Put Congress into the electricity business, putting them in control of guaranteed loans.
"Voting rights act?"
New voters grateful to the incumbents that passed it. Nothing like it got passed until the minorities started to form clear electorate majorities.
"Motor voter bill?"
If it is a federal measure (which I doubt), legislation would increase the number of "registered voters" without increasing the actual number of voters. Also requires people to register even if they are deliberately not registered.
"a stationwagon cannot be delivered anywehere in the US in 24hrs"
Tsk tsk, you're too short-sighted. I can put a station wagon anywhere in the world in under 24 hours if I'm given a big-ass parachute and a C-130 to drop the station wagon out of the back of.
Better yet, put the station wagon on top of a sub-orbital rocket. Now that's bandwidth!
" Is there going to be any legitimate non-gaming or high end science usage for something like this?"
I could go for a GUI where windows with the focus are brought forward, while windows without focus are dropped back a bit but still not obscured by the focus window. Moving my head to see around the focus window is often easier/better than alt-tabbing or trying to tile them.
When was the last time Congress ever voted to give anybody more power other than to themselves?
They occasionally pass pieces of legislation that give the president authorization to conduct "police actions" instead of a real declaration of war, but that's more a matter of "Congress avoiding blame" than "Congress giving up power."
They occasionally pass new campaign finance "reform" laws, but all they do is funnel money to the two major parties and special interest lobbyists, effectively giving more power to the people that put them in power to begin with, so that doesn't really count either.
There was that "new" constitutional amendment saying that Congressional raises don't go into effect until the next term, but the vast majority of Congressional elections are won by the incumbents. A calculated risk at best.
Of course Congress wouldn't vote to give up any of the power they've collected for themselves. Why would they? Who's going to stop them?
The same goes for the federal government in general. Could you see something like the Eleventh Amendment getting proposed in this day and age?
"How close does an natural astronomical body have to orbit a planet for it to be a moon?"
Close enough that it orbits the planet and not the system star. The sun is so much bigger than all the other planets (combined, even) that there is a definite line between those two.
"(the Pluto debate, etc)"
IMO, Pluto qualifies as a planet because it's held together by its own gravitational forces. Planetoids are held together solely by chemical forces (ie. just one big rock). Heck, Pluto even has its own atmosphere.
"but what exactly is a moon?"
Pluto and Charon confuse things a little bit in this reguard because it can almost be called a binary planet.
"Would it be possible for an object to travel into the Solar System, and then whip around Jupiter, and then reenter the Solar System, etc (without actually getting that close to the sun)."
No, because the sun is massive compared to Jupiter, like 1000 times more massive. An object would have to get extremely close to Jupiter (astronomically speaking) for it to notice Jupiter's pull more than the sun's. Note that all the other outer planets still orbit the sun, even though Jupiter is often much closer to each of them. Jupiter affects the orbit of these planets slightly, but those orbits are still around the sun.
It seems that the new Internet2 backbone will go into full-scale operation at about the same time everybody converts to IPv6. Hell, we'll all have Fast Ethernet to the curb by then.
"So make a friend who doesn't use all of his/her bandwidth and leech offa that when you're at your limit."
Actually, for a small investment, that could be a way to maximize bandwidth while screwing the school. Collect interested students in a pool, and collect their MAC addresses (or whatever else they use to identify students on the network). Have ineternet traffic go through your own router, and rig the router to change MAC addresses as soon as one student's gets used up. You'll then have a group of students that are getting their maximum allowed free bandwitdth and not a bit more. The easiest way I can see of implementing this would be to put the students in question into a private wireless network and forsaking the copper resnet altogether (in order to prevent a MAC conflict on the resnet).
On the other hand, it would probably be easier to cobble together a P2P app that keeps track of and announces a peer's remaining bandwidth. The machine would then randomly alternate between using its own bandwidth for extranet locations and using another peer as a temporary gateway, and then defaulting to routing through another peer once the bandwidth cap has been reached. This would make it less obvious who was participating and who was not if the admin were to look at just the bandwidth quotas alone, because participants may or may not reach the bandwidth cap.
Cornell will still continue to charge students their special "captive audience" prices for student housing and pay student employees minimum wage for work where the normal salary is at least double that.
"but the parts higher up have to have a higher linear velocity, in order to have the same rotational velocity (lower case omega) as the rest of the structure."
