My appology. I wrote a previous message that got lost. I'll try to reconstruct it:
The continual transfer of energy from sun to earth is just one example of shifting "wealth" from place to place. "Transfer" is NOT "creation". My point that one can't "create" wealth still stands
You are equating energy with wealth, which is IMHO a mistake.
Wealth is the supply of needs and luxuries. It is a monotonic increasing function of the means of production.
The means of production are an indreasing function of 4 things: raw materials, personnel, energy, and technology.
The number of people on earth is rising, hence wealth is higher.
The ammount of raw materials on earth, even w/o recycling, is immense. In fact, once a technologically advanced species has enough energy, all
it needs are the basic elements: of these there are an abbundance of, even w/o breaching the earth's crust. And of course there is recycling, which "only" costs energy.
What is my point ? that once a species has enough energy and technology, raw materials are dirt cheap. A CPU has so much more wealth than the elements making it up, that their relative cost is practically zero. Almost all wealth, if energy is not a concern, is a matter of the arrangements of matter, IOW, of information.
Now for energy. Today we regard energy as the most precious resource, and a scarce, i.e. diminishing, one. Once one takes into account
efficient usage of solar radiation (with sattelite power stations,
SPS), this becomes practically false.
It's not that the sun's nuclear energy will not run out eventually, it's that for human, economic, time scales, a billion years is practically equal to infinity: no economic model can seriously predict
what will happen a thousand years from now, let alone a billion. Hence, the energy emission from the sun should be regarded as a constant flux of energy. Although the flux can, theoretically, be used in full (this would mean an increase of 10^16 in humanity's energy usage, again a number so large it's pointless to discuss), it will not diminish any resource in any measureable ammount.
So, to summarize, once a civilization is advanced enough technologically, both energy, and raw materials are no practical barrier to the growth of wealth.
Now for the key ingredient, technology and knowledge. This is where
the laws of thermodynamics do not hold. Or, more precisely, they hold in such a large time scale that you can practically ignore them for any viable purpose.
The creation of new information and knowledge does not nessecitate destruction of old knowledge. It is there for the taking, although usually no-one but archeologists really wants to. There is, today, no "conservation law of informatics" mandating that the amount of information should be constant (except, again, for theoretic limits so large as to be unpractical).
This is what I ment when I said scientists and engineers create wealth (though by no means am I claiming they are the ONLY ones that do). And this is the reason that humanity, today, is at least thousands of times more wealthy then a thousand years ago: we make things better. And our children, barring some cataclysm, will make more, better and cheaper things than us. Because they will learn from us and be smarter.
This is what I mean when I put that ecclesias has always been wrong: For that smart, but misguded, old man's defence, I can say that the rate of improvement was much slower then. But today it is really so high, that a numeric appraisal of the means of production cannot miss it.
Tee hee hee! Newton is the one who published what I just said:... snipped conservation of energy + 2nd-law of thermo...
Did you read my post ? I did not say the laws of thermo. are invalid.
Rather, the earth is not a closed system, and solar energy is here to stay for billions of years to come. Billions of years is, for all human purposes (including economy...), indistinguishable from infinity.
Hence, once the human race starts to harvest this energy in earnest, energy is practically NOT a diminishing resource.
( And BTW, please lookup the numbers of just how MUCH energy the sun emits, and devide it by how much humanity currently uses. The numbers are,no pun intended, astronomical )
If you look just at the bad and not the good you'll always be losing. This is a common failing of the barren critic, known as ecclesias.
Every major economy is driven at least in part by the destruction of pre-existing, irreplacable resources.
not driven by, burden with.
Nobody creates wealth- they just shift it from place to place, with transactional inefficiency bleeding off 5% here and there.
I think Newton, Gauss, Einstein and all scientists and engineers might have begged to differ...
What economists call "growth" is the same thing venture capitalists call "burn rate". Both can make a system appear vigorous and attractive, for a time. Reality will set back in sometime.
You know, old ecclesiases have been crying:
"there is nothing new under the sun" every generation... and have always been proven wrong by the bright youngsters of the following generation...
