Reality and statistics says that there's a pretty good chance that an asteroid or comet strike big enough to potentially wipe out our species will happen again. If we are still around when it happens and we don't have sufficiently advanced space tech (either for colonizing other planets or for deflecting the comet/asteroid or both) then we certainly could be wiped out. Chances are miniscule that it will happen in our lifetimes, but if we manage to survive as a species for tens of millions more years, it's almost inevitable. It's possible that we might have sufficiently advanced terrestrial technology at that time to weather it, but our chances are even better if we have space capabilities. In other words, it's not a religious belief.
Also, what you say here still doesn't explain what the original comment has to do with The Fine Article despite the common theme of asteroid strikes. Why would narrowing down _which_ asteroids supplied most of Earth's water do anything to injure the idea that a massive comet or asteroid might cause another global extinction event in the future? You seem to be using some sort of faulty reasoning. Do you also think that because the ozone layer is a good thing that protects us that we should all make sure to breathe as much ozone as possible?
Actually, as long as the ground is going to be on fire for a few hundred years and there's nothing you can do to stop it, might as well find a way to extract the energy. Has anyone looked into extracting geothermal energy from underground coal fires?
Yes, I don't quite understand this from an energy efficiency point of view. They're using natural gas to run compressors to store compressed air that they can later release through generator turbines to generate electricity. It seems like the infrastructure costs for the natural gas-powered compressors and the generator turbines to generate power from the compressed air shouldn't be less than it would cost to just build a bunch of natural gas-powered generators. I could understand it if they were using it to store power from wind or solar, but why store power from natural gas, which is already a storable form of power?
But the inner solar system asteroids from the time period we're talking about would have had a lot more water. Over billions of years, it will have mostly sublimated away and been pushed right out of the solar system or collected in the outer solar system.
The moon has lower gravity than earth and little or no atmosphere for all of its history. Any water on the surface of the moon would be expected to be stripped away by by the solar wind over millions of years, leaving only deposits in shielded locations. Some water would also be created on the moon from the solar wind as well. I think we should reasonably expect with those conditions and that amount of time that the concentrations of water on Earth and on the moon would be nothing alike.
So, the idea that most of the Earth's water came from the outer solar system as opposed to the inner solar system is one of the main points of the "religion" of the people you refer to as "Space Nutters"? You seem to have a pretty serious psychological disorder there yourself.
Oh no. It might, gasp, cost money to find out that the justice system has been murdering innocent people. If they've already been killed, wouldn't want to find out that you've killed the wrong person. Nope, just close your eyes and pretend that it's all fine and nothing bad ever happens. And hey, if you happen to be a murderer who got away because they stopped looking for you after they caught the wrong person, bonus!
I'm not sure what the various payloads travelling along with, but one of them, Hubble, cost ~$2.5 billion.
Which is more than four times the Hubble's weight in gold at current prices. Most of that $2.5 billion (provided that it doesn't actually include the launch cost) will have been spent on the engineering, toolchain development and testing (which they could have saved a lot of money by doing a little bit more since the original lens was out of spec). If they'd built 10 Hubble telescopes, they could have gotten the price down to something like 300 million apiece, 100 at something like 32 million apiece and so on. There would be a minimum price point, probably somewhere in the tens of millions. If you accidentally dropped the Hubble off a loading crane, you would be out a lot of money, but not the entire development cost.
McAuliffe's schoolteacher status didn't contribute to the Challenger disaster.
Mostly true, but at least a little arguable. The decision to launch Challenger, despite the low temperatures was heavily motivated by political pressure, and one of the reasons there was so much political pressure was because it was a high profile launch. The reason it was such a high-profile launch is because of the teacher in space publicity stunt. It's certainly possible that they might not have postponed the launch if it was a regular crew that wasn't so high-profile, but there's at least a reasonable argument that they might have postponed if everyone weren't so worried about losing the TV spot.
I would find partisan wing-nuts absolutely hilarious if I didn't find them so tragic. All the energy wasted on pointless sniping at strawman mis-characterizations of each other.
I'm pretty shocked that you're shocked you were modded flamebait. You certainly couldn't have expected an Informative mod. Offtopic might have been a fit. Maybe you could have gotten a Funny, but it just wasn't that funny.
