Now that you own Washington DC, please replace Congress, the Supreme Court and the President with a few Beowulf clusters. We should see a marked improvement in performance.
Don't you know the first thing about sci-fi? As soon as you give too much power to artificial constructs, one of them is bound to go on the fritz and start killing people. It's not just HAL-9000 or the Cylons; the theme goes as far back as Frankenstein's monster.
Hell, just look at the Vice President - all we gave him was a cybernetic heart, and he's already had to be restrained from going Terminator on his old hunting buddies.
I think it's disgusting that price is the only thing that people seem to think about when deciding whether to burn fuel.
Price is the only thing that people can be expected to think about when deciding to consume something, and usually capitalism makes price a pretty good sum total of all the costs involved in that consumption.
Combustion is an exception to that rule thanks to the externalities involved, but the solution to that is to try to use taxes to include those externalities in the price, not to demand that everyone who drive develop morality contrary to their own best interests. Not everybody is ready to change their whole life in order to slow global warming by a millionth of a percent. The Prisoner's Dilemma is rough enough with only two players; imagine how futile it can be with two billion.
Parrots are not native to geographies where fjords are to be found, and so are unlikely to pine for them.
Frogs lack both the intelligence and the proper vocal cords to form human speech, much less to sing "Hello my lady, hello my darling..."
When attempting to inform another person of an easily misunderstood name, in a real conversation one would rapidly devise unambiguous statements such as "The name of the player on first base is spelled H - U." to avoid any confusion.
If anyone has any additional jokes that they would like Mr. Anonymous Coward or me to suck all the life out of, just let us know.
and yet these same engineers just randomly throw an engine onto a rocket while screaming "ye haw!!" and hope that it works??
No, but those same engineers start out by throwing an engine choice and some loose structure weight estimates onto a PowerPoint slide. The choices are based more on calculations than on yelling and hoping, but the numbers still tend to change as the details come in. In their classes those engineers did learn how to predict "exactly how much compression force a load-bearnig wall is under", etc., but in their design projects and job experience they learned that no design predictions are final until you know the position of every rivet and the strength of every weld.
Of course, ideally you would have some components that end up lighter than initially expected (which would thus add to your rocket's eventual payload) as well as some that end up heavier, and it would balance out. Historically, that's not what happens; the tolerances on orbital rockets are tight enough that everybody's designs get heaver as they get more complete.
So what they do to compensate is add a margin for "mass growth" to the initial design, and try and hold down the growth in practice as the progressing design becomes more detailed and as test data refines those initial assumptions. Sometimes that margin isn't enough. You're right that it's unlikely that some random guy on the internets caught NASA in an engineering error; but even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Right now it looks like both the Ares I and the CEV designs still have margin to spare, but I wouldn't be certain they'll stay that way until after the hardware is assembled.
According to Ballmer, "the appropriate economic return for our shareholders from our innovation" is about negative 348 million dollars.
That number sounds a bit small to me; I think Novell should have at least held out for an even $400 million, an apology, and a promise from Microsoft to never try "innovating" again without adult supervision.
But really, this intellectual property stuff is serious business, and I don't think any Linux users want to fall afoul of the law. If Novell had to pay negative hundreds of dollars for each of their users' infringement of MS intellectual property, I think us Fedora users (and you Ubuntu users, and Gentoo users...) should all be willing to step up to the plate and pay negative hundreds of dollars per license too.
It appears the plot was real, because the current administration is trying to bring those responsible to justice. To me, that suggests the coup leaders were not involved in the bomb plot.
Right, and OJ Simpson is still searching for "the real killer"...
Unless we get really good at manufacturing those things, a space elevator isn't going to be composed of 40,000 kilometer long molecules.
That is the assumption the beanstalk people are going with
No, it's not. Even if we could make nanotubes that long, we'd still need a good way to join them laterally to spread loads around, both because the cross section of the elevator should increase as it approaches GEO and because there needs to be some level of fault tolerance in the system if individual strands break. So if we ever do come up with a way to join nanotubes without ruining their strength, we might as well apply it to shorter tubes that are easier to manufacture.
and if they get their material the most basic property is going to be graphite sheet conduction - you get it with the entire class of materials from graphite up - and the best conduction is also in the high strength direction.
You're actually probably right. I just don't feel confident discussing properties of materials that don't exist.
With your model where angular velocity does so much of the work to lift things - the assumption of two elevators is extremely unrealistic considering the massive project it would be to make one when it becomes possible.
That depends on how expensive unobtainium turns out to be. If the elevator material is most of the cost, then yeah, you want to scrimp as much on it as possible. If, on the other hand, the biggest cost is getting your initial elevator strands into GEO on rockets, then it makes sense to increase your payload capacity by using that first elevator to lift the second, the third, etc.
It also depends on how reliable unobtainium turns out to be, I think. The payloads and the astronauts can sit inside radiation shielding, but any attempt to shield the cable itself would weigh too much to work. So if I had just finished putting up that first elevator, the first payloads I'd want to set up would be for the start of the second elevator, just in case the lifetime of the first turns out to be shorter than expected.
How do things work out with a single elevator?
Hmmm... I was about to say it's obviously the same, but there's about twice as many terms in the equations if you have to allow the center of mass of the system to move away from the center of mass of the Earth. The fraction of energy you get from Earth's angular momentum turns out not to be exactly the same, but the difference is on the order of the ratio of the payload's mass to the Earth's mass, negligable.
DOS support isn't extremely hard, and it isn't something Windows is exceptional at. I know Windows users who are now stuck using Dosbox to run their oldest games, just like us Linux users.
