It makes perfect sense that a lower class serf would pay attention to the faces (who could or couldn't make one's life miserable), while the upper class had little need to pay much time or attention in identifying individual serfs.
So says the advantaged... Technologies that become community services are best when run for the public good over private profit. Not that the two are mutually exclusive. Perhaps oversight with teeth is all that is needed to protect those with little to no voice, in this headlong rush to use up everything on the planet. Waste hurts us all. Not keeping up with providing basic resources is a real reason for sacking our officials, not the fact that somebody needs to find a new way of skimming their living off everyone else.
Once your craft is out of a planetary gravity well, most of the heavy lifting is done.
Three or more transports would make the trips more of a routine, and would allow for scheduled return trips, trade and tourism.
Water-fuel storage would be integrated into the shielding of the vessels, but once the transports are up to speed, they should make Rendezvous at suitable Solar or planetary LaGrange points for refueling and transfer personnel and cargo, rather than in orbit around a specific planet to reduce the fuel requirements.
Water (and probably a lot more) will be mined from high-value asteroids, which have been nudged into more convenient orbits using the guided mass of tethered gravity-slings to maneuver the asteroids' mining operations to one of the LaGrange points. Long-term use of space requires a wider view of the time and distances required. Creating well-stocked Trading Posts can alleviate the need to go to the store on Earth for every little thing... the Trading Posts themselves can be Orbital, allowing for a rendezvous at any point along the route.
Interplanetary orbital routes can make use of opportune gravity wells to conserve fuel, or reduce transit time. Not all cargo vessel need to be "man-rated"...
A mass like water could be accelerated using a rail gun, or perhaps in a beanstalk sort of straw of balloons, using solar powered evaporators to keep the H20 rising, at least to the top of the atmosphere, where specialized spacecraft could swoop down to take the load the rest of the way to orbit.
You never know when the inspiration will strike for the stretching of goals; does not mean that the current projects are not along the necessary & critical path to the goals discovered farther off...
Sci-Fi Author, James P. Hogan, used a device of this description in his trilogy, the Minervan Experiment, to view a 100,000 year old document so dessicated from exposure to the Moon's vacuum it could not be opened...
Don't even bother to tell me when they're over: I could not be LESS interested. It's no longer about the athlete drones, but about the money: Like everything else in this F#$ked World! Human beings are worthy of a Darwin Award for self-extinction! They can't seem to get beyond this obsession with counting imaginary bits of value, placing the unobtainable goal of infinite growth in imaginary wealth over & above above taking care of the real business of survival on a planet with only "enough" resources.
Ah! Investors! Could they possibly more clueless! There IS no unlimited growth, folks! Why not realize that, and figure out how to make an economy work by just making enough, not insisting that EVERY company must get BIGGER. Slow and steady is what lasts for thousands of years, not these frenzies that investors tie themselves up into knots over. Let's get real, folks: take care of the planet and our human needs FIRST, before investors and the large multi-national corporate greed that they spawn are allowed to trash our planet with their monolithic obsession over counting imaginary bits of promised value, instead of real life necessities, like air, water, soil and food for all our biological robots!
My impressions:
1) As long as healthcare is monetized for profit, only the wealthy, the insured, or those on Medicare will get good access to healthcare. The politicians have rigged the system so that the primary concern is billable procedures, not favorable outcomes, and the various insurance companies have been given the power to determine how much healthcare may be dispensed.
2) Record keeping is an essential and critical element in providing continuing healthcare. The information routinely "charted" falls into easily recognizable patterns, and if the healthcare providers were not so concerned with their profits (gleaned from the misfortunes of their fellow human beings), they would be able to institute a universal charting system that begins in medical and nursing school and is a core feature of a robust healthcare system. Access to the information collected should belong to and be controlled by the patient: NOT the doctors, hospitals, insurance companies, or the government. We have the technology to store this information in encrypted personal record accounts that are established when a child is born. Is such records are permanently linked to the individual, these records could be stored (or backed up) on secure cloud servers, while the patient would approve access, perhaps by assigning a public/private key as a part of the check-in process. I find it unfathomable that untrained patients are required to recite their complete and complex medical histories to every new doctor they need to consult, when that information should already be available: this is hubris, not good medicine.