The kinds of technologies that would make a manned colony on Mars sustainable are just the kinds of things that would help out tremendously here on Earth. Also, this article is about a private mission to Mars, not a government-funded one.
Sorry, there seems to be a little bit of "and then a miracle occurs" in your calculations. You don't really seem to provide numbers for anything. Essentially, most of Mars gets a daily average 150 Watts per square meter which is 60% of the typical 250 Watts/square meter for Earth. This is better than the 44% you'd expect based on the distance of Mars from the sun for a number of reasons, mostly having to do with Earth's atmosphere and weather. Essentially, the peak hours on Mars are a bigger proportion of the day, and the average insolation never really goes down due to weather, even in the worst dust storms. So, at 15% efficiency (we do have significantly more efficient solar cells, they're just more expensive) that's 22.5 Watts per square meter of solar cells. Let's estimate 30% power transmission/conversion losses for a usable 15.75 watts per square meter. From what I can find, it looks like you can expect power consumption of something like 130 watts per square meter of greenhouse LEDs. So, we'll round up and say that you need 9 square meters of solar cells for every square meter of greenhouse. That's ignoring the fact that your greenhouse will probably also be getting some natural sunlight as well and that you can increase that sunlight cheaply with an array of mylar reflectors. Anyway, for 10,000 square meters of greenhouse (which may well be more than you need), you need 90,000 square meters of solar cells, which is 23 acres of solar cells. That's still a lot of solar cells, but it's not an insurmountable number. To generate the ~1.86 megawatts you need from the solar cells, if you used thin-film solar panels and pretty much just lie them on the ground and stake them down, it would take about 3,100 kg of solar cells. This is based on 1kg/600W (Martian rating based on 150 W/sq meter) thin-film solar cells which are available on Earth now and have a rating of 1kg/kW (based on 250W/sq meter). Just a bit over 3 metric tons is a lot, but should still be able to fit into the mass budget of a Mars mission.
Of course, all of this may not matter if you can send a nuclear reactor instead. There is a question though of how well nuclear reactors scale. Can you get more bang for the buck by unit mass from a nuclear reactor than from solar cells? Probably. But can you get 1.86 megawatts from a reactor that only masses 3 metric tons or less? Questionable.
Of course, powering LED grow lights with solar cells does seem a bit silly from an efficiency point of view. There are plenty of plants that will thrive in the 60% effective insolation of Mars in direct sunlight. A dedicated indoor greenhouse is a good idea, but there seem to be better ways to provide light to the plants. Mylar or foil reflector arrays to deliver sunlight to a greenhouse are one way, although there are limits to the density you can achieve before you've created an oven nothing can live in.
What seems to me to be a better approach is to go with certain nutritious staple crops that can be grown with very little maintenance outside for 90% of nutritional needs, then grow what you need to fill in the nutritional gaps and spice things up in the indoor greenhouse. Along with that, send every colonist with a lifetime supply of nutritional supplement pills (at least, those supplements that can be chemically stabilised that long). There seem to be some plants that would happily grow even in a near vacuum, but what I'm thinking of is just growing algae like Spirulina and other plants and simple foods that you can just grow in a big pool of water. This does rely on obtaining water in situ, but all current indications are that this is probably quite possible. You just need to make big pools (taking advantage of surface features where possible) covered over with relatively thin transparent plastic (treated for UV protection) with a light atmosphere (no need for anything more than a few psi) inside. If they don't stay warm enough, then either build some solar reflectors that reflect directly into the pool or pipe water out, through a reflective solar hea
Actually, the Concorde wasn't quite as horrifically expensive as you seem to think. The ticket prices were so high because they found out that people expected them to be very high, so they raised them to what the market would bear. The Concorde was retired because the one crash of a Concorde along with September 11th caused irrational fear about flying in it. Also, although the Concorde was profitable, the airlines realized that the people flying on it would be buying first-class tickets on sub-sonic aircraft if there were no Concorde. Since the Concorde was the only supersonic passenger aircraft, they didn't need to worry about losing the passengers to the non-existent competition.
