A space elevator made of a simple mechanical cable may very well be impossible with normal matter. Of course, it often turns out that there are plenty of ways to cheat. I've had a nearly lifelong aversion to authoritative statements that "X is obviously absolutely impossible because of physical law Y" (you said "could" so you seem to understand). I remember reading an article back when I was 7 or 8 "proving" through math and physics that it would be impossible for a dragon (of a given size) to fly. Of course, the person who wrote the article understood math and physics, but not aerodynamics, so they started with the assumption that a heavier than air flying animal must produce downward thrust equal or greater than its own weight. As an example, consider the launch loop concept. There are physics problems still to be worked out in getting it to work, but there's nothing wrong with the basic idea of the powered structure. Now, if you take, for example, a 200 mile long steel cable (on an infinite, frictionless plane with normal Earth gravity, blah, blah, etc.) connected to an infinitely strong post at either end and stretched so that it is lifted off the plane along the entire length. It can't happen, the cable will snap. Double (plus a little extra) the cable length and replace the posts with devices that catch the incoming side of the loop and throw the outgoing side. Now the cable can form a rigid arc, suspended in the air without snapping and it may be possible by mucking around with electromagnetic effects to build on top of the arc. It requires power to keep it up, but not ridiculous levels. It doesn't ignore the physical limits, it's just a different arrangement of the same matter (plus some extra) that is restricted by the same physical laws, but in different ways. It might be possible to build a sort of space elevator on the same principles with a loop with a very high arc.You could build a series of them reaching to different elevations and support a space elevator cable every 60 miles or so. Once you're up a few thousand miles, gravity drops low enough that you can string a traditional style space elevator cable from the apex of the highest loop to geosynchronous orbit. You could do the same thing with orbital loops as the elevator supports.
Of course, if you can build a working space loop, it's hard to see what you would need a space elevator for, but this is just a thought experiment. It demonstrates that there probably (almost certainly) is a way to cheat and string a cable that high. It's almost certainly not the only way. Lots of half-baked ideas spring to mind. Electrostatic jets along the lower parts of the cable, powered from the ground either through conduction along the cable or microwave beams. Cable supports held aloft by ground based lasers. There may be all sorts of ways to power the cable internally to make it effectively stronger than any possible static material. I can't really think of anything offhand that wouldn't be likely to vaporise the cable, but that doesn't mean there isn't a way. It may turn out, of course, that any method of making the space elevator work would be self defeating - that, like the launch loop idea, would render the space elevator obsolete - but some variation on the idea is probably possible.
Other people have commented on the lousy "size of Texas"-style "2.3 times larger than Earth" bit, but there's so much more wrong with this. There's the now standard "artists representation" header artwork/slideshow teaser that doesn't even have any sort of disclaimer that it's not a representation of any kind of this planet. There's also an appalling lack of any of the figures people really want to know such as what the surface gravity would be on this planet. I'm getting about 3.3 G based on the diameter and mass they give. Surface area is about 5 times that of Earth. The year is about 1 and a half Earth months. The temperature is over 200 degrees celcius, close to the melting point of tin.
Good grief. If you can't see how these kind of tying arrangements limit consumer choice and create monopolies, it's probably hopeless to try to explain it to you.
People like me?:) You mean people who realize that making optimal choices when faced with many interdependent factors is very hard. Oh, and also that people are generally not acting with perfect information about all aspects of such an arrangement beforehand.
Unless they get cut in on the deal as well. In any case, it's not clear exactly what the arrangement is between the universities and the property management company in this case. The actual physical property, including the network equipment, may well belong to the universities and the property management company is their agent. We don't know enough to say for sure.
The problem is, most US Universities have long histories of cynically abusing their students as captive markets for textbooks and other products and services. Most people in university administration have no problem with, for example, mandating which texbooks students must use based on which will earn the University bookstore, the publisher, etc. more money rather than which textbooks are actually better for learning.
Anybody who doesn't like what they are doing can rent somewhere else. If their college has an exclusive contract with them (unlikely but possible), people can choose a different college.
I was going to methodically criticize this sentence but then I realized I shouldn't need to. Anyone with half a brain should be able to see what's wrong with the idea that the easy remedy to this sort of thing for consumers is to "choose a different college"!
"Ask Slashdot" is supposed to be asking the Slashdot community a specific question since we're supposed to be a reasonably knowledgeable community. Somehow it always seems to devolve into these tangents instead of being useful. It's especially bad when the person asking the question is facing personal tragedy and all they get are insensitive, unhelpful and morbid suggestions.
Management came along and did something about the "underperforming" techs as determined by metrics. That is to say those techs with long call times who don't just get the caller off the phone as quickly as possible.
