DRAM is probably much cheaper than hard drives in the sense of their electricity bill. Think of how many nodes their clusters have and then imagine each of them each having at least two hard drive motors spinning 24/7.
"Sony and the RIAA don't want you to be able to listen to your CD's on Linux.
Sony and the MPAA don't want you to be able to watch your DVD's on Linux."
But Sony is selling Linux for the PlayStation 2 (with gcc, no less), so there ain't a damned thing Sony can do about it.
"Don't support control freaks. Don't buy Sony products."
Ever hear of positive reinforcement? The idea behind making the PS2 not just a set-top box but a cheap server (to quote the countless trolls, "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!") is too good to pass up. Sony is doing everything right in this instance (at least from our standpoint) and they deserve to have my money because of it.
You want us to boycott Sony. Indefinitely? Ten or fifteen years ago you'd probably be screaming to boycot IBM. Would you still be boycotting them today?
Besides, unless Sony turns some profit off of this idea, nobody else would even want to consider doing something like this again. This is something to grab on to with both hands.
When I first read "Robots vs. Humans and Other Security Issues," I saw that as putting robots up against all our security issues, which just happened to include humans (the biggest threat to our security by far).
Sir Martin Rees is quoted a lot in the article. But I think he's a bit too pessimistic.
He worries about the availability of new biological weapons. But the groups that are looking to develop these new weapons also happen to be those with the fewest resources with which to do it. While an Islamic extremist may be able to work in relative peace in Baghdad, what does he have to work with other than his freedom? Besides, the vast majority of the people who can think up this stuff tend to get sucked up into cushy jobs in the pharmecutical industry.
He talks about how unstoppable global warming is, even if "urgent action" is taken. While I know that I'll probably just be repeating flamebait by saying that the jury still seems to be out on what is causing this warming, the argument does have it's merits. And even if it is man-made carbon emissions, I can't see this decade ending without either fusion or ZPE bearing fruit. Either of those would solve the problem practically over-night, at least in countries like the US that are sick of OPEC.
He then goes on to droughts and floods. For several decades starvation has been a problem of distribution only, the inability of getting food from where it comes from to those who need it. Working out the kinks in international trade (which is what the WEF is supposed to be doing to begin with) would help alleviate problems like this.
As for a merging of humans and machinery, I'm failing to see how this is extreme pessimism. The whole point of expanding our intelligence is to figure out the solutions to these problems to begin with. And as for computer implants, the only real problem I see with putting implants in my brain comes in the form of script kiddies (maybe I've just seen Ghost in the Shell too often). Besides, I can only see a small percentage of the population going in for voluntary brain surgery...
He's Astronomer Royal, right? Why is an astronomer supposedly the definitive source of information on such a diverse array of subjects?
Linux is now beginning to support IBM's Personal System/2? Wow... new keyboard and mouse ports, micro-channel architecture... talk about screaming into the 20th century!
"How do you think the thing can stay up on a *cable*? It's not a rigid tower."
If that were the case, then you'd have to make the cable long enough so that its center of gravity (as opposed to its center of mass) is in geostationary. As I pointed out in another post, if we assume a uniform density, this puts the height at 985 earth radii or so, well over 15 times the mean distance between the earth and the moon. People at the top would experience about 3 G's of outward acceleration (until the moon snapped off the top).
"A tethered space elevator is something for a low (think space shuttle) level orbit."
The lower the altitude, the faster you have to be going to be in orbit. In the example of a beanstalk with its top in geostationary orbit, only the top is going fast enough to be considered in orbit. All points below it are going to slow to be in orbit at their altitude (in fact, they're going even slower than the top).
If you put the top at 500 km, if it's stationary with relation to the ground, those at the top would still be experiencing about a full G of weight (about 9.3 m/s^2 instead of our usual 9.8 m/s^2).
Keeping the same hight but putting the top in orbit would mean having it circle the globe once every 87 minutes. Assuming you have the thing moving along with the earth's rotation, the bottom will be dragging along the ground at about 15,000 miles an hour (with all points above naturally going faster). I'd hate to think of what something that big going at about mach 20 would do to the surrounding area.
"No, you don't need a counterweight. If the cable is long enough so that the center of mass is in geostationary orbit it will just hang there by itself."
No, not the center of mass but the center of gravity, which when you're talking about structures this high is a completely different animal. Because the force of gravity drops off exponentially with altitude, the bottom is always heavier than the top and so you'll need to put more on top to get that center of gravity higher.
I did the math last night with the help of my TI-92. Assuming a structure of uniform density, to put the center of gravity of the structure at geostationary altitudes (about 22,000 miles or 6 earth radii) requires the entire structure to be about 985 earth radii (about 20 light-seconds) tall.
With a structure that high, people at the top would experience a net acceleration of about 3 g's outwards and be travelling at about 960,000 miles an hour.
Of course, this is all moot because it would only stand for a few weeks until the moon breaks most of it off at 60 earth radii.
"And most of it would burn up in the atmosphere. You may have some hundreds of depleted material hitting the ocean, but nothing like you are talking about."
