Charlie Stross, like Bruce Schneier, has no fucking clue what he's talking about. But then, the people they're writing for don't either, and thus are trivially manipulated.
Has anyone stopped to consider that if it came to situation that required ground to air missiles, by putting the launchers on residential buildings they have just made civilian homes prime targets...
No more than they've stopped to consider painting themselves pink and sprinkling themselves with glitter. These are meant to deter against a 9/11 style attack (which doesn't make the residences a target), not against a military air-to-ground attack (which would).
Yes, radar cross section is a concern, no the Navy doesn't use the methods she used to reduce radar cross section. Yes, reduced crew manning is a concern and has been for decades, no, she didn't play any particular role in that either. Yes, roll reduction has been a concern, but as you point out - the one feature of Sea Shadow that contributed to that (the catamaran hull) isn't in operational use.
I know you don't RTFA, at least google the story a bit or follow a wikipedia reference or two.
Don't take the Slashdot editors to task for what you're too lazy to do yourself.
If you actually read and comprehended your linked references, you'd note that the previous attempts have been to sell/donate Sea Shadow as a museum ship - while this offer is for scrapping and disposal.
And if it's a "failed experiment" why the requirement to dismantle? If all it is is a curious looking ship, who cares what happens to it after it leaves the Navy's hands?
Because the government doesn't sell military equipment unless it's either a) been demilitarized (essentially, rendered useless), or b) going to be scrapped. Otherwise, as it does for museum ships, it retains custody.
This sounds more like something you'd do with a successful prototype that nevertheless was not militarily useful due to factors relating to the fact that it is a prototype and not a full blown warship....
She was an abysmal failure. For a reasonable amount of armament, she ended up much larger more expensive than a ship with a conventional displacement hull.... and she wasn't actually all that stealthy. (In particular, her wake could be trivially detected using the same radar used to detect submarine periscopes.) On top of that, because of displacement limitations, she was highly vulnerable in combat, had low survivability, limited endurance, maintenance issues, and had habitability issues as compared to an equivalent conventional design.
tl;dr version: The Navy already had a stealth ship (the fast attack submarine) that filled the various mission needs that the Navy needed stealth for. Sea Shadow had no particular advantages over the submarine and several key disadvantages. Other than her one party trick (stealth), she was inferior to conventional surface ships but had a considerably higher price tag.
Warren Buffett, the world's most famous investor, published that in 2003
So? He's published a lot of things in his annual reports, at least one of them was bound to end up being an accurate predictor of the future. (Or at least close enough to be cited as if it were.)
Ocean water has temperature, pressure, salinity gradients
No, the ocean does not have pressure gradients - pressure varies with depth and nothing else. Temperature gradients vary wildly with the seasons. Salinity gradients are very weak, and only occur where there are either a) massive inputs of fresh water, or b) massive amounts of evaporation.
So no, none of these will really work to provide navigation cues.
Magnetic field has different strength in different area so you could (assuming no major changes have occurred) approximate distance from the polar region in addition to knowing the direction.
No you can't - because field strength does not vary linearly with distance from the polar region. Even if it did, since you can't measure East-West position with a compass - that still wouldn't work to fix a position.
Those services work for Canadians because 80% of all Canadians live withing fifty odd miles of the border, and 80% of those live in a fairly small number of metropolitan areas. There's no similar situation in the US.
As long as the Earth's magnetic poles don't radically shift, the turtles could mark a location in their mind when they're born.
You can't "mark" a location using magnetic sense - because all a compass gives you is a direction, not a position. (And a not very accurate (relatively speaking) direction at that.) On top of that, the direction varies over time. (See Magnetic Declination.)
In school we all get this picture of Earth's magnetic field as a tidy and static system, when in reality it's anything but.
Lets say you made glass so durable that it wouldn't fracture when hit with a hammer, then you might not want to use that glass in an emergency box which says,"In case of emergency, smash glass"
You mean like plexiglass is so durable it won't fracture when hit with a hammer - but when grooved, breaks with a modest tug on a bit of string?
I.E. they'd no more use such glass in an emergency box without proper preparation than they would use current, bulletproof, glasses.
norganic farming using chemical fertilizers and pesticides is a modern aberration
That whooshing sound you heard was my point going right over your head. Like the OP, you're making an artificial and pointless distinction between means of increasing yield.
