A virus dangerous enough to destroy an entire planet would defeat itself - it would be a evolutionary phreak and oculdn't survive. Consider this:
Most scientists rightly consider Ebola virus a 'defunct' virus - not a good one. Ebola will kill a victim in 3 days (or so, maybe a week depending on the strain). By doing so it lessons it chances of infecting the next host. The only reason Ebola is such a (possible) problem today is b/c of things like airlines. In actuality, a ebola 'outbreak' will occur and then will rapidly die out as the hosts die faster than the virus can spread. IN a sense Ebola does one thing perfectly (reproduce extremely fast by consuming bodily tissues) but another very, very badly (destroys the hosts too fast).
A far more 'perfect' virus would be something along the lines of AIDS/HIV. These virus spread very, very slowly and can remain inside their hosts for 10-20 years in some cases. Remember the point of a virus is to Duplicate itself and survive. Ebola just isn't as effective as AIDS in doing so. I.E. 100-200 Ebola deaths a year compared to 5-6 million AIDS deaths a year (and rising with an infection rate of around 60% in some African countries).
Indeed, it would be nearly impossible for a virus to do as you say (wipe out a planet) nor would it make evolutionary sense (no, not a perfect theory but do you really want to argue creationism?). It would most likely burn itself out. No virus ever discovered can travel between more than a few species or genus that I can ever recall hearing about. And don't forget that life has been evolving on this planet for 3-4 billion years far longer than martian life would've had time to evolve and probably a higher mutation rate (due to larger amounts of radiation - closer to sun).
The difference in the organisms make travel impossible between them. Not only that but remember people *Do* survive Ebola and other types of doomsday virus's. The mortality rate may be 90% but that 10% will be immune to the virus from then on.
Ok, so your perfect virus wiped out 90% of the life on a planet (we will discuss why this is nearly impossible ina second). 10 % remaining. Planet screwed right? Nadda. During the.. oh crap can't remmeber the eon.. I think it was phanerozic - something transition around *98%* of all species on earth died (most likely due to a huge meteor impact). NINETY EIGHT PERCENT. Within 50 mil years afterwards life had recovered, if I am wrong on any of this please some geologist correct me but I think I got the time frame pretty close.
Yet we are still here and the earth fine. You see life expands expotentially (sp?). You oculd wipe out everything on the earth except for a few bacteria (and I mean a FEW one or two) and the earth woudl be ship-shape in a say 100 million years.
At the height of the cold war if the soviet/us/china released all their nuclear weapons at once distrubuted evenly over the earths surfact they wouldn't destroy life on earth. B/c of things like aneorabic bacteria just discovered living miles underground, or deep-sea vent colonies living 10's of kilometers under the sea or mold spores perserved in rock, etc, etc ad nausem.
The final point is this: why the hell would the bacteria be dangerous to us? TO do so martian life would've had to have had a DNA/whatever structure incredibly close to ours. SOooo here we go:
Your virus has to:
A.) Somehow destroy all life on a planet within a relatively short timeframe (say 10,000 years) otherwise life will adapt, and fast.
B.) Be able to infect every single species of life and mutate fast enough to overcome any changes between the species.
C.) Be able to survive for oh, 1 billion or so years on the martian surface blasted by UV, in near freezing conditions with no life to prey upon to reproduce.
D.) Be able to adapt to EARTHS lifeforms somehow.
E.) Somehow this has to make sense evolutionary-wise (remember life always expands, not contracts)
Anyways sorry for the long post.
Re:I honestly can't figure out
on
What is .NET?
·
· Score: 1
Actually the Itanium contains the ability to run x86 instructions on-chip even though it is equipped with an entriely new instruction set. Here is an extremetech article on the built-on x86 instructions.
INtel doesn't plan on abandoning the x86 instruction set all that soon.
Notice that damm near every single day we hear of company's (Music/Video mostly) suing company's b/c of alleged copyright infrigements yet lo and behold it is having absolutely no effect on music/video stealing,sharing,fair use whatever?
