Consider a tropical rainforest in which some of the trees are valuable hardwoods used for luxury furniture and veneers. It would be possible to sustainably harvest widely scattered high-value trees if it were not for the network of logging roads that destroys the first understory. So to generate sufficient value to the local economy, the forest ends up being mowed down and replaced by something like a coffee plantation.
But what if an airship were available to lift large logs out of the forest without use of logging roads. You have to wait for calm weather to use the airship, but in this application that is not a problem. The forest thrives, and so does the local economy.
Read the Bloomberg article at the link, rather than this silly summary. It describes a nuclear program that is already producing so much additional power ("overcapacity") that it will reduce the number of coal stations faster than originally planned. The "mounting safety requirements" part was a two-year hold to make post-Fukushima updates to the program. China currently plans 176 reactors, far more than any other nation.
"Right now there are NO cars on the market that are capable of accepting full Tesla supercharger power."
But if the industry standardized the plugs and sockets, all electrics could charge from the same 'pumps'. Not having this standardization is like all those old jokes about if Microsoft cars had to use Microsoft gasoline.
Or it could be how it used to be, and your local retailer knowing you had no alternatives just fucked you every chance they got... you can also use sites that watch prices of items to help you get the lowest rate.
In the good old days, you had to drive out of town to get around this problem. Today you fire up your VPN.
"Oh quit being so dramatic. They sold statistics. "
You're forgetting the Slashdotista rules: to you mass information about when people visit the Walmart on Wednesdays is just anonymous data. But if the data is being sold to Uber, it's EEEVIL because UNITED MYLAN MONSANTO COMCAST AARGH!
After the Sumerians invented a written language pressed into clay tablets, one of the first uses they had for this tech was business: http://international.loc.gov/i...
Stallman is trying to promote a version of theInternet that by being non-commercial forever fundamentally changes human nature.
I was already well into my thirties when I first encountered Basic. What was amazing about it to me was it being the first language I could own for myself.
Long before Basic came along, there was JOSS, my first real-time language. Being able to pull immediate graphs of research results (U of Calif) and then play what-if games with modified inputs was far more revolutionary for us than whatever it was the Students for a Democratic Society was setting fire to out in the quad. It was implemented on a new mainframe operating system that doled out tiny slices of processor time (in those days the processor was the second room on the left) on a rotating basis to each of perhaps ten users pecking away on IBM 1050 typewriter terminals. In the ten minutes or so between OS crashes, you could refine your research model a little more.
Unfortunately, databases still lived only on card decks and open-reel tape, which in any case were only accessible to the batch programs that ran after hours. You had to initialize every element of your model's input array in code, and then manually modify it as you got results.
ISPs are only in the email business at all because they were the first to offer the service. Now that big national IMAP systems like Gmail have become the norm, ISPs would rather ditch their trouble-prone POP servers. Don't be that grandma who holds up the process by hanging onto that rickety old email address.
You can also run a version of Libre Office on it if you want to. And yes, there is actually a valid reason for doing that: LO imports a variety of ancient file formats that nobody else supports.
Shortcuts like this are great where they can be found, but there will still be a fundamental need to scavenge local energy and local materials at the target system, leveraging the knowledge and processing power you bring with you.
The cheapest commodity to transport over interstellar distances is information, even if you have to use a physical medium to ship it in. Envision a robot with primitive foraging skills that can find a body like Enceladus and then extract metals and other base resources from its surface. Using AI directing a long series of tools-to-make-the-tools manufacturing steps, it converts a large body of ferried information into local exploration robots, a local communications network and a large transmitter.
Wood is carbon neutral, sort of, if you don't count having to haul it across the Atlantic from the southern US in diesel-powered ships, but trees could be used to take carbon out of circulation for much longer periods of time.
The UK is 18.5% nuclear, which helps, and it also imports 5% of its power from France. The giant coal plant at Drax in Yorkshire was converted to burn American wood pellets, which makes this hellmouth count as a renewable source under the European carbon accounting rules. Set up an artificial accounting system of any kind, and human nature dictates that tit will be scammed.
Renewables have not been notably successful at making Britain sunnier.
This is a Thought Experiment, not a real plan to go anywhere... we aren't going to travel between the stars until we figure out something a whole lot better than chemical rockets and probably FTL drive...
Everything else is just fantasy...
The missions being envisioned here are for small robots that can be accelerated and decelerated with reasonably foreseeable technologies, not humans with life support. Being able to decelerate into a target system would not only increase the data return, but would enable a small probe to locate accessible resources (as in not down a gravity well) to construct a transmitter large enough to return the data in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
Consider a tropical rainforest in which some of the trees are valuable hardwoods used for luxury furniture and veneers. It would be possible to sustainably harvest widely scattered high-value trees if it were not for the network of logging roads that destroys the first understory. So to generate sufficient value to the local economy, the forest ends up being mowed down and replaced by something like a coffee plantation.