If you really want to demonstrate a Linux distribution having problems with backwards compatibility, I'd point out the removal of LinuxThreads support when Fedora Core 5 went NPTL-only. Damn Red Hat, I want to play SimCity 3000 again! (Oh, yeah, and it broke a bunch of old versions of non-entertainment software, too.)
If the materials are carbon based tubes the high strength direction as a minimum will have the conductivity you get along a sheet of graphite.
Just because a buckytube has a certain electrical conductivity doesn't mean that a composite including buckytubes will. Unless we get really good at manufacturing those things, a space elevator isn't going to be composed of 40,000 kilometer long molecules.
I also suggest you reconsider the forces acting on an elevator modelled as a point mass travelling up the wire with no friction - make sure you don't let the frame of reference confuse you.
I used a non-rotating frame of reference, then assumed space elevators on both sides to make sure the center of mass wouldn't move. The results are that more than 15% of the total work required to get from the Earth's surface to GEO comes from the Earth's spin, and if you want to go beyond GEO, everything past that is free.
When you're modeling "the wire", you're not assuming it's a stiff line, are you? As the payload weight moves up, the wire is deflected backward in it's orbit; the tension from both the Earth and the counterweight then both point forward in the orbit, accelerating the payload as it ascends.
That's the whole point. IF the elevator cable EVER fails : and don't kid yourself, ONE missile strike...not even a nuclear missile, something like a long range cruise missile with a payload of shaped HE, and the entire investment is lost.
Not exactly. One missile strike gets through the perimeter, strikes the cable, and it starts the cable falling...
Upward.
A space elevator may get called an "orbital tower", but it would be in tension, not in compression like a normal tower. If someone breaks it near the base, the part below the break falls down into the atmosphere, but the part above the break just rises into an elliptical orbit with a longer period and a higher apogee. You trim the orbit back down to geosynchronous, lower a new cable extension, and reattach. There may be complications (for instance, LEO satellites may be in orbits designed to never hit the stationary cable, but they'd better also be prepared to dodge a slowly moving cable), but nothing insuperable.
Just as imporantly, "the entire investment" shouldn't be in one cable. A big chunk of the cost of building one space elevator is that you have to lift enough mass for the initial cable strands into GEO via rockets. Since you can use the first cable to start lifting strands of the second into orbit at vastly reduced marginal cost, you'd be nuts to only build one.
Better yet, much of the energy that goes into a space elevator payload comes from the Earth's angular momentum.
Back to school boy and learn how to use your frames of reference appropriately.
Hey, if you don't understand conservation laws, don't blame *my* professors.
When a payload goes up a space elevator, the moment of inertia of the payload plus Earth increases. Because of the conservation of angular momentum, the angular velocity of the system decreases. This reduces the rotational energy of the Earth, and because of conservation of energy, that work goes into the payload. If you need me to I'll walk you through the algebra, but I assure you it's not a negligible effect.
I'm also astounded that people are talking about a highly conductive material for a cable and they are suggesting using a very lossy form of wireless power - the crawler would be straddling something more conductive than copper! Surely getting power to the motors by induction makes more sense than collector dishes with decent and heavy cooling systems and huge output lasers.
The problem with talking about the conductivity of the cable material is that well, we don't have a cable material - even if buckytubes are it, they'll have to be bound together somehow, and who knows what that will do to the cable resistivity. Maybe the conductivity will be so high that we can transmit up power from the ground, for that matter maybe the ground station will be able to draw power from the ionosphere, but planning for what can be done in the worst case isn't a bad idea. Besides, photovoltaics aren't so inefficient when they can be designed for a single frequency of light; I think they're above 50% and climbing.
Actually that's the point of a rocket...the faster the exhaust goes the faster the payload goes. Conservation of momentum.
That's true, but that's not the point of the rocket. The point of the rocket is to make the payload go fast; wasting energy making the exhaust go fast is just a necessary evil.
It's a horrid idea, and it STILL takes just as much actual energy to put anything in orbit...
No, it doesn't. Most of the energy used by a rocket goes into the exhaust's temperature and velocity, not into the payload's velocity. Better yet, much of the energy that goes into a space elevator payload comes from the Earth's angular momentum, not from the beamed power source.
You're right that laser launch may be a good idea, and you're right that the materials necessary to build a geosynchronous tether on Earth do not exist in bulk and may never be good enough... but there's obviously still a gap between the amount of passion you've spent learning about both subjects and the amount you spend speaking about them. Calm down, take a deep breath, and back slowly away from the Caps Lock key...
Wait a minute. What you are saying seems to defy common sense.
Yup, orbital mechanics will do that. It starts with "if you want to go faster, slow down" and just gets weirder from there.
In space, if you throw an object, it will continue in that direction until resistance is met.
Only if its orbital velocity is negligable compared to the velocity you throw it at; otherwise it's direction will change constantly under the influence of gravity.
So, if the space station is 220 to 250 miles out in orbit and you throw or eject a package of trash toward the earth at 20 miles per hour (that seems reasonably simple). The package would travel 220 to 250 miles in 11 to 12.5 hours. It would be incinerated well before that. Am I missing something? Is there some principle of physics that would cause it's descent to slow as it's orbit decreased? It seems to me, that it would speed up if anything.
If you throw your trash toward the Earth at 20 miles per hour, the trash won't be moving at 20 miles per hour, it will still be moving at approximately 11,000 miles per hour; its velocity will just have changed direction by about a tenth of a degree. Its new orbit will now be slightly elliptical, but it still won't be elliptical enough to intersect thick atmosphere.
You're right that the trash will speed up as it gets closer to Earth... and as it speeds up, the centrifugal force required to keep it moving closer to Earth increases, gravity can't keep up, and the trash moves outwards again.