The RIAA/MPAA can sue company's into oblivion: Napster, bleem!, replay, etc and, to be honest, it will have absolutely no effect upon the amount of money they lose
People have seen that you can get whatever music, video off the internet and will not stop doing it because X company was put out of business. To be effective they will have to start suing individual people, millions of them, who have copyrighted material on their hard drive (Cough, cough does 2000 mp3's and 423 ST:TNG,DS9,VOY,ENT episdoes count? =))
I love apple personally but to switch an entire university system over to apple computers would be way too expensive. For linux you don't have to 'buy' anything (support or such yes) but for apple you have to purchase literally thousands of computers.
Valid counterpoints. Nobody said it would be easy. But in my view, and of many people on campus, getting rid of M$ is far preferable to losing faculty (UNL is already way below the curve for teacher pay/benefits) and teaching resources which would hurt far more than having to 'learn' how to use a new system.
Tried that. I work in a computer lab in the main library on campus and I suggested equipping 20-25 computers with linux and star office.
My manager wouldn't approve it - wouldn't even think of it. The best I managed to do was get StarOffice for windows installed (which is actually quite useful with all of its converters built in).
At my university (Nebraska-Lincoln) we are currently facing budget cuts to the tune of something like 8.3 million dollars. Now, the university has a contract with Microsoft to for about a few million a year to supply all computers on campus with windows/office.
When somebody suggested not renewing the contract (Thereby saving a few mil) and instead switching over as much of campus as possible to Linux they where laughed out the door by the ITS people. They said, among other things:
1.)Cost too much to implement (retraining users, etc)
2.)Would be too hard to support
3.)Wouldn't provide students with the knowledge of computers to succeed in the real world I.E. Microsoft software is used by 99% of the business world and having everything run linux would simply not be effective in teaching students how to use 'real world' applications.
Where they right? I don't think so. But instead of cancelling the contract they are now cutting faculty raises, a number of teaching centers, and some extra programs.
Before we go and change how gov'ts contract software we must realize just how damm impossible it is to get them to get past microsoft's FUD.
Not a programmer either so if I get this wrong sorry however I think:
No it is architecture independent. There is nothing in this patch that address hardware - it simply allows the kernel to halt processs to free up resources for other more pressing functions, a kernel function; not a hardware function.
Most notably, Vermont's standards require an opt-in decision for the sharing of information with third parties -- typically marketing agreements that financial institutions use to round out service offerings to customers.
Round out services to customers eh? Guess that includes selling your personal data to whoever wanted it.
Second Favorite:
they are warning that Vermont residents may be excluded en masse from the kinds of offers and information that data sharing allows.
Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooo!!!! I *wanted* beasty porn in my email!!
P.S. Sounds like a good idea to move to Vermont.. now where the hell is that state anyways
=)
Copied this from a previous post (but in general tell them the same thing - they will run away).
"I know someone that was audited by the BSA and decided to fight it. Basically they countered by stating they wanted full disclosure of who reported them so as to determine the validity of the claim prior to wasting internal resources and dollars. They also argued that the reporting tools are a violation of privacy. Yes, they expected them to place some software on their network which scans their entire network not to mention each machine's registry. Third, they also argued that even if they were in violation of license, the license is between them and the vendor (after all, the license does not allow for the BSA as having legal proxy interests) and unless the vendor in questions decides that they'd like to personally persue the issue, the BSA does not have legal authority or the legal grounds to persue the action. Furthermore, they argued that even if something odd was discovered and they lost, only the government has the right to impose fines on legal matters as such and they would be within their legal rights to simply purchase any outstanding licenses or settle directly with the vendor in question and completely dismiss the BSA altogether thereby eliminating the need to pay any fines or added fees.
Last I heard, even though two ex-employees had turned them in, the BSA simply walked from the issue as, from what I gathered, they really don't have a legal leg to stand on."