That filter can be a forum, a web form that forces you to view every single article in the knowledge base, or a team of barely trained monkeys who are underpaid, and will burn out within 3-6 months from being asked the same questions over again by customers who are, on average, so dense that they don't mention the device in question isn't even turned on until they have already nodded along and gone through 30 minutes of "troubleshooting".
And even less helpful. This is an "ask Slashdot" article. A question has been asked by someone in real need. I wish I had a real answer, but I really am not up on the state of the art in the field. I do know a counter-productive non-answer when I see one and, in the described situation, posts like yours are exactly such.
I didn't mean a ritual sacrifice. I was simply pointing out how ridiculously morbid the discussion on this is. Someone posts looking for advice for a loved one in distress and, instead of a helpful discussion of the state of the art in brain/machine interface and assistive technology, scores of posters descend with ghoulish suggestions regarding her and a perfectly healthy baby who is not the source of the problem (I suppose we can chalk that one up to complete reading mis-comprehension).
Religion or philosophy may help her in the long run (or not, every person is different), but they hardly need to turn to Slashdot for that. If the family is at all religious, I'm sure they've already received spiritual advice from whatever pastor/priest/cleric/guru they already have.
Right, because DNA testing came along and proved that a bunch of people were on death row unjustly and were railroaded through the system, that obviously shows that there's 100% certainty in all cases where there's no exonerating DNA evidence. Brilliant logic.
Why didn't they dump the kid and save her for God's sake???
They can make another kid, there is only one of her!!
The child has already been delivered by c-section. It's right there in the summary! Or do you believe that there's some way to retroactively sacrifice the baby to fix the unrelated brain tumour?
You could argue that. If there is a judge involved, he wouldn't be blinded by the splendour of your argument.
Of course, the same judge will wisely and sagely nod along in complete agreement when the government is arguing that ubiquitous surveillance and tracking in public is ok because a surveillance camera connected to a massive computational back end is just like a patrol cop.
lol.. It's not quite that simple. The 13th amendment makes slavery and/or involuntary servitude illegal in the US and jurisdictions the US controls and grants congress the power to enforce it.
Actually, it's not that simple either. The 13th amendment makes certain types of slavery and/or involuntary servitude illegal in the US and jurisdictions the US controls. Basically, hereditary slavery is out. So, if you're currently a slave, your children aren't automatically slaves. The 13th amendment still allows for you to become a slave either temporarily or permanently as a result of any conviction for any crime. That includes being sold to private citizens effectively as property. The only real protection is the 8th amendment, which vaguely protects you from cruel and unusual punishment. Of course, the 8th didn't protect people who were slaves back before the 13th. There's the argument that what was being done to them from birth wasn't a punishment, therefore it didn't fall under the 8th. This same argument crops up a lot in modern times, often in relation to various lists (no fly, terrorist watch, sex offender, plus various others, some of which are probably still secret) which, although quite harmful to be on, are supposedly not punishments. Of course, that argument is in complete defiance of the 5th amendment where life, liberty and property are not supposed to be deprived without due process of law. So, anyway, hereditary slavery was basically unconstitutional _before_ the 13th amendment, but that fact was simply ignored, and the 13th amendment only did away with hereditary slavery.
I'm not claiming that the way the economy of the US is managed is good. It's not. It's massively mismanaged. I'm just saying that backing it against a dense yellow metal alone makes no sense versus backing it against all assets. Yes, actually figuring out the worth of all that stuff is a difficult, probably intractable problem. Of course, the same thing is true of gold, which has little rational basis for its value. The fact is, all money is just a shared fiction that we take part in to make trade easier, even the stuff backed by a vault full of dense yellow metal.
No, I really can't. If you are a criminal, you refuse to abide by society's rules, and you don't deserve to live in society. Since it's impossible to otherwise remove them from society, yes, this works for me.
Otherwise impossible... except by death. Got it. Glad you've really thought this through.
The thing of it is, if you're hungry, SOMEONE will feed you. If you need clothes, SOMEONE will clothe you. If you need a place to stay for the night, SOMEONE will provide. We have so many charities and charitable people, that there is no need to turn to crime to live your life.
Got it. You live in happy fantasyland and think that your imaginary picture of the real world is actually how it works. Chalk one up for ignorance and naiveté.
Slashdot Mirror
A space elevator made of a simple mechanical cable may very well be impossible with normal matter. Of course, it often turns out that there are plenty of ways to cheat. I've had a nearly lifelong aversion to authoritative statements that "X is obviously absolutely impossible because of physical law Y" (you said "could" so you seem to understand). I remember reading an article back when I was 7 or 8 "proving" through math and physics that it would be impossible for a dragon (of a given size) to fly. Of course, the person who wrote the article understood math and physics, but not aerodynamics, so they started with the assumption that a heavier than air flying animal must produce downward thrust equal or greater than its own weight.