As the GPL says, "Each licensee is addressed as 'you'." Sun is not a licensee of it's own code, it is a licensor. Sun's licensees are prohibited from redistributing Java or Java-derived works without also offering a redistributable royalty-free license to any patents that code would infringe, but Sun is not so prohibited.
I guess it's possible that Section 0. applies, since "The act of running the Program is not restricted" could be interpreted as a patent license.. but on the other hand the preceding sentence is "Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope.", and patents definitely cover more than copying, distribution, and modification.
Looking at the responses on the thread you linked, I only see assertions and misconceptions. Sun is not distributing Java based on its GPL license, Sun is distributing software based on its ownership of the copyrights - as such, Sun is not bound by any of the requirements of the GPL license, including the requirement to sublicense patents.
If Sun is serious about going open source, then of course this is just hair splitting - they'll just officially offer a royalty-free redistributable patent license for GPL'ed software as soon as someone brings the problem to their attention. But just because they should have done so and they probably will do so doesn't mean they already have done so. Microsoft FUD aside, the GPL is not a virus: it can't take away any of your IP that you don't explicitly agree to give away. Sun is agreeing explicitly to release their copyrights by licensing them under the GPL, but I don't see any explicit about their patents yet.
A person could throw it with the hand towards the earth and have more than enough 'thrust' to 'deorbit' it. Orbit is a VERY precarious balancing act. Just a little higher or lower, faster or slower and you lose it.
No, you don't lose it (otherwise every little tidal perturbation would be knocking satellites from the sky), you just change it. To actually immediately leave orbit from the ISS you'd need more than 100m/s delta V, which you're not going to get from someone throwing a bag of trash by hand even if they're not in a bulky space suit.
So the plan here isn't to throw trash out of orbit, it's to throw it into a slightly lower orbit and let atmospheric drag eventually do the rest. They seem to be relying on the fact that if the trash doesn't break into many small pieces, there's only a tiny probability of it hitting anything during the hundreds of orbits before drag finally wins. Well, best of luck to them, but I'd hate to be the decisionmaker responsible for any accidents.
As soon as they switched over to GPL, they immediately granted free use of these patents to every programmer who builds on java and distributes his code under the GPL.
Are you sure about that? Show me the patent license. The usual text in the GPLv2 doesn't apply, because that only restricts people and companies who need to use the GPL license to redistribute Sun code. Sun isn't among those companies; they can continue to legally sell non-free licenses of Java, or even legally enforce patents against other Java users if they want. What are you supposed to do if that happens; sue them for infringing their own copyrights?
That may eventually change - one of the tough choices when going GPL is eventually people send you big patches that you want to be able to redistribute, and then you have to worry about obeying the GPL on what is no longer wholly your own code - but right now any patent license from Sun is either separate from the GPL or doesn't exist at all.
Is that 'libre' as in 'hablar', or 'gratis' as in 'cerveza'?
In my defense, I was in the middle of a sentence that ended with "I don't know Spanish", so I hope nobody was expecting too much accuracy... I suppose it's too late to pretend that I was just distracted while typing "dulces libres de azucar"?
Technically, functionally, you may be right. Morally and ethically might be a different question.
The main question is..."if it is unsecured, is that a specific invitation to use it?"
Morally and ethically, if I buy a yard decoration that has "Dulces Libres Aqui" painted on it, I don't then get to turn around and sue a bunch of hispanic kids for trespassing because I don't know Spanish. We wouldn't have a problem if judges understood that internet protocols they've never heard of like SSID and DHCP broadcasts are languages in which offers can be made, just like Spanish and just like protocols like HTTP they have heard of.
Seriously, if you don't don't trust those "technical, functional" protocols to grant you permission to use network resources, you just shouldn't use the internet at all. You've probably got written permission to use your ISP's routers; how much other "moral, ethical" permission do you have? Are you sure Slashdot's owners want you hitting their website? HTTP servers are configured to be open-by-default just like wireless routers, you know - perhaps Malda just never got around to disallowing your IP block. You could mail him a letter to ask, but that'll get pretty tedious if you have to do hunt down the owners of every computer that has only given you "technical, functional" permission to access it. At some point you just have to trust that when the network service says "please take this (web page|IP address|etc) you asked for", it's telling the truth.
Oregon has been using vote by mail for 10 years and they consistently have higher voter participation than every other state and practically no fraud.
Practically no reported fraud, I'm sure.
I stopped sending checks though the mail after discovering that one had been stolen. But unlike my bank account, I can't double-check my voting record later. If my mail-in election ballot had been stolen instead (whether to be altered by someone who didn't like how I voted or just to be trashed by someone who doesn't like how my precinct tends to vote), how would I ever have found out?
I am not happy with Bush or MOST of the Repugnicans, and I would not have been happy with Gore an most of the Demoncrats. Neither is more harmful than the other. Both are basically the same despite their rhetoric.
And that's a reasonable position to take, even if I'd disagree with this particular instance of it. There were a few three-way races in Texas where I felt free to vote for a good-but-longshot Libertarian candidate because I felt that the Republicrat offerings were either just as good as each other or just as bad.
But really, you've got to be pretty far away from mainstream political thought if that kind of situation happens to you all the time. For most people, there are at least half a dozen important issues on which the Democrats and Republicans usually differ, and nobody wants to lose their opportunity to vote on those issues just because there's some guy getting a hundred votes whom they would like even better. We need a system where you can vote your preference for a longshot without abdicating your ability to express a preference between the leading candidates.