Overall you're probably right that the Concorde will not be replaced. At least, not in the short term. The industry is too closed for the economics to work out.
The interesting tie between the Concorde and the fine article is that, when the Concorde was being retired, Richard Branson offered to buy them to continue their operation, but was refused.
You cannot convince me that "evil people" want to destroy the planet and they are blocking all attempts to the contrary
But that's a strawman argument. You're misrepresenting the GP poster as claiming that all the denialists are "evil people" as if it had been claimed that they were some some sort of cartoon super-villains. That's clearly not the GP's claim, although I'm sure the GP does think that there are some greedy cynics propping up the movement. AIDs denialists aren't cartoon supervillains either, but their denialism and its adoption by some governments, such as South Africa's has probably killed hundreds of thousands of people. Whether those denialists are "evil people" might be a bit up in the air of course. Some of them hold their views simply because they think anyone who has any form of sex that doesn't fit their particular preferences deserves to die. That could certainly be considered evil.
As for the rest of your post, which basically claims that people who believe in anthropogenic climate change are liars because they would otherwise all be eco-terrorists, there isn't much to say. I'll just say it's a ridiculous argument and leave it at that.
Yeah, you're missing something. You see, trains can be designed to be pressurized just like planes already are. So, even though the train is travelling in a vacuum, the passengers are not. Sort of like how the entire planet Earth is travelling in a vacuum but those of us on the planet still get to breathe.
You do realize that this article is about _trains_, right? You and your monomania are what brought space into the discussion. There's nothing impossible about a maglev train, nor a superconducting power cable, nor a depressurized tunnel. We already have all of these things. It may prove cost prohibitive to operate a train system like this.
Frankly, all that the article could really has to say about why such trains aren't being built is that they might be hard to maintain and everyone will die if it crashes. That and some completely hyperbolic speculation about one little leak almost immediately compromising the entire vacuum. So, basically, wow. Super-informative article. No really.
A standard space elevator isn't actually technologically possible right now. We still don't have materials strong enough to make a tether that can reach that far without breaking under its own weight, even with an optimal shape. Don't say graphene, by the way. It might be strong enough, but we still can't actually manufacture it in enough quantity to even test the idea. Also, since graphene is naturally a sheet, you'd have to roll it up into tubes, in which case it's just carbon nanotubes, which we've know about even longer than graphene and which we can't make in sufficient quantity or length to test either.
Believe me, I'm all for a space elevator or some similar technology to make access to space either, but we're just not there yet. We do, however, have all of the actual technology (if not the practical experience, which we'll have to learn by doing) to make various other technologies for accessing space more easily. Skyhooks, for example, might allow us to boost cargo launched on high-altitude planes or dirigibles. We might also be able to construct a launch loop. We probably also have all the necessary tech to build a space elevator that anchors to an orbital ring a hundred kilometers up rather than at geosynchronous orbit.
Hmm, couldn't resist posting myself, but I have to point out that all of this is in response to a ridiculous troll post. It's probably unhealthy to contribute to the off-topic thread.
You are ignorant and deceitful, and you are spreading lies, that much is clear.
Hmmm. There's an old saying about never attributing to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. You seem to be generously accusing me of both incompetence and malice. The problem is that if I'm simply ignorant then how can what I say be malicious lies? They're mutually incompatible, but somehow you feel you can accuse me of both. The truth is that I'm neither a liar nor particularly ignorant.
Design patents are not what you say they are... if they were they would be completely worthless, but they are not.
Design patents are what I say they are. In my opinion they are completely worthless. In the opinion of Patent Attorneys and various intellectual property parasites like those "invention protection" companies that advertise on late night TV, they have a definite value. The main value is that they're easy to get and, once you have them, you can fool people (even judges) into treating them like utility patents. The advice I've seen from patent attorney's on this is to go after a design patent because it's cheaper, and will almost never be rejected and then you can throw "patent pending" on your product, which will help you get in the door with investors and customers, allowing you to pitch to them before they find out it's just a design patent. They're valuable to people like that precisely because they're a bastardized hybrid that cause a bit of cognitive dissonance in people trying to judge their status, which is perfect for people whose business plan relies on obstructionism. They are also a (relatively) cheap way to inflate a patent portfolio.