Do you have a keyboard with the hebrew charicters on it or to you use a keyboard maping ?
yes. standard in Israel, so if you know someone travelling to Israel just ask him to buy one or two for you. (Or perhaps check with the local jewish community )
How (or do you) use vowle points?
nikud (I forget the english word) isn't normally used by advanced hebrew speakers. But IIRC you can use it with lyx.
For hebrew support of different sw search the
for nikud support in lyx lookup the lyx site tips and tricks section.
I don't know the QT situation, though.
I guess the big question is could I resonably leard to type hebrew with my standard us keyboard?
You can do everything, but I would recomend getting a hebrew keyboard. Keyboards are cheap.
I mean, say I exercise every day for 15 minutes for the rest of my life. That's a lot of frickin' time. I could be having fun in that time
Your assumption of constant time is wrong. Moderate amounts of exercise can cause you to need less sleep (and feel better). Actually you'll probably gain more than 15 minutes a day.
Sure, I might live longer, but those will be years when I'm old and decrepit.
I agree, life expectancy per se is less important than life quality. However, note that you will probably get "old and decrepit" sooner if you'll neglect to maintain your body.
This the current "publish or perish" environment all those papers establishing the fields of Physics and Calculus may not be enough..
actually no. In my institution the metric they use is the number of times your articles are referenced by other researchers.
No problem for Newton there...
(This metric can cause some interesting hacks, BTW. Much inter-institutional acadedmic politics is a sort of "you reference my back, I'll reference yours" mutual understanding )
But higher transient fields have been produced for some time:
Large Z-Pinches routinely reach 100T, and may, at stagnation, quite conceivably reach fields as high as 10^4 T.
In laser produced plasmas, magnetic fields have actually been measured to rise up to more than 3*10^4 T: Tatarakis et. al. Phys. of Plas. 9/5 pp. 2244 (2002)
The fact is that *no* path to commercially useful fusion can be passed without some kind of *invention*.
The invention you're talking about may very well be Sanford's 1995 discovery, that the use of fine wire arrays improves dense Z-pinches X-ray yield by many orders of magnitude.
But... What if there were some fluke impurities in the palladium which made the lattice distorted in such a way as to push two deuterons into one cell.
first, you would need to overcome the atoms' electronic repulsion (van-der-vaals repulsive part). This is called pressure ionization and needs pressure like the inside of gas giants. Highly unlikely inside ordinary solid state matter.
Second, you'll need a way to overcome the nucleon's electostatic repulsion. This requires energies of at least thousands of eVs (>10^7 degrees). I don't see where this energy would come from...
In this case, though, the stakes are huge and quite frankly no method is a clear winner
But some methods are clear losers: some were quite valid science, like muon-CF, for example (which was also quite cool IMHO;) ).
Also laser and particle-beams ICF will probably not work, unless a drastic breakthrough is achieved.
There is one method which currently considered a realistic approach, which is hohlraum-based ICF, using dense wire-array Z-Pinch as X-ray source. If you're interested, lookup the 1998 sci-am article about it.
At any rate, I don't forsee cold fusion being all that useful for making bombs since (if possible) it wouldn't nearly be energetic enough to make a useful explosion. Don't forget that the only reason fusion bombs work is that they include a fission bomb to kick-start the process
I don't know about cold fusion, but for ICF this is probably wrong: if you have ignition w/o a fission-detonator, you can probably increase the mass and yield considerably and still use a fissionless hohlraum-based approach (like a regular H-bomb, w/o the fission)
As a rule of thumb, in nuclear systems, scaling up is much easier than down...
(That doesn't mean that a fission-detonator based HB won't be easier and more efficient, though)
Beyond that, I personally believe that us humans are not yet able to handle a cheap, powerful energy source such as fusion. Imagine if energy were effectively free. What would we do with it? Constructive, imaginative things?
No - with a powerful, cheap energy source comes the ability to make even more powerful, cheap weapons.
What will we do, destroy humanity 10000 times over, instead of 10 ?
Controlled fusion will, very likely, not be able to produce new weapons (not that we need ones; current fission products are quite enough). It will, if successful, solve the energy crisis for centuries. Can you be any more constructive ?
And having worked for 2 years on a plasma-MSc, believe me, on this I know a thing or two.
Re: Why do you hate arabs so ?
on
Cracking GSM
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
You say Israel has:
250 nuclear weapons that makes it a rival to China,
Later, after an amusing bit of zoology, you predict:... Zionism will self destruct on our life time.