Even if your politics are so far out that you'd never want to vote for a Republicrat, wouldn't you at least appreciate a system that makes it easier for nominally Republican and Democrat voters to also vote for candidates you'd prefer? Maybe you'll never vote for anyone but a Socialist; wouldn't you still see it as an improvement if your Socialist candidate had a lot of votes from nominally Democrat voters? I'd certainly be thrilled if small-government Republicans had the chance to vote for a libertarian without the risk of inadvertently helping elect a Democrat. Ranked voting systems can let that happen.
The "You're throwing away your vote!" garbage gets me real steamed.
You might want to steer clear of game theory, then. Might I suggest topology instead?;-)
You should always vote for the best person (not necessarily candidate, as some would take that as being someone who can win) according to your beliefs.
So do you want me to vote for a write-in in every election? There are a couple hundred million Americans eligible for office, and I don't think I've ever seen the best people among them named on a ballot.
No, thanks. I think I'll continue to compromise my beliefs and vote for candidates that have a real chance of winning - i.e., whenever I perceive a major difference between two candidates who are leading in the polls but still polling close to each other, I'm going to be voting for one of them, no matter how much I'd prefer the Libertarian getting 2%.
If you don't like that policy, great! I don't like it either. But it's an inevitable consequence of the spoiler effect in plurality voting: a candidate who is similar to the Condorcet winner of an election can split that winner's segment of a plurality vote, causing an opponent who is preferred by a minority of voters to win office. That's not the voters' fault, that's just reality.
If that happened, we wouldn't be in the messes we are in now.
To bring things back to a practical example: If every Nader voter who preferred Bush over Gore had voted for Bush, and every Nader voter who preferred Gore over Bush had voted for Gore, Gore would have won by a large margin even in Florida, a majority of voters would have been happier in 2000, and we wouldn't be in so many of the messes we are in now. Trying to convince people to vote idealistically instead of pragmatically just leads to mistakes in a plurality system - as a majority of Nader voters figured out by 2004.
If you want people to vote idealistically in a system which punishes idealism, you don't have a chance in hell of changing most voters, so you ought to try to figure out how to change the system.
In fact, if you'll look at my original comment you'll see that I "wouldn't ever want this system to be implemented" because of the risks of blackmail, bribery, and retribution; and I wrote that the risks of voting blackmail with mail-in ballots are just as great as the risks in the system I described.
I did write that blackmail is "unlikely to be happening very often", because it's a detectable and reportable form of fraud and I haven't seen any reports... but since you said "it currently isn't a big problem" I don't think I've written anything you disagree with.
So did you just click on the wrong "Reply to This" link? Or did you whip out the personal attacks because you didn't understand my posts? Either way, it sounds like you might want to make "myopic vision" cracks more sparingly until after you've updated your own reading glasses prescription.
Of course not. An uninformed vote will be insignificantly different from a random vote, and I don't think anyone would encourage you to go to your polling place and flip a coin to determine each vote. In fact, I suspect that the very same people insisting you go vote would be appalled if you did that.
You're right that a random vote is much better than a misinformed vote - if a million non-voters decided to go the polls and start flipping coins, they'd basically just add gaussian noise with a 500 vote standard deviation to the results. That's not a good thing, but it's not going to make any long term difference in election results.
Unfortunately, human beings aren't as good at picking random numbers as coins are. If a million non-voters decided to go to the polls and start voting ignorantly, they'd be adding their own conscious and subconscious biases to the vote. Perhaps those biases would go to the guy who had more money to spend on commercials and signs, or to the taller candidate, or to the candidate who played dirtier tricks, but however it worked out I expect the results wouldn't be good - any such bias is likely to eventually benefit candidates who are good at running for office, at the expense of candidates who would merely be good at holding office.
A party-line vote is just as bad. I'm a registered Republican (and just voted for 5 or 6 R's), but I think the Republicans Uber Alles mentality that's infected most of their leadership is ruining this country. I'm fairly libertarian (and just voted for 8 or 9 L's), but a few of the Libertarian candidates on my ballots this year clearly would be incompetent in office, and a few of the competent ones were no better than spoilers in races ruined by the plurality voting system. I voted mostly for Democrats this year, but I think an all-D federal government wouldn't be much better than the current mess. If everyone always voted a straight-party ticket we'd never have gridlock, which in my lifetime has been much better at running the government than any unopposed party.
I think the best you can do if you want to cast a full ballot without spending hours researching candidates is to: 1. Vote against the incumbent. In federal elections this may hurt your district, but it's good for the country as a whole. 2. Vote for the non-Republicrat candidate. Even if you're not a fan of the Libertarians or Greens, a strong showing for them might get the parties in power to look at non-plurality voting systems to avoid having their voting base splintered.
And if neither of those things are possible, the only remaining good advice I can give comes from a Heinlein character: "If this is too blind for your taste, consult some well-meaning fool (there is always one around) and ask his advice. Then vote the other way. This enables you to be a good citizen (if such is your wish) without spending the enormous amount of time that truly intelligent exercise of the franchise requires."
The fact that in many (most?) states you can request an absentee ballot takes the wind out of that argument.
Either that or it just makes the argument more serious. Some types of absentee ballot fraud, like the blackmail I mentioned before, are reportable and so are unlikely to be happening very often; other types, like a (friend|family member|postman|ballot counter) throwing away ballots they expect they'll disagree with, could be happening all the time and we'd never know. It doesn't have to happen one ballot at a time, either - one scam I've heard of is offering to help nursing home residents fill out and mail in their votes, then mailing in only the ballots you agree with and trashing the rest.
The nice thing about a ballot box is that each candidate can have someone watching the box from the time it's empty until the time it's opened and counted. With mail-in ballots there's just no equivalent; they're not as bad as secret electronic ballots (since at least all the mail-in ballots don't pass through the same hands) but there's certainly room for small-scale election fraud.
