While we do not have the tech now, we will never develop it unless we try. My first suggestion would be to bag a comet, literally. Find a smallish comet and wrap it in a giant plastic bag. Vent the gas released by the comet to bring it into a circular orbit. As the ices that make up the comet melt away, they can be refined into water, and propellant.
As for meteor hits, and burying stuff to keep them safe, you can redirect sunlight with mirrors. Nothing critical needs to be exposed.
I guess you missed the ST:TNG episode where they explained why most aliens are humanoid. An ancient species altered the DNA on hundreds of planets in the galaxy. There are hints of this dropped in ST:TOS as well.
Neither I, nor my neighbour, is in geosynchronous orbit, so I don't quite understand your point. Of course, we don't have a wire directly connecting each other either. (Does a ping on cable broadband go through some sort of central office, or is a neighbourhood all one LAN?)
That is misleading for two reasons. First, the signal does not travel through the planet, it travels around the surface. Second, your calculation is for sending a signal (and receiving an echo) from opposite sides of the planet. Should I not be able to expect a shorter ping time if I am pinging my next door neighbour? Google says: (10 meters * 2) / the speed of light = 66.712819 nanoseconds.
This might be a good starting point. Baghdad, Iraq to Washington DC, United States is about 9968 km, yeilding a 66.5 ms minimum ping time.
The problem isn't that there is too many people. The problem is that there are too many wasteful people. How many lights are left burning 24hrs a day? How many incandescent lights could be replaced by compact fluorescents? How about turning off the escalators in the malls? Are we so lazy we can't walk up a flight of stairs? How many million VCRs, TVs, DVDs, stereos, etc. are trickling power away on standby, just so we can use the remote instead of walking three metres to turn the device on manually? How many computers, monitors, laser printers, etc are left on 24/7? Heck, how much power is wasted by "wall wart" transformers, even when the device they power is turned off?
That's what the power companies do. They push the electrons through one way, then they reverse the flow and push the same electrons through the other way. You wind up paying for the same electrons over and over again. That's why Westinghouse won out over Edison. Westinghouse's operation was pure profit.
Some people would rather buy a dedicated piece of store bought hardware than cobble together a righteous hack out of stone knives and bearskins, no matter how much duct tape they own. Go figure!
Now, in the old days, you bought a record, and put it on your record player, and you played it. No problems, and consumers had nothing to do with copyright, because they never copied music.
Perhaps you are unaware of the concept of a 'mix tape'. People would select songs from various records (and 8-Tracks) that they could get their hands on, and copy songs onto cassettes. They would select all of the love songs and give it to their girlfiends for Valentine's day. They would select all the songs with a good beat for summer road trips. The legality/illegality of this was never discussed.
Simply reducing the amount of time a patent is valid from 20 years, to about 5 years, and making them non-transferrable (ie. Company A cannot purchase patents from Company B, or acquire them by purchasing Company B) might go a long way to cleaning up the system.
Yes, of course they had times where they lost badly It's called gambling for a reason. However, the point is they won more often than they lost. They were able to tip the odds out of the casino's favour into theirs.
"There are those who believe... that life here... began out there. Far across the universe. With tribes of humans... who may have been the forefathers of the Egyptians... or the Toltecs... or the Mayans... Some believe that there may yet be brothers of man... who even now fight to survive... somewhere beyond the heavens"
Sorry, momentarily lulled by the "Egyptians, Toltecs, Mayans" bit. You will have to concede though that the original series was set in the 1940s/1950s (based on the age of the actors portraying Boxey/Captain Troy in original series and in the Galactica 1980 spinoff).
So, not in the distant past, but not exactly in the present either.
Shortly after the WW1 and before commercial air travel became popular, "barnstorming" aviators would "buzz" small towns or county fairs, using of one of the local farm fields as a temporary runway, and offer airplane rides to customers. These flights didn't have a "real destination". The purpose was not travel, but experience.
The emerging space tourism industry is about to begin it's "barnstorming" days, selling rides for the experience, not the destination. Initially it will only suborbital flights. Soon, they will be competing for altitude and duration of weightlessness records. Then someone will start offering a "once around" package.
Space flight as a means to an end is not going to happen until you have and end with meaning. Why "sit on a thousand pounds of explosives" to go to the moon? There's nothing there but grey rocks and dust. Mars, same thing, but the rocks are red. There's no real destination, no purpose in going except for the experience of being there, and that won't change until we get some sort of permanent outpost set up there.
Slashdot Mirror
There, there. The only stupid question is the one not asked.
I agree with most of your post. However...
While we do not have the tech now, we will never develop it unless we try. My first suggestion would be to bag a comet, literally. Find a smallish comet and wrap it in a giant plastic bag. Vent the gas released by the comet to bring it into a circular orbit. As the ices that make up the comet melt away, they can be refined into water, and propellant.
As for meteor hits, and burying stuff to keep them safe, you can redirect sunlight with mirrors. Nothing critical needs to be exposed.
It's sort of a hardware version of a filesystem.