Coca-Cola's legitimate design patent for their famous hour glass bottle cannot be infringed upon by an hour glass nor by a rocket made by Goddard, yet by your definition, this is entirely possible.
You're inverting what I was saying. What I'm saying is that if the Coca-cola bottle design had been shaped similarly to a milk bottle design from the 1800's and someone else came out with their own soda bottle shaped like that milk bottle, without the coca-cola logo imprinted on it, Coca-cola would have no claim against whoever came out with that new copy of the pre-Coca-cola design. Also, I think you would find that, while Coca-cola's design patent was in effect, if anyone had started marketing hourglasses clearly copied from the Coca-cola bottle design, Coca-cola would have gone after them in court, and probably won (unless the hourglass company could find a similar old bottle to present as prior art).
Your argument is entirely worthless because your definitions are innaccurate and incomplete. A design patent is only awarded to functional items, thus, the function of these items is entirely relevant to the patent and any claims of infringement.
But the 1994 tablet was a functional item, even though no-one actually built it. And it had the same design. So it's prior art. As for a design patent only being awarded to functional items, please define "function" in this context? The patent office considers "decorative" to be a legitimate function. So, saying that design patents are only awarded to functional items is meaningless. Do a little research on the web, there are plenty of guides to artists on how to patent their artwork. The design patent on your example, the Coca-cola bottle, only covered the ornamentation of the bottle, it had nothing to do with the function. Bottles are an ancient invention and there was nothing novel in the function of the Coca cola bottle.
If you'd stop listening to your own bullshit rhetoric and take a look at the actual definition of a design patent, you'd readily find out that a design patent is indeed a type of utility patent. This information is available from countless sources all over the Internet.
And, once again, after being the first to cast stones against me f
Slashdot Mirror
Reality and statistics says that there's a pretty good chance that an asteroid or comet strike big enough to potentially wipe out our species will happen again. If we are still around when it happens and we don't have sufficiently advanced space tech (either for colonizing other planets or for deflecting the comet/asteroid or both) then we certainly could be wiped out. Chances are miniscule that it will happen in our lifetimes, but if we manage to survive as a species for tens of millions more years, it's almost inevitable. It's possible that we might have sufficiently advanced terrestrial technology at that time to weather it, but our chances are even better if we have space capabilities. In other words, it's not a religious belief.
Also, what you say here still doesn't explain what the original comment has to do with The Fine Article despite the common theme of asteroid strikes. Why would narrowing down _which_ asteroids supplied most of Earth's water do anything to injure the idea that a massive comet or asteroid might cause another global extinction event in the future? You seem to be using some sort of faulty reasoning. Do you also think that because the ozone layer is a good thing that protects us that we should all make sure to breathe as much ozone as possible?
Actually, as long as the ground is going to be on fire for a few hundred years and there's nothing you can do to stop it, might as well find a way to extract the energy. Has anyone looked into extracting geothermal energy from underground coal fires?
Yes, I don't quite understand this from an energy efficiency point of view. They're using natural gas to run compressors to store compressed air that they can later release through generator turbines to generate electricity. It seems like the infrastructure costs for the natural gas-powered compressors and the generator turbines to generate power from the compressed air shouldn't be less than it would cost to just build a bunch of natural gas-powered generators.
I could understand it if they were using it to store power from wind or solar, but why store power from natural gas, which is already a storable form of power?
But the inner solar system asteroids from the time period we're talking about would have had a lot more water. Over billions of years, it will have mostly sublimated away and been pushed right out of the solar system or collected in the outer solar system.
The moon has lower gravity than earth and little or no atmosphere for all of its history. Any water on the surface of the moon would be expected to be stripped away by by the solar wind over millions of years, leaving only deposits in shielded locations. Some water would also be created on the moon from the solar wind as well. I think we should reasonably expect with those conditions and that amount of time that the concentrations of water on Earth and on the moon would be nothing alike.
So, the idea that most of the Earth's water came from the outer solar system as opposed to the inner solar system is one of the main points of the "religion" of the people you refer to as "Space Nutters"? You seem to have a pretty serious psychological disorder there yourself.
