There's no question that isn't solvable. The question is, once you have a solution, is there any advantage to the design? If it takes thrusters to stabilize the elevator that expend as much power as it would take to lift the payload, you might as well dispense with the elevator and just attach the thrusters to the payload like we do today.
It's not a question of whether it's possible to make a space elevator, it's a question of whether there's ultimately any point to doing so...
The sun is not, in fact, physically attached to any arm. It orbits the center of the galaxy just like all the other stars in the galaxy. The stars pass in and out of the arms as they go around. Stars near the center tend to move faster than the arms, whereas stars towards the edge more more slowly than the arms.
The arms, by the way, are density waves. Their motion is unrelated to the motion of the stars, just as the motion of the individual water molecules has little to do with the motion of waves on a river. I've seen people exclaim the Mississippi is flowing backwards on days when waves are heading upstream, but waves can move north even while water molecules are moving south.
The engineering that was required for the Apollo missions was mind-boggling too, especially when you consider they were using computers back then less powerful than a typical scientific calculator...
At what point does sending a man to the moon require math you can't easily do with pencil and paper?
There were a number of challenges faced back then, but the fact they did it without modern computers isn't all that remarkable. Sending a man to the moon doesn't require a great deal of computational power or data storage capability.
Heck, it doesn't require that deep an understand of physics, either. I believe they did most of their calculations using Newton's formulae. Einstein's might be more accurate, but it makes no practical difference for a moon shot.
Slide rules may be quaint, but they were more than up to the task at hand. Rocket science isn't brain surgery...
Also, look at history, we managed to believe the earth was flat for quite a lot longer than a century, going by your "stable" logic that means the earth is flat and what we know now is wrong?
Actually, if you look at history, it's pretty hard to find any time where we thought the earth was flat. Mostly people didn't know the shape of the earth, those who even considered the question came up with a variety of answers, but mostly concluded it was round.
My daughter got the MMR a month or two ago and she ended up with a week of 106F fever.
About a year ago, I had a bad fever for several days after getting my oil changed. But Detroit and the oil companies make sure these kind of stories don't appear in the media...:p
Rule of thumb: When someone is trying to explain the "cause" of something, and they have mentioned less than a dozen different things, they're oversimplifying.
True. Actually, the real difference between the meaning of the word "reflection" and "echo" lies on in the delay but in the repeat. An echo is a reflection that is perceiving after one has already perceived the same thing the first time. So, although you see the gun fire and a second later here the report, that first hearing of the report is not an echo. But when you then hear the same report reflected off of the wall behind the guy firing the starting pistol, that is an echo. Since we saw the original supernova, then saw the reflection after, the second perception is of an echo. The delay is less important to the distinction than the fact that it's a repeat.
Esoteric-looking shells are there for marketing purposes and cost-justification.
In other words, the important part.:)
I'm only half-joking, of course. In a capitalistic system, "marketing purposes" alludes to the primary reason the computer is being built: to sell and thus make money.
Hehe. But seriously, there has been a strong link between religion and astronomy (in the broad sense) since prehistoric times. Ancient people didn't build astroliths to conduct scientific experiments...
Can't he also release them to multiple websites?
Ogg (or what ever the completely open format the cool kids are using these days) on some.gov site and the locked down.flv on YouTube.
I've never had any trouble getting anything I want in.mp4 format from YouTube. Granted, they don't make is obvious how...
Enabling auto-update implies the user trusts Microsoft to (a) update Windows properly and (b) not steal their bank account and credit card information with each update.
Actually, installing Microsoft Windows and then connecting to the Internet implies you don't believe Microsoft will steal your bank account and credit card information. If they then further believe Microsoft will steal their data if they use Windows Update, no further analysis of their beliefs can yield useful information about what actions they may or may not engage in -- they have at that point proven to be completely irrational. Given this, any actions are possible, and you can try to rationalize their actions any way you like by picking and choosing from their contradictory beliefs, but it's ultimately pointless, since to do so assumes a level of rationality that is clearly not present.
That was stupid on so many levels it's hard to know where to start.
I'll point out first and foremost, however, that free and fair elections were part of the constitution of the Soviet Union. If you're going to quote principles from political documents as if you gullibly believe everything politicians publicly advocate, the USSR were really nice guys. OTOH, if you understand that documents like this are intended to mislead people, you'd have to be stupid to quote them as examples of what Hitler or any facist is really all about. So... which is it, are you horribly gullible or just horribly stupid? (If you weren't either, you wouldn't have made the post to begin with, knowing that there's no point in quoting the text in question as an example of anything.)