As an example, consider the launch loop concept. There are physics problems still to be worked out in getting it to work, but there's nothing wrong with the basic idea of the powered structure. Now, if you take, for example, a 200 mile long steel cable (on an infinite, frictionless plane with normal Earth gravity, blah, blah, etc.) connected to an infinitely strong post at either end and stretched so that it is lifted off the plane along the entire length. It can't happen, the cable will snap. Double (plus a little extra) the cable length and replace the posts with devices that catch the incoming side of the loop and throw the outgoing side. Now the cable can form a rigid arc, suspended in the air without snapping and it may be possible by mucking around with electromagnetic effects to build on top of the arc. It requires power to keep it up, but not ridiculous levels. It doesn't ignore the physical limits, it's just a different arrangement of the same matter (plus some extra) that is restricted by the same physical laws, but in different ways. It might be possible to build a sort of space elevator on the same principles with a loop with a very high arc.You could build a series of them reaching to different elevations and support a space elevator cable every 60 miles or so. Once you're up a few thousand miles, gravity drops low enough that you can string a traditional style space elevator cable from the apex of the highest loop to geosynchronous orbit. You could do the same thing with orbital loops as the elevator supports.
Of course, if you can build a working space loop, it's hard to see what you would need a space elevator for, but this is just a thought experiment. It demonstrates that there probably (almost certainly) is a way to cheat and string a cable that high. It's almost certainly not the only way. Lots of half-baked ideas spring to mind. Electrostatic jets along the lower parts of the cable, powered from the ground either through conduction along the cable or microwave beams. Cable supports held aloft by ground based lasers. There may be all sorts of ways to power the cable internally to make it effectively stronger than any possible static material. I can't really think of anything offhand that wouldn't be likely to vaporise the cable, but that doesn't mean there isn't a way. It may turn out, of course, that any method of making the space elevator work would be self defeating - that, like the launch loop idea, would render the space elevator obsolete - but some variation on the idea is probably possible.
Other people have commented on the lousy "size of Texas"-style "2.3 times larger than Earth" bit, but there's so much more wrong with this. There's the now standard "artists representation" header artwork/slideshow teaser that doesn't even have any sort of disclaimer that it's not a representation of any kind of this planet. There's also an appalling lack of any of the figures people really want to know such as what the surface gravity would be on this planet. I'm getting about 3.3 G based on the diameter and mass they give. Surface area is about 5 times that of Earth. The year is about 1 and a half Earth months. The temperature is over 200 degrees celcius, close to the melting point of tin.
The cupola on the ISS is sort of a space patio. Also do ISS and space shuttle decks count?
I think you're ignoring that the university generally profits directly from the textbook sales.
Good grief. If you can't see how these kind of tying arrangements limit consumer choice and create monopolies, it's probably hopeless to try to explain it to you.
People like me? :) You mean people who realize that making optimal choices when faced with many interdependent factors is very hard. Oh, and also that people are generally not acting with perfect information about all aspects of such an arrangement beforehand.
Unless they get cut in on the deal as well. In any case, it's not clear exactly what the arrangement is between the universities and the property management company in this case. The actual physical property, including the network equipment, may well belong to the universities and the property management company is their agent. We don't know enough to say for sure.
Because you're the IT guy, they probably view you as a subject matter expert, and you can use that authority to guide their thinking.
Ha!
The problem is, most US Universities have long histories of cynically abusing their students as captive markets for textbooks and other products and services. Most people in university administration have no problem with, for example, mandating which texbooks students must use based on which will earn the University bookstore, the publisher, etc. more money rather than which textbooks are actually better for learning.
Anybody who doesn't like what they are doing can rent somewhere else. If their college has an exclusive contract with them (unlikely but possible), people can choose a different college.
I was going to methodically criticize this sentence but then I realized I shouldn't need to. Anyone with half a brain should be able to see what's wrong with the idea that the easy remedy to this sort of thing for consumers is to "choose a different college"!
I think the point was that non-destructively scanning an entire body is a lot more difficult than destructively scanning it.
"Ask Slashdot" is supposed to be asking the Slashdot community a specific question since we're supposed to be a reasonably knowledgeable community. Somehow it always seems to devolve into these tangents instead of being useful. It's especially bad when the person asking the question is facing personal tragedy and all they get are insensitive, unhelpful and morbid suggestions.
Management came along and did something about the "underperforming" techs as determined by metrics. That is to say those techs with long call times who don't just get the caller off the phone as quickly as possible.