Which brings the question:
Why do you hate Israel's arab neighbours so ? If such a raving lunatic (as you say) with 250 nukes (as you claim) will self destruct (as you hope), won't it take its Arab neighbours with it ?
I would think every sane Arab should prey to Allah that Israel is never destroyed...
Or is that kind of reasoning too difficult for you ?
Since most of Orion's bombs (Excuse me, "Pulse units") go off high in the air, there's a lot less fallout than you might expect.
How come ? I thought everything inside the magnetosphere will eventually return down to the atmosphere and down to ground. Is there any mechanism to keep heavy elements in the upper levels of the atmosphere ?
The US has powerful treaty agreements with most industrialized nations which bind their
There are no "powerful agreements". an agreement is as powerful as the interest of keeping it. Was the Kyoto convention "powerful" ?
Do you think that european, japanese or asian nations are more likely to fulfil an exploitatory agreement than the US ? why ? are they "purer of heart" ?
which bind their action should the American courts decide Linux violates SCO IP, nations which further more have a history of rubber stamping copies of America's laws
First, AFAIK, when a court decides anything, it is not a law, but a precedent. Even other (equivelent or higher-ranked) courts in the same country are not nsececerily bound by a precedent. Let alone courts in other countries !
Second, again, there's the matter of perceived self-interest. If linux and FOSS will be viewed (corectly, IMHO), as a way for non-US industries and goverments to avoid US control,,do you think they'll "rubber-stamp" any US wish ? are ther no longer trade-conflicts ?
Third, given the current anti-american popular sentiments (which IMHO are often pure irrational hatred, unrelated to any real issues with the US) what better way for a politician to get public-opinions brownie points than to be percieved as "the fighter for Euro rights against the evil amreican empire" ?
Witness the DCMA-type rollouts in the EU. Most of the developers and contributors are citizens of those countries. While you're correct that not every country will follow suit, I'd wager enough will to neutralize Linux as a viable alternative
No, what you must look at is the body of potential developpers and at the motivation. Two countries first spring to mind: Russia (short-term) and China (longer term). Also there are all the third-worlders, which I believe will gradually take the lead in FOSS anyway, even w/o US foolishness.
To summarize:
I really think the US is a bit insane in it's atitude to FOSS: I don't think the US can eradicate FOSS because, for infra-structure SW, it's just too good a developpment process. But, instead of joining, they're fighting it, hurting mainly themselves.
However, they are a smart people,often smarter than they seem, one can still hope they'll someday come to their senses.
A successful vehicle design has to scale down to where it is efficient even when launching a small satellite.
why ? these are the tool's parameters, work with them. Orion is the best high-thrust high-isp combination currently proposed (AFAIK). If anyone has a better design, great, if not, that's the way to go.
You can't just batch together a bunch of satellite launches into one orion flight either, since such launches need to establish totally different tragectories from each other
That is untrue. Not only you can, it is the most efficient method, since once out of atmosphere, an unmanned vehicle only needs high isp, not high thrust (like you said). So you can launch 20 sat. together with an Orion, and use low thrust high-isp engines (either for each, or on a transport craft) to change the orbits' parameters for each sat.
An orion would be a great spaceship design for use OUTSIDE an atmosphere, because then you don't get fallout drifting far away, but unfortunately it's here on Earth that we need it's high thrust ratio the most
Again, agreed,except it's "magnetosphere", not atmosphere.
But take into account atmosphere (and the water circulation cycle of rain-runoff-ocean-evaporate), and there's nowhere safe to launch from, not even the ice caps. (Imagine how much ice would melt an d end up in the oceans. Even if you discount the radiation danger of that (I don't know the science so I don't know how much of a danger that would really be), there's still the fact that you can't have repeat missions on "ground" that melts away a large part of itself each time you use it. Each launch would have to be in a new location.)
No, that doesn't add up at all. The explosions near the ground are supposed to be small (~20 kilotonnes each). Suppose that you melt even a megaton's worth of ice. That's 10^10 calories which melts and evaporates ~10^8 gr = 100 m^3 of ice... I think the arctic won't even notice it...
As for the ground, you just wait until it freezes over. Let's say, at the most, until next winter.