Burning up in the atmosphere doesn't save you from the laws of conservation of momentum and energy. If you have hundreds of thousands of tons of stuff hitting the atmosphere, whether it makes it through or not you're still going to have a very nasty shockwave to deal with. Hell, the force of the air moving alone could be enough to start those tsunamis.
"First of all this isn't a Building it's a Cable the largest elevator cable ever granted, but the cable is composed of carbon nanotubes -- which puts it as 30 times stronger than steel in the first place."
But we're not talking about something that's only 30 times bigger than the WTC, are we?
"Second it's in geosync orbit It's NOT a building"
No, the very top is in orbit. Everything below that is a building.
"In fact one plan puts it in the middle of an ocean attached to a ship at one end and a space platform at the other."
As I already went on about ad nauseum in another post, every single point in that structure between the ground and geostationary (all 22,000 miles of it) has a net force on it pointing down. I don't care how light that material is, 22,000 miles of it will sink that ship.
"Considering that it's being built in the middle of international waters there is Nothing any government can do except threaten nuclear war to stop this thing going up."
Somebody never read Sun-Tzu. If you don't like the idea, you cut off where the supplies come from.
"So that means that the geosync orbit platform can keep the cable in a stable orbit even should part of the cable be sheared free."
Any point below the top has to be going faster than the top in order to be in orbit. But instead it's fixed in relation to the surface of the earth. So all points below the top are actually going slower than the top. Which means that the net force on all points below the top is DOWN.
"Also you can design the cable to have point where the cable can be seperated in an emergency causing only a fraction of the cable to fall to earth."
Whether it comes down in one 22,000 mile long chunk or 22,000 chunks a mile long, it's still coming down.
"If you detach the cable from the base (Earth-Side) all that happens is you have to reattach it (Assuming the Space-Side can hold the cable in orbit.)"
Essentially, orbit means "centripetal force juuuust matches gravity." If the top is in geostationary orbit, then only the top is in microgravity. Every single inch below the top has a net force pulling downward. The lower your altitude, the faster you have to go to be in orbit (one revolution per day at geostationary, one revolution per hour at LEO). A break at any point in the beanstalk would bring it down.
You could make it tall enough so that the sum of the centripetal force of the end counterbalances the weight of the structure, and this would put the structure under tension instead of compression.
However, if you cut the structure anywhere between the surface of the earth and geostationary, everything below the cut will come crashing down. Fly a plane into it at seven miles, and you have a seven mile structure (about 35 times the height of the WTC) falling towards you. If the US can hit ballistic targets at a few hundred miles up with a kinetic-kill vehicle, Joe Shmoe with his suitcase nuke on a V-2 can hit a stationary target at that altitude. If there's a time-bomb on the elevator that goes off when the elevator floor is at or near geostationary, then we have 22,000 miles of material coming down.
"And the cable itself can withstand the force of multiple nuclear explosions (has to b/c of forces acting upon it)meaning it ain't coming down easy."
Tension, compression, and shear are three different things. Just because a material can withstand one or two of the three doesn't mean it can withstand all three.
And then there's a fourth factor: Heat. This was the WTC's weakness. While the steel structure withstood the airplane impacts, it couldn't survive the heat of the fire. Sure, the beanstalk might be able to survive the blast from a nuke, maybe even a shockwave if it was within the atmosphere, but nothing can survive the heat.
"The cable will wrap around the earth in a straight line from where it was cut."
No. Your main problem here is that you're assuming that all the mass will be at the top of the structure, forcing the structure below it to follow the top along as it comes down. Gravity being what it is, the center of gravity (assuming a structure of uniform density) will be somewhere between the bottom and the half-way point. And because gravity increases exponentially as you go down, taller structures will have their centers of gravity further from the midpoint than shorter ones.
So while you're correct in thinking that each unit length of cable will have to deal with tension in the cable (due to the motion of the rest of the cable) as well as gravity, you're incorrect in guessing what direction that tension will pull. For points in the structure higher than the center of gravity, the tension in the structure will be the stronger of the two forces, pulling the structure down along it's length instead of letting it spiral down in free-fall.
If anything, the top of the structure may fall along a straight line because it got snapped like the end of a whip, giving it more kinetic energy than it would have had if it were just in free-fall (and causing more damage than a free-fall would have done).
"By the second time around the earth the cable will began deterioting and exploding in the upper atmosphere."
First off, you have no idea how large these pieces may be when they break off. Second, all the kinetic energy of hundreds or thousands of miles worth of stuff has to go somewhere. If the actual mass doesn't make it past the upper atmosphere, then the momentum and kinetic energy just gets transferred to the atmosphere, which means a shockwave.
"Also since this has top be placed in a geo-synch orbit it needs to be located close to the equator. I.E. if it falls it hits a whole lotta ocean and not much else."
Tsunamis. Big tsunamis. And most of the world's population lives within 200 miles of the ocean.
Remember, something with the mass of a small island killed off the dinosaurs. What we're talking about is a structure with at least that much mass. While it may not be one big chunk, mass is mass and it's still coming down in a very short period of time.
"Futhermore having breakaway points on the cable itself would allow for only say 1/10 of the cable to impact the earth the rest would break and fly off into space."
Just for the sake of repeating myself, if the cut is anywhere between 0 and 22,000 miles up, anything below it is coming down. Period.