But the tension in the beanstalk itself would give those parts a velocity component along the length of the beanstalk. If it starts to lean in the direction of the earth's rotation, the higher points will be slowed down by the act of the structure zipping down along its length. Which to me seems to imply motion of the higher points something like a whiplash, speeding up and slowing down violently WRT the surface of the earth as surface gravity pulls the bottom down perpendicular to the surface.
"My understanding is that it's pulled away from the earth by centrifical force and held down by an anchor."
The anchor itself wouldn't really be nessecary. The beanstalk would be held in place more by its own weight. Every point in the beanstalk below geostationary altitude is moving too slowly to be in orbit for its altitude, which means the net force in every single point in the beanstalk below geostationary is straight down.
"Of course, if it snapped in the middle, the lower piece would fall towards us instead..."
Exactly. And that lower piece will be up to 45,000 kilometers long.
"or if the cable readily seperates into extremely flat or thin pieces, it should have a very high surface area to mass ratio, high enough to have a very low terminal velocity."
Except the ribbon would be perpendicular to the ground (ie. edgewise), not paralell. If it would be pulled straight down, there would be very little friction on the ribbon to slow it down. Think spring-loaded tape measure.
And I don't see how it would break up without being rigged with explosives or the like. If the ribbon is strong enough to deal with its own weight, payloads and tidal forces, something active would have to be done with it to convince it to break up. And if for whatever reason that doesn't happen, you'd have the entire structure coming down accelerating at a rate of 9.8 m/s^2 (the acceleration of the lowest parts, which pull down the higher parts).
"If it fell, it would wrap itself around the planet."
Why? Gravity would be pulling straight down (in relation to the surface of the earth), and tension in the beanstalk would pull the bulk of it towards the bottom, meaning the whole thing will accelerate downards at the speed of the lowest point (which is subject to the most gravity). The Red Mars scenario essentially relies on gravity turning itself off for the fall.
Take a spring-loaded tape measure, tie a weight to the end, and spin yourself in a chair fast enough to have the weight held out on the end, counteracting the spring-loaded tension in the tape itself. If the tape were cut while you were spinning, would the tape magicly wrap itself around you, or would the spring mechanism, no longer having a weight counteracting its own tension, yank the tape back towards you and slice your hand up?
" and also apparently due to the forces acting on it if it did "fall" or break it would go flying off into space instead of collapsing on earth"
Only the parts above geosynchronus would "fly off." Every single point below that altitude isn't moving fast enough to be in orbit and has a net force pulling down.
"if you spin a basketball with a straw attached to it and the straw gets unstuck from the basketball...where will the straw go? It sure wont collapse onto the ball."
You're neglecting gravity, which would be one of the main components in keeping the "straw" stuck to the "basketball" to begin with.
"Then you head towards your agricultural civs and people start to embrace a monotheistic religon and everything narrows in terms of what they believe. It gets even tighter when you get to the industrial revolution."
If you're going to say Event A caused Event B, you might want pick two events closer to each other. Dozens of empires quite literally rose and fell between the development of agriculture and motheism becoming popular. We know about the Greco-Roman pantheon of gods because they conquered the known world, including the few rare monotheists in the Middle East. Rome was on the decline when they decided to take up Christianity. And that was the first time any empire took up any monotheistic religion as a state religion (unless you count that very short stint in Egypt with Akenaton).
"Cars travel so slowly most of the time, that aerodynamics simply isn't important."
When you're commuting on the interstate for over an hour a day ~70 mph and you're the one paying for gas, it gets pretty important.
And then there's the annual (or more frequent) road trips which, while perhaps not a large percentage of overall driving time, are still 8+ hours of driving per day at interstate speeds. And they do get considerably expensive when you start adding things to a roof rack.
In Europe and Asia, sure it's relatively insignifigant, but I wouldn't say that about North America.
"When did we start thinking about the future so much?"
The Industrial Revolution, because...
"Did people in the middle ages, for example, ever think much past the end of their own lives?"
... then started to have this thing called "free time," time that wasn't devoted to the task of living, and also...
"I'm guessing they did,"
... it wasn't until then that the common person could see the effect technological (and political, for that matter) innovation could have on a person and people within their lifetime. Before industrialization, nobody thought about the future that much because there was no reason to; their lives were just like their parents, whose were just like their parents, whose...
But, just like the Honda Civic, you'll be stuck with a relatively low-performance machine where the only thing you can truly modify (without replacing the eng^H^H^H motherboard) is the case.