So Orions aren't a viable solution to build a space program on
Not a viable solution for a space program in it's current, limited form, I agree. But a much better space program could be built using Orions. One where tens of thousands,,perhaps even hundred of thousands of people would be launched to live and work in space. One where space is no longer a curiosity or a millioner's toy. One that will enable the survival of the human race.
IMHO, such a program is the most important endeavour humanity should take in this century.
Palestine isn't a nation, it is under Israeli occupation, and since Israel is allied with the US, it will soon extradite these people to the US so they can be prosecuted.
Yeah, right, exactly on the top of the IDF's agenda. Far more important than stoping genocide-bombers from exploding in busses.
Do you really think anyone in Israel's army actually thinks about **AA ?
I'm not a speaker, but AFAIK "Ras Kabir" is arabic for "large head" definately a pseudonym.
What's more, with the fighting in the west-bank over the last two years, I doubt that people there had time to run any OS project, let alone one with "15 million active online users" cocurently. Especially entertainment-oriented.
This "declaration of war" is probably a hoax, and I wouldn't be surprized if kooky conspiracy-theories actually turn-out true in this case...
(BTW, I'm not much of a speaker, but AFAIK "Ras Kabir" is arabic for "large head" definately a bad pseudonym )
Usually though, a PhD is in fluid dynamics, or string theory, or some other intellectually high brow area that the average business IT department just doesn't care about...
I think you're a bit confused there: while string-theory's attachment to reality is, ahem, somewhat doubious, fluid dynamics, although no less "high-brow", is about as practical as a subject can get.
Of course, with a PhD in fluid-dynamics, you usually wouldn't want to be hired by "IT department".
Slashdot Mirror
However, there is one way out of the mess. Leave. Bugger off.
Where ? most tech people are immigrating into america.
If America's tech industry suddenly died overnight, then maybe they'd pay attention.
Don't think american hightech can't be replaced by 10^5 bright indians
The billparish link definately is.
Did you read my post?
My appology. I wrote a previous message that got lost. I'll try to
reconstruct it:
The continual transfer of energy from sun to earth is just one example of shifting "wealth" from place to place. "Transfer" is NOT "creation". My point that one can't "create" wealth still stands
You are equating energy with wealth, which is IMHO a mistake.
Wealth is the supply of needs and luxuries. It is a monotonic
increasing function of the means of production.
The means of production are an indreasing function of 4 things:
raw materials, personnel, energy, and technology.
The number of people on earth is rising, hence wealth is higher.
The ammount of raw materials on earth, even w/o recycling, is immense.
In fact, once a technologically advanced species has enough energy, all
it needs are the basic elements: of these there are an abbundance of,
even w/o breaching the earth's crust. And of course there is recycling,
which "only" costs energy.
What is my point ? that once a species has enough energy and
technology, raw materials are dirt cheap. A CPU has so much more
wealth than the elements making it up, that their relative cost
is practically zero. Almost all wealth, if energy is not a concern,
is a matter of the arrangements of matter, IOW, of information.
Now for energy. Today we regard energy as the most precious resource,
and a scarce, i.e. diminishing, one. Once one takes into account
efficient usage of solar radiation (with sattelite power stations,
SPS), this becomes practically false.
It's not that the sun's nuclear energy will not run out eventually,
it's that for human, economic, time scales, a billion years is
practically equal to infinity: no economic model can seriously predict
what will happen a thousand years from now, let alone a billion.
Hence, the energy emission from the sun should be regarded as a
constant flux of energy. Although the flux can, theoretically, be
used in full (this would mean an increase of 10^16 in humanity's
energy usage, again a number so large it's pointless to discuss),
it will not diminish any resource in any measureable ammount.
So, to summarize, once a civilization is advanced enough
technologically, both energy, and raw materials are no practical
barrier to the growth of wealth.
Now for the key ingredient, technology and knowledge. This is where
the laws of thermodynamics do not hold. Or, more precisely,
they hold in such a large time scale that you can practically
ignore them for any viable purpose.
The creation of new information and knowledge does not nessecitate
destruction of old knowledge. It is there for the taking, although
usually no-one but archeologists really wants to. There is, today,
no "conservation law of informatics" mandating that the amount
of information should be constant (except, again, for theoretic limits
so large as to be unpractical).
