In the long term, do you think we'll be synthesizing gasoline? Perhaps wood alcohol, but that'll be a hell of a lot more expensive than the stuff we're currently pumping out of finite ground reserves, and I suspect battery/fuel cell improvements will make all-electric cars superior.
>My assumption is that the intelligent species out there aren't advertising their presence.
Interesting assumption. Too bad the only example we can test it against in the universe (ie, humans) violates it.
Violates it? Barely. How far are our radio emissions distinguishable from background noise? I thought it was only a few dozen light years. And IIRC, according to the recent Scientific American article on SETI a couple months back, although we could send directed communications for thousands of light years with an Arecibo, our current searches wouldn't detect an 20th century level civilization at any distance.
We make no attempt to hide our presence. It's pretty conceivable to me that other species could make the same "mistake".
Unless it really is a mistake. It could be that a sizable minority of species in the galaxy is both malevolent (in the sense that they would destroy weaker, expanding technological civilizations in order to avoid future threats to their own existance), yet hiding their presence (perhaps because they fear a more powerful, yet similarly hiding civilization). In such a scenario, any emerging technical civilization which did not adopt a hiding strategy would be toast before it was finished colonizing it's own solar system.
There's a cute Fermi's Paradox discussion on sci.space policy about all this, if anyone's curious. It's mostly died down, but you can check Deja.
...who would prefer 58 more channels of broadcast crap (I'm acknowledging two good channels for the Simpsons and Babylon 5 reruns to be generous) to the tens (or hundreds, with anything but the best digital compression) of megabits/second of data bandwidth that those channels require? If there's enough unused capacity in a DSL connection to piggyback 60 full motion video channels, how come anyone not next door to the telco gets told they can't be guaranteed more than a couple hundred kbps?
That wire isn't yours, and you can't get a cable signal flowing from it to your home without signing an agreement with the cable company. That contract presumably includes your agreement not to descramble premium channels you haven't paid for.
With satellite TV, you could make a good case for being able to record/retransmit/etc the signal, because they're beaming it to your house whether you signed up with them or not. The trick is that IIRC digital satellite TV actually uses real encryption, and so you can't do anything interesting with that encrypted signal without the keys, which you can't obtain legally without (again) signing an agreement with the TV service.
The one place I think your argument is bullseye correct for is broadcast analog television. What the hell gives Fox the right to pump the Simpsons unrequested into every home in America, then send in the goon squads when someone decides to record that signal and put parts of it on the web?
But that's all just Randesque rambling. In a libertarian fantasy world, copyright follows from force/fraud in the sense that you have to agree to respect copyright law before you are given physical access to someone's copyrighted work, and so breaking copyright law requires breaking (or assisting someone else in breaking) that agreement. Broadcast TV comes into my home whether I've asked for it or not, so no agreements apply. And it's (currently) unencrypted, so I don't have to snitch any other data to do what I want with the TV signal.
Of course, in the real world, copyright law sticks to a work once it's produced, and even giving it away in volume can't take off those strings attached.
Anything given is implcitly given without restriction. Unless that restriction (that only I can use the info) is made explicit, I ought to be able to do whatever I please with it.
Why should "given without restriction" be the implicit ruleset for personal information? It certainly isn't the implicit rule for most intellectual property... I have dozens of CDs, books, EULA-free software packages, etc. which I was not only given by their original owners, but which I paid money for, and which I didn't make any agreements about at the time of purchase! Should I be able to whatever I please with them?
Society already agrees that we don't need an explicit contract to be signed every time copyrighted material is traded; we have copyright law which codifies a set of implicit agreements. Would it be such a stretch to change the implicit agreements for personal data to reflect a similar retention of control?
I'm working with a group at Rice University that is putting some of our textbook content online. It's only reached a useful state this summer, and online texts are currently being used as a supplement for two ELEC courses here.
We've got our own DTD (although are trying to borrow from existing stuff like the Dublin Core elements when possible) to do page markup for educational content, and XSL+CSS stylesheets to turn that into XHTML+MathML that browsers (well, currently just Mozilla; soon IE too we hope) can read.