That filter can be a forum, a web form that forces you to view every single article in the knowledge base, or a team of barely trained monkeys who are underpaid, and will burn out within 3-6 months from being asked the same questions over again by customers who are, on average, so dense that they don't mention the device in question isn't even turned on until they have already nodded along and gone through 30 minutes of "troubleshooting".
Or a decent FAQ or knowledge base.
That makes it rather a lot more hypothetical.
And even less helpful. This is an "ask Slashdot" article. A question has been asked by someone in real need. I wish I had a real answer, but I really am not up on the state of the art in the field. I do know a counter-productive non-answer when I see one and, in the described situation, posts like yours are exactly such.
I didn't mean a ritual sacrifice. I was simply pointing out how ridiculously morbid the discussion on this is. Someone posts looking for advice for a loved one in distress and, instead of a helpful discussion of the state of the art in brain/machine interface and assistive technology, scores of posters descend with ghoulish suggestions regarding her and a perfectly healthy baby who is not the source of the problem (I suppose we can chalk that one up to complete reading mis-comprehension).
Religion or philosophy may help her in the long run (or not, every person is different), but they hardly need to turn to Slashdot for that. If the family is at all religious, I'm sure they've already received spiritual advice from whatever pastor/priest/cleric/guru they already have.
Right, because DNA testing came along and proved that a bunch of people were on death row unjustly and were railroaded through the system, that obviously shows that there's 100% certainty in all cases where there's no exonerating DNA evidence. Brilliant logic.
I certainly know for sure that if I were in her position, I would want the plug pulled.
Do any of you people grasp at all the fact that she may not be permanantly stuck in this state?
Why didn't they dump the kid and save her for God's sake???
They can make another kid, there is only one of her!!
The child has already been delivered by c-section. It's right there in the summary! Or do you believe that there's some way to retroactively sacrifice the baby to fix the unrelated brain tumour?
That might be funny if you weren't talking about coders, who _also_ have a stereotype about eating cheetos, completely independent of the stoner one.
You could argue that. If there is a judge involved, he wouldn't be blinded by the splendour of your argument.
Of course, the same judge will wisely and sagely nod along in complete agreement when the government is arguing that ubiquitous surveillance and tracking in public is ok because a surveillance camera connected to a massive computational back end is just like a patrol cop.
lol.. It's not quite that simple. The 13th amendment makes slavery and/or involuntary servitude illegal in the US and jurisdictions the US controls and grants congress the power to enforce it.
Actually, it's not that simple either. The 13th amendment makes certain types of slavery and/or involuntary servitude illegal in the US and jurisdictions the US controls. Basically, hereditary slavery is out. So, if you're currently a slave, your children aren't automatically slaves. The 13th amendment still allows for you to become a slave either temporarily or permanently as a result of any conviction for any crime. That includes being sold to private citizens effectively as property. The only real protection is the 8th amendment, which vaguely protects you from cruel and unusual punishment. Of course, the 8th didn't protect people who were slaves back before the 13th. There's the argument that what was being done to them from birth wasn't a punishment, therefore it didn't fall under the 8th. This same argument crops up a lot in modern times, often in relation to various lists (no fly, terrorist watch, sex offender, plus various others, some of which are probably still secret) which, although quite harmful to be on, are supposedly not punishments. Of course, that argument is in complete defiance of the 5th amendment where life, liberty and property are not supposed to be deprived without due process of law. So, anyway, hereditary slavery was basically unconstitutional _before_ the 13th amendment, but that fact was simply ignored, and the 13th amendment only did away with hereditary slavery.
I'm not claiming that the way the economy of the US is managed is good. It's not. It's massively mismanaged. I'm just saying that backing it against a dense yellow metal alone makes no sense versus backing it against all assets. Yes, actually figuring out the worth of all that stuff is a difficult, probably intractable problem. Of course, the same thing is true of gold, which has little rational basis for its value. The fact is, all money is just a shared fiction that we take part in to make trade easier, even the stuff backed by a vault full of dense yellow metal.
Well, as long as it's not blood-thirst and only soulless, cold-hearted pragmatism.
No, I really can't. If you are a criminal, you refuse to abide by society's rules, and you don't deserve to live in society. Since it's impossible to otherwise remove them from society, yes, this works for me.
Otherwise impossible... except by death. Got it. Glad you've really thought this through.
The thing of it is, if you're hungry, SOMEONE will feed you. If you need clothes, SOMEONE will clothe you. If you need a place to stay for the night, SOMEONE will provide. We have so many charities and charitable people, that there is no need to turn to crime to live your life.
Got it. You live in happy fantasyland and think that your imaginary picture of the real world is actually how it works. Chalk one up for ignorance and naiveté.