If you consider gravity to be "magic", then yes.
Oh no. It might, gasp, cost money to find out that the justice system has been murdering innocent people. If they've already been killed, wouldn't want to find out that you've killed the wrong person. Nope, just close your eyes and pretend that it's all fine and nothing bad ever happens. And hey, if you happen to be a murderer who got away because they stopped looking for you after they caught the wrong person, bonus!
Moisture vaporators would be my guess.
I'm not sure what the various payloads travelling along with, but one of them, Hubble, cost ~$2.5 billion.
Which is more than four times the Hubble's weight in gold at current prices. Most of that $2.5 billion (provided that it doesn't actually include the launch cost) will have been spent on the engineering, toolchain development and testing (which they could have saved a lot of money by doing a little bit more since the original lens was out of spec). If they'd built 10 Hubble telescopes, they could have gotten the price down to something like 300 million apiece, 100 at something like 32 million apiece and so on. There would be a minimum price point, probably somewhere in the tens of millions. If you accidentally dropped the Hubble off a loading crane, you would be out a lot of money, but not the entire development cost.
McAuliffe's schoolteacher status didn't contribute to the Challenger disaster.
Mostly true, but at least a little arguable. The decision to launch Challenger, despite the low temperatures was heavily motivated by political pressure, and one of the reasons there was so much political pressure was because it was a high profile launch. The reason it was such a high-profile launch is because of the teacher in space publicity stunt. It's certainly possible that they might not have postponed the launch if it was a regular crew that wasn't so high-profile, but there's at least a reasonable argument that they might have postponed if everyone weren't so worried about losing the TV spot.
I would find partisan wing-nuts absolutely hilarious if I didn't find them so tragic. All the energy wasted on pointless sniping at strawman mis-characterizations of each other.
I'm pretty shocked that you're shocked you were modded flamebait. You certainly couldn't have expected an Informative mod. Offtopic might have been a fit. Maybe you could have gotten a Funny, but it just wasn't that funny.
For six billion dollars, at modern launch prices, you can get about 100 small vans into Earth orbit.
The kinds of technologies that would make a manned colony on Mars sustainable are just the kinds of things that would help out tremendously here on Earth. Also, this article is about a private mission to Mars, not a government-funded one.
Sorry, there seems to be a little bit of "and then a miracle occurs" in your calculations. You don't really seem to provide numbers for anything. Essentially, most of Mars gets a daily average 150 Watts per square meter which is 60% of the typical 250 Watts/square meter for Earth. This is better than the 44% you'd expect based on the distance of Mars from the sun for a number of reasons, mostly having to do with Earth's atmosphere and weather. Essentially, the peak hours on Mars are a bigger proportion of the day, and the average insolation never really goes down due to weather, even in the worst dust storms. So, at 15% efficiency (we do have significantly more efficient solar cells, they're just more expensive) that's 22.5 Watts per square meter of solar cells. Let's estimate 30% power transmission/conversion losses for a usable 15.75 watts per square meter. From what I can find, it looks like you can expect power consumption of something like 130 watts per square meter of greenhouse LEDs. So, we'll round up and say that you need 9 square meters of solar cells for every square meter of greenhouse. That's ignoring the fact that your greenhouse will probably also be getting some natural sunlight as well and that you can increase that sunlight cheaply with an array of mylar reflectors. Anyway, for 10,000 square meters of greenhouse (which may well be more than you need), you need 90,000 square meters of solar cells, which is 23 acres of solar cells. That's still a lot of solar cells, but it's not an insurmountable number. To generate the ~1.86 megawatts you need from the solar cells, if you used thin-film solar panels and pretty much just lie them on the ground and stake them down, it would take about 3,100 kg of solar cells. This is based on 1kg/600W (Martian rating based on 150 W/sq meter) thin-film solar cells which are available on Earth now and have a rating of 1kg/kW (based on 250W/sq meter). Just a bit over 3 metric tons is a lot, but should still be able to fit into the mass budget of a Mars mission.