Wish I could give you a URL, but all the good stuff is being restricted to on-campus access right now.
There's also a couple universities working on a similar system, and a company doing the same sort of thing (although aimed more at corporate training). It's an idea whose time has come; it's just a question of who gets there first.
Now, in the Beta newsgroup, Micrsoft has specifically told us not to get our panties in a bunch... most of the internet reports are WRONG (including mine above) in some form or another... no one has it right yet, and not to believe them.
A more effective course of action might have been for them to use this newsgroup to disseminate accurate information, rather than trying to squelch half-accurate rumors.
Windows may not make a great workstation OS, but it's just fine if you're running some network daemons in the background on it and don't fiddle directly.
I don't think rankings of creationist/evolutionist sites will be a problem, as long as more information than just the average 1-10 rank or the majority vote is provided. If a web surfer runs across the twocompeting Talk.Origins archives, and discovers that on each one sizable groups of people have voted for both "completely factual" and "completely false", then said web surfer will have to (guess what) think for themselves. In this case, that's not a bad thing, because the better evolutionists and creationst are all smart enough to provide references, the references are increasingly linked to online, and so with a web rating system it would at least be possible to get most of the facts straight in that debate, even if many people consider the conclusions still debatable.
What I would worry about is stuff like this post, which got modded up for a little while because it sounded technically informed, before one or two of the replies showed how to verify that it was bullshit. Peer review works for academic research because it is actually review by one's peers who can be expected to fully understand the articles in question. If you extend that "peer group" to be the entire internet, then people who know what they're talking about are lost in the noise. At the least, this "web fact ratings" system would have to allow for moderators to add comments and links to justify their opinions.
A "rate everything" website wouldn't be too hard to do; there were a couple companies trying (although not doing a great job IMHO) last time I checked. I'd start with something like the slash code, but with the story ids replaced by arbitrary URLs. Open a "story", and in one frame it gives you the website (put through a caching filter so that link tags take you to the ratings site for the linked page) and in the other frame it gives you veracity ratings, related links, commentary, etc. Add a front page with the ability to search through most popular pages, most active stories, etc. and you'd rake in the hits.
That's the other near-term market
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Besides manned space flight, well, an orbital rocket is obviously also a suborbital rocket, with a little more payload or a little less fuel expenditure.
Kanko-Maru Parcel Service: For when it absolutely has to be in Tokyo by lunchtime.
And what infrastructure are you looking for?
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A space station? Naah, we've had a couple of those before, and now we've even got a really freaking expensive space station. I don't see the final frontier opening wide up yet, do you?
How about probes to the moon and NEO asteroids, to give us some prospector-impressive data? No, wait, NASA's already doing that, we already know there's a hell of a lot of valuable minerals out there, but nobody wants to get them.
So why does nobody want to get them? Because if there were pure gold to be scooped up in Low Earth Orbit a Space Shuttle flight that filled it's cargo bay with the stuff would lose money.
The infrastructure we need isn't mining equipment; we know how to make mining equipment. What we need is a cheap way of getting it off the ground!
And if you haven't done the math yet, this Kanko-Maru project is looking at trips to orbit for $1,000,000 a flight. That's about a thousandth of the cost (with development costs accounted for, as they would have to be in a commercial venture) of a Shuttle flight, with a fifth of the payload. On a rocket that's still human-rated for safety, and would be a proof of concept for a fully reusable launch vehicle.
I defy you to name any sort of infrastructure we could develop that would be more valuable than that.
Here's hoping they do it, this time. "Kanko-Maru" is the name of a decades-old idea that (AFAIK) never got the funding to be tried, and it's technically not much different from the Phoenix idea that Gary Hudson was pushing before the Roton. Of course, Hudson had a few small financers who could put up half the cash he needed; the article here is claiming Kanko-Maru has Mitsubishi, Fujitsu, Sharp, and Nissan.
Mars Direct isn't nearly as ephemeral a plan as the Apollo missions were (the Apollo missions didn't leave automated fuel production facilities and human habitats on the moon, for instance) but I expect the end result would be the same: a half dozen missions, followed by nothing.