Oh, and your power supply exhaust will sound like an angry weed-wacker when you do this.
Why? Are the UK and India paying women to have abortions so that they have more stem cells to work with? Because essentially that's the only limitation the White House has put on stem cell research. We still have fetal stem cell research (as well as research on stem cells from all other sources), and, IIRC, still have more strains of fetal stem cells to work with than any other country.
You might want to have that knee-jerk reaction of yours looked in to. It could be debilitating.
In one of his posts, Straczynski recounted a conversation he had had with fellow B5 producer Doug Netter, who in turn recounted a conversation he had had with B5 star Bruce Boxleitner. It seems that Boxleitner had accompanied his wife, Screen Actors Guild president Melissa Gilbert, to the White House. The occasion was to discuss acting roles moving north of the border to Canada. In the middle of the conversation, the door opens and White House strategist Karl Rove walks in. He says to Melissa, "I hope you will forgive me, but I'm actually here to see Bruce." And, no, it wasn't to give him a hard time about how the Night Watch subplot on Babylon 5 was an eerie foreshadowing of the War on Terrorism.
According to Straczynski, Rove tells Boxleitner, "I just wanted to tell you that I'm a big science fiction fan, and that Babylon 5 is the best science fiction television series ever." After a pause, he adds, "And the president thinks so too."
"The mission's primary objectives are testing planetary exploration technologies."
NASA, on the other hand, actually goes out and explores planets. The Deep Space probes are about the only US space project I can think of whose primary objective was to act as a proof-of-concept, and that was because most of the technology on them were a leap ahead of what was in use until then.
The ESA says "let's see if we can do this." NASA and Rosaviakosmos say "let's do this." You don't see us having to test things out on the moon before, say, mapping Venus or dropping probes into Jupiter. Or should we have just said "Oh, wait, we can't land on Eros, we haven't tested that idea yet! It's not in the mission parameters!"
"I tell you what, you find me a place in the US with more small country towns than Maine,"
I don't know if you've heard of it, but there's this tiny little state called ALASKA...
Sheesh, the place is so sparsely populated that they don't even bother dividing most of the land into boroughs (counties). And you're so short-sighted that you can't think of any place in the entire nation (the third-largest, no less!) more sparsely populated than Maine?
Give back your laptop, it's obviously not helping your education.
Slashdot Mirror
"Rural electrification?"
Put Congress into the electricity business, putting them in control of guaranteed loans.
"Voting rights act?"
New voters grateful to the incumbents that passed it. Nothing like it got passed until the minorities started to form clear electorate majorities.
"Motor voter bill?"
If it is a federal measure (which I doubt), legislation would increase the number of "registered voters" without increasing the actual number of voters. Also requires people to register even if they are deliberately not registered.
" Sure, you can get it there, but once it's there you have to start the restore process..."
That's what the barrels of psycho geese are for, assuming Taco would lease them out...
"a stationwagon cannot be delivered anywehere in the US in 24hrs"
Tsk tsk, you're too short-sighted. I can put a station wagon anywhere in the world in under 24 hours if I'm given a big-ass parachute and a C-130 to drop the station wagon out of the back of.
Better yet, put the station wagon on top of a sub-orbital rocket. Now that's bandwidth!
" Is there going to be any legitimate non-gaming or high end science usage for something like this?"
I could go for a GUI where windows with the focus are brought forward, while windows without focus are dropped back a bit but still not obscured by the focus window. Moving my head to see around the focus window is often easier/better than alt-tabbing or trying to tile them.
"Maybe congress could pass a law for that."
When was the last time Congress ever voted to give anybody more power other than to themselves?
They occasionally pass pieces of legislation that give the president authorization to conduct "police actions" instead of a real declaration of war, but that's more a matter of "Congress avoiding blame" than "Congress giving up power."
They occasionally pass new campaign finance "reform" laws, but all they do is funnel money to the two major parties and special interest lobbyists, effectively giving more power to the people that put them in power to begin with, so that doesn't really count either.
There was that "new" constitutional amendment saying that Congressional raises don't go into effect until the next term, but the vast majority of Congressional elections are won by the incumbents. A calculated risk at best.
Of course Congress wouldn't vote to give up any of the power they've collected for themselves. Why would they? Who's going to stop them?