They would balk at the suggestion but that doesn't make it any less true. A large number of very famous books (No I can't remember the names.. sigh) have been printed on this subject and all come to the conclusion that the german public willingly supported hitler until the very end. By 'public' you are talking the majority (At least) of the population.
Remember, Hitler had led them to believe that their humiliating loss in WWI and the Versaille treaty where the result of the Jews/Foreign powers.
Also, don't ever, ever forget this fact: Hitler was ELECTED chancellor.
Finally, as for the Holocaust, it is pretty hard to not notice millions of people all of a sudden disappearing from around you.
Liquid oxygen is just one of hte fuels you need. Try handling liquid hydrogen. Needs to be cryogenically frozen(-253 C) and is EXPLOSIVE upon contact with oxygen (hence why it is used as a fuel.) Other fuels (ammonia, kerosene, etc) have similar drawbacks the biggest being that they are not efficent enough to use in most cases.
A 30 day requirement is what the shuttle can do. THe shuttle can stay in space for 30 days with a crew of 7 and let them breathe, drink, etc. I imagine that your ship would need to do about the same to make it useful in space (in case of malfuncntion, extended missions, etc)
A 99.4% success ratio is what the shuttle has accomplished OVER 20 YEARS! You want to do three flights eh? Guess what the shuttle did around 40 before the challenger blew up. Also, consider the fact that the space program hasn't had an accident in Fifteen years. Can't say that about the airline industry.
The most complex machines part. SPace isn't a forgiving enviroment. THey have to be complex... anything less results in sub-par performance and risks (just look @ the results of the soviet space program). Normal Liquid-Rocket enqines are some of the most complex machinerary on the face of the planet and you can't do much of anything to change that.
You are right - to get into space it must become a hell of alot simpler. Unfortunately, no one besides national gov'ts (i.e. US, ESA) has enough funding to develop the type of technology's needed to do this (ScramJets, Ramjets, Orion, Nerva, etc).
The Wright Brothers (or pick your own early aviation pioneers)did not require a 15,000 man ground support crew to fly.
Yeah and the wright brothers didn't have to:
1.) accelerate to Mach 25
2.) deal with extremely dangerous and hard to handle fuels
3.) Figure out how to live in an incredibly hazardous enviroment of no air, extreme heat/cold, large amounts of radiation, micrometoriods, and oh yeah, You have to support a crew for 30 days also
4.) Wright brothers didn't have to maintain a 99.4% success ratio (Nasa ratio with the shuttle) otherwise their funding would be destroyed
5.) Deal with one of the most complex machines ever made in the history of mankind with somewhere around 12,000 moving parts and millions upon millions of possible problems
Is nasa perfect? Hell no they waste a shit ton of money. But don't just babble about how the commercial sector could somehow get it done better.. They won't. 99.4% seems like a pretty good succes rate to me. Oh yeah btw all of the shuttle matinence is outsourced to a private company.
It doesn't work for some people. But it does work for some things or a specific audience. Ad agencies aren't stupid. They do things that *work* (SOMEBODY has to buy those damm XCams)
Hell come to think of it it works on all of us over-educated (or under I suppose) slashdotters. Hmm let me think.. who owns slashdot? Oh that's right VA linux. Hey that's funny why is their that OSDN bar everywhere I look. Not trying to be a troll here but let us not all become too sanctimonous. We are posting on a site which is owned by someone who uses this site as a really big product placement ad for their services (not any worse of course than AOL-TW or anyother massive media conglomerate but still..)
Not a physical reason why you shouldn't do this but an economic one.
The whole point of a space elevator is to get out of Earth's 'gravity well' cheaply. Nothing, and I mean nothing (well besides transporters) is as cheap as a space elevator (once you recoup building costs that is). Also, nothing is as safe as a space elevator (relatively speaking - as long as it doesn't come down on you).
