Yep, this machine can produce enough energy to "light America up like a birthday cake"
... for a few nanoseconds. How exactly is it supposed to help with California's power crisis right now?
When they can achieve a sustained power production, that will be another story. And that's what it's all about, of course! But in the meantime, just build more of the good ol' uranium fission reactors...
Linux is free as in beer: why would anyone want to buy Windows if they can run their applications on a gratis OS?
IIRC, OS/2 used to be cheaper than DOS + Windows3.1. The usual argument was that the price of the latter combination was already included in that of the PC you buy, which is still often true of Windows95/98/ME/etc. Furthermore, are the applications really going to run? How long till Microsoft adds a new API à la win32s?
One could have said the same thing when Windows 95 came out, I believe that people didn't want to run Win3.1 applications on this Win32 "beast" because the widgets didn't look that advanced.
What do you mean? Weren't Win16 applications "assimilated" in the sense that they ran under Win32 with the same look&feel as the other 32-bit programs? I thought a lot of early "for Windows95" software was actually Win16/win32s?
Linux offers a lot of alternatives for Windows programs, Wine thus only easyers the transition until people are used to the alternatives.
Again, the same was true of OS/2. Some were even free (as in free-beer) or even included with the OS. The only difference with the situation now is the free-speech side. I hope it is big enough.
WINE is certainly a nice thing to have. However, I'm wondering whether it really is doing more good than harm, as there is a theory that one of the factors which led to the demise of OS/2 was precisely its ability to run Windows (3.1) applications.
Of course, everybody agrees that IBM's attitude did not help, to say the least. But the lack of native OS/2 applications can also be explained by the fact that software developers could target the DOS and Win16 platforms, and also have some OS/2 market share...
Now, OS/2 did not have a strong open-source movement behind it. Nevertheless, couldn't a good WINE make Win32 the de facto standard platform for PC software, and eventually make the OS's it runs on targets for the Microsoft change-the-API tactic, as they did with Windows3.1, 3.11, win32s1.1, 1.25 and 1.30?
Re:What if you get stuck
on
Going Up?
·
· Score: 1
Think about it for a minute! It would move OUTWARD if the cable were broken anywhere near the ground level. Now, if it breaks 10 miles up, that's 10 miles to fall. But everything past that 10 floats out into space.
Yes, indeed. And if it breaks twenty thousand miles up (meteorites, terrorists at the GEO station, whatever), that's twenty thousand miles to fall...
Wouldn't the mass of such a huge structure provide some natural gravity?
Not if you stay on the inner side of the ring (Gauss' theorem applied to a cylinder just inside the ring, without taking the star at the center into account: no mass inside, so no gravity), which you have to if you want sunlight.
Anyway the mass of the structure would be negligible with respect to the star's, whose gravity field you have to deal with one way or the other. So either you stay outside the ring, spin it at less than orbital speed, and use the star's gravity (but no sunlight and you need a ring that won't collapse), or you stay inside but have to spin at more than orbital speed if you don't want to fall to the center.
Re:What if you get stuck
on
Going Up?
·
· Score: 1
Seriously, though, that is a consideration - what are the safety implications of a tower that high? If it, for some reason, cracked and fell, you have a large swathe of the Earth being bombarded by flying, red hot, extremely tough debris.
I'll refer you to Kim Stanley Robinson's "RedMars". Except that Earth is larger, so the cable wouldn't roll up more than once around the equator.
If it was a ring you could spin it at any speed you wanted because it would never "fall" to Earth. It would be "balanced".
And fantastically unstable. See Larry Niven's "The Ringworld Engineers".
Not that a space elevator would be really stable, but surely it is more manageable...
Re:There has to be a practical reason...
on
Going Up?
·
· Score: 1
Not at all the same concept. Niven's Ringworld goes all the way around a star and isn't in orbit (it revolves faster so as to maintain an artificial gravity).
Re:One of the Greats. :-)
on
Going Up?
·
· Score: 1
With an early preview at the end of 2061:OdysseyThree. But I'm sure there are other references to that concept...
I'm not sure I understand what you mean. The "lower elevations" would of course be too slow with respect to their altitude to maintain orbit by themselves and hence would feel some weight down. (Conversely, the counterweight above GEO would be too fast, and feel some weight up.) That's why you need its center of mass at GEO (so the whole structure is in orbit) and a hell of a tensile strength!
Incidentally, the title of the article, "Next stop: low Earth orbit" is misleading: the only point in the tower where you can drop off and be in orbit with a little push is at GEO.
The orbits of Mir and the ISS are not in the same plane; it would take more fuel to move hardware between the two than to launch it in the first place.
Now there had been some debate about whether to launch the ISS to the same orbit as Mir, for that very purpose. The Russians wanted to use some of Mir's newer modules, such as Priroda, as extra modules for the ISS. As far as I understand it, NASA refused because they did not want the possibility that anybody might see the ISS as a Russian station with American modules rather than a joint project or maybe the reverse.