The same goes for the federal government in general. Could you see something like the Eleventh Amendment getting proposed in this day and age?
bah
"How close does an natural astronomical body have to orbit a planet for it to be a moon?"
Close enough that it orbits the planet and not the system star. The sun is so much bigger than all the other planets (combined, even) that there is a definite line between those two.
"(the Pluto debate, etc)"
IMO, Pluto qualifies as a planet because it's held together by its own gravitational forces. Planetoids are held together solely by chemical forces (ie. just one big rock). Heck, Pluto even has its own atmosphere.
"but what exactly is a moon?"
Pluto and Charon confuse things a little bit in this reguard because it can almost be called a binary planet.
"Would it be possible for an object to travel into the Solar System, and then whip around Jupiter, and then reenter the Solar System, etc (without actually getting that close to the sun)."
No, because the sun is massive compared to Jupiter, like 1000 times more massive. An object would have to get extremely close to Jupiter (astronomically speaking) for it to notice Jupiter's pull more than the sun's. Note that all the other outer planets still orbit the sun, even though Jupiter is often much closer to each of them. Jupiter affects the orbit of these planets slightly, but those orbits are still around the sun.
It seems that the new Internet2 backbone will go into full-scale operation at about the same time everybody converts to IPv6. Hell, we'll all have Fast Ethernet to the curb by then.
"So make a friend who doesn't use all of his/her bandwidth and leech offa that when you're at your limit."
Actually, for a small investment, that could be a way to maximize bandwidth while screwing the school. Collect interested students in a pool, and collect their MAC addresses (or whatever else they use to identify students on the network). Have ineternet traffic go through your own router, and rig the router to change MAC addresses as soon as one student's gets used up. You'll then have a group of students that are getting their maximum allowed free bandwitdth and not a bit more. The easiest way I can see of implementing this would be to put the students in question into a private wireless network and forsaking the copper resnet altogether (in order to prevent a MAC conflict on the resnet).
On the other hand, it would probably be easier to cobble together a P2P app that keeps track of and announces a peer's remaining bandwidth. The machine would then randomly alternate between using its own bandwidth for extranet locations and using another peer as a temporary gateway, and then defaulting to routing through another peer once the bandwidth cap has been reached. This would make it less obvious who was participating and who was not if the admin were to look at just the bandwidth quotas alone, because participants may or may not reach the bandwidth cap.
Cornell will still continue to charge students their special "captive audience" prices for student housing and pay student employees minimum wage for work where the normal salary is at least double that.
"but the parts higher up have to have a higher linear velocity, in order to have the same rotational velocity (lower case omega) as the rest of the structure."
But the tension in the beanstalk itself would give those parts a velocity component along the length of the beanstalk. If it starts to lean in the direction of the earth's rotation, the higher points will be slowed down by the act of the structure zipping down along its length. Which to me seems to imply motion of the higher points something like a whiplash, speeding up and slowing down violently WRT the surface of the earth as surface gravity pulls the bottom down perpendicular to the surface.
"My understanding is that it's pulled away from the earth by centrifical force and held down by an anchor."
The anchor itself wouldn't really be nessecary. The beanstalk would be held in place more by its own weight. Every point in the beanstalk below geostationary altitude is moving too slowly to be in orbit for its altitude, which means the net force in every single point in the beanstalk below geostationary is straight down.
"Of course, if it snapped in the middle, the lower piece would fall towards us instead..."
Exactly. And that lower piece will be up to 45,000 kilometers long.
"or if the cable readily seperates into extremely flat or thin pieces, it should have a very high surface area to mass ratio, high enough to have a very low terminal velocity."
Except the ribbon would be perpendicular to the ground (ie. edgewise), not paralell. If it would be pulled straight down, there would be very little friction on the ribbon to slow it down. Think spring-loaded tape measure.
And I don't see how it would break up without being rigged with explosives or the like. If the ribbon is strong enough to deal with its own weight, payloads and tidal forces, something active would have to be done with it to convince it to break up. And if for whatever reason that doesn't happen, you'd have the entire structure coming down accelerating at a rate of 9.8 m/s^2 (the acceleration of the lowest parts, which pull down the higher parts).
"If it fell, it would wrap itself around the planet."
Why? Gravity would be pulling straight down (in relation to the surface of the earth), and tension in the beanstalk would pull the bulk of it towards the bottom, meaning the whole thing will accelerate downards at the speed of the lowest point (which is subject to the most gravity). The Red Mars scenario essentially relies on gravity turning itself off for the fall.