Now for your scheme to build a 60-80km high tower consider how much money you would save. Virtually none. The platform isn't high enough to seriously affect a 'planes' carrying weight (at least not any more than a spacecraft or a Scram/Ram - jet powered spaceplane.
Simply put the benefits in a tower of that size can be more easily realized with two-stage to orbit spaceplanes or Scram or Ram jets.
Various Soviet Spaceplanets
Not neccesarily. 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.) Any prognosis of doom would have to come from detaching it from the space-side in which cause Earth's gravity would pull it down. Now, crashing an airplane into the WTC is one thing, taking down a orbiting space asteroid is quite another. (Of course in Kim Stanley Robinsons Mars series that is exactly what happened but..) 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.
If it *does* fall down it won't case all that much damage. The cable will wrap around the earth in a straight line from where it was cut. At the beginning of the impact the kinetic energy wouldn't be that much it wouldn't be until later on that you would have to worry about any serious affect. By the second time around the earth the cable will began deterioting and exploding in the upper atmosphere.
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. It shouldn't be too hard to figure out a spot where it nearly completely avoids populated areas. 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. place it on the coast, the thing breaks off and the 1/10 impacts the pacific/atlantic ocean. Done deal.
If we can build a damm space elevator we can protect it!
Slashdot Mirror
WARNING: long post
A virus dangerous enough to destroy an entire planet would defeat itself - it would be a evolutionary phreak and oculdn't survive. Consider this:
Most scientists rightly consider Ebola virus a 'defunct' virus - not a good one. Ebola will kill a victim in 3 days (or so, maybe a week depending on the strain). By doing so it lessons it chances of infecting the next host. The only reason Ebola is such a (possible) problem today is b/c of things like airlines. In actuality, a ebola 'outbreak' will occur and then will rapidly die out as the hosts die faster than the virus can spread. IN a sense Ebola does one thing perfectly (reproduce extremely fast by consuming bodily tissues) but another very, very badly (destroys the hosts too fast).
A far more 'perfect' virus would be something along the lines of AIDS/HIV. These virus spread very, very slowly and can remain inside their hosts for 10-20 years in some cases. Remember the point of a virus is to Duplicate itself and survive. Ebola just isn't as effective as AIDS in doing so. I.E. 100-200 Ebola deaths a year compared to 5-6 million AIDS deaths a year (and rising with an infection rate of around 60% in some African countries).
Indeed, it would be nearly impossible for a virus to do as you say (wipe out a planet) nor would it make evolutionary sense (no, not a perfect theory but do you really want to argue creationism?). It would most likely burn itself out. No virus ever discovered can travel between more than a few species or genus that I can ever recall hearing about. And don't forget that life has been evolving on this planet for 3-4 billion years far longer than martian life would've had time to evolve and probably a higher mutation rate (due to larger amounts of radiation - closer to sun).
The difference in the organisms make travel impossible between them. Not only that but remember people *Do* survive Ebola and other types of doomsday virus's. The mortality rate may be 90% but that 10% will be immune to the virus from then on.
Ok, so your perfect virus wiped out 90% of the life on a planet (we will discuss why this is nearly impossible ina second). 10 % remaining. Planet screwed right? Nadda. During the.. oh crap can't remmeber the eon.. I think it was phanerozic - something transition around *98%* of all species on earth died (most likely due to a huge meteor impact). NINETY EIGHT PERCENT. Within 50 mil years afterwards life had recovered, if I am wrong on any of this please some geologist correct me but I think I got the time frame pretty close.
Yet we are still here and the earth fine. You see life expands expotentially (sp?). You oculd wipe out everything on the earth except for a few bacteria (and I mean a FEW one or two) and the earth woudl be ship-shape in a say 100 million years.
At the height of the cold war if the soviet/us/china released all their nuclear weapons at once distrubuted evenly over the earths surfact they wouldn't destroy life on earth. B/c of things like aneorabic bacteria just discovered living miles underground, or deep-sea vent colonies living 10's of kilometers under the sea or mold spores perserved in rock, etc, etc ad nausem.
