That's good. One source of pride in my college is that essentially all of my professors in the "soft" subjects tried to get us to think, not just to agree with them. And I never ran into any who confused those two goals.
I quote, "What's wrong withe status quo? It works for me!"
For instance, if I had asked a question and made a statement like this, the professors who were trying to get me to think would have answered the question and then asked me for more details on the statement. Occasionally their answers would change my mind or their questions would help me change theirs, but in any instance we'd both learn something from the exchange. Even among my most liberal professors, I never got to meet the stereotypical ivory tower dweller who thinks it's self-evident that a "status quo" is an inherently bad thing and that there is no wisdom in being conservative when proposing to change a working system.
For that, I guess I have to go to Slashdot. Nice to meet you.
SSN-based identity theft could be stopped with one simple law: "Provision of an SSN is not considered evidence of identity in court".
And as for those companies? They just need a few court judgements of "You say he owes you $10,000 and you know this because you have his SSN? I find in favor of the defendant." Possibly followed by a few more of "You reported a credit default based on only his name and SSN? I find in favor of the plaintiff, and the penalties for libel are..." They'll figure out better ways to confirm identity soon enough.
The reason nobody cares about SSNs being a lousy password isn't because they need a good talking to, it's because they have no legal reason to care. We just need to clarify the law to give them a good reason.
Probably not. The law says that false copyright claims "with fraudulent intent" are crimes punishable by up to $2,500, but I highly doubt that a judge would call the AP's scripting flaws "fraudulent intent".
At least not yet. We'll see if their program gets any smarter a month or a year from now. If their software can make them more money by selling invalid licenses based on false claims of copyright, you've got to wonder how long they can wait to fix that bug before some enterprising class action lawyer decides that they really consider it a feature instead.
The person did this with intent to gain a worthless license even.
This one did. But unless the AP's whole licensing server is worthless, it's got to be able to handle the case where someone wants to copy text from an AP story but doesn't know that the AP doesn't hold the copyright. Despite the AP's new "you have to pay us for five-word phrases!" policy, it seems they aren't keeping track of the five-word (or twenty-six-word) phrases that they've copied from others.
Low earth orbit is above the law, literally, isn't it?
Yes, I think I can safely assure you that your pirate satellite will not be arrested. This may be small consolation to the people who build and launch it, who themselves will inconveniently not be in LEO.
You dropped a word from the phrase you were replying to; "cost" and "incremental cost" are not the same thing.
Example: the cost to produce 10,000,000 DVDs might be $10 per DVD, because the blockbuster movie cost $100,000,000 to make. But once the movie is made you don't have to make 10% more movie to make 10% more DVDs, you just have to print more disks; the incremental cost would be less than $1 per DVD.
With the shuttle things are even more complicated. Do you want the total cost per flight; the amount of money spent on the whole program divided by the number of flights? That's well over $1 billion per launch. What about the operating cost per flight? If the R&D is considered "sunk cost" and you just consider the current budget per flight, that varies widely from year to year depending on how many flights are made, and NASA's $450 million might come from one of those calculations. And the incremental cost is less still. If you cancel a shuttle flight and only fly 3 in a year when you'd planned 4, you save a bit of fuel costs, some operations costs, you don't have to manufacture another external tank... but you don't get to put all your employees on leave for 3 months, you don't get to mothball your facilities for 3 months, and so you don't save nearly as much as you might hope. I thought even the incremental cost was over $100 million per flight, but I wouldn't be too surprised if it was $60 million.
Maybe someone wiser can set me straight on how that won't happen.
There aren't any wise people on Slashdot, so I'll try:
When the market predicts a future change in value, it doesn't wait for that change to happen before the price reflects the change; the change in price happens immediately. If Google announces that they'll release a software package next month that flawlessly runs all Windows software and works with all Office documents, Microsoft's share price isn't going to wait a month before collapsing. Likewise, if the Census bureau announces that a huge wave of baby boomers are about to start retiring and selling their stocks to pay for their retirement needs, the market could predict that, and preemptively keep share prices low (except in companies that are well-positioned to make loads of money selling retirement needs to boomers).
Of course, the market could have also predicted housing prices were going up too fast, but prices bubbled and popped anyway. Ironically the market only works because of the constant adjusting actions of people who believe that the market isn't quite working right. If you think most people have irrationally overpriced something, don't be too confident that they really know what they're doing.
