, but there are still very few good alternative deep-water routes through that area.
Perhaps the saddest thing about all this is that the Somali pirates are now funded and directed by the international crime cartels - some based in Europe (and IMHO probably Russia), who are making most of the money.
Legality of weapons aboard vessels varies for different countries. This applies both to the nation of registry, and the nation's territorial waters. Some nations will confiscate your boat if a weapon is found; some will require you to give them your weapons for 'safekeeping' while you are in the country (and often lose them while they are in 'safekeeping'), some don't ask, some don't care. When in international waters only the nation of registry matters - AFAIK there is no international law regarding arming of boats in international waters. IANAL, etc.
Sorry, I left the wrong impression. What I was saying was that the people of the many poor, overpopulated countries will increasingly want to come here, increasing the stress on the borders. That is the likely scenario.
The last bit about the US going down the tubes was a kind of throwaway line. It's pretty unlikely, but would make a pretty good SF story.
I expect this will probably get worse over the next decades. At present the US has, in addition to a fairly stable and high-tech economy by world standards, one of the lowest mean population densities. So sheer population pressure and all its relatives will be an increasing factor for the foreseeable future, in addition to all the others. And so the immigration policies and practices will continue to get more onerous.
OTOH, there's a finite chance that the US will become such a train wreck in the next 50 years that other countries will look at US citizens as a bunch of wetbacks trying to get out, to escape the grinding poverty in Chicago and New York! :P
In my somewhat-out-of-date experience, _well designed, planned and managed_ medium to large projects can often be more predictable than smaller ones, as the stochastic variation of the many small component projects (some run early, some run late) can average out.
Unfortunately there is also a body of evidence that the larger the project, the more likely it is to fail - as of the beginning of this century, at about $5 million the probability of failure was getting over 90%. I don't recall the definition of failure very well, but I think it was being so seriously over budget and behind schedule that the project got cancelled.
I ran one project where we got budget approved for six engineers and two years, for converting a multi-language, multi-platform system with several bleeding-edge components and (IIRC) 300,000 lines of code. And within a week the marketing team had promised delivery of a working system in two months to General Electric. Then our budget got cut to two people. This was essentially the final straw, and I left the company. I learned later that, with the connivance of the department at GE, the company delivered two non-working systems so the customer could sign off on delivery. Then they spent the two years hacking up a POS, not converting but merely porting things, smooshing things together and finally trying unsuccessfully to make it work. I think GE finally sued them.
SSL does not automatically solve the authentication problem. It's best to have some type of login form submission sequence, but digest authentication at least provides an authentication process that is encrypted end-to-end, and it happens before any web page is made visible. Digest plus SSL is a reasonable _minimum_ level of security for data that you want to keep private but aren't the crown jewels (IMHO).
Yep, just like that gun the evil villain is holding while his henchman ties Batman to the conveyor belt that takes 15 minutes to carry him up to the huge saw blade. :D Hmm. Maybe we should put the laser on a platform on the top of the building. Oh, I know - it will be New Year's, and it's secretly been installed inside the Times Square ball, so when it gets to the bottom the laser triggers and aims perfectly for the guy with the cell phone. Of course, the evil villain has a secret system for making a thunderstorm hover over the exact spot, building up an electrical charge. In fact, he advertises this as a rain-suppression system to protect the crowds from rain. But it will really zap the cell-phone guy, then (as we find out in a sub-plot where the good-guy nerd at National Weather Service figures it out and tells his girl friend) dump a huge deluge, causing flooding in downtown Manhattan just as the New Year's celebration begins!
Now THAT's a plot! MUahahahaha!!! :D
I always wanted my hair permed! :D But of course all that hardware would be remotely controlled, along with the cloud seeding blimp to encourage the lightning to start at the right time.
Hmm. I wonder if we could get the victim to stand on a platform that just happens to be charged up to make it a better target.
Shine a UV laser beam from near the top of a high building (with the lightning rods disconnected from the ground) to the guy with the phone. That could ionize a conductive path to the victim, which the lightning could follow on its way through the victim to the ground. Use the cell phone signal as the trigger to greatly increase the beam strength (to give the friggin' cell phone a role in this Rube Goldberg scheme). Also maybe shine another one straight up into the storm.