Of course, all of this may not matter if you can send a nuclear reactor instead. There is a question though of how well nuclear reactors scale. Can you get more bang for the buck by unit mass from a nuclear reactor than from solar cells? Probably. But can you get 1.86 megawatts from a reactor that only masses 3 metric tons or less? Questionable.
Of course, powering LED grow lights with solar cells does seem a bit silly from an efficiency point of view. There are plenty of plants that will thrive in the 60% effective insolation of Mars in direct sunlight. A dedicated indoor greenhouse is a good idea, but there seem to be better ways to provide light to the plants. Mylar or foil reflector arrays to deliver sunlight to a greenhouse are one way, although there are limits to the density you can achieve before you've created an oven nothing can live in.
What seems to me to be a better approach is to go with certain nutritious staple crops that can be grown with very little maintenance outside for 90% of nutritional needs, then grow what you need to fill in the nutritional gaps and spice things up in the indoor greenhouse. Along with that, send every colonist with a lifetime supply of nutritional supplement pills (at least, those supplements that can be chemically stabilised that long). There seem to be some plants that would happily grow even in a near vacuum, but what I'm thinking of is just growing algae like Spirulina and other plants and simple foods that you can just grow in a big pool of water. This does rely on obtaining water in situ, but all current indications are that this is probably quite possible. You just need to make big pools (taking advantage of surface features where possible) covered over with relatively thin transparent plastic (treated for UV protection) with a light atmosphere (no need for anything more than a few psi) inside. If they don't stay warm enough, then either build some solar reflectors that reflect directly into the pool or pipe water out, through a reflective solar hea
No, my friend, it is rape. And murder. If you want to have a truly impressive argument, include as many inflammatory terms as you can think of.
Also, the VCR is the Boston Strangler!
Actually, the Concorde wasn't quite as horrifically expensive as you seem to think. The ticket prices were so high because they found out that people expected them to be very high, so they raised them to what the market would bear. The Concorde was retired because the one crash of a Concorde along with September 11th caused irrational fear about flying in it. Also, although the Concorde was profitable, the airlines realized that the people flying on it would be buying first-class tickets on sub-sonic aircraft if there were no Concorde. Since the Concorde was the only supersonic passenger aircraft, they didn't need to worry about losing the passengers to the non-existent competition.
Overall you're probably right that the Concorde will not be replaced. At least, not in the short term. The industry is too closed for the economics to work out.
The interesting tie between the Concorde and the fine article is that, when the Concorde was being retired, Richard Branson offered to buy them to continue their operation, but was refused.
The headline is, of course, intentionally poorly worded to drive page views.
Gary Larson (creator of _The Far Side_) had a variety of chewing louse that infests owls named after him: Strigiphilus Garylarsoni.
You cannot convince me that "evil people" want to destroy the planet and they are blocking all attempts to the contrary
But that's a strawman argument. You're misrepresenting the GP poster as claiming that all the denialists are "evil people" as if it had been claimed that they were some some sort of cartoon super-villains. That's clearly not the GP's claim, although I'm sure the GP does think that there are some greedy cynics propping up the movement. AIDs denialists aren't cartoon supervillains either, but their denialism and its adoption by some governments, such as South Africa's has probably killed hundreds of thousands of people. Whether those denialists are "evil people" might be a bit up in the air of course. Some of them hold their views simply because they think anyone who has any form of sex that doesn't fit their particular preferences deserves to die. That could certainly be considered evil.
As for the rest of your post, which basically claims that people who believe in anthropogenic climate change are liars because they would otherwise all be eco-terrorists, there isn't much to say. I'll just say it's a ridiculous argument and leave it at that.
Yeah, you're missing something. You see, trains can be designed to be pressurized just like planes already are. So, even though the train is travelling in a vacuum, the passengers are not. Sort of like how the entire planet Earth is travelling in a vacuum but those of us on the planet still get to breathe.
You do realize that this article is about _trains_, right? You and your monomania are what brought space into the discussion. There's nothing impossible about a maglev train, nor a superconducting power cable, nor a depressurized tunnel. We already have all of these things. It may prove cost prohibitive to operate a train system like this.
Frankly, all that the article could really has to say about why such trains aren't being built is that they might be hard to maintain and everyone will die if it crashes. That and some completely hyperbolic speculation about one little leak almost immediately compromising the entire vacuum. So, basically, wow. Super-informative article. No really.