But what if an airship were available to lift large logs out of the forest without use of logging roads. You have to wait for calm weather to use the airship, but in this application that is not a problem. The forest thrives, and so does the local economy.
This could be used to carry large ungainly freight, like lifting a factory-built house onto a mountainside.
Spotted the Redflex employee!
Read the Bloomberg article at the link, rather than this silly summary. It describes a nuclear program that is already producing so much additional power ("overcapacity") that it will reduce the number of coal stations faster than originally planned. The "mounting safety requirements" part was a two-year hold to make post-Fukushima updates to the program. China currently plans 176 reactors, far more than any other nation.
"Right now there are NO cars on the market that are capable of accepting full Tesla supercharger power."
But if the industry standardized the plugs and sockets, all electrics could charge from the same 'pumps'. Not having this standardization is like all those old jokes about if Microsoft cars had to use Microsoft gasoline.
Or it could be how it used to be, and your local retailer knowing you had no alternatives just fucked you every chance they got... you can also use sites that watch prices of items to help you get the lowest rate.
In the good old days, you had to drive out of town to get around this problem. Today you fire up your VPN.
"Oh quit being so dramatic. They sold statistics. "
You're forgetting the Slashdotista rules: to you mass information about when people visit the Walmart on Wednesdays is just anonymous data. But if the data is being sold to Uber, it's EEEVIL because UNITED MYLAN MONSANTO COMCAST AARGH!
After the Sumerians invented a written language pressed into clay tablets, one of the first uses they had for this tech was business:
http://international.loc.gov/i...
Stallman is trying to promote a version of theInternet that by being non-commercial forever fundamentally changes human nature.
Stallman may not have a TV set, but he does have the only computer with a psychedelic bus.
Hi Esther! Don't let the trolls get to you. I'm one of the people trying to maintain a vestige of the old Slashdot here.
I was already well into my thirties when I first encountered Basic. What was amazing about it to me was it being the first language I could own for myself.
Long before Basic came along, there was JOSS, my first real-time language. Being able to pull immediate graphs of research results (U of Calif) and then play what-if games with modified inputs was far more revolutionary for us than whatever it was the Students for a Democratic Society was setting fire to out in the quad. It was implemented on a new mainframe operating system that doled out tiny slices of processor time (in those days the processor was the second room on the left) on a rotating basis to each of perhaps ten users pecking away on IBM 1050 typewriter terminals. In the ten minutes or so between OS crashes, you could refine your research model a little more.
Unfortunately, databases still lived only on card decks and open-reel tape, which in any case were only accessible to the batch programs that ran after hours. You had to initialize every element of your model's input array in code, and then manually modify it as you got results.
Needed it for an engineering course. My first actual programming course used PL/I
When I started using PL/I, I thought I was really stepping up in the world. Later, I wrote a compiler for it. In Japan.
No, actually it was IBM 1410 Fortran I.
ISPs are only in the email business at all because they were the first to offer the service. Now that big national IMAP systems like Gmail have become the norm, ISPs would rather ditch their trouble-prone POP servers. Don't be that grandma who holds up the process by hanging onto that rickety old email address.
You can also run a version of Libre Office on it if you want to. And yes, there is actually a valid reason for doing that: LO imports a variety of ancient file formats that nobody else supports.
If you run the other popular operating system, full installs of Pages, Numbers and Keynote come with it.
Found the Bernie voter!
Hence my stipulation "not down a gravity well."
In this context, a technology that is not renewable but produces no carbon beats one that is renewable but produces carbon.
Shortcuts like this are great where they can be found, but there will still be a fundamental need to scavenge local energy and local materials at the target system, leveraging the knowledge and processing power you bring with you.
The cheapest commodity to transport over interstellar distances is information, even if you have to use a physical medium to ship it in. Envision a robot with primitive foraging skills that can find a body like Enceladus and then extract metals and other base resources from its surface. Using AI directing a long series of tools-to-make-the-tools manufacturing steps, it converts a large body of ferried information into local exploration robots, a local communications network and a large transmitter.
Wood is carbon neutral, sort of, if you don't count having to haul it across the Atlantic from the southern US in diesel-powered ships, but trees could be used to take carbon out of circulation for much longer periods of time.
The UK is 18.5% nuclear, which helps, and it also imports 5% of its power from France. The giant coal plant at Drax in Yorkshire was converted to burn American wood pellets, which makes this hellmouth count as a renewable source under the European carbon accounting rules. Set up an artificial accounting system of any kind, and human nature dictates that tit will be scammed.
Renewables have not been notably successful at making Britain sunnier.
This is a Thought Experiment, not a real plan to go anywhere... we aren't going to travel between the stars until we figure out something a whole lot better than chemical rockets and probably FTL drive...
Everything else is just fantasy...
The missions being envisioned here are for small robots that can be accelerated and decelerated with reasonably foreseeable technologies, not humans with life support. Being able to decelerate into a target system would not only increase the data return, but would enable a small probe to locate accessible resources (as in not down a gravity well) to construct a transmitter large enough to return the data in the first place.