If you want to see real exploration of space, the way to do it isn't to throw a few men to Mars, damn the cost; the way to do it is to reduce the cost!
Yes, the length of an efficient Hohmann orbit is a lot greater than the straight line distance to Mars. But with a travel time of two weeks, efficiency goes completely out the window; you would be practically taking a straight line path.
Calculating the actual orbit is a non-trivial task, but I recall that for the outer planets, at least, the straight line approximation mghiggins did wouldn't be very far off (in terms of relating travel time and acceleration) for a constant-thrust ship of even.1 G.
Also, I'd assume "trip to Mars in 2 weeks" means when Earth is passing closest to Mars in it's orbit, so the.15 G figure is probably more accurate, and even a wide margin of error wouldn't change the answer to the "would I be pureed by this acceleration?" question.
Why is everyone so convinced that Linux has to be prettied up, promoted, and made palatable to the masses?
Because the masses have money. Companies like money. Companies that see the prospect of money in Linux on the desktop are more likely to publish Linux ports of their video games, write Linux drivers for their hardware, and offer Linux-compatible ISP services and online media.
I like Linux game, Linux drivers, and Linux compatibility. Any more questions?
There are many more reasons why even the most hardcore, non-gaming, free-software-only Linux user still benefits by "Linux for the masses", though. You may complain that Red Hat is aiming for a Linux distribution a 3 year old can use... but they're not taking away our Perl interpreters and ssh daemons to do it, and eventually that 3 year old may grow up and spend a little time playing around with the compiler himself.
The other thing that's "vital for desktop acceptance" is an office suite of the caliber of MS Office 2000, which isn't going to happen unless they decide to port it.
Of course it isn't. Free software developers could never produce any sort of useful desktopsoftware on their own, certainly not any officeprograms. That stuff is just toocomplicated for a bunch of hackers. Why, where would they even start?
They aren't going to see any serious revenue until their launch vehicle reachs orbit, and even by their optimistic development cost estimates, that's going to take more than the 5 figure sum they owe in taxes, it's going to take another 8 figures of capital. Granted, there's always the chance that some wacky billionaire will cut a check (and Mr. Gates, if you're reading this: here is how to get geeks to forgive you for Windows) but I wouldn't bet on it.
In other words, if Rotary has paid their taxes, it doesn't mean anything besides a few more months of their aero test unit sitting in mothballs and their remaining staff (Gary Hudson, the man behind the whole thing, has left, and I don't know how many people survived their layoffs) praying for new investors.
Damn shame, too. Even Beal's out of the running now. I don't know how Kistler is doing now, but if they don't make orbit we can pretty much kiss serious space development goodbye for another couple decades.
Oops, splattered another better, faster, cheaper space probe into Mars.
Keep in mind, "cheaper" generally means "a tenth the price of Viking. We can afford the expense of losing a couple. I don't know if NASA can afford the negative PR of it, though.
Sure, you could spend hours hacking around yourself to get Win98 working, but I doubt you're an example the average projected X-Box user. The nice thing about running Linux games on the X-Box would be that it wouldn't have to be hacked by users; *game publishers* could do it, putting a stripped-down, drivers-installed Linux distro on the CD configured to boot directly to the video game on the same CD. You can't do that with Win98, not without per-CD licensing fees swallowing your revenues.
Wow... Two score:4 posts in a row with fundamental misunderstandings. There's the main problem with Slashdot moderation: it's easier to sound correct than to be correct.
Azog: If you have a proper one way hash function doing the server-side checksum, you don't *have* to trust the client. You have the client send you all it's character data, and if the checksum of the client data doesn't match the stored checksum, you don't allow that character to play. Perhaps rknop was misleading in his use of the word "checksum" (since a real checksum would make it easy to generate an upgraded character profile with the same checksum), but his mention of public key crypto should have made it clear that he was talking about a 1-way hash function, which would make client cheating as difficult as faking a PGP signature.
rknop: Except for saving disk space (reducing the amount of server-side data that must be stored while the client is disconnected), what problems would storing a hash of the character data instead of the whole data solve? If someone hasn't hacked your server, they can't change the server-side character data. If someone has read/write access to your server, then they can read your hash function, calculate a hash of their own altered character data, then write that new hash. It would make altering a character more tedious, but not more difficult.