The space shuttle was a noble goal: "Make a reusable launch vehicle, one that can be operated every few days without having to be thrown away." "Every few days" turned into "every several months" and "without having to be thrown away" turned into "with only part of it being thrown away, part fished out of the ocean, and part torn apart and rebuilt", but the long term goal was good. No matter how many incremental improvements you make to an expendible rocket, you either need to make the non-incremental change of adding flyback systems or you need to accept that the price of each trip will include building and discarding one of the largest and highest performance vehicles in history. The Delta, Atlas, etc. people made the latter choice, and although iteration still led them to better satellite launchers than Shuttle, it's not something we can build a real space program on.
The trouble with the RLV alternative is that, if making a reusable orbital vehicle in shot is too hard (as I'd agree NASA proved), the only way to get there incrementally is from reusable suborbital vehicles. Start with something like the DC-X, bump up to something that can hit Mach 10, Mach 15, Mach 20, Mach 25, increasing the size and performance as necessary. But long before you've made enough incremental improvements to reach orbit, you'll probably have made too many for the public's patience. "We made it to the moon in 1969!" they'll tell their Congressmen; "why are we wasting so much money" (i.e. a tiny fraction of that expense) "on rockets that can't even stay in space?" Or worse, you'll lose the program to administrators who think "Here's a great opportunity to experiment with multi-lobed tanks, lifting bodies, linear aerospike engines, and a bunch of other untested technology all at once, just as soon as we weed the competition down to a single contract to the guys who made the best Powerpoint slides! What could possibly go wrong? Whateration, did you say?"
The USA is one of the few countries that can AFFORD freedom of speech.
You make it sound like that's just some wacky coincidence. Did the USA just get lucky?
Start with a land full of Stone Age tribes, some already warring among and raiding each other. Take the best of that land away from them, by trade if you can but by genocide when you have to. Start filling it with immigrants, some from groups that emigrated because they were hated where they came from, some from groups that the earlier immigrants hate and despise, and some violently taken into slavery. Bring them from every country that will send them, don't worry about how recently their countries were at war with each other, don't even require them to speak the same language, and then if they don't self-segregate into ghettos right away, stoke prejudices to encourage that divisiveness.
Sounds like a recipe for peace, harmony, and love, does it? No need to worry about watching people's speech there?
Hardly. The USA doesn't have free speech because we can "afford" it; that's ludicrous. The USA has free speech because it's a human right. Fortunately for us, if you have a nation founded in division, violence, and hate, and you want to turn it into a melting pot where free speech seems "affordable", it turns out that a good way to do so is to foster the belief that human rights should be respected whether the government thinks they're "affordable" or not.
a new set of programs came out which have once again made Blu-Ray discs unrippable
At best, 19 Blu-Ray discs are unrippable - the rest are even easier to rip than they first were, because the "break old BD+ encryption" method of ripping has been supplemented with the "go online and download an already ripped copy" method. So congratulations to the movie industry; a fraction of a percent of the titles they've released will take a little longer to join the rest being pirated. In exchange, they've had to pay for a complex encryption system whose existence has delayed the development of HD home theater equipment, stopped me from buying their products (I didn't buy into DVD either until it had solid open source support, which as a corollary implies that a format is rippable) and failed frequently enough to scare away other early adopters.
neither side is able to consistently gain the upper hand
That's an understatement. Fair use is still grossly inconvenient and/or illegal, and copyright infringement is practically unhindered. It looks to me like both sides are losing.
The Constitution has no Environmental protections and the 10th amendment says basically If it is not in here you can not do it.
Like you, I'm not at all a fan of the "you engage in interstate commerce occasionally, therefore any law that applies to you is constitutional via the commerce clause" rationale for giving Congress unlimited power. But surely air pollution, which unavoidably does cross state lines, is a federal issue. (Leaving aside for the moment the assertion that rising CO2 levels count as air pollution and that the externalized costs have been accurately estimated)
Of course, the same convection-diffusion laws that prevent air pollution from being soluble as a state issue prevent it from being soluble as a national issue either. Selectively penalize it and you just end up shifting it to non-cooperating nations (and adding more pollution from the transportation of their exported goods).
My non-representing representatives are about to loose their job. Remember Obama can not protect them and keep their job but I can vote the dumb asses out. I do not care if you have a D or an R after your name if you are an incumbent.... get your resume up to date.... we are coming.