"Rest asure, it's well be in the middle of the nowhere."
There is no such place as far as something this size is concerned.
"It will have to be near the equator (geosync) for this thing to work."
You have no idea how high up that is, do you? Measured from the surface of the earth, in order for the top to be in geostationary (I don't even want to think about putting it in geosynch, the flexing would be murder), it would be over 22,000 miles tall!!! To put that into perspective, that's about the circumference of the earth. Wrap it around the equator and it would touch itself. Even if you put it in Ecuador and it snapped cleanly in half, you'd still have pieces of it landing in the Indian Ocean with some ungodly velocity.
Because if it fell down, it'd be about as destructive as a thermonuclear bomb (kinetic energy's a bitch). And NOBODY would want this in their back yard after 9/11.
On the moon, Mars, any other sparsely-populated/unpopulated body in the solar system? Sure. But not here.
"Regardless, anyone who DOES make money off selling drugs in the U.S. wouldn't be able to make nearly as much if our government hadn't created incredibly high prices (by keeping drugs ilegal and seizing them at every turn)."
The same can be said of any illegal smuggling operation, be it diamonds, bootleg CDs, weapons, or even sneakers. Why should drugs have special treatment?
"You are very mistaken. The source matters very much. On the rare occasion that something comes in from out of state, everybody knows. It looks and tastes different! It's usually not as good. The "domestic drug trade" that I support isn't a bunch of TV-style gun-toting gangsters, they're freedom-loving peacefull Americans just like me who like to have a good time. THAT "domestic drug trade" is something very much worth supporting."
Mock me if you will for quoting from a government source, but as you pointed out they seize a lot of it and they are the most likely ones to know the most about this. From http://www.usdoj.gov/ndic/pubs/647/marijuan.htm:
Distribution
With multiple domestic and foreign sources of supply and an almost countless array of groups and independent dealers involved, no single group can be claimed to control marijuana distribution in the United States. However, Mexican drug trafficking organizations clearly dominate a greater portion of wholesale distribution than any other identifiable group. Most DEA Field Divisions identify marijuana from Mexico as the dominant type in their jurisdictions, and many report that Mexican organizations dominate wholesale distribution in their areas. All report that marijuana from Mexico is readily available. Because marijuana from Mexico is of substantially lower quality and less expensive than domestic marijuana, it is used frequently to "bulk up" domestic marijuana and increase profits--even in areas where it is not the preferred type.
DEA findings are consistent with information provided to NDIC by 412 state and local law enforcement agencies, almost 30 percent of which identify Mexican organizations as the dominant marijuana wholesale distributors in their area. Local independent dealers are the most frequently identified wholesale marijuana distributors after Mexican organizations. Law enforcement agencies note, however, that many independent dealers are Caucasians supplied by Mexican organizations. Agencies that note domination of the local market by Jamaican distributors report, too, that Mexican organizations are a primary source of supply. Agencies in the northern United States identify connections between local independent dealers and Canadian sources of supply; agencies elsewhere note that local dealers maintain connections with street gangs, OMGs, and Jamaican groups.
"As for USCG interdictions (I assume you're refering to coast guard anti drug actions?): again, this wouldn't be an issue if we relaxed our damn drug policies."
And it wouldn't be so expensive to stop the illegal diamond trade in the US if we just relaxed our import restrictions. But I'd rather fund efforts to stop this trade than to fund Liberian warlords. Again, what makes drugs so different?
""InfoWorld is reporting that such luminaries as TRUSTe, ePrivacy Group, MSN, and DoubleClick are getting together to develop a "trusted senders" program to certify "commercial email" and "elevate" it above ISPs' and end users' spam filters."
This ain't so bad. This way, you won't have to jump through hoops to find out where to send the invoice for the unauthorized use of your IT resources.
"And in the ideal world the suggestion would be caried through to the only obvious conclusion: prohibition of illegal drugs should be ended."
Illegal drug trade helps fuel terrorism. So does illegal diamond trade, illegal weapons trade... hell, even pirated CDs can help fuel groups. By your logic, all trade should be legallized. Think of the hapless importers that are being victimized just because the Nike's they're unloading just happen to be made by child labor?
Pawn stores lose money left and right when they unwittingly buy stolen goods. So should we legallize robbery?
Bartenders can get into all sorts of legal trouble if they let an obviously drunk patron drive off. Maybe we should legallize drunk driving as well.
After all, these are my tax dollars at work...
" and funds wasted on fighting the "drug war" should be redirected towards [voluntary] treatment programs for addicts"
So the money that's spent on trying to prevent a problem should instead be spent on cleaning up after the fact? WTF? Maybe we should yank those annoying "Truth" anti-smoking ads off TV and just put the money towards niccotine patches and cancer research while we're at it...
Better yet, let's abolish the EPA. Factories are going to pollute anyway, so why don't we put the money towards buying every man, womnan and child a respirator?
When all is said and done, if the pro-drug lobby really cared about the human aspects of the drug trade, they wouldn't touch the stuff to begin with. But they do because their own few moments of bliss are worth more than the life of some poor sap in Mexico or Colombia or Thailand who has to make this stuff at gun-point. If these people are going to be so selfish as to not be able to show even the most basic level of honest-to-God empathy or altruism, then at the very least I want them to be convicted felons so they no longer have the privilege to vote and have a say in directing the governments they leech off of.