I had to upgrade to ppp-2.4.0 (from Rawhide, I think I got it) before my modem would work at all, and there still seems to be a problem (with easy but annoying workaround) with Red Hat's ppp-watch setup. Oh, well, I'm only stuck on a modem for another couple weeks.
Of course, if you've upgraded to Red Hat 7 (like I have), you've got 50 other updates you'll want to download, so don't feel too special.
Install that, and the pilot-link frontend it puts in your control panel explicitly supports any number of devices, so you can have the daemon listening on both COM ports. You'll need to have a different username/id pair on the two pilots, though, if you want them to backup/sync to different directories.
If they want to call it the top ten books of the millenium, they should have been polling a representative sample of readers from the whole millenium! But no, that would take a lot of expensive exhuming, and Amazon just can't bear to get it's hands dirty.
the only point in the tower where you can drop off and be in orbit with a little push is at GEO.
Almost correct; the only point where you can drop off into a circular orbit is at GEO; there's a huge range of hyperbolic orbits you can get into (well, hyperbolic w.r.t. the Earth; enough to take you to the inner planets at least) by dropping off the tower above GEO, and a range of elliptical orbits (including one with perigee in the upper atmosphere, making aerobraking into equatorial LEO a cheap possiblity) you can get to by dropping off the tower below GEO.
Throw in some high efficiency rockets (ion engines, plasma rockets - all the sorts of things you can't use on a launch vehicle because they're too low thrust), and you could get into any Earth orbit with a lot more payload, a lot cheaper than with a conventional rocket.
Or perhaps I should say marginally cheaper; as the amortization of the original construction cost should be considered. Of course, building this thing means manufacturing thousands of tons of buckytubes, each thousands of kilometers long. IIRC, current buckytube manufacturing is on the order of $2000 a gram, for micrometer-sized things that might be useful in electronics, MEMS, or nanotech, but certainly wouldn't be as a structural material. We've still got a little technology to research...
Honestly, now, has Slashdot become infested by morons? Look at all the crap that's been moderated up on this article! There's the "won't it suck away all our air" question, the "will it change our orbit" question, and the mumblings about shear stress...
Don't take this the wrong way: those are all valid questions to ask, I don't think they should be moderated down, I hope they all get accurate responses, and I hope the responses get moderated up. Ignorance is correctable, and the right way to correct it is by asking serious questions.
But could you imagine this kind of thing happening in a computer science story? Would someone who asked "Won't Lunix let the hackers steal my computer cause it's open source?" get stamped with +1, insightful?
Ok, done ranting now. On to your question.
Serious question: Wouldn't such a thing affect the earth orbit?
Quick answer: Yes, but not so you'd notice.
Building the beanstalk, if it were done with asteroidal materials, would add mass, angular momentum, and an increased moment of inertia to the Earth. Depending on how the asteroid was captured, this could raise the earth's orbit slightly, but would leave the rotational period (length of a day) unchanged. Launching interplanetary vehicles from the beanstalk would remove angular momentum (and a little mass) from the system, slowing the rate of a day slightly.
If the beanstalk was built with terrestrial materials (building one thread first and hauling the rest up on that), it would increase the moment of inertia of the planet-beanstalk system slightly, without adding any angular momentum. Again, the day would be slowed slightly.
But, the key word here is "slightly". By slightly I don't mean days that are one second longer, I mean days that are (1 + ~10*(mass of beanstalk / mass of earth), which works out to something like 100 picoseconds, longer. Use the beanstalk to launch continual interplanetary payloads for a few millenia, and maybe we'll slow the rotation of the earth down by a microsecond. This is all back-of-the-napkin arithmetic, of course, but if my conclusions are too optimistic by a factor of a thousand I'm still not nervous.
Slashdot Mirror
In the long term, do you think we'll be synthesizing gasoline? Perhaps wood alcohol, but that'll be a hell of a lot more expensive than the stuff we're currently pumping out of finite ground reserves, and I suspect battery/fuel cell improvements will make all-electric cars superior.