Good luck, seriously, but I wouldn't be so optimistic. We may not be impressed by a "D" or an "R", but enough people demand one or the other to make district flips rare, and both parties try to make successful primary challenges even rarer. Reelection rates are usually above 90% in the house and 80% in the Senate, and I doubt that's going to be fixed without a Constitutional amendment. The Founding Fathers may have tried their best to protect us from centralization, but they don't seem to have anticipated Duverger's Law at all.
Much better to spend the colossal amount of money on fixing this world.
Yeah, what good is the other 99% of the Solar System anyway? Vast quantities of energy, raw materials, space, and new scientific and technical challenges probably have no bearing on our problems here at home.
In fact, I think you should take our philosophy one step further. Some of your pie-in-the-sky ancestors actually left Olduvai Gorge before it was completely fixed! And here we are, tens of thousands of years later, and (probably thanks to those jerks who wouldn't stay to fix it!) it's still a lousy place to live. You should go fix it right away. Send us postcards.
The Earth of Roddenberry is VERY different than this one. Let us strive to achieve THAT before we strive for the fastest way off of here.
Your philosophical ancestors might have felt the same way about achieving the best society they could around Olduvai Gorge. I hear they've finally got the median age in Tanzania over 18, too. I wish them the best of luck, but frankly I'm glad that my physical and philosophical ancestors just got up and left instead.
Science has changed a lot in the last decade? What are your kids studying right now, applied solid-state physics? Areology? For most of what kids learn from K-12, the only flaw in a 30 year old textbook is that the binding probably started crumbling away 20 years ago.
I know that Germany isn't actually going to go on a world conquest kick again any time soon, I know that the French military would be able to handle an unarmed opponent, and I thought that insinuating otherwise would be enough to make it clear that I was kidding.
And although I haven't explicitly read that the German army still has guns, I would never have guessed otherwise. Do gun bans ever actually ban guns? Gun control is generally for the hoi polloi, not for men who take the leaders' orders.
Although I am naturally quite uneasy about a German government demanding such intrusive power over people's lives with the explicit purpose of shaping their very thoughts, I am pleased that at least they'll all be unarmed. The last time a German government went mad with power, their military might soon controlled most of Europe, deep into Russia, north Africa, the Atlantic... But if they no longer have any projectile weapons, next time they won't manage to conquer anyone except France!
Thanks for the info; I figured the word "basically" was probably concealing some exceptions. If nothing else, you could always use a variable nozzle or a set of vectorable nozzles to (somewhat) control the thrust you get from an invariant rocket burn... but that would add complexity and (in this case) further reduce specific impulse.
Let's say "liquid-propellant rocket engines" instead. In a paragraph contrasting spaceflight "the way God and Robert Heinlein intended" to "rockets of lower ISP", it was almost sacrilegious of me to assume that even the former would be wholly chemically fueled.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all in favor of spaceships landing on a tail of fire, "the way God and Robert Heinlein intended!" But rocket-powered landings on Earth are a questionable engineering decision even when you get to reuse some of the liquid-fueled rocket engines that you already needed for liftoff and already wanted to recover intact. If you instead have to add extra weight to your upper stage for single-purpose solid rockets of lower ISP, it seems even more dubious.
And that's before you get into the issue of "solid rockets" and "precision". Even designing a liquid-fueled rocket with adequate throttle control for a gentle landing isn't easy. (It's like brain surgery! Or possibly like some other appropriate metaphor!) But at least throttling liquid fuel consumption rates is possible. Solid rockets basically have just three settings: "off", "on", and "kaboom".
that's why they get money from every member of the audience, for each audience they perform to. A recording of a performance is not a performance.
That's going to be very disappointing for authors and composers. Sales of tickets to watch someone write rarely sell as well as copies of the final product.
That's sort of like today, except instead of converting between 1.4Mbps raw and 128kbps encoded audio, people expect to be able to convert between 1.1Gbps raw and 9Mbps encoded HD video. Some things have changed a little...
The market for webcams that send lousy video over US 'broadband' connections is pretty huge. So is the market for digital cameras that can record high quality video at much higher bitrates. I suspect the market for uploading high quality live video would still be huge, if only there were home providers with the capability to serve it.
Limited warfare was the norm until the late 1700's
Limited warfare is mostly the norm today: you surrender, the aggressor stops fighting you to the death. If the aggressor doesn't stop that, then we stop calling it "war" and start calling it "genocide".