The final point is this: why the hell would the bacteria be dangerous to us? TO do so martian life would've had to have had a DNA/whatever structure incredibly close to ours. SOooo here we go:
Your virus has to:
A.) Somehow destroy all life on a planet within a relatively short timeframe (say 10,000 years) otherwise life will adapt, and fast.
B.) Be able to infect every single species of life and mutate fast enough to overcome any changes between the species.
C.) Be able to survive for oh, 1 billion or so years on the martian surface blasted by UV, in near freezing conditions with no life to prey upon to reproduce.
D.) Be able to adapt to EARTHS lifeforms somehow.
E.) Somehow this has to make sense evolutionary-wise (remember life always expands, not contracts)
Anyways sorry for the long post.
Actually the Itanium contains the ability to run x86 instructions on-chip even though it is equipped with an entriely new instruction set. Here is an extremetech article on the built-on x86 instructions.
INtel doesn't plan on abandoning the x86 instruction set all that soon.
Everyone is suing people who make devices
Notice that damm near every single day we hear of company's (Music/Video mostly) suing company's b/c of alleged copyright infrigements yet lo and behold it is having absolutely no effect on music/video stealing,sharing,fair use whatever?
The RIAA/MPAA can sue company's into oblivion: Napster, bleem!, replay, etc and, to be honest, it will have absolutely no effect upon the amount of money they lose
People have seen that you can get whatever music, video off the internet and will not stop doing it because X company was put out of business. To be effective they will have to start suing individual people, millions of them, who have copyrighted material on their hard drive (Cough, cough does 2000 mp3's and 423 ST:TNG,DS9,VOY,ENT episdoes count? =))
They are on a sinking ship...
I love apple personally but to switch an entire university system over to apple computers would be way too expensive. For linux you don't have to 'buy' anything (support or such yes) but for apple you have to purchase literally thousands of computers.
Valid counterpoints. Nobody said it would be easy. But in my view, and of many people on campus, getting rid of M$ is far preferable to losing faculty (UNL is already way below the curve for teacher pay/benefits) and teaching resources which would hurt far more than having to 'learn' how to use a new system.
Tried that. I work in a computer lab in the main library on campus and I suggested equipping 20-25 computers with linux and star office.
My manager wouldn't approve it - wouldn't even think of it. The best I managed to do was get StarOffice for windows installed (which is actually quite useful with all of its converters built in).
At my university (Nebraska-Lincoln) we are currently facing budget cuts to the tune of something like 8.3 million dollars. Now, the university has a contract with Microsoft to for about a few million a year to supply all computers on campus with windows/office.
When somebody suggested not renewing the contract (Thereby saving a few mil) and instead switching over as much of campus as possible to Linux they where laughed out the door by the ITS people. They said, among other things:
1.)Cost too much to implement (retraining users, etc)
2.)Would be too hard to support
3.)Wouldn't provide students with the knowledge of computers to succeed in the real world I.E. Microsoft software is used by 99% of the business world and having everything run linux would simply not be effective in teaching students how to use 'real world' applications.
Where they right? I don't think so. But instead of cancelling the contract they are now cutting faculty raises, a number of teaching centers, and some extra programs.
Before we go and change how gov'ts contract software we must realize just how damm impossible it is to get them to get past microsoft's FUD.
Not a programmer either so if I get this wrong sorry however I think:
No it is architecture independent. There is nothing in this patch that address hardware - it simply allows the kernel to halt processs to free up resources for other more pressing functions, a kernel function; not a hardware function.
Just trying to point out that anymore it seems like the consumer (where ever they are) are always on the losing end of the stick.
Sigh. Yeah. It's been awhile since CSE 101
Nope. You can't. Welcome to the Post-DMCA world of mega-corporations and huge amounts of lobbying money.