>My assumption is that the intelligent species out there aren't advertising their presence.
Interesting assumption. Too bad the only example we can test it against in the universe (ie, humans) violates it.
Violates it? Barely. How far are our radio emissions distinguishable from background noise? I thought it was only a few dozen light years. And IIRC, according to the recent Scientific American article on SETI a couple months back, although we could send directed communications for thousands of light years with an Arecibo, our current searches wouldn't detect an 20th century level civilization at any distance.
We make no attempt to hide our presence. It's pretty conceivable to me that other species could make the same "mistake".
Unless it really is a mistake. It could be that a sizable minority of species in the galaxy is both malevolent (in the sense that they would destroy weaker, expanding technological civilizations in order to avoid future threats to their own existance), yet hiding their presence (perhaps because they fear a more powerful, yet similarly hiding civilization). In such a scenario, any emerging technical civilization which did not adopt a hiding strategy would be toast before it was finished colonizing it's own solar system.
There's a cute Fermi's Paradox discussion on sci.space policy about all this, if anyone's curious. It's mostly died down, but you can check Deja.
...who would prefer 58 more channels of broadcast crap (I'm acknowledging two good channels for the Simpsons and Babylon 5 reruns to be generous) to the tens (or hundreds, with anything but the best digital compression) of megabits/second of data bandwidth that those channels require? If there's enough unused capacity in a DSL connection to piggyback 60 full motion video channels, how come anyone not next door to the telco gets told they can't be guaranteed more than a couple hundred kbps?
That wire isn't yours, and you can't get a cable signal flowing from it to your home without signing an agreement with the cable company. That contract presumably includes your agreement not to descramble premium channels you haven't paid for.
With satellite TV, you could make a good case for being able to record/retransmit/etc the signal, because they're beaming it to your house whether you signed up with them or not. The trick is that IIRC digital satellite TV actually uses real encryption, and so you can't do anything interesting with that encrypted signal without the keys, which you can't obtain legally without (again) signing an agreement with the TV service.
The one place I think your argument is bullseye correct for is broadcast analog television. What the hell gives Fox the right to pump the Simpsons unrequested into every home in America, then send in the goon squads when someone decides to record that signal and put parts of it on the web?
But that's all just Randesque rambling. In a libertarian fantasy world, copyright follows from force/fraud in the sense that you have to agree to respect copyright law before you are given physical access to someone's copyrighted work, and so breaking copyright law requires breaking (or assisting someone else in breaking) that agreement. Broadcast TV comes into my home whether I've asked for it or not, so no agreements apply. And it's (currently) unencrypted, so I don't have to snitch any other data to do what I want with the TV signal.
Of course, in the real world, copyright law sticks to a work once it's produced, and even giving it away in volume can't take off those strings attached.
I mean, c'mon, you expect me to believe that the same guy directed both Fight Club and Alien 3?
Anything given is implcitly given without restriction. Unless that restriction (that only I can use the info) is made explicit, I ought to be able to do whatever I please with it.
Why should "given without restriction" be the implicit ruleset for personal information? It certainly isn't the implicit rule for most intellectual property... I have dozens of CDs, books, EULA-free software packages, etc. which I was not only given by their original owners, but which I paid money for, and which I didn't make any agreements about at the time of purchase! Should I be able to whatever I please with them?
Society already agrees that we don't need an explicit contract to be signed every time copyrighted material is traded; we have copyright law which codifies a set of implicit agreements. Would it be such a stretch to change the implicit agreements for personal data to reflect a similar retention of control?
Imagine how secure your data would be if nobody knew where it was except you - you wouldn't need any expensive safes or firewalls then.
Not unless script kiddies obtained some sort of "port scanning" software, of course.
If I know I'm being trolled, and I respond anyway, does it make me more or less of an idiot?
I'm working with a group at Rice University that is putting some of our textbook content online. It's only reached a useful state this summer, and online texts are currently being used as a supplement for two ELEC courses here.