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Now that you own Washington DC, please replace Congress, the Supreme Court and the President with a few Beowulf clusters. We should see a marked improvement in performance.
Don't you know the first thing about sci-fi? As soon as you give too much power to artificial constructs, one of them is bound to go on the fritz and start killing people. It's not just HAL-9000 or the Cylons; the theme goes as far back as Frankenstein's monster.
Hell, just look at the Vice President - all we gave him was a cybernetic heart, and he's already had to be restrained from going Terminator on his old hunting buddies.
I think it's disgusting that price is the only thing that people seem to think about when deciding whether to burn fuel.
Price is the only thing that people can be expected to think about when deciding to consume something, and usually capitalism makes price a pretty good sum total of all the costs involved in that consumption.
Combustion is an exception to that rule thanks to the externalities involved, but the solution to that is to try to use taxes to include those externalities in the price, not to demand that everyone who drive develop morality contrary to their own best interests. Not everybody is ready to change their whole life in order to slow global warming by a millionth of a percent. The Prisoner's Dilemma is rough enough with only two players; imagine how futile it can be with two billion.
Parrots are not native to geographies where fjords are to be found, and so are unlikely to pine for them.
Frogs lack both the intelligence and the proper vocal cords to form human speech, much less to sing "Hello my lady, hello my darling..."
When attempting to inform another person of an easily misunderstood name, in a real conversation one would rapidly devise unambiguous statements such as "The name of the player on first base is spelled H - U." to avoid any confusion.
If anyone has any additional jokes that they would like Mr. Anonymous Coward or me to suck all the life out of, just let us know.
and yet these same engineers just randomly throw an engine onto a rocket while screaming "ye haw!!" and hope that it works??
No, but those same engineers start out by throwing an engine choice and some loose structure weight estimates onto a PowerPoint slide. The choices are based more on calculations than on yelling and hoping, but the numbers still tend to change as the details come in. In their classes those engineers did learn how to predict "exactly how much compression force a load-bearnig wall is under", etc., but in their design projects and job experience they learned that no design predictions are final until you know the position of every rivet and the strength of every weld.
Of course, ideally you would have some components that end up lighter than initially expected (which would thus add to your rocket's eventual payload) as well as some that end up heavier, and it would balance out. Historically, that's not what happens; the tolerances on orbital rockets are tight enough that everybody's designs get heaver as they get more complete.
So what they do to compensate is add a margin for "mass growth" to the initial design, and try and hold down the growth in practice as the progressing design becomes more detailed and as test data refines those initial assumptions. Sometimes that margin isn't enough. You're right that it's unlikely that some random guy on the internets caught NASA in an engineering error; but even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Right now it looks like both the Ares I and the CEV designs still have margin to spare, but I wouldn't be certain they'll stay that way until after the hardware is assembled.
According to Ballmer, "the appropriate economic return for our shareholders from our innovation" is about negative 348 million dollars.
That number sounds a bit small to me; I think Novell should have at least held out for an even $400 million, an apology, and a promise from Microsoft to never try "innovating" again without adult supervision.
But really, this intellectual property stuff is serious business, and I don't think any Linux users want to fall afoul of the law. If Novell had to pay negative hundreds of dollars for each of their users' infringement of MS intellectual property, I think us Fedora users (and you Ubuntu users, and Gentoo users...) should all be willing to step up to the plate and pay negative hundreds of dollars per license too.
It appears the plot was real, because the current administration is trying to bring those responsible to justice. To me, that suggests the coup leaders were not involved in the bomb plot.
Right, and OJ Simpson is still searching for "the real killer"...
Unless we get really good at manufacturing those things, a space elevator isn't going to be composed of 40,000 kilometer long molecules.
That is the assumption the beanstalk people are going with
No, it's not. Even if we could make nanotubes that long, we'd still need a good way to join them laterally to spread loads around, both because the cross section of the elevator should increase as it approaches GEO and because there needs to be some level of fault tolerance in the system if individual strands break. So if we ever do come up with a way to join nanotubes without ruining their strength, we might as well apply it to shorter tubes that are easier to manufacture.
and if they get their material the most basic property is going to be graphite sheet conduction - you get it with the entire class of materials from graphite up - and the best conduction is also in the high strength direction.
You're actually probably right. I just don't feel confident discussing properties of materials that don't exist.
With your model where angular velocity does so much of the work to lift things - the assumption of two elevators is extremely unrealistic considering the massive project it would be to make one when it becomes possible.
That depends on how expensive unobtainium turns out to be. If the elevator material is most of the cost, then yeah, you want to scrimp as much on it as possible. If, on the other hand, the biggest cost is getting your initial elevator strands into GEO on rockets, then it makes sense to increase your payload capacity by using that first elevator to lift the second, the third, etc.
It also depends on how reliable unobtainium turns out to be, I think. The payloads and the astronauts can sit inside radiation shielding, but any attempt to shield the cable itself would weigh too much to work. So if I had just finished putting up that first elevator, the first payloads I'd want to set up would be for the start of the second elevator, just in case the lifetime of the first turns out to be shorter than expected.
How do things work out with a single elevator?
Hmmm... I was about to say it's obviously the same, but there's about twice as many terms in the equations if you have to allow the center of mass of the system to move away from the center of mass of the Earth. The fraction of energy you get from Earth's angular momentum turns out not to be exactly the same, but the difference is on the order of the ratio of the payload's mass to the Earth's mass, negligable.
DOS support isn't extremely hard, and it isn't something Windows is exceptional at. I know Windows users who are now stuck using Dosbox to run their oldest games, just like us Linux users.