You see, it's all One's and Zero's. They are the One's and we are the Zero's. No matter how many AND operations you perform 1 AND 0 will always = 1.
My Personal Favorite Quote:
o oooooooooo!!!! I *wanted* beasty porn in my email!!
Most notably, Vermont's standards require an opt-in decision for the sharing of information with third parties -- typically marketing agreements that financial institutions use to round out service offerings to customers.
Round out services to customers eh? Guess that includes selling your personal data to whoever wanted it.
Second Favorite:
they are warning that Vermont residents may be excluded en masse from the kinds of offers and information that data sharing allows.
Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
P.S. Sounds like a good idea to move to Vermont.. now where the hell is that state anyways
=)
Sometimes is nice being right.. even if I prove that I am an idiot at spelling. =).
Right but it shows them in a seperate frame which would, apparently, be illegal.
Doesn't say and IANAL but I believe this would allow them to sue you to remove them (I.E. copyright violation) and hold you liable for damages.
Which makes you wonder just how many people are going to file lawsuits against Google soon. Too bad I really loved their image search.
Oh. That might be a factor lol. Sorry figured you where in the US. What I would suggest is
getting a lawyer and fast
re-image all your drives and make sure that everything on their isn't pirated.
Lock out employees from installing anything at all
That should work. Anything else you can tell em to go F**K themselves
Copied this from a previous post (but in general tell them the same thing - they will run away).
"I know someone that was audited by the BSA and decided to fight it. Basically they countered by stating they wanted full disclosure of who reported them so as to determine the validity of the claim prior to wasting internal resources and dollars. They also argued that the reporting tools are a violation of privacy. Yes, they expected them to place some software on their network which scans their entire network not to mention each machine's registry. Third, they also argued that even if they were in violation of license, the license is between them and the vendor (after all, the license does not allow for the BSA as having legal proxy interests) and unless the vendor in questions decides that they'd like to personally persue the issue, the BSA does not have legal authority or the legal grounds to persue the action. Furthermore, they argued that even if something odd was discovered and they lost, only the government has the right to impose fines on legal matters as such and they would be within their legal rights to simply purchase any outstanding licenses or settle directly with the vendor in question and completely dismiss the BSA altogether thereby eliminating the need to pay any fines or added fees.
Last I heard, even though two ex-employees had turned them in, the BSA simply walked from the issue as, from what I gathered, they really don't have a legal leg to stand on."
Not to be a jackass/troll but don't randomly quote people without giving credit:
Original post
They would balk at the suggestion but that doesn't make it any less true. A large number of very famous books (No I can't remember the names.. sigh) have been printed on this subject and all come to the conclusion that the german public willingly supported hitler until the very end. By 'public' you are talking the majority (At least) of the population.
Remember, Hitler had led them to believe that their humiliating loss in WWI and the Versaille treaty where the result of the Jews/Foreign powers.
Also, don't ever, ever forget this fact: Hitler was ELECTED chancellor.
Finally, as for the Holocaust, it is pretty hard to not notice millions of people all of a sudden disappearing from around you.
Liquid oxygen is just one of hte fuels you need. Try handling liquid hydrogen. Needs to be cryogenically frozen(-253 C) and is EXPLOSIVE upon contact with oxygen (hence why it is used as a fuel.) Other fuels (ammonia, kerosene, etc) have similar drawbacks the biggest being that they are not efficent enough to use in most cases.
A 30 day requirement is what the shuttle can do. THe shuttle can stay in space for 30 days with a crew of 7 and let them breathe, drink, etc. I imagine that your ship would need to do about the same to make it useful in space (in case of malfuncntion, extended missions, etc)
A 99.4% success ratio is what the shuttle has accomplished OVER 20 YEARS! You want to do three flights eh? Guess what the shuttle did around 40 before the challenger blew up. Also, consider the fact that the space program hasn't had an accident in Fifteen years. Can't say that about the airline industry.