We've got our own DTD (although are trying to borrow from existing stuff like the Dublin Core elements when possible) to do page markup for educational content, and XSL+CSS stylesheets to turn that into XHTML+MathML that browsers (well, currently just Mozilla; soon IE too we hope) can read.
Wish I could give you a URL, but all the good stuff is being restricted to on-campus access right now.
There's also a couple universities working on a similar system, and a company doing the same sort of thing (although aimed more at corporate training). It's an idea whose time has come; it's just a question of who gets there first.
Now, in the Beta newsgroup, Micrsoft has specifically told us not to get our panties in a bunch ... most of the internet reports are WRONG (including mine above) in some form or another ... no one has it right yet, and not to believe them.
A more effective course of action might have been for them to use this newsgroup to disseminate accurate information, rather than trying to squelch half-accurate rumors.
Windows may not make a great workstation OS, but it's just fine if you're running some network daemons in the background on it and don't fiddle directly.
Yeah, there's a sentence I had to read twice!
I don't think rankings of creationist/evolutionist sites will be a problem, as long as more information than just the average 1-10 rank or the majority vote is provided. If a web surfer runs across the two competing Talk.Origins archives, and discovers that on each one sizable groups of people have voted for both "completely factual" and "completely false", then said web surfer will have to (guess what) think for themselves. In this case, that's not a bad thing, because the better evolutionists and creationst are all smart enough to provide references, the references are increasingly linked to online, and so with a web rating system it would at least be possible to get most of the facts straight in that debate, even if many people consider the conclusions still debatable.
What I would worry about is stuff like this post, which got modded up for a little while because it sounded technically informed, before one or two of the replies showed how to verify that it was bullshit. Peer review works for academic research because it is actually review by one's peers who can be expected to fully understand the articles in question. If you extend that "peer group" to be the entire internet, then people who know what they're talking about are lost in the noise. At the least, this "web fact ratings" system would have to allow for moderators to add comments and links to justify their opinions.
A "rate everything" website wouldn't be too hard to do; there were a couple companies trying (although not doing a great job IMHO) last time I checked. I'd start with something like the slash code, but with the story ids replaced by arbitrary URLs. Open a "story", and in one frame it gives you the website (put through a caching filter so that link tags take you to the ratings site for the linked page) and in the other frame it gives you veracity ratings, related links, commentary, etc. Add a front page with the ability to search through most popular pages, most active stories, etc. and you'd rake in the hits.
Besides manned space flight, well, an orbital rocket is obviously also a suborbital rocket, with a little more payload or a little less fuel expenditure.
Kanko-Maru Parcel Service: For when it absolutely has to be in Tokyo by lunchtime.
A space station? Naah, we've had a couple of those before, and now we've even got a really freaking expensive space station. I don't see the final frontier opening wide up yet, do you?
How about probes to the moon and NEO asteroids, to give us some prospector-impressive data? No, wait, NASA's already doing that, we already know there's a hell of a lot of valuable minerals out there, but nobody wants to get them.
So why does nobody want to get them? Because if there were pure gold to be scooped up in Low Earth Orbit a Space Shuttle flight that filled it's cargo bay with the stuff would lose money.
The infrastructure we need isn't mining equipment; we know how to make mining equipment. What we need is a cheap way of getting it off the ground!
And if you haven't done the math yet, this Kanko-Maru project is looking at trips to orbit for $1,000,000 a flight. That's about a thousandth of the cost (with development costs accounted for, as they would have to be in a commercial venture) of a Shuttle flight, with a fifth of the payload. On a rocket that's still human-rated for safety, and would be a proof of concept for a fully reusable launch vehicle.
I defy you to name any sort of infrastructure we could develop that would be more valuable than that.
Here's hoping they do it, this time. "Kanko-Maru" is the name of a decades-old idea that (AFAIK) never got the funding to be tried, and it's technically not much different from the Phoenix idea that Gary Hudson was pushing before the Roton. Of course, Hudson had a few small financers who could put up half the cash he needed; the article here is claiming Kanko-Maru has Mitsubishi, Fujitsu, Sharp, and Nissan.