This is what I ment when I said scientists and engineers create wealth
(though by no means am I claiming they are the ONLY ones that do).
And this is the reason that humanity, today, is at least thousands of
times more wealthy then a thousand years ago: we make things better.
And our children, barring some cataclysm, will make more, better and
cheaper things than us. Because they will learn from us and be smarter.
This is what I mean when I put that ecclesias has always been wrong:
For that smart, but misguded, old man's defence, I can say that the
rate of improvement was much slower then. But today it is really so
high, that a numeric appraisal of the means of production cannot
miss it.
Tee hee hee! Newton is the one who published what I just said:
Did you read my post ? I did not say the laws of thermo. are invalid.
Rather, the earth is not a closed system, and solar energy is here to
stay for billions of years to come. Billions of years is, for all human
purposes (including economy
Hence, once the human race starts to harvest this energy in earnest,
energy is practically NOT a diminishing resource.
( And BTW, please lookup the numbers of just how MUCH energy the sun
emits, and devide it by how much humanity currently uses.
The numbers are,no pun intended, astronomical )
Right, it's not zero-sum... it's negative sum.
If you look just at the bad and not the good you'll always be losing.
This is a common failing of the barren critic, known as ecclesias.
Every major economy is driven at least in part by the destruction of pre-existing, irreplacable resources.
not driven by, burden with.
Nobody creates wealth- they just shift it from place to place, with transactional inefficiency bleeding off 5% here and there.
I think Newton, Gauss, Einstein and all scientists and engineers might
have begged to differ
What economists call "growth" is the same thing venture capitalists call "burn rate". Both can make a system appear vigorous and attractive, for a time. Reality will set back in sometime.
You know, old ecclesiases have been crying:
"there is nothing new under the sun"
every generation
bright youngsters of the following generation
opps, sorry but preview doesn't work. it should be
For hebrew support of different sw search the IGLU site.
for nikus support lookup the lyx site tips and tricks section
Do you have a keyboard with the hebrew charicters on it or to you use a keyboard maping ?
yes. standard in Israel, so if you know someone travelling to Israel just ask him to buy one or two for you. (Or perhaps check with the local jewish community )
How (or do you) use vowle points?
nikud (I forget the english word) isn't normally used by advanced hebrew speakers. But IIRC you can use it with lyx.
For hebrew support of different sw search the
for nikud support in lyx lookup the lyx site tips and tricks section.
I don't know the QT situation, though.
I guess the big question is could I resonably leard to type hebrew with my standard us keyboard?
You can do everything, but I would recomend getting a hebrew keyboard. Keyboards are cheap.
good luck.
I mean, say I exercise every day for 15 minutes for the rest of my life. That's a lot of frickin' time. I could be having fun in that time
Your assumption of constant time is wrong. Moderate amounts of exercise can cause you to need less sleep (and feel better). Actually you'll probably gain more than 15 minutes a day.
Sure, I might live longer, but those will be years when I'm old and decrepit.
I agree, life expectancy per se is less important than life quality. However, note that you will probably get "old and decrepit" sooner if you'll neglect to maintain your body.
This the current "publish or perish" environment all those papers establishing the fields of Physics and Calculus may not be enough..
actually no. In my institution the metric they use is the number of times your articles are referenced by other researchers.
No problem for Newton there
(This metric can cause some interesting hacks, BTW. Much inter-institutional acadedmic politics is a sort of "you reference my back, I'll reference yours" mutual understanding )
But higher transient fields have been produced for some time:
Large Z-Pinches routinely reach 100T, and may, at stagnation, quite conceivably reach fields as high as 10^4 T
In laser produced plasmas, magnetic fields have actually been measured to rise up to more than 3*10^4 T
Tatarakis et. al. Phys. of Plas. 9/5 pp. 2244 (2002)
The fact is that *no* path to commercially useful
fusion can be passed without some kind of *invention*.
The invention you're talking about may very well be Sanford's 1995 discovery, that the use of fine wire arrays improves dense Z-pinches X-ray yield by many orders of magnitude.
But... What if there were some fluke impurities in the palladium which made the lattice distorted in such a way as to push two deuterons into one cell.
first, you would need to overcome the atoms' electronic repulsion (van-der-vaals repulsive part). This is called pressure ionization and needs pressure like the inside of gas giants. Highly unlikely inside ordinary solid state matter.