Complicated? Of course not. Simple as pie. :D All in a day's work. Why, I have a portable 100 watt UV laser right here in my back pocket!
Various reasons - energy efficiency, trains are more likely to be able to go _right where you want to be_ rather than some flat spot 30 miles out of town, etc. And if we assume that one more transport-class airport would have to be built, that's more land area than the entire rail system required. (Case in point - Dallas/Fort Worth Airport is, IIRC, more acreage than a four-lane freeway from Dallas to Washington DC. Same with the big one in Montreal.) Also trains are more comfortable by at least an order of magnitude.
I'll let others comment, but I think that if the Earth did not rotate, and the Moon were not there, and the Sun's energy were evenly distributed around the equator, that the atmospheric motion would be entirely North and South (as well as vertical - elevation). There would be no easterly or westerly trade winds, no jet streams.
I mention the distribution of the Sun's energy only because if the Earth always faced one side to the Sun, then the thermal gradient from the near side to the far side would drive some hellish winds.
But I had forgotten about the Coriolis Effect. So I may be completely full of it, or maybe what I've been saying is expressed in the Coriolis effect, or maybe it's in addition to it. I can't say offhand, and it's bed time. :)
Through Columbus (an entrepreneur funded by a government), we learned about new places. But through exploration and exploitation of those places, we revolutionized every aspect of human life, with effects (good and bad) still echoing through society. China could have done that, but after Zheng He's dramatic expeditions, evidently the Chinese decided they had learned enough, and withdrew from the exploration and exploitation phase - and thereby lost the position of most powerful and influential economic and political power in the world. Had they done what the Europeans did, the peoples of Asia, Africa, the Americas, even possibly the peoples of Europe, might be speaking Mandarin today.
It's all very well and good to send out sensors to learn things - but the fundamental driving force of all life is to expand, explore, adapt, populate and grow. The alternative is generally stagnation and eventual death. To my mind, almost the entire purpose of robotic exploration is to provide the information needed to expand the human presence into the Universe. Otherwise it comes down to the equivalent of the ancient Greeks staring at pretty pictures and arguing over whether the Earth is flat or round.
Me too. :)
While I agree with your overall point - space is not easy, baby steps, etc. - the question of whether we are ready to prepare for a permanent off-Earth colonization process is one that is best answered by letting those who are most interested work to prepare a justifiable 'business plan' with a reasonable chance of success, and provide government where appropriate. (The support of Ferdinand and Isabella for Columbus' first expedition made Spain for a time the wealthiest nation on Earth. Of course it also disrupted the European financial system...)
Note that essentially all of the early European explorers were essentially entrepreneurial individuals and entities - early VC companies that used a mix of private and public funds to finance the construction of ships and equipment to allow them to take the trips across the ocean to the "Indies", to Africa, to the Indian Ocean, etc. It wasn't until the overall lay of the land was somewhat known, and the availability of financially interesting resources was established, that the governments took anything more than passing interest - and then the military and naval expeditions started, as the various nations worked to stake out their claims.
So, let Elon Musk, Robert Bigelow, and the many others, work to put together a reasonable case for their coming expeditions, and provide government financing when it seems likely to provide an economic and political return. As I alluded above, given an opportunity for a dozen people to move to Mars, with a 50/50 chance of living 1 year and 0 possibility of return, there are at least 1000s of people who would volunteer for each of the 12 slots - even if part of the deal was mandatory sterilization to prevent dead babies. Think of it - the chance to be the first, or the only, Terrans to land and live on Mars. Heck, I might even take that deal. An entire planet is a hell of a monument to the first ones there.
I think there are many people who, given a 50/50 chance of living a year, would accept the challenge to go to Mars. It doesn't matter whether you think they are idiotic - they don't agree. In fact, I would bet that there are enough such people reading this thread to populate such a mission. And twice as many if there were a reasonable probability for follow-up missions bringing additional explorers/settlers/whatever you want to call them. And given the capability to launch the inaugural mission, it would not be that much more difficult to launch follow-up missions to provide enough supplies to last one year. And it's within the range of possibility that within that year, enough would have been learned to make a permanent, mostly-self-sustaining colony feasible. I won't argue that mars is the right place but given our present level of technical, engineering and other expertise, it is not out of the realm of possibility.