Of course, that's for an extremely literal definition of "limited"... but exactly what other definition does make the claim I've quoted above make sense? Try a search for "sack of", check out the first few dozen of the countless results, and make sure your definition of "limited" includes raping and pillaging from non-combatants, mass executions of prisoners of war, and other such war crimes that used to be status quo. I'll admit that Heinlein's post-WWII writing might have been distorted by some of that particularly-heinous context, but even genocide isn't a new thing in history. Ever read the Old Testament?
But suppose that total war and genocide have become particularly common in the last few centuries, perhaps because of the better killing technologies available... how exactly would that reflect poorly on Heinlein's arguments that preparation for war is a necessity for survival? If the temptation of and damage done by war are going up with the advancement of technology and the passage of time, then surely that makes it reasonable to postulate a technologically-advanced future where those factors haven't decreased back to "the norm" yet. This is science fiction, after all - noticing that the norms in human history have included limited war, horse-drawn carts, stone tools, etc. has little relevance to a genre of literature that's also noticed that the norm in modern history is for norms to be perpetually changing.
How effective are these sails when they themselves are punctured by debris?
99.999% as effective. At orbital altitudes air doesn't behave like a continuum, just like independent molecules bouncing around. This is bad if you're trying to design a wing (pressure doesn't affect flow in the same way and your lift to drag ratios suck) but great if you're designing a parachute (a small hole will let molecules through at the site of the hole, but won't affect their absorption/reemission or their reflection elsewhere on the parachute). So you shouldn't have to worry about whether the sail is airtight or leaking. If a meteorite punctures a 1mm^2 hole in a 1m^2 sail, that sail will just intercept 0.0001% fewer molecules and generate 0.0001% less drag.
On the other hand, this means you might need more than a 1m^2 sail to begin with - anything that's in the wake of the satellite itself is partly redundant.
Slashdot Mirror
exchanging the heat through plastic into a concrete biomass should work just fine.
For the typical house built on top of a concrete mass, exchanging heat with it may work fine.
But if your house is built on on top of a concrete biomass, RUN! IT'S ALIVE!! RUN!!!
what I do is try and get them to think.
That's good. One source of pride in my college is that essentially all of my professors in the "soft" subjects tried to get us to think, not just to agree with them. And I never ran into any who confused those two goals.
I quote, "What's wrong withe status quo? It works for me!"
For instance, if I had asked a question and made a statement like this, the professors who were trying to get me to think would have answered the question and then asked me for more details on the statement. Occasionally their answers would change my mind or their questions would help me change theirs, but in any instance we'd both learn something from the exchange. Even among my most liberal professors, I never got to meet the stereotypical ivory tower dweller who thinks it's self-evident that a "status quo" is an inherently bad thing and that there is no wisdom in being conservative when proposing to change a working system.
For that, I guess I have to go to Slashdot. Nice to meet you.
Talk to your Congressmen.
SSN-based identity theft could be stopped with one simple law: "Provision of an SSN is not considered evidence of identity in court".
And as for those companies? They just need a few court judgements of "You say he owes you $10,000 and you know this because you have his SSN? I find in favor of the defendant." Possibly followed by a few more of "You reported a credit default based on only his name and SSN? I find in favor of the plaintiff, and the penalties for libel are..." They'll figure out better ways to confirm identity soon enough.
The reason nobody cares about SSNs being a lousy password isn't because they need a good talking to, it's because they have no legal reason to care. We just need to clarify the law to give them a good reason.
the mechanism for doing so does not check ownership.
No, but it asserts ownership:
"© Associated Press, 2009"
No laws were broken. No trust broken.
Probably not. The law says that false copyright claims "with fraudulent intent" are crimes punishable by up to $2,500, but I highly doubt that a judge would call the AP's scripting flaws "fraudulent intent".
At least not yet. We'll see if their program gets any smarter a month or a year from now. If their software can make them more money by selling invalid licenses based on false claims of copyright, you've got to wonder how long they can wait to fix that bug before some enterprising class action lawyer decides that they really consider it a feature instead.
The person did this with intent to gain a worthless license even.
This one did. But unless the AP's whole licensing server is worthless, it's got to be able to handle the case where someone wants to copy text from an AP story but doesn't know that the AP doesn't hold the copyright. Despite the AP's new "you have to pay us for five-word phrases!" policy, it seems they aren't keeping track of the five-word (or twenty-six-word) phrases that they've copied from others.
Low earth orbit is above the law, literally, isn't it?