Second, you'll need a way to overcome the nucleon's electostatic repulsion. This requires energies of at least thousands of eVs (>10^7 degrees). I don't see where this energy would come from
In this case, though, the stakes are huge and quite frankly no method is a clear winner
But some methods are clear losers: some were quite valid science, like muon-CF, for example (which was also quite cool IMHO
Also laser and particle-beams ICF will probably not work, unless a drastic breakthrough is achieved.
There is one method which currently considered a realistic approach, which is hohlraum-based ICF, using dense wire-array Z-Pinch as X-ray source. If you're interested, lookup the 1998 sci-am article about it.
At any rate, I don't forsee cold fusion being all that useful for making bombs since (if possible) it wouldn't nearly be energetic enough to make a useful explosion. Don't forget that the only reason fusion bombs work is that they include a fission bomb to kick-start the process
...
I don't know about cold fusion, but for ICF this is probably wrong: if you have ignition w/o a fission-detonator, you can probably increase the mass and yield considerably and still use a fissionless hohlraum-based approach (like a regular H-bomb, w/o the fission)
As a rule of thumb, in nuclear systems, scaling up is much easier than down
(That doesn't mean that a fission-detonator based HB won't be easier and more efficient, though)
Beyond that, I personally believe that us humans are not yet able to handle a cheap, powerful energy source such as fusion. Imagine if energy were effectively free. What would we do with it? Constructive, imaginative things?
No - with a powerful, cheap energy source comes the ability to make even more powerful, cheap weapons.
What will we do, destroy humanity 10000 times over, instead of 10 ?
Controlled fusion will, very likely, not be able to produce new weapons (not that we need ones; current fission products are quite enough). It will, if successful, solve the energy crisis for centuries. Can you be any more constructive ?
And having worked for 2 years on a plasma-MSc, believe me, on this I know a thing or two.
You say Israel has:
250 nuclear weapons that makes it a rival to China,
Later, after an amusing bit of zoology, you predict:
Which brings the question:
Why do you hate Israel's arab neighbours so ? If such a raving lunatic (as you say) with 250 nukes (as you claim) will self destruct (as you hope), won't it take its Arab neighbours with it ?
I would think every sane Arab should prey to Allah that Israel is never destroyed
Or is that kind of reasoning too difficult for you ?
Since most of Orion's bombs (Excuse me, "Pulse units") go off high in the air, there's a lot less fallout than you might expect.
How come ?
I thought everything inside the magnetosphere will eventually return down to the atmosphere and down to ground. Is there any mechanism to keep heavy elements in the upper levels of the atmosphere ?
OK, IANAL, but this looks a bit inaccurate to me:
,do you think they'll "rubber-stamp" any US wish ? are ther no longer trade-conflicts ?
The US has powerful treaty agreements with most industrialized nations which bind their
There are no "powerful agreements". an agreement is as powerful as the interest of keeping it. Was the Kyoto convention "powerful" ?
Do you think that european, japanese or asian nations are more likely to fulfil an exploitatory agreement than the US ? why ? are they "purer of heart" ?
which bind their action should the American courts decide Linux violates SCO IP, nations which further more have a history of rubber stamping copies of America's laws
First, AFAIK, when a court decides anything, it is not a law, but a precedent. Even other (equivelent or higher-ranked) courts in the same country are not nsececerily bound by a precedent. Let alone courts in other countries !
Second, again, there's the matter of perceived self-interest. If linux and FOSS will be viewed (corectly, IMHO), as a way for non-US industries and goverments to avoid US control,
Third, given the current anti-american popular sentiments (which IMHO are often pure irrational hatred, unrelated to any real issues with the US) what better way for a politician to get public-opinions brownie points than to be percieved as "the fighter for Euro rights against the evil amreican empire" ?
Witness the DCMA-type rollouts in the EU. Most of the developers and contributors are citizens of those countries. While you're correct that not every country will follow suit, I'd wager enough will to neutralize Linux as a viable alternative
No, what you must look at is the body of potential developpers and at the motivation. Two countries first spring to mind: Russia (short-term) and China (longer term). Also there are all the third-worlders, which I believe will gradually take the lead in FOSS anyway, even w/o US foolishness.