"Are you ready for perpetual war?"
I don't care what John Lenon says, there are some things that are far more valuable than peace.
"In reality, the only actual drug/terror link would be in opium-related narcotics (ie heroin), but I don't expect the super bowl ads will mention that."
And how do you think FARC in Colombia make their money? Selling cookies at bake sales? They're only the most prominent example, but they aren't the only group of people making their money by growing drugs or "taxing" their export.
"Personally, I'm 100% certain that when I buy MY drugs, they're locally grown and I'm in no way supporting terrorism."
And we all know how reputable dealers are... assuming they're high enough in the supply chain to even know where it came from...
"And it makes me awfully bitter that my taxes are being spent on a pair of superbowl ads that do nothing but slander me and the millions of other innocent americans who happen to enjoy smoking pot."
And you're suposed to be some kind of "victim" in all this? What you "happened" to do was make a conscious decision to do something that's been illegal for the better part of a century. You really have no idea if what you smoke came from a hydroponics lab in someone's attic or from a Abu Sayef field. And when it comes right down to it, you really don't care. If you did, the ramifications of supporting the domestic drug trade would have stopped you long before now. But if the potential of joining those 3/4 million people you mention elsewhere in your post didn't give you pause, what will?
So quit your damned bitching and take your lumps. You made your choice, deal with it. Better yet, go distract yourself by smoking a joint instead. So long as MY tax dollars have to go towards funding methodone clinics, USCG interdictions, and training foreign police and military forces, they'll go towards these commercials as well.
"There are real threats to this country right now."
"With consumer-grade recordable DVD just around the corner, there's no real market here for a new tape format."
DVD video recorders? Yes. DVD recorders that can properly record two different disk layers like a commercial stamper? I don't see that happening any time in the near future. Even without having to contend with the media corps that would rather not see this, the technical problems of bringing holographic recording to the home are rather... well... problematic.
All the deliberate disadvantages of DVD combined with the relatively short life-span of magnetic media (already some of my old VHS tapes are deteriorated to the point of being unviewable)? I'll pass, thanks.
Yes, I know that digitally encoding the tapes will help them survive a bit longer (since you don't have to rely on signal quality as much), but even then that life-span is a drop in the bucket compared to even analog laserdiscs.
"If anyone wanted to run Bleem! on the PS2, I'd have to shake them vigourously for a few minutes. The PS2 already runs legacy PSX games natively."
But there are currently no real advantages to playing PSX games on a PS2. If anything, using a PS2 is a disadvantage (as anybody who's ever tried to play Final Fantasy V on it can attest).
The "features" that the PS2 tries to add are faster disc access times (done in a half-assed manner that causes a/v sync problems in many games) and slightly better texture mapping that is either not noticable or makes things generally ugly.
Bleem! and the countless other PSX emulators for the PC, on the other hand, all improve the graphics considerably by not limiting themselves to PSX-quality resolution and polygon rendering. Sony handicapped the PS2 where PSX games are concerned because they and their third-party developers didn't want to see PSX games competing with PS2 games in terms of graphics. Think what would happen if the $19.95 MGS looked as good as the $49.95 MGS2. Consumers be damned. Personally I would have thought that game companies could just write better games that sell on more merits beyond just graphics, but what do I know?
(Not that Nintendo did much better with GBC and GBA backwards compatability, but that's another rant.)
By selling their Linux distro for the PS2 (with gcc, no less!), Sony is opening Pandora's Box. Any control they thought they had over the hardware is out the window, whether they "allow" it or not. The visual gap between PSX and PS2 games will close considerably (if not totally in many cases). And while the Brits can't even get mod chips in their PS2s, I'll be able to play Japanese SATURN games (mmm... Phantasy Star Collection...) on my PS2. Sony's only saving graces here are that the ability to do all this will run the consumers another $200 and won't be playable on a TV (well, until somebody writes a TV driver for the distro).
Um, gee, let me think... maybe perhaps to the 40 GB HDD, keyboard, VGA adapter and 100BaseTx NIC that comes with the software? Maybe just a little bit?
$200 would have been very steep if all it came with was the software, but it doesn't seem so bad when you throw in the 40 GB HDD, the NIC, and the keyboard and such. Heck, might be worth it just for the hardware (finally get my PS2 on my LAN, just like my Dreamcast).
Also, the kit includes two DVDs. One of the DVDs is supposedly source code, so that still leaves one full DVD for executable code. So either DVDs are now cheaper to make than CDs, or there could be a !#@%$-load of stuff on this disk.
Third, while Sony has a history of fighting for control of their IP tooth and nail, they aren't so stupid as to believe that they're going to have a strangle-hold on development for PS2 software after the release of this OS. If they wanted to avoid, say, Bleem! being played on the PS2, the only way to avoid that is to just not release Linux (no matter how much they think they've crippled it). So either Sony is being really stupid by releasing the software and trying to lock it down as bes they could, or they're acknowledging the inevitable and letting programmers pretty much do as they will.
