I wonder if you would set of metal detectors too? Normally small amounts of metal are alright, but this has to be acting as an antenna of some sort to get enough energy to vibrate enough to be felt.
So basically he's quoting the fuel costs for just the weight of the person and minimal life support for a one-way trip to Mars assuming a more efficient engine than we have today? That's nice, but it doesn't really capture the full extent of the costs for this trip.
2048 pixels is the max? There are single displays that will exceed that. Heck, the latest iPad is already 2048 pixels wide, and that screen is less than 10 inches diagonal!
Um, where do you think those Xeons and Opterons are installed? In individual towers? 1U servers are basically the same as blades except you have a lot more smaller redundant parts (power supplies, fans, etc...).
Plus, you are griping about hardware that has been retired.
You don't have to solve every problem on day 1. Simply reducing the load on Coal power plants and letting more people charge their (electric) cars off of solar would already make a huge dent in the fossil fuel consumption across the globe. Maybe in 5-10 years such a setup will be practical, depending on advances in battery and solar technologies. It's hard to predict. Airplanes will still use fossil fuels (or maybe biofuels if that pans out), but that's alright because the pressure on them will be lessened from several other sectors of the economy.
Really, the problem is that Solar cells used to be 10x too expensive to be worthwhile for most people. Now they're only 2-3x too expensive. In a few more years they could actually start to become commonplace.
Ugh, I hate those. You get a ticket in the mail for $4 for the speed you were going over (2mph over the speed limit)...and $450 in fines/court fees/camera operator expenses (as a goddamn seperate check!). It's a total rip. You just know it was tagging every single car on the road that day. And they're totally lazy about updating the court records so it's a total nightmare to actually get it paid. The worst thing is that they install them on interstate overpasses and just get pictures of your plate as you go under them, so there's zero warning.
I have to wonder how long until some police department (I'm looking at you, Arizona or Florida) tortures a prisoner to death with one of these? They're already going gangbusters with pepper spray and tazers/stun guns. Theoretically this is military equipment, but police departments have a way of acquiring military hardware for their own uses. The 16 hour warmup time might not be a problem either if you can just leave it plugged in and ready to go 24/7 (assuming it isn't consuming liquid helium or something constantly).
Would ending the practice of locking down material with DRM be considered a political position? I could see that going both ways. This gets muddled even more when you consider entities like the Swedish Pirate Party.
One thing I don't understand: Why build a linear track that is 1000 km long when you could build a much much shorter loop instead? The lateral G force will be a problem, but it has to be cheaper to solve than building a track across most of Europe. You can then spit the train out on a shorter (and elevated) linear section for the last bit.
Floating superconducting tracks 25km up in the air is total lunacy however.
When someone proposes a gigantic megaproject like this and says that it would be technologically possible with todays materials, I always assume that they have oversimplified many parts of the design and that there are serious fundamental problems with the approach. This has been a pretty safe bet so far, and I don't think I'm going to be wrong here.
Here's a question: When you are accelerating a multi-ton mass at 3G up to the top of a tube that is 24 times higher than the highest skyscraper in the world, how do you keep it from buckling under the force? Don't assume that the designers have thought about stuff like this, because most of the time they have not. They just worked out the basics on the back of a cocktail napkin and got all excited.
Space elevator enthusiasts tend to be really bad about this. They're dreamers, not engineers.
Baen has been doing well with that model for over a decade now, the other publishers don't care. Even when Baen was literally the only company making any money on ebooks none of the other publishers would even give that model a second look. If it's not loaded down with DRM and badly overpriced, they just don't see the advantage.
Like all good crazy conspiracy theories this one requires dozens (probably hundreds) of people in on the scam (in which people are killed!) and nobody ever coming forward to bust them. It's a cute read, but when you start thinking about it this plan was just way way too complex to have even gotten as far as it did.
I thought the guy was making a dig at how temporary houses made of "sticks" are. Generally they are the guys who want cinderblock walls all through the house, forgetting that big heavy stone construction materials like that are often more dangerous in earthquake prone areas than more traditional 2x4s.
If the ground shifts several meters then your house is not going to have water, sewer, or power when it lands either. I'm guessing they'll have to tether the house to the ground a little bit (maybe with big springs?) so it doesn't wander too far off of its foundation.
It could be worse, it could be like Babylon 5 where they just added black bars to the top and bottom of the image to go widescreen, cutting off the top of people's heads and spaceships with reckless abandon.
Slashdot Mirror
I need a tongue-in-cheek tag apparently. Apparently this flew over too many people's head.
The next Mac version of Office is going to suck even more isn't it? It's going to be hard to debug when they don't have a platform to run it on.
Also, expect even more interoperability issues in the future, because everybody loves when their stuff doesn't work, right?
I wonder if you would set of metal detectors too? Normally small amounts of metal are alright, but this has to be acting as an antenna of some sort to get enough energy to vibrate enough to be felt.