Yes, I think I can safely assure you that your pirate satellite will not be arrested. This may be small consolation to the people who build and launch it, who themselves will inconveniently not be in LEO.
You dropped a word from the phrase you were replying to; "cost" and "incremental cost" are not the same thing.
Example: the cost to produce 10,000,000 DVDs might be $10 per DVD, because the blockbuster movie cost $100,000,000 to make. But once the movie is made you don't have to make 10% more movie to make 10% more DVDs, you just have to print more disks; the incremental cost would be less than $1 per DVD.
With the shuttle things are even more complicated. Do you want the total cost per flight; the amount of money spent on the whole program divided by the number of flights? That's well over $1 billion per launch. What about the operating cost per flight? If the R&D is considered "sunk cost" and you just consider the current budget per flight, that varies widely from year to year depending on how many flights are made, and NASA's $450 million might come from one of those calculations. And the incremental cost is less still. If you cancel a shuttle flight and only fly 3 in a year when you'd planned 4, you save a bit of fuel costs, some operations costs, you don't have to manufacture another external tank... but you don't get to put all your employees on leave for 3 months, you don't get to mothball your facilities for 3 months, and so you don't save nearly as much as you might hope. I thought even the incremental cost was over $100 million per flight, but I wouldn't be too surprised if it was $60 million.
Surely if you believe that you have freedom,
Somewhere in between the unwarranted wiretaps and the indefinite detentions without trials, I decided to stop taking that belief for granted.
you don't need to be anonymous when you speak your mind?
My country was literally founded by people anonymously speaking their minds. I would be very wary of anyone who claims we don't need that right anymore.
Maybe someone wiser can set me straight on how that won't happen.
There aren't any wise people on Slashdot, so I'll try:
When the market predicts a future change in value, it doesn't wait for that change to happen before the price reflects the change; the change in price happens immediately. If Google announces that they'll release a software package next month that flawlessly runs all Windows software and works with all Office documents, Microsoft's share price isn't going to wait a month before collapsing. Likewise, if the Census bureau announces that a huge wave of baby boomers are about to start retiring and selling their stocks to pay for their retirement needs, the market could predict that, and preemptively keep share prices low (except in companies that are well-positioned to make loads of money selling retirement needs to boomers).
Of course, the market could have also predicted housing prices were going up too fast, but prices bubbled and popped anyway. Ironically the market only works because of the constant adjusting actions of people who believe that the market isn't quite working right. If you think most people have irrationally overpriced something, don't be too confident that they really know what they're doing.
The space shuttle was a noble goal: "Make a reusable launch vehicle, one that can be operated every few days without having to be thrown away." "Every few days" turned into "every several months" and "without having to be thrown away" turned into "with only part of it being thrown away, part fished out of the ocean, and part torn apart and rebuilt", but the long term goal was good. No matter how many incremental improvements you make to an expendible rocket, you either need to make the non-incremental change of adding flyback systems or you need to accept that the price of each trip will include building and discarding one of the largest and highest performance vehicles in history. The Delta, Atlas, etc. people made the latter choice, and although iteration still led them to better satellite launchers than Shuttle, it's not something we can build a real space program on.
The trouble with the RLV alternative is that, if making a reusable orbital vehicle in shot is too hard (as I'd agree NASA proved), the only way to get there incrementally is from reusable suborbital vehicles. Start with something like the DC-X, bump up to something that can hit Mach 10, Mach 15, Mach 20, Mach 25, increasing the size and performance as necessary. But long before you've made enough incremental improvements to reach orbit, you'll probably have made too many for the public's patience. "We made it to the moon in 1969!" they'll tell their Congressmen; "why are we wasting so much money" (i.e. a tiny fraction of that expense) "on rockets that can't even stay in space?" Or worse, you'll lose the program to administrators who think "Here's a great opportunity to experiment with multi-lobed tanks, lifting bodies, linear aerospike engines, and a bunch of other untested technology all at once, just as soon as we weed the competition down to a single contract to the guys who made the best Powerpoint slides! What could possibly go wrong? Whateration, did you say?"
The USA is one of the few countries that can AFFORD freedom of speech.
You make it sound like that's just some wacky coincidence. Did the USA just get lucky?