As a reasonable thought experiment, let's hypothesize the classic Nemesis event - we discover a huge asteroid will definitely strike Earth in 30 years, or 100 years, and will wipe out almost all life for 100 years. Given such a stimulus, I think the probability of establishing one or many self-sustaining colonies off Earth would suddenly look a lot more practical. Necessity is the mother of invention - and also of initiative. Of course, one would hope that at the same time, significant efforts would also be made to figure out how to establish a survival base here on Earth as well. Competition for resources between those two would be ... interesting... But I think that other than the financial resources, there needn't be much competition between them - they are both reasonable solutions, and "Let's do both!!" (Or, rather, some folks would go for space, others would build habitats in the deep mines, perhaps underwater, etc. - and some of them might survive.)
Now, merely change the term '30 years' to 'some unknown time in the future, possibly 30,000 to one million years', and the probability of the Nemesis event gets much closer to 1. So all we are debating is whether we are ready to begin the process. It's not whether we should, it's when. Of course, this is all "blue sky" thinking. :D
Letting a bunch of clueless lawyers with delusions of grandeur run your space program⦠really bad idea.
FTFY :)
There are few things more dangerous to society than the opportunity to have a monument named after you.
Oh - one bit I did not address - in the case of the Moon, as noted, the moon's orbit gradually gets slower and the diameter gets larger. I'm not correctly addressing this in the case of the atmosphere, which means that I have not properly or completely addressed your question about the conservation of momentum. I'll speculate that this might be expressed in a slight difference in the elevation of the overall height of the atmosphere, and/or a slight increase in the loss of gases to space, or a slight net cooling (e.g. lower pressure at altitude). IOW, I have no clue. :)
Oh, God you're going to make me do the arithmetic! :) I'm much better at hand-waving than equations. Perhaps someone more adept than I can explain this is more precise terms. In the meantime, if I can stipulate my statement that the atmosphere acts analogously to kind of diffuse moon, I think the following (from Wikipedia article on the Moon, can help explain how the angular momentum is exchanged to slow the Earth's rotation and the Moon's orbit. And thus, something similar happens with the atmosphere. (But I hasten to add that I can not say that this effect is greater than, or even in the same magnitude, as the thermal effects of the Sun. I did say 'part of' the effect... :) )
Gravitational coupling between the Moon and the bulge nearest the Moon acts as a torque on the Earth's rotation, draining angular momentum and rotational kinetic energy from the Earth's spin.[94][96] In turn, angular momentum is added to the Moon's orbit, accelerating it, which lifts the Moon into a higher orbit with a longer period. As a result, the distance between the Earth and Moon is increasing, and the Earth's spin slowing down.[96] Measurements from lunar ranging experiments with laser reflectors left during the Apollo missions have found that the Moon's distance to the Earth increases by 38 mm per year[97] (though this is only 0.10 ppb/year of the radius of the Moon's orbit). Atomic clocks also show that the Earth's day lengthens by about 15 microseconds every year,[98] slowly increasing the rate at which UTC is adjusted by leap seconds. Left to run its course, this tidal drag would continue until the spin of the Earth and the orbital period of the Moon matched. However, the Sun will become a red giant long before that, engulfing the Earth.
So, if the atmosphere can be analogized to the moon in the way I described, the same effect applies. IMHO one of the strong evidences is that there is an overall net directionality of the atmosphere - near the tropics the winds go east to west as the Earth goes west to east; the lesser volume of wind in the temperate latitudes goes west to east, and the even smaller winds near the arctic are again east to west. This fits with the idea that the air is being dragged along by the Earth. This same pattern is true on Jupiter as well. To my mind, the thermal effects are more strongly visible in the Hadley, Ferrell and Polar cells where the hot air at the equator rises, then cools and falls between the tropic and temperate zones, and a similar effect occurs between the temperate and polar regions. That's probably much stronger than the rotational drag but IANA atmospheric physicist.