Nobody can say you broke the law unless you have a conviction, so it's only illegal if you get caught.
Actually, anyone can say you broke the law, regardless. If you're going to argue you can sue them for slander if they do, then by your own logic it follows that anyone can say you broke the law unless you sue them.
And try to convince me that a flight simulator in your project is a good thing, why won't you?
Why would I? I'm not claiming that no Easter Egg is ever bad. Again, your argument rests entirely on faulty logic and bad analogies. Anyone who claims all Easter Eggs are good would be as idiotic as someone who claims all Easter Eggs are bad.
he promised another Moon shot and increase NASA spending to mine the Moon for materials and maybe put a base there.
And he just asked NASA to estimate the cost of accelerating the the Ares/Orion program to get it done sooner.
You must be new here. You should know by know that the only thing more misleading than a politician's promises is a Slashdot summary, and both are trumped by Slashdot headlines.
Granted that Dems are usually regarded as the "spend" party.
Despite all evidence to the contrary. I've always wondered about this one, given that it's rather obviously and blatantly false if you look at the history and the budgets the various parties submit. But then I watched Stephen Colbert, and it all makes sense now. It's one of those statements that has a great deal of truthiness, and people's guts tell them it's true. Nevermind the fact that GOP budgets are frequently larger...
Both parties want to spend your money. They just want to spend it on different things. Often they want to spend it on hideously expensive things (be it social programs, massive defense budgets, or ginormous subsidies to Exxon-Mobile).
The main difference is, deficits grow a bit or sometimes shrink a bit under Democratic administrations, but balloon entirely out of control under Republican ones. That's because for all their rhetorical opposition, Republics have less things they're actually willing to cut. Granted, the things Democrats like to cut are easier targets. It's easier to sell cutting bombers than cutting health services for the poor.
First of all, like most Slashdot headlines, it's horribly slanted. The headline could just as easily be "Obama Team Considers Accelerating Development of Ares, Orion". Cost estimates are requested for both.
Secondly, your statement is obviously, blatantly false. It was Democrats who put a man on the moon the first time.
I also love it when my plumber routes the pipes around the house just for some harmless fun, and the electrician routes wires around against specs just for some harmless fun.
Does it bother you when the plumber leaves a distinctive mark on the pipes he's installed? Or does your argument depend on making ludicrously bad analogies indicating you don't have the slightly clue in the world what you're talking about?
That's essentially correct, insofar as by "Windows NT feature" it's understood that the feature (and the term itself) originated with OS/2. It's an OS/2 feature that was inherited by Windows NT when it was forked from OS/2.
The whole problem with "lying by omission" is that, if you accept that as a valid concept, it follows that no one ever tells the truth, given that practical communications require the omission of details. A complete description of what I did this morning would require the rest of our lives for me to relate to you if I didn't omit details. Communications are only practical when I omit most of the details.
Assuming I honestly include all details I feel are relevant, I think the statement that "the whole spirit of the resume is...lying by omission" is just plain false. A resume shouldn't be more than two pages, ideally it should be one page. It shouldn't include long lists of irrelevant details. Someone should be able to quickly scan it and see what qualifies you for the job in question. If it has your complete life story instead, it should be thrown in the trash without being read, since it demonstrates your inability to determine what's relevant.
And yes, I am significantly more awesome than my resume would suggest.;) A complete description of my work history would not be readable, even quickly, in the 30 seconds max you get before an employer throws your resume into the keeper or toss-out pile.
It's a nice idea, but the messages are still being sent in the clear, and anyone monitoring your internet traffic would be able to readily identify which sites were visited and in which order....
Okay... um... you're not qualified to send secret messages.
The article in question assumes the sender isn't stupid enough to post it all, in order, from the same IP. Anyone monitoring my internet traffic would likely catch zero or at most one piece of the message, and knowing what order they were posted in would do nothing but confuse them if they were silly enough to think that mattered.
Slashdot Mirror
There's no question that isn't solvable. The question is, once you have a solution, is there any advantage to the design? If it takes thrusters to stabilize the elevator that expend as much power as it would take to lift the payload, you might as well dispense with the elevator and just attach the thrusters to the payload like we do today.
It's not a question of whether it's possible to make a space elevator, it's a question of whether there's ultimately any point to doing so...