If you really want to demonstrate a Linux distribution having problems with backwards compatibility, I'd point out the removal of LinuxThreads support when Fedora Core 5 went NPTL-only. Damn Red Hat, I want to play SimCity 3000 again! (Oh, yeah, and it broke a bunch of old versions of non-entertainment software, too.)
If the materials are carbon based tubes the high strength direction as a minimum will have the conductivity you get along a sheet of graphite.
Just because a buckytube has a certain electrical conductivity doesn't mean that a composite including buckytubes will. Unless we get really good at manufacturing those things, a space elevator isn't going to be composed of 40,000 kilometer long molecules.
I also suggest you reconsider the forces acting on an elevator modelled as a point mass travelling up the wire with no friction - make sure you don't let the frame of reference confuse you.
I used a non-rotating frame of reference, then assumed space elevators on both sides to make sure the center of mass wouldn't move. The results are that more than 15% of the total work required to get from the Earth's surface to GEO comes from the Earth's spin, and if you want to go beyond GEO, everything past that is free.
When you're modeling "the wire", you're not assuming it's a stiff line, are you? As the payload weight moves up, the wire is deflected backward in it's orbit; the tension from both the Earth and the counterweight then both point forward in the orbit, accelerating the payload as it ascends.
That's the whole point. IF the elevator cable EVER fails : and don't kid yourself, ONE missile strike...not even a nuclear missile, something like a long range cruise missile with a payload of shaped HE, and the entire investment is lost.
Not exactly. One missile strike gets through the perimeter, strikes the cable, and it starts the cable falling...
Upward.
A space elevator may get called an "orbital tower", but it would be in tension, not in compression like a normal tower. If someone breaks it near the base, the part below the break falls down into the atmosphere, but the part above the break just rises into an elliptical orbit with a longer period and a higher apogee. You trim the orbit back down to geosynchronous, lower a new cable extension, and reattach. There may be complications (for instance, LEO satellites may be in orbits designed to never hit the stationary cable, but they'd better also be prepared to dodge a slowly moving cable), but nothing insuperable.
Just as imporantly, "the entire investment" shouldn't be in one cable. A big chunk of the cost of building one space elevator is that you have to lift enough mass for the initial cable strands into GEO via rockets. Since you can use the first cable to start lifting strands of the second into orbit at vastly reduced marginal cost, you'd be nuts to only build one.
Better yet, much of the energy that goes into a space elevator payload comes from the Earth's angular momentum.
Back to school boy and learn how to use your frames of reference appropriately.
Hey, if you don't understand conservation laws, don't blame *my* professors.
When a payload goes up a space elevator, the moment of inertia of the payload plus Earth increases. Because of the conservation of angular momentum, the angular velocity of the system decreases. This reduces the rotational energy of the Earth, and because of conservation of energy, that work goes into the payload. If you need me to I'll walk you through the algebra, but I assure you it's not a negligible effect.
I'm also astounded that people are talking about a highly conductive material for a cable and they are suggesting using a very lossy form of wireless power - the crawler would be straddling something more conductive than copper! Surely getting power to the motors by induction makes more sense than collector dishes with decent and heavy cooling systems and huge output lasers.
The problem with talking about the conductivity of the cable material is that well, we don't have a cable material - even if buckytubes are it, they'll have to be bound together somehow, and who knows what that will do to the cable resistivity. Maybe the conductivity will be so high that we can transmit up power from the ground, for that matter maybe the ground station will be able to draw power from the ionosphere, but planning for what can be done in the worst case isn't a bad idea. Besides, photovoltaics aren't so inefficient when they can be designed for a single frequency of light; I think they're above 50% and climbing.
Actually that's the point of a rocket...the faster the exhaust goes the faster the payload goes. Conservation of momentum.
That's true, but that's not the point of the rocket. The point of the rocket is to make the payload go fast; wasting energy making the exhaust go fast is just a necessary evil.
It's a horrid idea, and it STILL takes just as much actual energy to put anything in orbit...
No, it doesn't. Most of the energy used by a rocket goes into the exhaust's temperature and velocity, not into the payload's velocity. Better yet, much of the energy that goes into a space elevator payload comes from the Earth's angular momentum, not from the beamed power source.
You're right that laser launch may be a good idea, and you're right that the materials necessary to build a geosynchronous tether on Earth do not exist in bulk and may never be good enough... but there's obviously still a gap between the amount of passion you've spent learning about both subjects and the amount you spend speaking about them. Calm down, take a deep breath, and back slowly away from the Caps Lock key...
Wait a minute. What you are saying seems to defy common sense.
Yup, orbital mechanics will do that. It starts with "if you want to go faster, slow down" and just gets weirder from there.
In space, if you throw an object, it will continue in that direction until resistance is met.
Only if its orbital velocity is negligable compared to the velocity you throw it at; otherwise it's direction will change constantly under the influence of gravity.
So, if the space station is 220 to 250 miles out in orbit and you throw or eject a package of trash toward the earth at 20 miles per hour (that seems reasonably simple). The package would travel 220 to 250 miles in 11 to 12.5 hours. It would be incinerated well before that. Am I missing something? Is there some principle of physics that would cause it's descent to slow as it's orbit decreased? It seems to me, that it would speed up if anything.
If you throw your trash toward the Earth at 20 miles per hour, the trash won't be moving at 20 miles per hour, it will still be moving at approximately 11,000 miles per hour; its velocity will just have changed direction by about a tenth of a degree. Its new orbit will now be slightly elliptical, but it still won't be elliptical enough to intersect thick atmosphere.
You're right that the trash will speed up as it gets closer to Earth... and as it speeds up, the centrifugal force required to keep it moving closer to Earth increases, gravity can't keep up, and the trash moves outwards again.