I'm a little miffed by the requirement for a monitor (as if I didn't have too little desk space already), but I'd consider buying it for the ability to play emulators alone. Mark my words: By this time next year you'll have most Linux-based emulators (including even maybe an N64 emulator) ready for use on a PS2 running Linux, complete with full controller port support. And then finally my PS2 will be able to play my PSX Final Fantasy games with the picture quality they were supposed to have...
Slashdot Mirror
DRAM is probably much cheaper than hard drives in the sense of their electricity bill. Think of how many nodes their clusters have and then imagine each of them each having at least two hard drive motors spinning 24/7.
"Sony and the RIAA don't want you to be able to listen to your CD's on Linux.
Sony and the MPAA don't want you to be able to watch your DVD's on Linux."
But Sony is selling Linux for the PlayStation 2 (with gcc, no less), so there ain't a damned thing Sony can do about it.
"Don't support control freaks. Don't buy Sony products."
Ever hear of positive reinforcement? The idea behind making the PS2 not just a set-top box but a cheap server (to quote the countless trolls, "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!") is too good to pass up. Sony is doing everything right in this instance (at least from our standpoint) and they deserve to have my money because of it.
You want us to boycott Sony. Indefinitely? Ten or fifteen years ago you'd probably be screaming to boycot IBM. Would you still be boycotting them today?
Besides, unless Sony turns some profit off of this idea, nobody else would even want to consider doing something like this again. This is something to grab on to with both hands.
When I first read "Robots vs. Humans and Other Security Issues," I saw that as putting robots up against all our security issues, which just happened to include humans (the biggest threat to our security by far).
Sir Martin Rees is quoted a lot in the article. But I think he's a bit too pessimistic.
He worries about the availability of new biological weapons. But the groups that are looking to develop these new weapons also happen to be those with the fewest resources with which to do it. While an Islamic extremist may be able to work in relative peace in Baghdad, what does he have to work with other than his freedom? Besides, the vast majority of the people who can think up this stuff tend to get sucked up into cushy jobs in the pharmecutical industry.
He talks about how unstoppable global warming is, even if "urgent action" is taken. While I know that I'll probably just be repeating flamebait by saying that the jury still seems to be out on what is causing this warming, the argument does have it's merits. And even if it is man-made carbon emissions, I can't see this decade ending without either fusion or ZPE bearing fruit. Either of those would solve the problem practically over-night, at least in countries like the US that are sick of OPEC.
He then goes on to droughts and floods. For several decades starvation has been a problem of distribution only, the inability of getting food from where it comes from to those who need it. Working out the kinks in international trade (which is what the WEF is supposed to be doing to begin with) would help alleviate problems like this.
As for a merging of humans and machinery, I'm failing to see how this is extreme pessimism. The whole point of expanding our intelligence is to figure out the solutions to these problems to begin with. And as for computer implants, the only real problem I see with putting implants in my brain comes in the form of script kiddies (maybe I've just seen Ghost in the Shell too often). Besides, I can only see a small percentage of the population going in for voluntary brain surgery...
He's Astronomer Royal, right? Why is an astronomer supposedly the definitive source of information on such a diverse array of subjects?
"You unfunny, un sarcastic moron. It is the 21st century."
And what century did IBM sell PS/2s in? Think about this.
(BEGIN sarcasm)
Linux is now beginning to support IBM's Personal System/2? Wow... new keyboard and mouse ports, micro-channel architecture... talk about screaming into the 20th century!
(END sarcasm)
"How do you think the thing can stay up on a *cable*? It's not a rigid tower."
If that were the case, then you'd have to make the cable long enough so that its center of gravity (as opposed to its center of mass) is in geostationary. As I pointed out in another post, if we assume a uniform density, this puts the height at 985 earth radii or so, well over 15 times the mean distance between the earth and the moon. People at the top would experience about 3 G's of outward acceleration (until the moon snapped off the top).
"A tethered space elevator is something for a low (think space shuttle) level orbit."
The lower the altitude, the faster you have to be going to be in orbit. In the example of a beanstalk with its top in geostationary orbit, only the top is going fast enough to be considered in orbit. All points below it are going to slow to be in orbit at their altitude (in fact, they're going even slower than the top).
If you put the top at 500 km, if it's stationary with relation to the ground, those at the top would still be experiencing about a full G of weight (about 9.3 m/s^2 instead of our usual 9.8 m/s^2).
Keeping the same hight but putting the top in orbit would mean having it circle the globe once every 87 minutes. Assuming you have the thing moving along with the earth's rotation, the bottom will be dragging along the ground at about 15,000 miles an hour (with all points above naturally going faster). I'd hate to think of what something that big going at about mach 20 would do to the surrounding area.
"No, you don't need a counterweight. If the cable is long enough so that the center of mass is in geostationary orbit it will just hang there by itself."
No, not the center of mass but the center of gravity, which when you're talking about structures this high is a completely different animal. Because the force of gravity drops off exponentially with altitude, the bottom is always heavier than the top and so you'll need to put more on top to get that center of gravity higher.