The sun is not, in fact, physically attached to any arm. It orbits the center of the galaxy just like all the other stars in the galaxy. The stars pass in and out of the arms as they go around. Stars near the center tend to move faster than the arms, whereas stars towards the edge more more slowly than the arms.
The arms, by the way, are density waves. Their motion is unrelated to the motion of the stars, just as the motion of the individual water molecules has little to do with the motion of waves on a river. I've seen people exclaim the Mississippi is flowing backwards on days when waves are heading upstream, but waves can move north even while water molecules are moving south.
The engineering that was required for the Apollo missions was mind-boggling too, especially when you consider they were using computers back then less powerful than a typical scientific calculator ...
At what point does sending a man to the moon require math you can't easily do with pencil and paper?
There were a number of challenges faced back then, but the fact they did it without modern computers isn't all that remarkable. Sending a man to the moon doesn't require a great deal of computational power or data storage capability.
Heck, it doesn't require that deep an understand of physics, either. I believe they did most of their calculations using Newton's formulae. Einstein's might be more accurate, but it makes no practical difference for a moon shot.
Slide rules may be quaint, but they were more than up to the task at hand. Rocket science isn't brain surgery...
Also, look at history, we managed to believe the earth was flat for quite a lot longer than a century, going by your "stable" logic that means the earth is flat and what we know now is wrong?
Actually, if you look at history, it's pretty hard to find any time where we thought the earth was flat. Mostly people didn't know the shape of the earth, those who even considered the question came up with a variety of answers, but mostly concluded it was round.
Except, from the article you (almost) linked to:
Which brings us back to the problems with very tall elevators addressed in the article, and the lack of suitable materials with which to build them.
Not really. The "elevator" here could be ballistic delivery system. No exotic materials are required...
My daughter got the MMR a month or two ago and she ended up with a week of 106F fever.
About a year ago, I had a bad fever for several days after getting my oil changed. But Detroit and the oil companies make sure these kind of stories don't appear in the media... :p
Rule of thumb: When someone is trying to explain the "cause" of something, and they have mentioned less than a dozen different things, they're oversimplifying.
True. Actually, the real difference between the meaning of the word "reflection" and "echo" lies on in the delay but in the repeat. An echo is a reflection that is perceiving after one has already perceived the same thing the first time. So, although you see the gun fire and a second later here the report, that first hearing of the report is not an echo. But when you then hear the same report reflected off of the wall behind the guy firing the starting pistol, that is an echo. Since we saw the original supernova, then saw the reflection after, the second perception is of an echo. The delay is less important to the distinction than the fact that it's a repeat.
Esoteric-looking shells are there for marketing purposes and cost-justification.
In other words, the important part. :)
I'm only half-joking, of course. In a capitalistic system, "marketing purposes" alludes to the primary reason the computer is being built: to sell and thus make money.
Specifically, a Roman holiday. When the emperors converted to Christianity, they rebranded their favorite holidays.
I don't know whether you need more coffee or less, but please, do something.
Hey hey, be careful with the blasphemies. Suggesting there might be such thing as too much coffee... that's just evil...
to separation of church and space?
Hehe. But seriously, there has been a strong link between religion and astronomy (in the broad sense) since prehistoric times. Ancient people didn't build astroliths to conduct scientific experiments...
Can't he also release them to multiple websites? Ogg (or what ever the completely open format the cool kids are using these days) on some .gov site and the locked down .flv on YouTube.
I've never had any trouble getting anything I want in .mp4 format from YouTube. Granted, they don't make is obvious how...
Enabling auto-update implies the user trusts Microsoft to (a) update Windows properly and (b) not steal their bank account and credit card information with each update.
Actually, installing Microsoft Windows and then connecting to the Internet implies you don't believe Microsoft will steal your bank account and credit card information. If they then further believe Microsoft will steal their data if they use Windows Update, no further analysis of their beliefs can yield useful information about what actions they may or may not engage in -- they have at that point proven to be completely irrational. Given this, any actions are possible, and you can try to rationalize their actions any way you like by picking and choosing from their contradictory beliefs, but it's ultimately pointless, since to do so assumes a level of rationality that is clearly not present.
That was stupid on so many levels it's hard to know where to start.