I find the rhetorical twist here interesting: "conventional farming" is now the artificially accelerated, yield raising variant of farming.
And has been ever since we started artificially restoring fertility and raising yield - I.E. whenever we started using manure and night soil, then added crop rotation, phosphate (guano), liming fields, etc...
"Organic" farming as we know it now was previously largely known as "farming".
No it wasn't.
The one spinning and redefining here is you - because you're artificially walling off a host a practices dating back millenia as 'organic' rather than recognizing them for what they are.
Sir Arthur may have proposed it, but he got the science badly wrong.
Not only would such a bomb not produce a flash (the flash is a product of the bomb's reactions with the atmosphere) or a radar pulse of any kind, but even if it did - it would have to be in the tens or hundreds of gigatons to exceed the illumination available from the sun, and would only be useful for 1 AU or so from the bomb.
"And it wants to use travelers' online behavior to serve up better targeted ads and content across all of Google's sites and services."
Seriously? Who thought this wasn't Google's goal?
And that's why I'm getting increasingly frustrated with Google's services - they're increasingly designed to serve their customers, and the user be dammed.
Google Picasa allows unlimited storage for images of up to 2048 x 2048 pixels
Which, to a photographer, is like having unlimited storage of 5 second audio files would be to a music collector - all but useless. And to get that unlimited storage, you have to upload them via Google+, otherwise it's a 1gig limit.
As I've said for years, most people are basically clueless when it comes to exploration. In school they learn about the heroes who did amazing voyages - but the grunts who made it possible, and the grunts who do the work that builds on that of the 'heroes'... go unremarked. Everybody knows who Lewis & Clark were - but only a few surveying/mapping geeks know the names of the guys who came after.
As for your comment about labor and electronics and other support system that is basically WRONG.
Nope. It's the stone cold sober truth. Structural materials and the labor to assemble them are cheap - it's all the complicated and labor intensive bits (basically everything that isn't structure) that cost real money.
Shipping things up to space is the single most expensive item.
That's what years of shrill propaganda might lead you to believe - but it's not even remotely true. But if even if it were true, structure rarely dominates the weight budget of a typical spacecraft. Even if it were true, how much will all the shipping containers and storage racks for all the non structural bits that will have to be boosted into orbit to install into your structure built in orbit weigh? (A great deal indeed.)
Not to mention construction materials. This is what NASA should have been working on for the past 30 years instead of the ISS
Yeah, they should have constructed a research facility on orbit so they could research chemical processes and materials handling on orbit, in zero G, so we have the basic knowledge to proceed with developing in situ resource processing.
Oh, wait. That's exactly what we tried to do. But because of people who don't see the value in doing the grunt work, we're years behind where we could be. You want to mine the asteroids or go to Mars? You're going to have to wait until the basics have been worked out.
However asteroids are already in orbit, and it takes a hell of a lot less fuel to deorbit than to orbit. So to a VERY crude first approximation the delivery expense is perhaps a buck per gram.
Which makes delivery (from orbit) a *very* high fraction of the cost of the metal - doubly so when you consider the huge upfront costs of obtaining that gram.
Its kind of like complaining that you can't mine gold in South Africa because a 747 cargo plane costs $50M and $50M is a lot to spend for a little gold. Well, yes $50M is a lot of dough but you'd find that the cargo capacity of a 747 in gold is worth a whole hell of a lot more than $50M, so suddenly the airplane cost doesn't matter much.
The problem is - they aren't mining gold. They're mostly mining iron, and iron is cheap. The amount of 'gold' they're getting could (relatively speaking) be put in the pocket of the pilot of the 747 in question.
I think the ROI/risk is about as bad as opening a gold mine in South Africa. Much riskier than a diamond mine in Canada. Not as risky as a rare earth mine anywhere on the African continent. Its a plausible realistic investment.
There's a market for gold, diamonds, and rare earths. There is no market for asteroid materials.
You're whole analogy repeatedly fails because you keep comparing apples to oranges.
Cheaper for a space station to get water from an asteroid mine than it is to ship it up from earth.
On the contrary - that water is going to be hideously expensive. Between the development of the (currently non existent) propulsion systems to change the asteroids orbit, and the development of the (currently non existent) mining and processing equipment, you're already anywhere from tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars in the hole. Now you have to spend millions launching the tens of tons of processing equipment... Not to mention operations and support costs.