I did the math last night with the help of my TI-92. Assuming a structure of uniform density, to put the center of gravity of the structure at geostationary altitudes (about 22,000 miles or 6 earth radii) requires the entire structure to be about 985 earth radii (about 20 light-seconds) tall.
With a structure that high, people at the top would experience a net acceleration of about 3 g's outwards and be travelling at about 960,000 miles an hour.
Of course, this is all moot because it would only stand for a few weeks until the moon breaks most of it off at 60 earth radii.
"And most of it would burn up in the atmosphere. You may have some hundreds of depleted material hitting the ocean, but nothing like you are talking about."
Burning up in the atmosphere doesn't save you from the laws of conservation of momentum and energy. If you have hundreds of thousands of tons of stuff hitting the atmosphere, whether it makes it through or not you're still going to have a very nasty shockwave to deal with. Hell, the force of the air moving alone could be enough to start those tsunamis.
"First of all this isn't a Building it's a Cable the largest elevator cable ever granted, but the cable is composed of carbon nanotubes -- which puts it as 30 times stronger than steel in the first place."
But we're not talking about something that's only 30 times bigger than the WTC, are we?
"Second it's in geosync orbit It's NOT a building"
No, the very top is in orbit. Everything below that is a building.
"In fact one plan puts it in the middle of an ocean attached to a ship at one end and a space platform at the other."
As I already went on about ad nauseum in another post, every single point in that structure between the ground and geostationary (all 22,000 miles of it) has a net force on it pointing down. I don't care how light that material is, 22,000 miles of it will sink that ship.
"Considering that it's being built in the middle of international waters there is Nothing any government can do except threaten nuclear war to stop this thing going up."
Somebody never read Sun-Tzu. If you don't like the idea, you cut off where the supplies come from.
"So that means that the geosync orbit platform can keep the cable in a stable orbit even should part of the cable be sheared free."
Any point below the top has to be going faster than the top in order to be in orbit. But instead it's fixed in relation to the surface of the earth. So all points below the top are actually going slower than the top. Which means that the net force on all points below the top is DOWN.
"Also you can design the cable to have point where the cable can be seperated in an emergency causing only a fraction of the cable to fall to earth."
Whether it comes down in one 22,000 mile long chunk or 22,000 chunks a mile long, it's still coming down.
"If you detach the cable from the base (Earth-Side) all that happens is you have to reattach it (Assuming the Space-Side can hold the cable in orbit.)"
Essentially, orbit means "centripetal force juuuust matches gravity." If the top is in geostationary orbit, then only the top is in microgravity. Every single inch below the top has a net force pulling downward. The lower your altitude, the faster you have to go to be in orbit (one revolution per day at geostationary, one revolution per hour at LEO). A break at any point in the beanstalk would bring it down.
You could make it tall enough so that the sum of the centripetal force of the end counterbalances the weight of the structure, and this would put the structure under tension instead of compression.
However, if you cut the structure anywhere between the surface of the earth and geostationary, everything below the cut will come crashing down. Fly a plane into it at seven miles, and you have a seven mile structure (about 35 times the height of the WTC) falling towards you. If the US can hit ballistic targets at a few hundred miles up with a kinetic-kill vehicle, Joe Shmoe with his suitcase nuke on a V-2 can hit a stationary target at that altitude. If there's a time-bomb on the elevator that goes off when the elevator floor is at or near geostationary, then we have 22,000 miles of material coming down.
"And the cable itself can withstand the force of multiple nuclear explosions (has to b/c of forces acting upon it)meaning it ain't coming down easy."
Tension, compression, and shear are three different things. Just because a material can withstand one or two of the three doesn't mean it can withstand all three.
And then there's a fourth factor: Heat. This was the WTC's weakness. While the steel structure withstood the airplane impacts, it couldn't survive the heat of the fire. Sure, the beanstalk might be able to survive the blast from a nuke, maybe even a shockwave if it was within the atmosphere, but nothing can survive the heat.
"The cable will wrap around the earth in a straight line from where it was cut."
No. Your main problem here is that you're assuming that all the mass will be at the top of the structure, forcing the structure below it to follow the top along as it comes down. Gravity being what it is, the center of gravity (assuming a structure of uniform density) will be somewhere between the bottom and the half-way point. And because gravity increases exponentially as you go down, taller structures will have their centers of gravity further from the midpoint than shorter ones.
So while you're correct in thinking that each unit length of cable will have to deal with tension in the cable (due to the motion of the rest of the cable) as well as gravity, you're incorrect in guessing what direction that tension will pull. For points in the structure higher than the center of gravity, the tension in the structure will be the stronger of the two forces, pulling the structure down along it's length instead of letting it spiral down in free-fall.
If anything, the top of the structure may fall along a straight line because it got snapped like the end of a whip, giving it more kinetic energy than it would have had if it were just in free-fall (and causing more damage than a free-fall would have done).
"By the second time around the earth the cable will began deterioting and exploding in the upper atmosphere."
First off, you have no idea how large these pieces may be when they break off. Second, all the kinetic energy of hundreds or thousands of miles worth of stuff has to go somewhere. If the actual mass doesn't make it past the upper atmosphere, then the momentum and kinetic energy just gets transferred to the atmosphere, which means a shockwave.