As the GPL says, "Each licensee is addressed as 'you'." Sun is not a licensee of it's own code, it is a licensor. Sun's licensees are prohibited from redistributing Java or Java-derived works without also offering a redistributable royalty-free license to any patents that code would infringe, but Sun is not so prohibited.
I guess it's possible that Section 0. applies, since "The act of running the Program is not restricted" could be interpreted as a patent license.. but on the other hand the preceding sentence is "Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope.", and patents definitely cover more than copying, distribution, and modification.
Looking at the responses on the thread you linked, I only see assertions and misconceptions. Sun is not distributing Java based on its GPL license, Sun is distributing software based on its ownership of the copyrights - as such, Sun is not bound by any of the requirements of the GPL license, including the requirement to sublicense patents.
If Sun is serious about going open source, then of course this is just hair splitting - they'll just officially offer a royalty-free redistributable patent license for GPL'ed software as soon as someone brings the problem to their attention. But just because they should have done so and they probably will do so doesn't mean they already have done so. Microsoft FUD aside, the GPL is not a virus: it can't take away any of your IP that you don't explicitly agree to give away. Sun is agreeing explicitly to release their copyrights by licensing them under the GPL, but I don't see any explicit about their patents yet.
A person could throw it with the hand towards the earth and have more than enough 'thrust' to 'deorbit' it. Orbit is a VERY precarious balancing act. Just a little higher or lower, faster or slower and you lose it.
No, you don't lose it (otherwise every little tidal perturbation would be knocking satellites from the sky), you just change it. To actually immediately leave orbit from the ISS you'd need more than 100m/s delta V, which you're not going to get from someone throwing a bag of trash by hand even if they're not in a bulky space suit.
So the plan here isn't to throw trash out of orbit, it's to throw it into a slightly lower orbit and let atmospheric drag eventually do the rest. They seem to be relying on the fact that if the trash doesn't break into many small pieces, there's only a tiny probability of it hitting anything during the hundreds of orbits before drag finally wins. Well, best of luck to them, but I'd hate to be the decisionmaker responsible for any accidents.
As soon as they switched over to GPL, they immediately granted free use of these patents to every programmer who builds on java and distributes his code under the GPL.
Are you sure about that? Show me the patent license. The usual text in the GPLv2 doesn't apply, because that only restricts people and companies who need to use the GPL license to redistribute Sun code. Sun isn't among those companies; they can continue to legally sell non-free licenses of Java, or even legally enforce patents against other Java users if they want. What are you supposed to do if that happens; sue them for infringing their own copyrights?
That may eventually change - one of the tough choices when going GPL is eventually people send you big patches that you want to be able to redistribute, and then you have to worry about obeying the GPL on what is no longer wholly your own code - but right now any patent license from Sun is either separate from the GPL or doesn't exist at all.
Is that 'libre' as in 'hablar', or 'gratis' as in 'cerveza'?
In my defense, I was in the middle of a sentence that ended with "I don't know Spanish", so I hope nobody was expecting too much accuracy... I suppose it's too late to pretend that I was just distracted while typing "dulces libres de azucar"?
Technically, functionally, you may be right. Morally and ethically might be a different question.
The main question is..."if it is unsecured, is that a specific invitation to use it?"
Morally and ethically, if I buy a yard decoration that has "Dulces Libres Aqui" painted on it, I don't then get to turn around and sue a bunch of hispanic kids for trespassing because I don't know Spanish. We wouldn't have a problem if judges understood that internet protocols they've never heard of like SSID and DHCP broadcasts are languages in which offers can be made, just like Spanish and just like protocols like HTTP they have heard of.
Seriously, if you don't don't trust those "technical, functional" protocols to grant you permission to use network resources, you just shouldn't use the internet at all. You've probably got written permission to use your ISP's routers; how much other "moral, ethical" permission do you have? Are you sure Slashdot's owners want you hitting their website? HTTP servers are configured to be open-by-default just like wireless routers, you know - perhaps Malda just never got around to disallowing your IP block. You could mail him a letter to ask, but that'll get pretty tedious if you have to do hunt down the owners of every computer that has only given you "technical, functional" permission to access it. At some point you just have to trust that when the network service says "please take this (web page|IP address|etc) you asked for", it's telling the truth.
Oregon has been using vote by mail for 10 years and they consistently have higher voter participation than every other state and practically no fraud.
Practically no reported fraud, I'm sure.
I stopped sending checks though the mail after discovering that one had been stolen. But unlike my bank account, I can't double-check my voting record later. If my mail-in election ballot had been stolen instead (whether to be altered by someone who didn't like how I voted or just to be trashed by someone who doesn't like how my precinct tends to vote), how would I ever have found out?
I am not happy with Bush or MOST of the Repugnicans, and I would not have been happy with Gore an most of the Demoncrats. Neither is more harmful than the other. Both are basically the same despite their rhetoric.
And that's a reasonable position to take, even if I'd disagree with this particular instance of it. There were a few three-way races in Texas where I felt free to vote for a good-but-longshot Libertarian candidate because I felt that the Republicrat offerings were either just as good as each other or just as bad.
But really, you've got to be pretty far away from mainstream political thought if that kind of situation happens to you all the time. For most people, there are at least half a dozen important issues on which the Democrats and Republicans usually differ, and nobody wants to lose their opportunity to vote on those issues just because there's some guy getting a hundred votes whom they would like even better. We need a system where you can vote your preference for a longshot without abdicating your ability to express a preference between the leading candidates.