The only way this water end up 'cheaper' is if either you a) handwave out of existence the enormous startup costs, or b) handwave into existence a sufficiently large market to recoup your investment in a reasonable time frame.
Similarly, if they can get a simple forge up there, they can build the heavy support structures for satelitels and space stations out of metals mined on the asteroid.
Nothing in space is 'simple'. (Even if we did know how to do it, which we don't. We can't even do it here on Earth.) And again, you run into the same problems the water has - high startup and operational costs, miniscule market. Worse yet, structural materials aren't the expensive part - it's the labor and electronics and other support systems.
Now imagine that the orbital dynamics were such that this happened in 1982 instead of 2012. Then you get a bright flash and a rumble over a major metro area during the Cold War.
And then the various systems designed to detect nuclear attacks remain stubbornly silent... And in the days after, no radioactive materials are detected...
So, it happening in the middle of the Cold War results in pretty much what's happening today, a few hours media sensation. (And much less of a sensation than today, since we weren't quite into the 24/7 news cycle era yet.)
Slashdot Mirror
There, fixed that for you.
Getting energy from "Not Earth" means (eventually) dumping energy into the Earth's systems. What happens when you scale it up? TANSTAAFL.
Charlie Stross, like Bruce Schneier, has no fucking clue what he's talking about. But then, the people they're writing for don't either, and thus are trivially manipulated.
No more than they've stopped to consider painting themselves pink and sprinkling themselves with glitter. These are meant to deter against a 9/11 style attack (which doesn't make the residences a target), not against a military air-to-ground attack (which would).
Yes, radar cross section is a concern, no the Navy doesn't use the methods she used to reduce radar cross section. Yes, reduced crew manning is a concern and has been for decades, no, she didn't play any particular role in that either. Yes, roll reduction has been a concern, but as you point out - the one feature of Sea Shadow that contributed to that (the catamaran hull) isn't in operational use.
Don't take the Slashdot editors to task for what you're too lazy to do yourself.
If you actually read and comprehended your linked references, you'd note that the previous attempts have been to sell/donate Sea Shadow as a museum ship - while this offer is for scrapping and disposal.
Because the government doesn't sell military equipment unless it's either a) been demilitarized (essentially, rendered useless), or b) going to be scrapped. Otherwise, as it does for museum ships, it retains custody.
She was an abysmal failure. For a reasonable amount of armament, she ended up much larger more expensive than a ship with a conventional displacement hull.... and she wasn't actually all that stealthy. (In particular, her wake could be trivially detected using the same radar used to detect submarine periscopes.) On top of that, because of displacement limitations, she was highly vulnerable in combat, had low survivability, limited endurance, maintenance issues, and had habitability issues as compared to an equivalent conventional design.
tl;dr version: The Navy already had a stealth ship (the fast attack submarine) that filled the various mission needs that the Navy needed stealth for. Sea Shadow had no particular advantages over the submarine and several key disadvantages. Other than her one party trick (stealth), she was inferior to conventional surface ships but had a considerably higher price tag.
So? He's published a lot of things in his annual reports, at least one of them was bound to end up being an accurate predictor of the future. (Or at least close enough to be cited as if it were.)
No, the ocean does not have pressure gradients - pressure varies with depth and nothing else. Temperature gradients vary wildly with the seasons. Salinity gradients are very weak, and only occur where there are either a) massive inputs of fresh water, or b) massive amounts of evaporation.
So no, none of these will really work to provide navigation cues.
No you can't - because field strength does not vary linearly with distance from the polar region. Even if it did, since you can't measure East-West position with a compass - that still wouldn't work to fix a position.
Those services work for Canadians because 80% of all Canadians live withing fifty odd miles of the border, and 80% of those live in a fairly small number of metropolitan areas. There's no similar situation in the US.
You can't "mark" a location using magnetic sense - because all a compass gives you is a direction, not a position. (And a not very accurate (relatively speaking) direction at that.) On top of that, the direction varies over time. (See Magnetic Declination.)
In school we all get this picture of Earth's magnetic field as a tidy and static system, when in reality it's anything but.
You mean like plexiglass is so durable it won't fracture when hit with a hammer - but when grooved, breaks with a modest tug on a bit of string?