I don't think it's the right thing to do. Blowing it up would create a tremendous amount of debris, some of which could take a long time to reenter the atmosphere; it would eventually scatter and could be a serious hazard to satellites in low Earth orbit. Bye bye, ISS!
Definitely not the US; the shuttles' schedule is full and they can't send send them at less than several months' notice anyway. Remember when the Hubble Space Telescope's gyroscopes failed? The "emergency repairs" took six months to prepare and that was just a scheduling change of an already-planned servicing mission...
No, the Russians could send up a Soyuz as planned, maybe a little earlier. If they can dock with an uncontrolled station.
If the weather cooperates, perhaps it would be interesting to check a satellite visibility prediction site (I know of Heavens-Above but there are others) and watch now and then; if it shines steadily while passing overhead, all right, but if its brightness varies erratically it could be bad, very bad: this is not 2010, there is no way to dock with a tumbling station...
Now, of course, it's not serious yet, but that's what everybody said would happen when they left it unmanned last year.
Everybody is already fighting over the allocation of frequency bands; the spectrum is clogged. See how much telephone companies are willing to pay in auctions for UMTS licenses? A public wireless network is quite possible, but such a service will be for a fee.
Slashdot Mirror
When they can achieve a sustained power production, that will be another story. And that's what it's all about, of course! But in the meantime, just build more of the good ol' uranium fission reactors...
Correct, although I couldn't say the exact price (wonder if anybody can). I did say both DOS + Windows.
IIRC, OS/2 used to be cheaper than DOS + Windows3.1. The usual argument was that the price of the latter combination was already included in that of the PC you buy, which is still often true of Windows95/98/ME/etc. Furthermore, are the applications really going to run? How long till Microsoft adds a new API à la win32s?
What do you mean? Weren't Win16 applications "assimilated" in the sense that they ran under Win32 with the same look&feel as the other 32-bit programs? I thought a lot of early "for Windows95" software was actually Win16/win32s?
Again, the same was true of OS/2. Some were even free (as in free-beer) or even included with the OS. The only difference with the situation now is the free-speech side. I hope it is big enough.
WINE is certainly a nice thing to have. However, I'm wondering whether it really is doing more good than harm, as there is a theory that one of the factors which led to the demise of OS/2 was precisely its ability to run Windows (3.1) applications.
Of course, everybody agrees that IBM's attitude did not help, to say the least. But the lack of native OS/2 applications can also be explained by the fact that software developers could target the DOS and Win16 platforms, and also have some OS/2 market share...
Now, OS/2 did not have a strong open-source movement behind it. Nevertheless, couldn't a good WINE make Win32 the de facto standard platform for PC software, and eventually make the OS's it runs on targets for the Microsoft change-the-API tactic, as they did with Windows3.1, 3.11, win32s1.1, 1.25 and 1.30?
Yes, indeed. And if it breaks twenty thousand miles up (meteorites, terrorists at the GEO station, whatever), that's twenty thousand miles to fall...
Not if you stay on the inner side of the ring (Gauss' theorem applied to a cylinder just inside the ring, without taking the star at the center into account: no mass inside, so no gravity), which you have to if you want sunlight.
Anyway the mass of the structure would be negligible with respect to the star's, whose gravity field you have to deal with one way or the other. So either you stay outside the ring, spin it at less than orbital speed, and use the star's gravity (but no sunlight and you need a ring that won't collapse), or you stay inside but have to spin at more than orbital speed if you don't want to fall to the center.
I'll refer you to Kim Stanley Robinson's "RedMars". Except that Earth is larger, so the cable wouldn't roll up more than once around the equator.
And fantastically unstable. See Larry Niven's "The Ringworld Engineers".
Not that a space elevator would be really stable, but surely it is more manageable...
Not at all the same concept. Niven's Ringworld goes all the way around a star and isn't in orbit (it revolves faster so as to maintain an artificial gravity).
With an early preview at the end of 2061:OdysseyThree. But I'm sure there are other references to that concept...
Incidentally, the title of the article, "Next stop: low Earth orbit" is misleading: the only point in the tower where you can drop off and be in orbit with a little push is at GEO.
Now there had been some debate about whether to launch the ISS to the same orbit as Mir, for that very purpose. The Russians wanted to use some of Mir's newer modules, such as Priroda, as extra modules for the ISS. As far as I understand it, NASA refused because they did not want the possibility that anybody might see the ISS as a Russian station with American modules rather than a joint project or maybe the reverse.
I don't think it's the right thing to do. Blowing it up would create a tremendous amount of debris, some of which could take a long time to reenter the atmosphere; it would eventually scatter and could be a serious hazard to satellites in low Earth orbit. Bye bye, ISS!
No, the Russians could send up a Soyuz as planned, maybe a little earlier. If they can dock with an uncontrolled station.
Now, of course, it's not serious yet, but that's what everybody said would happen when they left it unmanned last year.
Everybody is already fighting over the allocation of frequency bands; the spectrum is clogged. See how much telephone companies are willing to pay in auctions for UMTS licenses? A public wireless network is quite possible, but such a service will be for a fee.