3) The human race seems to be hell-bent on profiteering its way to oblivion, due to the adoption of the religion of capitalism and the misinformed and incomplete theories of Adam Smith, and those who followed him. The fact is that an economy based on continual growth is impossible to maintain on a finite planet, and in reality is a vast Ponzi scheme in which the.01% win and everyone else must fight over the scraps. It is also totally unnecessary and incompatible for human survival, since it leads to decisions based not on practical outcomes, but merely who can amass the most "beans"! As for the medical profession, any doctor that refuses treatment based on the ability to pay is violating his Hippocratic oath to do no harm.
4) The inability of most humans to see past personal profits to release the potential for every person on the planet to be able to live a comfortable and secure life is the hubris that will cause us to over-consume every resource until we become yet another extinct species of life on a planet that could have been a paradise for everyone.
5) I don't think the planet will miss us at all.
ALL human technology is inherently dirty. It comes out of the "dirty" minds of humans who are congenically disinclined to clean up after themselves (dry humour intended). The dirt in batteries (or any other technology) can and must be contained and returned for reprocessing. The real problem with petrochemical and other fossil energy sources is their effect on the atmosphere and climate change, DUE TO OVERUSE.
I saw a new design for an internal combustion/compressed air powered GENERATOR that can make carbon-neutral, multi-fueled engines much lighter.
The future will certainly be a blend of all of these technologies. The bigger issue is why we must continue being wasteful and arrogant in our use of technologies such as individually owned automobiles. Our best-engineered traffic systems are already clogging up. Our parking lots are filled with empty under-utilized cars. The solution may be towards an all-electric autonomously driven commuter-cab that anyone can summon. (OK--rich egocentric boors will still want to show up in their personal rides)...
Why should I have to pay? What WOULD be nice is a button on Discus to IGNORE certain pests. Maybe there is one. I just don't pay them enough attention, tho' when the Troll booth is green, it takes some patience to wade thru to the kernel of good comments. Sometimes the trolls keep me abreast of the latest assaults on reason, so that is a small service, I suppose. Live slowly and share prosperity!
Slashdot Mirror
It makes perfect sense that a lower class serf would pay attention to the faces (who could or couldn't make one's life miserable), while the upper class had little need to pay much time or attention in identifying individual serfs.
So says the advantaged... Technologies that become community services are best when run for the public good over private profit. Not that the two are mutually exclusive. Perhaps oversight with teeth is all that is needed to protect those with little to no voice, in this headlong rush to use up everything on the planet. Waste hurts us all. Not keeping up with providing basic resources is a real reason for sacking our officials, not the fact that somebody needs to find a new way of skimming their living off everyone else.
Once your craft is out of a planetary gravity well, most of the heavy lifting is done. Three or more transports would make the trips more of a routine, and would allow for scheduled return trips, trade and tourism. Water-fuel storage would be integrated into the shielding of the vessels, but once the transports are up to speed, they should make Rendezvous at suitable Solar or planetary LaGrange points for refueling and transfer personnel and cargo, rather than in orbit around a specific planet to reduce the fuel requirements. Water (and probably a lot more) will be mined from high-value asteroids, which have been nudged into more convenient orbits using the guided mass of tethered gravity-slings to maneuver the asteroids' mining operations to one of the LaGrange points. Long-term use of space requires a wider view of the time and distances required. Creating well-stocked Trading Posts can alleviate the need to go to the store on Earth for every little thing... the Trading Posts themselves can be Orbital, allowing for a rendezvous at any point along the route. Interplanetary orbital routes can make use of opportune gravity wells to conserve fuel, or reduce transit time. Not all cargo vessel need to be "man-rated"...
A mass like water could be accelerated using a rail gun, or perhaps in a beanstalk sort of straw of balloons, using solar powered evaporators to keep the H20 rising, at least to the top of the atmosphere, where specialized spacecraft could swoop down to take the load the rest of the way to orbit.
You never know when the inspiration will strike for the stretching of goals; does not mean that the current projects are not along the necessary & critical path to the goals discovered farther off...
Sci-Fi Author, James P. Hogan, used a device of this description in his trilogy, the Minervan Experiment, to view a 100,000 year old document so dessicated from exposure to the Moon's vacuum it could not be opened...