Maybe because the Director for Digital Information and System Design was so busy that she needed an assistant?
while they offer great looking sites to their customers, they do a half-assed job on their own sites for whatever reason.
The cobbler's children never have shoes.
I guess you missed the ST:TNG episode where they explained why most aliens are humanoid. An ancient species altered the DNA on hundreds of planets in the galaxy. There are hints of this dropped in ST:TOS as well.
Neither I, nor my neighbour, is in geosynchronous orbit, so I don't quite understand your point. Of course, we don't have a wire directly connecting each other either. (Does a ping on cable broadband go through some sort of central office, or is a neighbourhood all one LAN?)
That is misleading for two reasons. First, the signal does not travel through the planet, it travels around the surface. Second, your calculation is for sending a signal (and receiving an echo) from opposite sides of the planet. Should I not be able to expect a shorter ping time if I am pinging my next door neighbour? Google says: (10 meters * 2) / the speed of light = 66.712819 nanoseconds.
This might be a good starting point. Baghdad, Iraq to Washington DC, United States is about 9968 km, yeilding a 66.5 ms minimum ping time.
The problem isn't that there is too many people. The problem is that there are too many wasteful people. How many lights are left burning 24hrs a day? How many incandescent lights could be replaced by compact fluorescents? How about turning off the escalators in the malls? Are we so lazy we can't walk up a flight of stairs? How many million VCRs, TVs, DVDs, stereos, etc. are trickling power away on standby, just so we can use the remote instead of walking three metres to turn the device on manually? How many computers, monitors, laser printers, etc are left on 24/7? Heck, how much power is wasted by "wall wart" transformers, even when the device they power is turned off?
That's what the power companies do. They push the electrons through one way, then they reverse the flow and push the same electrons through the other way. You wind up paying for the same electrons over and over again. That's why Westinghouse won out over Edison. Westinghouse's operation was pure profit.
Some people would rather buy a dedicated piece of store bought hardware than cobble together a righteous hack out of stone knives and bearskins, no matter how much duct tape they own. Go figure!
My ICBM launch password is the same as my lottery numbers.
Yeah, and Simpsons quotes, LOTR quotes, Star Wars and Star Trek quotes, etc are the first things that will be in the cracker's dictionary.
Now, in the old days, you bought a record, and put it on your record player, and you played it. No problems, and consumers had nothing to do with copyright, because they never copied music.
Perhaps you are unaware of the concept of a 'mix tape'. People would select songs from various records (and 8-Tracks) that they could get their hands on, and copy songs onto cassettes. They would select all of the love songs and give it to their girlfiends for Valentine's day. They would select all the songs with a good beat for summer road trips. The legality/illegality of this was never discussed.
Perhaps the reason Rome fell was because they didn't consult the books?
If it is in the park it is owned by the city, and is therefore public property, no?
Yes it can, by emulating whatever processor it does run on. Just don't expect a lot of performance.
I run linux as my desktop and I use the OpenOffice suite, so it has cost them $450 dollars. (/me makes sound of raindrop hitting bucket.)
Simply reducing the amount of time a patent is valid from 20 years, to about 5 years, and making them non-transferrable (ie. Company A cannot purchase patents from Company B, or acquire them by purchasing Company B) might go a long way to cleaning up the system.
Yes, of course they had times where they lost badly It's called gambling for a reason. However, the point is they won more often than they lost. They were able to tip the odds out of the casino's favour into theirs.
Apparently, card counting in Blackjack can provide a mathematical edge to the player rather than the casino.
"There are those who believe... that life here... began out there. Far across the universe. With tribes of humans... who may have been the forefathers of the Egyptians... or the Toltecs... or the Mayans... Some believe that there may yet be brothers of man... who even now fight to survive... somewhere beyond the heavens"
Sorry, momentarily lulled by the "Egyptians, Toltecs, Mayans" bit. You will have to concede though that the original series was set in the 1940s/1950s (based on the age of the actors portraying Boxey/Captain Troy in original series and in the Galactica 1980 spinoff).
So, not in the distant past, but not exactly in the present either.
Um... Battlestar Galactica is set in the distant past.
Fah! Leonardo DaVinci was designing these things over 500 years ago.
Shortly after the WW1 and before commercial air travel became popular, "barnstorming" aviators would "buzz" small towns or county fairs, using of one of the local farm fields as a temporary runway, and offer airplane rides to customers. These flights didn't have a "real destination". The purpose was not travel, but experience.
The emerging space tourism industry is about to begin it's "barnstorming" days, selling rides for the experience, not the destination. Initially it will only suborbital flights. Soon, they will be competing for altitude and duration of weightlessness records. Then someone will start offering a "once around" package.
Space flight as a means to an end is not going to happen until you have and end with meaning. Why "sit on a thousand pounds of explosives" to go to the moon? There's nothing there but grey rocks and dust. Mars, same thing, but the rocks are red. There's no real destination, no purpose in going except for the experience of being there, and that won't change until we get some sort of permanent outpost set up there.