So basically he's quoting the fuel costs for just the weight of the person and minimal life support for a one-way trip to Mars assuming a more efficient engine than we have today? That's nice, but it doesn't really capture the full extent of the costs for this trip.
2048 pixels is the max? There are single displays that will exceed that. Heck, the latest iPad is already 2048 pixels wide, and that screen is less than 10 inches diagonal!
And your forests will look so much duller in the winter with no PINES around.
blockquote works fine if you are in HTML mode, although it just shows up as another layer of indentation in the new layout.
Oh man, you're going to flip out when I tell you about this thing we call spam.
Um, where do you think those Xeons and Opterons are installed? In individual towers? 1U servers are basically the same as blades except you have a lot more smaller redundant parts (power supplies, fans, etc...).
Plus, you are griping about hardware that has been retired.
You don't have to solve every problem on day 1. Simply reducing the load on Coal power plants and letting more people charge their (electric) cars off of solar would already make a huge dent in the fossil fuel consumption across the globe. Maybe in 5-10 years such a setup will be practical, depending on advances in battery and solar technologies. It's hard to predict. Airplanes will still use fossil fuels (or maybe biofuels if that pans out), but that's alright because the pressure on them will be lessened from several other sectors of the economy.
Really, the problem is that Solar cells used to be 10x too expensive to be worthwhile for most people. Now they're only 2-3x too expensive. In a few more years they could actually start to become commonplace.
Ugh, I hate those. You get a ticket in the mail for $4 for the speed you were going over (2mph over the speed limit)...and $450 in fines/court fees/camera operator expenses (as a goddamn seperate check!). It's a total rip. You just know it was tagging every single car on the road that day. And they're totally lazy about updating the court records so it's a total nightmare to actually get it paid. The worst thing is that they install them on interstate overpasses and just get pictures of your plate as you go under them, so there's zero warning.
I have to wonder how long until some police department (I'm looking at you, Arizona or Florida) tortures a prisoner to death with one of these? They're already going gangbusters with pepper spray and tazers/stun guns. Theoretically this is military equipment, but police departments have a way of acquiring military hardware for their own uses. The 16 hour warmup time might not be a problem either if you can just leave it plugged in and ready to go 24/7 (assuming it isn't consuming liquid helium or something constantly).
GE Money Bank in particular seems ripe for hactivist activity.
Would ending the practice of locking down material with DRM be considered a political position? I could see that going both ways. This gets muddled even more when you consider entities like the Swedish Pirate Party.
So if I play games I'm getting in bed with Sony. If I don't play games I get into bed with hackers. It seems there is no way to win this game.
One thing I don't understand: Why build a linear track that is 1000 km long when you could build a much much shorter loop instead? The lateral G force will be a problem, but it has to be cheaper to solve than building a track across most of Europe. You can then spit the train out on a shorter (and elevated) linear section for the last bit.
Floating superconducting tracks 25km up in the air is total lunacy however.
There's also the slight problem of building a material that is considerably stronger than any known material today.
When someone proposes a gigantic megaproject like this and says that it would be technologically possible with todays materials, I always assume that they have oversimplified many parts of the design and that there are serious fundamental problems with the approach. This has been a pretty safe bet so far, and I don't think I'm going to be wrong here.
Here's a question: When you are accelerating a multi-ton mass at 3G up to the top of a tube that is 24 times higher than the highest skyscraper in the world, how do you keep it from buckling under the force? Don't assume that the designers have thought about stuff like this, because most of the time they have not. They just worked out the basics on the back of a cocktail napkin and got all excited.
Space elevator enthusiasts tend to be really bad about this. They're dreamers, not engineers.
Baen has been doing well with that model for over a decade now, the other publishers don't care. Even when Baen was literally the only company making any money on ebooks none of the other publishers would even give that model a second look. If it's not loaded down with DRM and badly overpriced, they just don't see the advantage.
Like all good crazy conspiracy theories this one requires dozens (probably hundreds) of people in on the scam (in which people are killed!) and nobody ever coming forward to bust them. It's a cute read, but when you start thinking about it this plan was just way way too complex to have even gotten as far as it did.
I thought the guy was making a dig at how temporary houses made of "sticks" are. Generally they are the guys who want cinderblock walls all through the house, forgetting that big heavy stone construction materials like that are often more dangerous in earthquake prone areas than more traditional 2x4s.
If the ground shifts several meters then your house is not going to have water, sewer, or power when it lands either. I'm guessing they'll have to tether the house to the ground a little bit (maybe with big springs?) so it doesn't wander too far off of its foundation.
Wow, that has to be one of the least practical systems ever envisioned in the history of the world.
It could be worse, it could be like Babylon 5 where they just added black bars to the top and bottom of the image to go widescreen, cutting off the top of people's heads and spaceships with reckless abandon.