Start with a land full of Stone Age tribes, some already warring among and raiding each other. Take the best of that land away from them, by trade if you can but by genocide when you have to. Start filling it with immigrants, some from groups that emigrated because they were hated where they came from, some from groups that the earlier immigrants hate and despise, and some violently taken into slavery. Bring them from every country that will send them, don't worry about how recently their countries were at war with each other, don't even require them to speak the same language, and then if they don't self-segregate into ghettos right away, stoke prejudices to encourage that divisiveness.
Sounds like a recipe for peace, harmony, and love, does it? No need to worry about watching people's speech there?
Hardly. The USA doesn't have free speech because we can "afford" it; that's ludicrous. The USA has free speech because it's a human right. Fortunately for us, if you have a nation founded in division, violence, and hate, and you want to turn it into a melting pot where free speech seems "affordable", it turns out that a good way to do so is to foster the belief that human rights should be respected whether the government thinks they're "affordable" or not.
a new set of programs came out which have once again made Blu-Ray discs unrippable
At best, 19 Blu-Ray discs are unrippable - the rest are even easier to rip than they first were, because the "break old BD+ encryption" method of ripping has been supplemented with the "go online and download an already ripped copy" method. So congratulations to the movie industry; a fraction of a percent of the titles they've released will take a little longer to join the rest being pirated. In exchange, they've had to pay for a complex encryption system whose existence has delayed the development of HD home theater equipment, stopped me from buying their products (I didn't buy into DVD either until it had solid open source support, which as a corollary implies that a format is rippable) and failed frequently enough to scare away other early adopters.
neither side is able to consistently gain the upper hand
That's an understatement. Fair use is still grossly inconvenient and/or illegal, and copyright infringement is practically unhindered. It looks to me like both sides are losing.
The Constitution has no Environmental protections and the 10th amendment says basically If it is not in here you can not do it.
Like you, I'm not at all a fan of the "you engage in interstate commerce occasionally, therefore any law that applies to you is constitutional via the commerce clause" rationale for giving Congress unlimited power. But surely air pollution, which unavoidably does cross state lines, is a federal issue. (Leaving aside for the moment the assertion that rising CO2 levels count as air pollution and that the externalized costs have been accurately estimated)
Of course, the same convection-diffusion laws that prevent air pollution from being soluble as a state issue prevent it from being soluble as a national issue either. Selectively penalize it and you just end up shifting it to non-cooperating nations (and adding more pollution from the transportation of their exported goods).
My non-representing representatives are about to loose their job. Remember Obama can not protect them and keep their job but I can vote the dumb asses out. I do not care if you have a D or an R after your name if you are an incumbent.... get your resume up to date.... we are coming.
Good luck, seriously, but I wouldn't be so optimistic. We may not be impressed by a "D" or an "R", but enough people demand one or the other to make district flips rare, and both parties try to make successful primary challenges even rarer. Reelection rates are usually above 90% in the house and 80% in the Senate, and I doubt that's going to be fixed without a Constitutional amendment. The Founding Fathers may have tried their best to protect us from centralization, but they don't seem to have anticipated Duverger's Law at all.
Much better to spend the colossal amount of money on fixing this world.
Yeah, what good is the other 99% of the Solar System anyway? Vast quantities of energy, raw materials, space, and new scientific and technical challenges probably have no bearing on our problems here at home.
In fact, I think you should take our philosophy one step further. Some of your pie-in-the-sky ancestors actually left Olduvai Gorge before it was completely fixed! And here we are, tens of thousands of years later, and (probably thanks to those jerks who wouldn't stay to fix it!) it's still a lousy place to live. You should go fix it right away. Send us postcards.
The Earth of Roddenberry is VERY different than this one. Let us strive to achieve THAT before we strive for the fastest way off of here.
Your philosophical ancestors might have felt the same way about achieving the best society they could around Olduvai Gorge. I hear they've finally got the median age in Tanzania over 18, too. I wish them the best of luck, but frankly I'm glad that my physical and philosophical ancestors just got up and left instead.
Science has changed a lot in the last decade? What are your kids studying right now, applied solid-state physics? Areology? For most of what kids learn from K-12, the only flaw in a 30 year old textbook is that the binding probably started crumbling away 20 years ago.
I know that Germany isn't actually going to go on a world conquest kick again any time soon, I know that the French military would be able to handle an unarmed opponent, and I thought that insinuating otherwise would be enough to make it clear that I was kidding.
And although I haven't explicitly read that the German army still has guns, I would never have guessed otherwise. Do gun bans ever actually ban guns? Gun control is generally for the hoi polloi, not for men who take the leaders' orders.