I.E. they'd no more use such glass in an emergency box without proper preparation than they would use current, bulletproof, glasses.
That whooshing sound you heard was my point going right over your head. Like the OP, you're making an artificial and pointless distinction between means of increasing yield.
And has been ever since we started artificially restoring fertility and raising yield - I.E. whenever we started using manure and night soil, then added crop rotation, phosphate (guano), liming fields, etc...
No it wasn't.
The one spinning and redefining here is you - because you're artificially walling off a host a practices dating back millenia as 'organic' rather than recognizing them for what they are.
Sir Arthur may have proposed it, but he got the science badly wrong.
Not only would such a bomb not produce a flash (the flash is a product of the bomb's reactions with the atmosphere) or a radar pulse of any kind, but even if it did - it would have to be in the tens or hundreds of gigatons to exceed the illumination available from the sun, and would only be useful for 1 AU or so from the bomb.
Well, bitcoin kinda meets the first two criteria... but semi-sucess on the third is misleading, because it implies a stability that Bitcoin lacks.
"And it wants to use travelers' online behavior to serve up better targeted ads and content across all of Google's sites and services."
Seriously? Who thought this wasn't Google's goal?
And that's why I'm getting increasingly frustrated with Google's services - they're increasingly designed to serve their customers, and the user be dammed.
Which, to a photographer, is like having unlimited storage of 5 second audio files would be to a music collector - all but useless. And to get that unlimited storage, you have to upload them via Google+, otherwise it's a 1gig limit.
As I've said for years, most people are basically clueless when it comes to exploration. In school they learn about the heroes who did amazing voyages - but the grunts who made it possible, and the grunts who do the work that builds on that of the 'heroes'... go unremarked. Everybody knows who Lewis & Clark were - but only a few surveying/mapping geeks know the names of the guys who came after.
Nope. It's the stone cold sober truth. Structural materials and the labor to assemble them are cheap - it's all the complicated and labor intensive bits (basically everything that isn't structure) that cost real money.
That's what years of shrill propaganda might lead you to believe - but it's not even remotely true. But if even if it were true, structure rarely dominates the weight budget of a typical spacecraft. Even if it were true, how much will all the shipping containers and storage racks for all the non structural bits that will have to be boosted into orbit to install into your structure built in orbit weigh? (A great deal indeed.)
Meteoric iron isn't notably different, chemically or physically, from the terrestrial kind.
Yeah, they should have constructed a research facility on orbit so they could research chemical processes and materials handling on orbit, in zero G, so we have the basic knowledge to proceed with developing in situ resource processing.
Oh, wait. That's exactly what we tried to do. But because of people who don't see the value in doing the grunt work, we're years behind where we could be. You want to mine the asteroids or go to Mars? You're going to have to wait until the basics have been worked out.
Which makes delivery (from orbit) a *very* high fraction of the cost of the metal - doubly so when you consider the huge upfront costs of obtaining that gram.
The problem is - they aren't mining gold. They're mostly mining iron, and iron is cheap. The amount of 'gold' they're getting could (relatively speaking) be put in the pocket of the pilot of the 747 in question.
There's a market for gold, diamonds, and rare earths. There is no market for asteroid materials.
You're whole analogy repeatedly fails because you keep comparing apples to oranges.
On the contrary - that water is going to be hideously expensive. Between the development of the (currently non existent) propulsion systems to change the asteroids orbit, and the development of the (currently non existent) mining and processing equipment, you're already anywhere from tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars in the hole. Now you have to spend millions launching the tens of tons of processing equipment... Not to mention operations and support costs.
The only way this water end up 'cheaper' is if either you a) handwave out of existence the enormous startup costs, or b) handwave into existence a sufficiently large market to recoup your investment in a reasonable time frame.
Nothing in space is 'simple'. (Even if we did know how to do it, which we don't. We can't even do it here on Earth.) And again, you run into the same problems the water has - high startup and operational costs, miniscule market. Worse yet, structural materials aren't the expensive part - it's the labor and electronics and other support systems.
And then the various systems designed to detect nuclear attacks remain stubbornly silent... And in the days after, no radioactive materials are detected...
So, it happening in the middle of the Cold War results in pretty much what's happening today, a few hours media sensation. (And much less of a sensation than today, since we weren't quite into the 24/7 news cycle era yet.)