Don't even bother to tell me when they're over: I could not be LESS interested. It's no longer about the athlete drones, but about the money: Like everything else in this F#$ked World! Human beings are worthy of a Darwin Award for self-extinction! They can't seem to get beyond this obsession with counting imaginary bits of value, placing the unobtainable goal of infinite growth in imaginary wealth over & above above taking care of the real business of survival on a planet with only "enough" resources.
Ah! Investors! Could they possibly more clueless! There IS no unlimited growth, folks! Why not realize that, and figure out how to make an economy work by just making enough, not insisting that EVERY company must get BIGGER. Slow and steady is what lasts for thousands of years, not these frenzies that investors tie themselves up into knots over. Let's get real, folks: take care of the planet and our human needs FIRST, before investors and the large multi-national corporate greed that they spawn are allowed to trash our planet with their monolithic obsession over counting imaginary bits of promised value, instead of real life necessities, like air, water, soil and food for all our biological robots!
My impressions: 1) As long as healthcare is monetized for profit, only the wealthy, the insured, or those on Medicare will get good access to healthcare. The politicians have rigged the system so that the primary concern is billable procedures, not favorable outcomes, and the various insurance companies have been given the power to determine how much healthcare may be dispensed. 2) Record keeping is an essential and critical element in providing continuing healthcare. The information routinely "charted" falls into easily recognizable patterns, and if the healthcare providers were not so concerned with their profits (gleaned from the misfortunes of their fellow human beings), they would be able to institute a universal charting system that begins in medical and nursing school and is a core feature of a robust healthcare system. Access to the information collected should belong to and be controlled by the patient: NOT the doctors, hospitals, insurance companies, or the government. We have the technology to store this information in encrypted personal record accounts that are established when a child is born. Is such records are permanently linked to the individual, these records could be stored (or backed up) on secure cloud servers, while the patient would approve access, perhaps by assigning a public/private key as a part of the check-in process. I find it unfathomable that untrained patients are required to recite their complete and complex medical histories to every new doctor they need to consult, when that information should already be available: this is hubris, not good medicine. 3) The human race seems to be hell-bent on profiteering its way to oblivion, due to the adoption of the religion of capitalism and the misinformed and incomplete theories of Adam Smith, and those who followed him. The fact is that an economy based on continual growth is impossible to maintain on a finite planet, and in reality is a vast Ponzi scheme in which the .01% win and everyone else must fight over the scraps. It is also totally unnecessary and incompatible for human survival, since it leads to decisions based not on practical outcomes, but merely who can amass the most "beans"! As for the medical profession, any doctor that refuses treatment based on the ability to pay is violating his Hippocratic oath to do no harm.
4) The inability of most humans to see past personal profits to release the potential for every person on the planet to be able to live a comfortable and secure life is the hubris that will cause us to over-consume every resource until we become yet another extinct species of life on a planet that could have been a paradise for everyone.
5) I don't think the planet will miss us at all.
ALL human technology is inherently dirty. It comes out of the "dirty" minds of humans who are congenically disinclined to clean up after themselves (dry humour intended). The dirt in batteries (or any other technology) can and must be contained and returned for reprocessing. The real problem with petrochemical and other fossil energy sources is their effect on the atmosphere and climate change, DUE TO OVERUSE. I saw a new design for an internal combustion/compressed air powered GENERATOR that can make carbon-neutral, multi-fueled engines much lighter. The future will certainly be a blend of all of these technologies. The bigger issue is why we must continue being wasteful and arrogant in our use of technologies such as individually owned automobiles. Our best-engineered traffic systems are already clogging up. Our parking lots are filled with empty under-utilized cars. The solution may be towards an all-electric autonomously driven commuter-cab that anyone can summon. (OK--rich egocentric boors will still want to show up in their personal rides)...
Why should I have to pay? What WOULD be nice is a button on Discus to IGNORE certain pests. Maybe there is one. I just don't pay them enough attention, tho' when the Troll booth is green, it takes some patience to wade thru to the kernel of good comments. Sometimes the trolls keep me abreast of the latest assaults on reason, so that is a small service, I suppose. Live slowly and share prosperity!
NASA can always use the technology if they get another bum primary mirror in one of their telescopes...