To summarize:
I really think the US is a bit insane in it's atitude to FOSS: I don't think the US can eradicate FOSS because, for infra-structure SW, it's just too good a developpment process. But, instead of joining, they're fighting it, hurting mainly themselves.
However, they are a smart people,often smarter than they seem, one can still hope they'll someday come to their senses.
SCO wins, Linux is destroyed
.
Why ? At the worst kooky scenario, linux will just turn illegal
in the US
Linux will not be destroyed by this, but the US industries may suffer somewhat.
A successful vehicle design has to scale down to where it is efficient even when launching a small satellite.
... I think the arctic won't even notice it...
,perhaps even hundred of thousands of people would be launched to live and work in space. One where space is no longer a curiosity or a millioner's toy. One that will enable the survival of the human race.
why ? these are the tool's parameters, work with them. Orion is the best high-thrust high-isp combination currently proposed (AFAIK). If anyone has a better design, great, if not, that's the way to go.
You can't just batch together a bunch of satellite launches into one orion flight either, since such launches need to establish totally different tragectories from each other
That is untrue. Not only you can, it is the most efficient method, since once out of atmosphere, an unmanned vehicle only needs high isp, not high thrust (like you said). So you can launch 20 sat. together with an Orion, and use low thrust high-isp engines (either for each, or on a transport craft) to change the orbits' parameters for each sat.
An orion would be a great spaceship design for use OUTSIDE an atmosphere, because then you don't get fallout drifting far away, but unfortunately it's here on Earth that we need it's high thrust ratio the most
Again, agreed,except it's "magnetosphere", not atmosphere.
But take into account atmosphere (and the water circulation cycle of rain-runoff-ocean-evaporate), and there's nowhere safe to launch from, not even the ice caps. (Imagine how much ice would melt an d end up in the oceans. Even if you discount the radiation danger of that (I don't know the science so I don't know how much of a danger that would really be), there's still the fact that you can't have repeat missions on "ground" that melts away a large part of itself each time you use it. Each launch would have to be in a new location.)
No, that doesn't add up at all. The explosions near the ground are supposed to be small (~20 kilotonnes each). Suppose that you melt even a megaton's worth of ice. That's 10^10 calories which melts and evaporates ~10^8 gr = 100 m^3 of ice
As for the ground, you just wait until it freezes over. Let's say, at the most, until next winter.
So Orions aren't a viable solution to build a space program on
Not a viable solution for a space program in it's current, limited form, I agree. But a much better space program could be built using Orions. One where tens of thousands,
IMHO, such a program is the most important endeavour humanity should take in this century.
Palestine isn't a nation, it is under Israeli occupation, and since Israel is allied with the US, it will soon extradite these people to the US so they can be prosecuted.
Yeah, right, exactly on the top of the IDF's agenda.
Far more important than stoping genocide-bombers from exploding in busses.
Do you really think anyone in Israel's army actually thinks about **AA ?
I'm not a speaker, but AFAIK "Ras Kabir" is arabic for "large head"
definately a pseudonym.
What's more, with the fighting in the west-bank over the last two years,
I doubt that people there had time to run any OS project, let alone one with "15 million active online users" cocurently. Especially entertainment-oriented.
This "declaration of war" is probably a hoax, and I wouldn't be surprized if kooky conspiracy-theories actually turn-out true in this case
(BTW, I'm not much of a speaker, but AFAIK "Ras Kabir" is arabic for "large head" definately a bad pseudonym )
It's not the money that's important.
It's the people.
Invest in smart people solving specific hard problems, and you'll have a lot of smart people able to solve other generally hard problems.
I believe copying technology is actually a lot like copying in exams: you get a short-term gratification, but you lose long-term abilities.
Thankyou. My Breakfast is now so much imroved.
Usually though, a PhD is in fluid dynamics, or string theory, or some other intellectually high brow area that the average business IT department just doesn't care about...
I think you're a bit confused there: while string-theory's attachment to reality is, ahem, somewhat doubious, fluid dynamics, although no less "high-brow", is about as practical as a subject can get.
Of course, with a PhD in fluid-dynamics, you usually wouldn't want to be hired by "IT department".