Even if your politics are so far out that you'd never want to vote for a Republicrat, wouldn't you at least appreciate a system that makes it easier for nominally Republican and Democrat voters to also vote for candidates you'd prefer? Maybe you'll never vote for anyone but a Socialist; wouldn't you still see it as an improvement if your Socialist candidate had a lot of votes from nominally Democrat voters? I'd certainly be thrilled if small-government Republicans had the chance to vote for a libertarian without the risk of inadvertently helping elect a Democrat. Ranked voting systems can let that happen.
The "You're throwing away your vote!" garbage gets me real steamed.
;-)
You might want to steer clear of game theory, then. Might I suggest topology instead?
You should always vote for the best person (not necessarily candidate, as some would take that as being someone who can win) according to your beliefs.
So do you want me to vote for a write-in in every election? There are a couple hundred million Americans eligible for office, and I don't think I've ever seen the best people among them named on a ballot.
No, thanks. I think I'll continue to compromise my beliefs and vote for candidates that have a real chance of winning - i.e., whenever I perceive a major difference between two candidates who are leading in the polls but still polling close to each other, I'm going to be voting for one of them, no matter how much I'd prefer the Libertarian getting 2%.
If you don't like that policy, great! I don't like it either. But it's an inevitable consequence of the spoiler effect in plurality voting: a candidate who is similar to the Condorcet winner of an election can split that winner's segment of a plurality vote, causing an opponent who is preferred by a minority of voters to win office. That's not the voters' fault, that's just reality.
If that happened, we wouldn't be in the messes we are in now.
To bring things back to a practical example: If every Nader voter who preferred Bush over Gore had voted for Bush, and every Nader voter who preferred Gore over Bush had voted for Gore, Gore would have won by a large margin even in Florida, a majority of voters would have been happier in 2000, and we wouldn't be in so many of the messes we are in now. Trying to convince people to vote idealistically instead of pragmatically just leads to mistakes in a plurality system - as a majority of Nader voters figured out by 2004.
If you want people to vote idealistically in a system which punishes idealism, you don't have a chance in hell of changing most voters, so you ought to try to figure out how to change the system.
In fact, if you'll look at my original comment you'll see that I "wouldn't ever want this system to be implemented" because of the risks of blackmail, bribery, and retribution; and I wrote that the risks of voting blackmail with mail-in ballots are just as great as the risks in the system I described.
I did write that blackmail is "unlikely to be happening very often", because it's a detectable and reportable form of fraud and I haven't seen any reports... but since you said "it currently isn't a big problem" I don't think I've written anything you disagree with.
So did you just click on the wrong "Reply to This" link? Or did you whip out the personal attacks because you didn't understand my posts? Either way, it sounds like you might want to make "myopic vision" cracks more sparingly until after you've updated your own reading glasses prescription.
Of course not. An uninformed vote will be insignificantly different from a random vote, and I don't think anyone would encourage you to go to your polling place and flip a coin to determine each vote. In fact, I suspect that the very same people insisting you go vote would be appalled if you did that.
You're right that a random vote is much better than a misinformed vote - if a million non-voters decided to go the polls and start flipping coins, they'd basically just add gaussian noise with a 500 vote standard deviation to the results. That's not a good thing, but it's not going to make any long term difference in election results.
Unfortunately, human beings aren't as good at picking random numbers as coins are. If a million non-voters decided to go to the polls and start voting ignorantly, they'd be adding their own conscious and subconscious biases to the vote. Perhaps those biases would go to the guy who had more money to spend on commercials and signs, or to the taller candidate, or to the candidate who played dirtier tricks, but however it worked out I expect the results wouldn't be good - any such bias is likely to eventually benefit candidates who are good at running for office, at the expense of candidates who would merely be good at holding office.
A party-line vote is just as bad. I'm a registered Republican (and just voted for 5 or 6 R's), but I think the Republicans Uber Alles mentality that's infected most of their leadership is ruining this country. I'm fairly libertarian (and just voted for 8 or 9 L's), but a few of the Libertarian candidates on my ballots this year clearly would be incompetent in office, and a few of the competent ones were no better than spoilers in races ruined by the plurality voting system. I voted mostly for Democrats this year, but I think an all-D federal government wouldn't be much better than the current mess. If everyone always voted a straight-party ticket we'd never have gridlock, which in my lifetime has been much better at running the government than any unopposed party.
I think the best you can do if you want to cast a full ballot without spending hours researching candidates is to:
1. Vote against the incumbent. In federal elections this may hurt your district, but it's good for the country as a whole.
2. Vote for the non-Republicrat candidate. Even if you're not a fan of the Libertarians or Greens, a strong showing for them might get the parties in power to look at non-plurality voting systems to avoid having their voting base splintered.
And if neither of those things are possible, the only remaining good advice I can give comes from a Heinlein character:
"If this is too blind for your taste, consult some well-meaning fool (there is always one around) and ask his advice. Then vote the other way. This enables you to be a good citizen (if such is your wish) without spending the enormous amount of time that truly intelligent exercise of the franchise requires."
The fact that in many (most?) states you can request an absentee ballot takes the wind out of that argument.
Either that or it just makes the argument more serious. Some types of absentee ballot fraud, like the blackmail I mentioned before, are reportable and so are unlikely to be happening very often; other types, like a (friend|family member|postman|ballot counter) throwing away ballots they expect they'll disagree with, could be happening all the time and we'd never know. It doesn't have to happen one ballot at a time, either - one scam I've heard of is offering to help nursing home residents fill out and mail in their votes, then mailing in only the ballots you agree with and trashing the rest.
The nice thing about a ballot box is that each candidate can have someone watching the box from the time it's empty until the time it's opened and counted. With mail-in ballots there's just no equivalent; they're not as bad as secret electronic ballots (since at least all the mail-in ballots don't pass through the same hands) but there's certainly room for small-scale election fraud.