"Also since this has top be placed in a geo-synch orbit it needs to be located close to the equator. I.E. if it falls it hits a whole lotta ocean and not much else."
Tsunamis. Big tsunamis. And most of the world's population lives within 200 miles of the ocean.
Remember, something with the mass of a small island killed off the dinosaurs. What we're talking about is a structure with at least that much mass. While it may not be one big chunk, mass is mass and it's still coming down in a very short period of time.
"Futhermore having breakaway points on the cable itself would allow for only say 1/10 of the cable to impact the earth the rest would break and fly off into space."
Just for the sake of repeating myself, if the cut is anywhere between 0 and 22,000 miles up, anything below it is coming down. Period.
"The far end of the thing is pulling up due to centripital forces."
If it were that tall, anybody at the top would be squished.
"Rest asure, it's well be in the middle of the nowhere."
There is no such place as far as something this size is concerned.
"It will have to be near the equator (geosync) for this thing to work."
You have no idea how high up that is, do you? Measured from the surface of the earth, in order for the top to be in geostationary (I don't even want to think about putting it in geosynch, the flexing would be murder), it would be over 22,000 miles tall!!! To put that into perspective, that's about the circumference of the earth. Wrap it around the equator and it would touch itself. Even if you put it in Ecuador and it snapped cleanly in half, you'd still have pieces of it landing in the Indian Ocean with some ungodly velocity.
"Put in next to a large body of water and use the stablizers to crash it gracefully into the ocean."
One word for you: tsunami.
Because if it fell down, it'd be about as destructive as a thermonuclear bomb (kinetic energy's a bitch). And NOBODY would want this in their back yard after 9/11.
On the moon, Mars, any other sparsely-populated/unpopulated body in the solar system? Sure. But not here.
The same can be said of any illegal smuggling operation, be it diamonds, bootleg CDs, weapons, or even sneakers. Why should drugs have special treatment?
"You are very mistaken. The source matters very much. On the rare occasion that something comes in from out of state, everybody knows. It looks and tastes different! It's usually not as good. The "domestic drug trade" that I support isn't a bunch of TV-style gun-toting gangsters, they're freedom-loving peacefull Americans just like me who like to have a good time. THAT "domestic drug trade" is something very much worth supporting."
Mock me if you will for quoting from a government source, but as you pointed out they seize a lot of it and they are the most likely ones to know the most about this. From http://www.usdoj.gov/ndic/pubs/647/marijuan.htm: "As for USCG interdictions (I assume you're refering to coast guard anti drug actions?): again, this wouldn't be an issue if we relaxed our damn drug policies."
And it wouldn't be so expensive to stop the illegal diamond trade in the US if we just relaxed our import restrictions. But I'd rather fund efforts to stop this trade than to fund Liberian warlords. Again, what makes drugs so different?
""InfoWorld is reporting that such luminaries as TRUSTe, ePrivacy Group, MSN, and DoubleClick are getting together to develop a "trusted senders" program to certify "commercial email" and "elevate" it above ISPs' and end users' spam filters."
This ain't so bad. This way, you won't have to jump through hoops to find out where to send the invoice for the unauthorized use of your IT resources.
"What we are in the process of doing for the first time is to launch a systematic attack on fraudulent and deceptive spam,"
So Hormel won't be able to sell turkey Spam any more?
"And in the ideal world the suggestion would be caried through to the only obvious conclusion: prohibition of illegal drugs should be ended."
Illegal drug trade helps fuel terrorism. So does illegal diamond trade, illegal weapons trade... hell, even pirated CDs can help fuel groups. By your logic, all trade should be legallized. Think of the hapless importers that are being victimized just because the Nike's they're unloading just happen to be made by child labor?
Pawn stores lose money left and right when they unwittingly buy stolen goods. So should we legallize robbery?
Bartenders can get into all sorts of legal trouble if they let an obviously drunk patron drive off. Maybe we should legallize drunk driving as well.
After all, these are my tax dollars at work...
" and funds wasted on fighting the "drug war" should be redirected towards [voluntary] treatment programs for addicts"
So the money that's spent on trying to prevent a problem should instead be spent on cleaning up after the fact? WTF? Maybe we should yank those annoying "Truth" anti-smoking ads off TV and just put the money towards niccotine patches and cancer research while we're at it...
Better yet, let's abolish the EPA. Factories are going to pollute anyway, so why don't we put the money towards buying every man, womnan and child a respirator?
When all is said and done, if the pro-drug lobby really cared about the human aspects of the drug trade, they wouldn't touch the stuff to begin with. But they do because their own few moments of bliss are worth more than the life of some poor sap in Mexico or Colombia or Thailand who has to make this stuff at gun-point. If these people are going to be so selfish as to not be able to show even the most basic level of honest-to-God empathy or altruism, then at the very least I want them to be convicted felons so they no longer have the privilege to vote and have a say in directing the governments they leech off of.
"Are you ready for perpetual war?"
I don't care what John Lenon says, there are some things that are far more valuable than peace.
"In reality, the only actual drug/terror link would be in opium-related narcotics (ie heroin), but I don't expect the super bowl ads will mention that."