I'll point out first and foremost, however, that free and fair elections were part of the constitution of the Soviet Union. If you're going to quote principles from political documents as if you gullibly believe everything politicians publicly advocate, the USSR were really nice guys. OTOH, if you understand that documents like this are intended to mislead people, you'd have to be stupid to quote them as examples of what Hitler or any facist is really all about. So... which is it, are you horribly gullible or just horribly stupid? (If you weren't either, you wouldn't have made the post to begin with, knowing that there's no point in quoting the text in question as an example of anything.)
Nobody can say you broke the law unless you have a conviction, so it's only illegal if you get caught.
Actually, anyone can say you broke the law, regardless. If you're going to argue you can sue them for slander if they do, then by your own logic it follows that anyone can say you broke the law unless you sue them.
Criminal... :p
And try to convince me that a flight simulator in your project is a good thing, why won't you?
Why would I? I'm not claiming that no Easter Egg is ever bad. Again, your argument rests entirely on faulty logic and bad analogies. Anyone who claims all Easter Eggs are good would be as idiotic as someone who claims all Easter Eggs are bad.
he promised another Moon shot and increase NASA spending to mine the Moon for materials and maybe put a base there.
And he just asked NASA to estimate the cost of accelerating the the Ares/Orion program to get it done sooner.
You must be new here. You should know by know that the only thing more misleading than a politician's promises is a Slashdot summary, and both are trumped by Slashdot headlines.
Granted that Dems are usually regarded as the "spend" party.
Despite all evidence to the contrary. I've always wondered about this one, given that it's rather obviously and blatantly false if you look at the history and the budgets the various parties submit. But then I watched Stephen Colbert, and it all makes sense now. It's one of those statements that has a great deal of truthiness, and people's guts tell them it's true. Nevermind the fact that GOP budgets are frequently larger...
Both parties want to spend your money. They just want to spend it on different things. Often they want to spend it on hideously expensive things (be it social programs, massive defense budgets, or ginormous subsidies to Exxon-Mobile).
The main difference is, deficits grow a bit or sometimes shrink a bit under Democratic administrations, but balloon entirely out of control under Republican ones. That's because for all their rhetorical opposition, Republics have less things they're actually willing to cut. Granted, the things Democrats like to cut are easier targets. It's easier to sell cutting bombers than cutting health services for the poor.
First of all, like most Slashdot headlines, it's horribly slanted. The headline could just as easily be "Obama Team Considers Accelerating Development of Ares, Orion". Cost estimates are requested for both.
Secondly, your statement is obviously, blatantly false. It was Democrats who put a man on the moon the first time.
That was Heinlein, not Asimov.
Speaking of authors who's has a lot of really great books, and just a tiny handful of really crappy movies made based on them...
I also love it when my plumber routes the pipes around the house just for some harmless fun, and the electrician routes wires around against specs just for some harmless fun.
Does it bother you when the plumber leaves a distinctive mark on the pipes he's installed? Or does your argument depend on making ludicrously bad analogies indicating you don't have the slightly clue in the world what you're talking about?
That's essentially correct, insofar as by "Windows NT feature" it's understood that the feature (and the term itself) originated with OS/2. It's an OS/2 feature that was inherited by Windows NT when it was forked from OS/2.
The whole problem with "lying by omission" is that, if you accept that as a valid concept, it follows that no one ever tells the truth, given that practical communications require the omission of details. A complete description of what I did this morning would require the rest of our lives for me to relate to you if I didn't omit details. Communications are only practical when I omit most of the details.
Assuming I honestly include all details I feel are relevant, I think the statement that "the whole spirit of the resume is...lying by omission" is just plain false. A resume shouldn't be more than two pages, ideally it should be one page. It shouldn't include long lists of irrelevant details. Someone should be able to quickly scan it and see what qualifies you for the job in question. If it has your complete life story instead, it should be thrown in the trash without being read, since it demonstrates your inability to determine what's relevant.
And yes, I am significantly more awesome than my resume would suggest. ;) A complete description of my work history would not be readable, even quickly, in the 30 seconds max you get before an employer throws your resume into the keeper or toss-out pile.
It's a nice idea, but the messages are still being sent in the clear, and anyone monitoring your internet traffic would be able to readily identify which sites were visited and in which order. ...
Okay... um... you're not qualified to send secret messages.
The article in question assumes the sender isn't stupid enough to post it all, in order, from the same IP. Anyone monitoring my internet traffic would likely catch zero or at most one piece of the message, and knowing what order they were posted in would do nothing but confuse them if they were silly enough to think that mattered.