Although I am naturally quite uneasy about a German government demanding such intrusive power over people's lives with the explicit purpose of shaping their very thoughts, I am pleased that at least they'll all be unarmed. The last time a German government went mad with power, their military might soon controlled most of Europe, deep into Russia, north Africa, the Atlantic... But if they no longer have any projectile weapons, next time they won't manage to conquer anyone except France!
Thanks for the info; I figured the word "basically" was probably concealing some exceptions. If nothing else, you could always use a variable nozzle or a set of vectorable nozzles to (somewhat) control the thrust you get from an invariant rocket burn... but that would add complexity and (in this case) further reduce specific impulse.
liquid-fueled rocket engines
Let's say "liquid-propellant rocket engines" instead. In a paragraph contrasting spaceflight "the way God and Robert Heinlein intended" to "rockets of lower ISP", it was almost sacrilegious of me to assume that even the former would be wholly chemically fueled.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all in favor of spaceships landing on a tail of fire, "the way God and Robert Heinlein intended!" But rocket-powered landings on Earth are a questionable engineering decision even when you get to reuse some of the liquid-fueled rocket engines that you already needed for liftoff and already wanted to recover intact. If you instead have to add extra weight to your upper stage for single-purpose solid rockets of lower ISP, it seems even more dubious.
And that's before you get into the issue of "solid rockets" and "precision". Even designing a liquid-fueled rocket with adequate throttle control for a gentle landing isn't easy. (It's like brain surgery! Or possibly like some other appropriate metaphor!) But at least throttling liquid fuel consumption rates is possible. Solid rockets basically have just three settings: "off", "on", and "kaboom".
that's why they get money from every member of the audience, for each audience they perform to. A recording of a performance is not a performance.
That's going to be very disappointing for authors and composers. Sales of tickets to watch someone write rarely sell as well as copies of the final product.
That's sort of like today, except instead of converting between 1.4Mbps raw and 128kbps encoded audio, people expect to be able to convert between 1.1Gbps raw and 9Mbps encoded HD video. Some things have changed a little...
upload is a niche market
The market for webcams that send lousy video over US 'broadband' connections is pretty huge. So is the market for digital cameras that can record high quality video at much higher bitrates. I suspect the market for uploading high quality live video would still be huge, if only there were home providers with the capability to serve it.
Limited warfare was the norm until the late 1700's
Limited warfare is mostly the norm today: you surrender, the aggressor stops fighting you to the death. If the aggressor doesn't stop that, then we stop calling it "war" and start calling it "genocide".
Of course, that's for an extremely literal definition of "limited"... but exactly what other definition does make the claim I've quoted above make sense? Try a search for "sack of", check out the first few dozen of the countless results, and make sure your definition of "limited" includes raping and pillaging from non-combatants, mass executions of prisoners of war, and other such war crimes that used to be status quo. I'll admit that Heinlein's post-WWII writing might have been distorted by some of that particularly-heinous context, but even genocide isn't a new thing in history. Ever read the Old Testament?
But suppose that total war and genocide have become particularly common in the last few centuries, perhaps because of the better killing technologies available... how exactly would that reflect poorly on Heinlein's arguments that preparation for war is a necessity for survival? If the temptation of and damage done by war are going up with the advancement of technology and the passage of time, then surely that makes it reasonable to postulate a technologically-advanced future where those factors haven't decreased back to "the norm" yet. This is science fiction, after all - noticing that the norms in human history have included limited war, horse-drawn carts, stone tools, etc. has little relevance to a genre of literature that's also noticed that the norm in modern history is for norms to be perpetually changing.
How effective are these sails when they themselves are punctured by debris?
99.999% as effective. At orbital altitudes air doesn't behave like a continuum, just like independent molecules bouncing around. This is bad if you're trying to design a wing (pressure doesn't affect flow in the same way and your lift to drag ratios suck) but great if you're designing a parachute (a small hole will let molecules through at the site of the hole, but won't affect their absorption/reemission or their reflection elsewhere on the parachute). So you shouldn't have to worry about whether the sail is airtight or leaking. If a meteorite punctures a 1mm^2 hole in a 1m^2 sail, that sail will just intercept 0.0001% fewer molecules and generate 0.0001% less drag.
On the other hand, this means you might need more than a 1m^2 sail to begin with - anything that's in the wake of the satellite itself is partly redundant.