The most complex machines part. SPace isn't a forgiving enviroment. THey have to be complex... anything less results in sub-par performance and risks (just look @ the results of the soviet space program). Normal Liquid-Rocket enqines are some of the most complex machinerary on the face of the planet and you can't do much of anything to change that.
You are right - to get into space it must become a hell of alot simpler. Unfortunately, no one besides national gov'ts (i.e. US, ESA) has enough funding to develop the type of technology's needed to do this (ScramJets, Ramjets, Orion, Nerva, etc).
Actually many companies do make a ton of money of space. Telco's and others.
Of course.. a single medium sized asteroid (in the 30km diamter range) has a estimated 1$ trillion dollars worth of metals. Nice huh?
The Wright Brothers (or pick your own early aviation pioneers)did not require a 15,000 man ground support crew to fly.
:
Yeah and the wright brothers didn't have to
1.) accelerate to Mach 25
2.) deal with extremely dangerous and hard to handle fuels
3.) Figure out how to live in an incredibly hazardous enviroment of no air, extreme heat/cold, large amounts of radiation, micrometoriods, and oh yeah, You have to support a crew for 30 days also
4.) Wright brothers didn't have to maintain a 99.4% success ratio (Nasa ratio with the shuttle) otherwise their funding would be destroyed
5.) Deal with one of the most complex machines ever made in the history of mankind with somewhere around 12,000 moving parts and millions upon millions of possible problems
Is nasa perfect? Hell no they waste a shit ton of money. But don't just babble about how the commercial sector could somehow get it done better.. They won't. 99.4% seems like a pretty good succes rate to me. Oh yeah btw all of the shuttle matinence is outsourced to a private company.
It doesn't work for some people. But it does work for some things or a specific audience. Ad agencies aren't stupid. They do things that *work* (SOMEBODY has to buy those damm XCams)
Hell come to think of it it works on all of us over-educated (or under I suppose) slashdotters. Hmm let me think.. who owns slashdot? Oh that's right VA linux. Hey that's funny why is their that OSDN bar everywhere I look. Not trying to be a troll here but let us not all become too sanctimonous. We are posting on a site which is owned by someone who uses this site as a really big product placement ad for their services (not any worse of course than AOL-TW or anyother massive media conglomerate but still..)
Not a physical reason why you shouldn't do this but an economic one.
The whole point of a space elevator is to get out of Earth's 'gravity well' cheaply. Nothing, and I mean nothing (well besides transporters) is as cheap as a space elevator (once you recoup building costs that is). Also, nothing is as safe as a space elevator (relatively speaking - as long as it doesn't come down on you).
Now for your scheme to build a 60-80km high tower consider how much money you would save. Virtually none. The platform isn't high enough to seriously affect a 'planes' carrying weight (at least not any more than a spacecraft or a Scram/Ram - jet powered spaceplane.
Simply put the benefits in a tower of that size can be more easily realized with two-stage to orbit spaceplanes or Scram or Ram jets.
Various Soviet Spaceplanets
Not neccesarily. 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.) Any prognosis of doom would have to come from detaching it from the space-side in which cause Earth's gravity would pull it down. Now, crashing an airplane into the WTC is one thing, taking down a orbiting space asteroid is quite another. (Of course in Kim Stanley Robinsons Mars series that is exactly what happened but..) 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.
If it *does* fall down it won't case all that much damage. The cable will wrap around the earth in a straight line from where it was cut. At the beginning of the impact the kinetic energy wouldn't be that much it wouldn't be until later on that you would have to worry about any serious affect. By the second time around the earth the cable will began deterioting and exploding in the upper atmosphere.
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. It shouldn't be too hard to figure out a spot where it nearly completely avoids populated areas. 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. place it on the coast, the thing breaks off and the 1/10 impacts the pacific/atlantic ocean. Done deal.
If we can build a damm space elevator we can protect it!