Mars Direct isn't nearly as ephemeral a plan as the Apollo missions were (the Apollo missions didn't leave automated fuel production facilities and human habitats on the moon, for instance) but I expect the end result would be the same: a half dozen missions, followed by nothing.
If you want to see real exploration of space, the way to do it isn't to throw a few men to Mars, damn the cost; the way to do it is to reduce the cost!
Yes, the length of an efficient Hohmann orbit is a lot greater than the straight line distance to Mars. But with a travel time of two weeks, efficiency goes completely out the window; you would be practically taking a straight line path.
.1 G.
.15 G figure is probably more accurate, and even a wide margin of error wouldn't change the answer to the "would I be pureed by this acceleration?" question.
Calculating the actual orbit is a non-trivial task, but I recall that for the outer planets, at least, the straight line approximation mghiggins did wouldn't be very far off (in terms of relating travel time and acceleration) for a constant-thrust ship of even
Also, I'd assume "trip to Mars in 2 weeks" means when Earth is passing closest to Mars in it's orbit, so the
Why is everyone so convinced that Linux has to be prettied up, promoted, and made palatable to the masses?
Because the masses have money. Companies like money. Companies that see the prospect of money in Linux on the desktop are more likely to publish Linux ports of their video games, write Linux drivers for their hardware, and offer Linux-compatible ISP services and online media.
I like Linux game, Linux drivers, and Linux compatibility. Any more questions?
There are many more reasons why even the most hardcore, non-gaming, free-software-only Linux user still benefits by "Linux for the masses", though. You may complain that Red Hat is aiming for a Linux distribution a 3 year old can use... but they're not taking away our Perl interpreters and ssh daemons to do it, and eventually that 3 year old may grow up and spend a little time playing around with the compiler himself.
The other thing that's "vital for desktop acceptance" is an office suite of the caliber of MS Office 2000, which isn't going to happen unless they decide to port it.
Of course it isn't. Free software developers could never produce any sort of useful desktop software on their own, certainly not any office programs. That stuff is just too complicated for a bunch of hackers. Why, where would they even start?
They aren't going to see any serious revenue until their launch vehicle reachs orbit, and even by their optimistic development cost estimates, that's going to take more than the 5 figure sum they owe in taxes, it's going to take another 8 figures of capital. Granted, there's always the chance that some wacky billionaire will cut a check (and Mr. Gates, if you're reading this: here is how to get geeks to forgive you for Windows) but I wouldn't bet on it.
In other words, if Rotary has paid their taxes, it doesn't mean anything besides a few more months of their aero test unit sitting in mothballs and their remaining staff (Gary Hudson, the man behind the whole thing, has left, and I don't know how many people survived their layoffs) praying for new investors.
Damn shame, too. Even Beal's out of the running now. I don't know how Kistler is doing now, but if they don't make orbit we can pretty much kiss serious space development goodbye for another couple decades.
Oops, splattered another better, faster, cheaper space probe into Mars.
Keep in mind, "cheaper" generally means "a tenth the price of Viking. We can afford the expense of losing a couple. I don't know if NASA can afford the negative PR of it, though.
Sure, you could spend hours hacking around yourself to get Win98 working, but I doubt you're an example the average projected X-Box user. The nice thing about running Linux games on the X-Box would be that it wouldn't have to be hacked by users; *game publishers* could do it, putting a stripped-down, drivers-installed Linux distro on the CD configured to boot directly to the video game on the same CD. You can't do that with Win98, not without per-CD licensing fees swallowing your revenues.
Wow... Two score:4 posts in a row with fundamental misunderstandings. There's the main problem with Slashdot moderation: it's easier to sound correct than to be correct.
Azog: If you have a proper one way hash function doing the server-side checksum, you don't *have* to trust the client. You have the client send you all it's character data, and if the checksum of the client data doesn't match the stored checksum, you don't allow that character to play. Perhaps rknop was misleading in his use of the word "checksum" (since a real checksum would make it easy to generate an upgraded character profile with the same checksum), but his mention of public key crypto should have made it clear that he was talking about a 1-way hash function, which would make client cheating as difficult as faking a PGP signature.
rknop: Except for saving disk space (reducing the amount of server-side data that must be stored while the client is disconnected), what problems would storing a hash of the character data instead of the whole data solve? If someone hasn't hacked your server, they can't change the server-side character data. If someone has read/write access to your server, then they can read your hash function, calculate a hash of their own altered character data, then write that new hash. It would make altering a character more tedious, but not more difficult.