Take a spring-loaded tape measure, tie a weight to the end, and spin yourself in a chair fast enough to have the weight held out on the end, counteracting the spring-loaded tension in the tape itself. If the tape were cut while you were spinning, would the tape magicly wrap itself around you, or would the spring mechanism, no longer having a weight counteracting its own tension, yank the tape back towards you and slice your hand up?
"Maybe make the Slashdot mirror only for subscribers?"
Why pay for Slashdot to provide what Google provides for free?
" and also apparently due to the forces acting on it if it did "fall" or break it would go flying off into space instead of collapsing on earth"
Only the parts above geosynchronus would "fly off." Every single point below that altitude isn't moving fast enough to be in orbit and has a net force pulling down.
"if you spin a basketball with a straw attached to it and the straw gets unstuck from the basketball...where will the straw go? It sure wont collapse onto the ball."
You're neglecting gravity, which would be one of the main components in keeping the "straw" stuck to the "basketball" to begin with.
"Would you like to own any of these 3 vehicles? I bet yes."
Then you lose. If you had included the Subaru WRX in the list, you would have gotten me, but not with any of the three cars* listed.
* (Real trucks don't have sparkplugs.)
"Then you head towards your agricultural civs and people start to embrace a monotheistic religon and everything narrows in terms of what they believe. It gets even tighter when you get to the industrial revolution."
If you're going to say Event A caused Event B, you might want pick two events closer to each other. Dozens of empires quite literally rose and fell between the development of agriculture and motheism becoming popular. We know about the Greco-Roman pantheon of gods because they conquered the known world, including the few rare monotheists in the Middle East. Rome was on the decline when they decided to take up Christianity. And that was the first time any empire took up any monotheistic religion as a state religion (unless you count that very short stint in Egypt with Akenaton).
"Cars travel so slowly most of the time, that aerodynamics simply isn't important."
When you're commuting on the interstate for over an hour a day ~70 mph and you're the one paying for gas, it gets pretty important.
And then there's the annual (or more frequent) road trips which, while perhaps not a large percentage of overall driving time, are still 8+ hours of driving per day at interstate speeds. And they do get considerably expensive when you start adding things to a roof rack.
In Europe and Asia, sure it's relatively insignifigant, but I wouldn't say that about North America.
The Industrial Revolution, because...
"Did people in the middle ages, for example, ever think much past the end of their own lives?"
"I'm guessing they did,"
"Quick, get me a JohnnyCab!"
A courteous, polite cabbie that speaks English. Now that's science fiction!
But, just like the Honda Civic, you'll be stuck with a relatively low-performance machine where the only thing you can truly modify (without replacing the eng^H^H^H motherboard) is the case.
Oh, and your power supply exhaust will sound like an angry weed-wacker when you do this.
"Stem cell research."
Why? Are the UK and India paying women to have abortions so that they have more stem cells to work with? Because essentially that's the only limitation the White House has put on stem cell research. We still have fetal stem cell research (as well as research on stem cells from all other sources), and, IIRC, still have more strains of fetal stem cells to work with than any other country.
You might want to have that knee-jerk reaction of yours looked in to. It could be debilitating.
"they won't think its so cool when they go up there and find the terrible secret of space!"
Could be worse: They could find the Prince of Space.
On top of that, he's a B5 fan:
Then let me put it this way:
"The mission's primary objectives are testing planetary exploration technologies."
NASA, on the other hand, actually goes out and explores planets. The Deep Space probes are about the only US space project I can think of whose primary objective was to act as a proof-of-concept, and that was because most of the technology on them were a leap ahead of what was in use until then.
The ESA says "let's see if we can do this." NASA and Rosaviakosmos say "let's do this." You don't see us having to test things out on the moon before, say, mapping Venus or dropping probes into Jupiter. Or should we have just said "Oh, wait, we can't land on Eros, we haven't tested that idea yet! It's not in the mission parameters!"
"I tell you what, you find me a place in the US with more small country towns than Maine,"
I don't know if you've heard of it, but there's this tiny little state called ALASKA...
Sheesh, the place is so sparsely populated that they don't even bother dividing most of the land into boroughs (counties). And you're so short-sighted that you can't think of any place in the entire nation (the third-largest, no less!) more sparsely populated than Maine?
Give back your laptop, it's obviously not helping your education.