And how do you think FARC in Colombia make their money? Selling cookies at bake sales? They're only the most prominent example, but they aren't the only group of people making their money by growing drugs or "taxing" their export.
"Personally, I'm 100% certain that when I buy MY drugs, they're locally grown and I'm in no way supporting terrorism."
And we all know how reputable dealers are... assuming they're high enough in the supply chain to even know where it came from...
"And it makes me awfully bitter that my taxes are being spent on a pair of superbowl ads that do nothing but slander me and the millions of other innocent americans who happen to enjoy smoking pot."
And you're suposed to be some kind of "victim" in all this? What you "happened" to do was make a conscious decision to do something that's been illegal for the better part of a century. You really have no idea if what you smoke came from a hydroponics lab in someone's attic or from a Abu Sayef field. And when it comes right down to it, you really don't care. If you did, the ramifications of supporting the domestic drug trade would have stopped you long before now. But if the potential of joining those 3/4 million people you mention elsewhere in your post didn't give you pause, what will?
So quit your damned bitching and take your lumps. You made your choice, deal with it. Better yet, go distract yourself by smoking a joint instead. So long as MY tax dollars have to go towards funding methodone clinics, USCG interdictions, and training foreign police and military forces, they'll go towards these commercials as well.
"There are real threats to this country right now."
Ignore the old man behind the curtain!
"With consumer-grade recordable DVD just around the corner, there's no real market here for a new tape format."
DVD video recorders? Yes. DVD recorders that can properly record two different disk layers like a commercial stamper? I don't see that happening any time in the near future. Even without having to contend with the media corps that would rather not see this, the technical problems of bringing holographic recording to the home are rather... well... problematic.
All the deliberate disadvantages of DVD combined with the relatively short life-span of magnetic media (already some of my old VHS tapes are deteriorated to the point of being unviewable)? I'll pass, thanks.
Yes, I know that digitally encoding the tapes will help them survive a bit longer (since you don't have to rely on signal quality as much), but even then that life-span is a drop in the bucket compared to even analog laserdiscs.
"If anyone wanted to run Bleem! on the PS2, I'd have to shake them vigourously for a few minutes. The PS2 already runs legacy PSX games natively."
But there are currently no real advantages to playing PSX games on a PS2. If anything, using a PS2 is a disadvantage (as anybody who's ever tried to play Final Fantasy V on it can attest).
The "features" that the PS2 tries to add are faster disc access times (done in a half-assed manner that causes a/v sync problems in many games) and slightly better texture mapping that is either not noticable or makes things generally ugly.
Bleem! and the countless other PSX emulators for the PC, on the other hand, all improve the graphics considerably by not limiting themselves to PSX-quality resolution and polygon rendering. Sony handicapped the PS2 where PSX games are concerned because they and their third-party developers didn't want to see PSX games competing with PS2 games in terms of graphics. Think what would happen if the $19.95 MGS looked as good as the $49.95 MGS2. Consumers be damned. Personally I would have thought that game companies could just write better games that sell on more merits beyond just graphics, but what do I know?
(Not that Nintendo did much better with GBC and GBA backwards compatability, but that's another rant.)
By selling their Linux distro for the PS2 (with gcc, no less!), Sony is opening Pandora's Box. Any control they thought they had over the hardware is out the window, whether they "allow" it or not. The visual gap between PSX and PS2 games will close considerably (if not totally in many cases). And while the Brits can't even get mod chips in their PS2s, I'll be able to play Japanese SATURN games (mmm... Phantasy Star Collection...) on my PS2. Sony's only saving graces here are that the ability to do all this will run the consumers another $200 and won't be playable on a TV (well, until somebody writes a TV driver for the distro).
"Where do you think this $199.00 really goes?
"
Um, gee, let me think... maybe perhaps to the 40 GB HDD, keyboard, VGA adapter and 100BaseTx NIC that comes with the software? Maybe just a little bit?
$200 would have been very steep if all it came with was the software, but it doesn't seem so bad when you throw in the 40 GB HDD, the NIC, and the keyboard and such. Heck, might be worth it just for the hardware (finally get my PS2 on my LAN, just like my Dreamcast).
Also, the kit includes two DVDs. One of the DVDs is supposedly source code, so that still leaves one full DVD for executable code. So either DVDs are now cheaper to make than CDs, or there could be a !#@%$-load of stuff on this disk.
Third, while Sony has a history of fighting for control of their IP tooth and nail, they aren't so stupid as to believe that they're going to have a strangle-hold on development for PS2 software after the release of this OS. If they wanted to avoid, say, Bleem! being played on the PS2, the only way to avoid that is to just not release Linux (no matter how much they think they've crippled it). So either Sony is being really stupid by releasing the software and trying to lock it down as bes they could, or they're acknowledging the inevitable and letting programmers pretty much do as they will.
I'm a little miffed by the requirement for a monitor (as if I didn't have too little desk space already), but I'd consider buying it for the ability to play emulators alone. Mark my words: By this time next year you'll have most Linux-based emulators (including even maybe an N64 emulator) ready for use on a PS2 running Linux, complete with full controller port support. And then finally my PS2 will be able to play my PSX Final Fantasy games with the picture quality they were supposed to have...