A standard space elevator isn't actually technologically possible right now. We still don't have materials strong enough to make a tether that can reach that far without breaking under its own weight, even with an optimal shape. Don't say graphene, by the way. It might be strong enough, but we still can't actually manufacture it in enough quantity to even test the idea. Also, since graphene is naturally a sheet, you'd have to roll it up into tubes, in which case it's just carbon nanotubes, which we've know about even longer than graphene and which we can't make in sufficient quantity or length to test either.
Believe me, I'm all for a space elevator or some similar technology to make access to space either, but we're just not there yet. We do, however, have all of the actual technology (if not the practical experience, which we'll have to learn by doing) to make various other technologies for accessing space more easily. Skyhooks, for example, might allow us to boost cargo launched on high-altitude planes or dirigibles. We might also be able to construct a launch loop. We probably also have all the necessary tech to build a space elevator that anchors to an orbital ring a hundred kilometers up rather than at geosynchronous orbit.
Hmm, couldn't resist posting myself, but I have to point out that all of this is in response to a ridiculous troll post. It's probably unhealthy to contribute to the off-topic thread.
You are ignorant and deceitful, and you are spreading lies, that much is clear.
Hmmm. There's an old saying about never attributing to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. You seem to be generously accusing me of both incompetence and malice. The problem is that if I'm simply ignorant then how can what I say be malicious lies? They're mutually incompatible, but somehow you feel you can accuse me of both. The truth is that I'm neither a liar nor particularly ignorant.
Design patents are not what you say they are... if they were they would be completely worthless, but they are not.
Design patents are what I say they are. In my opinion they are completely worthless. In the opinion of Patent Attorneys and various intellectual property parasites like those "invention protection" companies that advertise on late night TV, they have a definite value. The main value is that they're easy to get and, once you have them, you can fool people (even judges) into treating them like utility patents. The advice I've seen from patent attorney's on this is to go after a design patent because it's cheaper, and will almost never be rejected and then you can throw "patent pending" on your product, which will help you get in the door with investors and customers, allowing you to pitch to them before they find out it's just a design patent. They're valuable to people like that precisely because they're a bastardized hybrid that cause a bit of cognitive dissonance in people trying to judge their status, which is perfect for people whose business plan relies on obstructionism. They are also a (relatively) cheap way to inflate a patent portfolio.
Coca-Cola's legitimate design patent for their famous hour glass bottle cannot be infringed upon by an hour glass nor by a rocket made by Goddard, yet by your definition, this is entirely possible.
You're inverting what I was saying. What I'm saying is that if the Coca-cola bottle design had been shaped similarly to a milk bottle design from the 1800's and someone else came out with their own soda bottle shaped like that milk bottle, without the coca-cola logo imprinted on it, Coca-cola would have no claim against whoever came out with that new copy of the pre-Coca-cola design. Also, I think you would find that, while Coca-cola's design patent was in effect, if anyone had started marketing hourglasses clearly copied from the Coca-cola bottle design, Coca-cola would have gone after them in court, and probably won (unless the hourglass company could find a similar old bottle to present as prior art).
Your argument is entirely worthless because your definitions are innaccurate and incomplete. A design patent is only awarded to functional items, thus, the function of these items is entirely relevant to the patent and any claims of infringement.
But the 1994 tablet was a functional item, even though no-one actually built it. And it had the same design. So it's prior art. As for a design patent only being awarded to functional items, please define "function" in this context? The patent office considers "decorative" to be a legitimate function. So, saying that design patents are only awarded to functional items is meaningless. Do a little research on the web, there are plenty of guides to artists on how to patent their artwork. The design patent on your example, the Coca-cola bottle, only covered the ornamentation of the bottle, it had nothing to do with the function. Bottles are an ancient invention and there was nothing novel in the function of the Coca cola bottle.
If you'd stop listening to your own bullshit rhetoric and take a look at the actual definition of a design patent, you'd readily find out that a design patent is indeed a type of utility patent. This information is available from countless sources all over the Internet.
And, once again, after being the first to cast stones against me f