I had to upgrade to ppp-2.4.0 (from Rawhide, I think I got it) before my modem would work at all, and there still seems to be a problem (with easy but annoying workaround) with Red Hat's ppp-watch setup. Oh, well, I'm only stuck on a modem for another couple weeks.
Of course, if you've upgraded to Red Hat 7 (like I have), you've got 50 other updates you'll want to download, so don't feel too special.
Install that, and the pilot-link frontend it puts in your control panel explicitly supports any number of devices, so you can have the daemon listening on both COM ports. You'll need to have a different username/id pair on the two pilots, though, if you want them to backup/sync to different directories.
If they want to call it the top ten books of the millenium, they should have been polling a representative sample of readers from the whole millenium! But no, that would take a lot of expensive exhuming, and Amazon just can't bear to get it's hands dirty.
the only point in the tower where you can drop off and be in orbit with a little push is at GEO.
Almost correct; the only point where you can drop off into a circular orbit is at GEO; there's a huge range of hyperbolic orbits you can get into (well, hyperbolic w.r.t. the Earth; enough to take you to the inner planets at least) by dropping off the tower above GEO, and a range of elliptical orbits (including one with perigee in the upper atmosphere, making aerobraking into equatorial LEO a cheap possiblity) you can get to by dropping off the tower below GEO.
Throw in some high efficiency rockets (ion engines, plasma rockets - all the sorts of things you can't use on a launch vehicle because they're too low thrust), and you could get into any Earth orbit with a lot more payload, a lot cheaper than with a conventional rocket.
Or perhaps I should say marginally cheaper; as the amortization of the original construction cost should be considered. Of course, building this thing means manufacturing thousands of tons of buckytubes, each thousands of kilometers long. IIRC, current buckytube manufacturing is on the order of $2000 a gram, for micrometer-sized things that might be useful in electronics, MEMS, or nanotech, but certainly wouldn't be as a structural material. We've still got a little technology to research...
Honestly, now, has Slashdot become infested by morons? Look at all the crap that's been moderated up on this article! There's the "won't it suck away all our air" question, the "will it change our orbit" question, and the mumblings about shear stress...
Don't take this the wrong way: those are all valid questions to ask, I don't think they should be moderated down, I hope they all get accurate responses, and I hope the responses get moderated up. Ignorance is correctable, and the right way to correct it is by asking serious questions.
But could you imagine this kind of thing happening in a computer science story? Would someone who asked "Won't Lunix let the hackers steal my computer cause it's open source?" get stamped with +1, insightful?
Ok, done ranting now. On to your question.
Serious question: Wouldn't such a thing affect the earth orbit?
Quick answer: Yes, but not so you'd notice.
Building the beanstalk, if it were done with asteroidal materials, would add mass, angular momentum, and an increased moment of inertia to the Earth. Depending on how the asteroid was captured, this could raise the earth's orbit slightly, but would leave the rotational period (length of a day) unchanged. Launching interplanetary vehicles from the beanstalk would remove angular momentum (and a little mass) from the system, slowing the rate of a day slightly.
If the beanstalk was built with terrestrial materials (building one thread first and hauling the rest up on that), it would increase the moment of inertia of the planet-beanstalk system slightly, without adding any angular momentum. Again, the day would be slowed slightly.
But, the key word here is "slightly". By slightly I don't mean days that are one second longer, I mean days that are (1 + ~10*(mass of beanstalk / mass of earth), which works out to something like 100 picoseconds, longer. Use the beanstalk to launch continual interplanetary payloads for a few millenia, and maybe we'll slow the rotation of the earth down by a microsecond. This is all back-of-the-napkin arithmetic, of course, but if my conclusions are too optimistic by a factor of a thousand I'm still not nervous.