We all know that fusion has been somewhat pie in the sky, but it is a viable alternative and less than 20 years away.
(chuckle) Fusion's been "less than 20 years away" since the '60s. I'm all for it, but the breakthrough that makes fusion power reactors possible still appears to be a long way off.
Would nuclear power really be effective for hydrogen production? I'm assuming the nuke would generate electricity to electrolyze water. Not very efficient. (Q: Is there a more direct / efficent way to crack H2O?) Then again, with a lot of nukes generating very cheap electricity (delivered over superconducting lines?) H could be produced locally, or even in-home. No need for expensive, ugly pipelines.
Anyway, I agree with you 100% on the need to develop modern reactor technologies, be they used to pump hydrogen or electrons. The nukes we have now are nearing the end of their useful lifetimes, and if newer, safe(r) reactors aren't available, they'll be replaced with coal- or gas-fired plants - yecch.
If we need to curb greenhouse gases within the next 20 years, improving mainstream gasoline and diesel engines and transmissions and expanding the use of hybrids is the way to go.
Even if every nation on earth mandated high-efficiency diesel / hybrid / whatever for all new vehicles today, we wouldn't see significant impact before 2020 anyway. Imho, better to focus effort now on developing production & infrastructure for hydrogen, where the true long-term benefits are, so when the storage & engine technology matures we'll be ready to put it to work.
As in this, or perhaps this one. Basically a crude light pipe with hemispherical collector on the outdoor end. They work splendidly at bringing natural light into, e.g., a windowless bathroom where regular skylights won't work. If there's direct sun available outside the basement windows that can't get in because of size, wells, orientation, etc., maybe a couple of these could be retrofit & oriented off-wall to bring in gobs of that full daylight. If the natural light simply isn't available, try a brace of full-spectrum fluorescents, as earlier posters suggested (NOT plant grow-lights, as others have), a couple of halogen torchier lamps indirected off a bright-white ceiling, or, if you want a real S.A.D.-killer, a small (~150W) metal halide lamp in the 4000-5000K range. The latter is a total geek effort as you'll probably have to build it from components (Home Depot, Lowes, or any good lighting supply store). Research & experiment to determine proper wattage, positioning, etc., and bounce the light off the aforementioned white ceiling - don't illuminate directly and don't build it into a fixture - those suckers are bright, and at least as hot as a halogen lamp.
Beyond lighting, I've found what works best for me is a mix of warm colors - Monochrome Is Boring - (Home Depot / Lowes again; check out their recommended color combos; they're really very good at putting together eye-friendly stuff), the aforementioned white ceiling for light distribution, and liberal use of stained wood if you're good at finish work. And of course, liberal amounts of geek toys as accents.
My goal is to create a home-office environment that's visually (& every other way) comfortable for long work sessions, but not so much so that the creative juices dry up & I doze off.:) I can't say I'm there yet, but it's a lot better than the beige-and-blue-grey atrocity I work in during the day.
...they make me just a little more confident that the Elevator will actually happen.
Look, the Shuttle debacle just illustrates my point that a real space program absolutely requires cheap access to orbit, and we need to move beyond rocket propulsion to make that happen. The Shuttle's engines boost within shouting distance of the theoretical limit for chemical propellants; most of the beast is at least sort-of reusable; and it still costs $20K per kg delivered to low orbit. There are ways to improve upon this, but I hope we can agree that we don't want nuclear-powered rockets operating anywhere near Earth's gravity well anytime soon.
The thing is, this insane transport cost is the show-stopper when contemplating any non-trivial project outside the atmosphere. Nothing technological prevented us from building O'Neill colonies in the '70s. Nothing technological is preventing us from building solar power satellites, or huge orbiting or Lunar telescopes, or hotels in geosync, or settlements on the Moon or Mars with scheduled transports twice weekly. The limiting factor is that no private organization can afford to boost several thousand tons of material into space, and no elected government would dare to try. (Some non-elected ones might, but they can't afford it. [g]) The transport cost has to come down by a factor of at least 100 to make these things possible, and there's good reason to think that even a completely reusable single-stage-to-orbit "space plane" won't cut it. Given this, any reasonable budget for R&D on a solution with potential to drive that cost to orbit down to a few $$ per ton is cheap at the price.
As to specific points:
I am NOT saying it IS impossible, forever. It's just not the walk in the park that so many of you make it out to be. It's the "we could do it right now for only $6 billion" that's patently absurd.
Who the hell said anything about "a walk in the park?" I believe I was clear enough, by implication at least, that I was talking about a project on the scale of the Mercury / Gemini / Apollo programs. At it's peak, Apollo involved something like a quarter-million people and $20 billion / year (2003 dollars). Hardly a "walk in the park." The way I read the article, they were talking about $6 billion as the manufacturing cost of the elevator itself. R&D not included, and I suspect they didn't figure in the cost of shipping all those nanotubes up to geosync the soon-to-be-old-fashioned way. So what? So it takes 7 or 8 years and $100-odd billion to ramp up to build the first one. Still cheap at the price (maybe 10 years to recover costs through all the Shuttle flights that NASA won't have to conduct, and all the dumb boosters that the Air Force / France / China / et al won't have to launch), and the second elevator would come in reasonably close to that $6 billion, complete. Probably less.
In theory, sure, there are ways you might go about making a space elevator. The technologies to do so, however, do not currently exist, and that's a fact.
In 1900, the technologies needed for heavier-than-air flight did not exist. In 1962, the technologies to land men on the moon did not exist. What's your point? We have a solid theoretical basis for development of space-elevator technology, which is a lot more than Wilbur & Orville had when they started.
Might there be other projects that might be more unifying and challenging?
Maybe. Does that make this project any less so? And I'd argue that you'd have a hard time finding such a project. There's something about exploration and New Frontiers that fascinates us insatiably-curious humans in a way nothing else can. Fun experiment: Have an AIDS or cancer researcher speak to a 5th-grade class. Then send an astronaut in. Guess which one spends an extra hour signing autographs.
And now we have the possibility of developing technology which would be the equivalent of the Trans-continental Railroad, opening those frontiers to more than a select few and making "trade" with those pioneers dirt-cheap compared to what we have now. Even if nanotube construction ultimately proves to be impractical, isn't it worth a fraction of a percent of the national budget to find out?? As government programs go, it certainly beats hell out of corporate welfare and Lawrence Welk museums.
I must confess that intuitively, it sounds impossible to me. A 40,000 km string! Can you just imagine the harmonics on this thing when the jetstream plucks it (or whatever). Hello! Atmosphere! Weather! Not the beautiful calm vacuum of space.
[shrug] Lots of things are counter-intuitive, but happen anyway. Forget intuition for a moment and run the numbers. A string/ribbon/whatever that long would have a harmonic period measured in days. I think Clarke mentioned this in Fountains of Paradise. Payloads would have to be scheduled with resonance in mind anyway (a variation on the soldiers-marching-across-a-bridge scenario), so even if a weird weather pattern or whatever induces a harmonic wave (extremely unlikely), a couple tweaks to the payload schedule would damp it out. Besides, no jetstreams at the equator.:)
And the geosynchronous terminus at the other end... a geosynchronous orbit doesn't maintain a precise spot over the earth. It wanders here and there...
Indeed, not much, or my Echostar antenna mount would have to be a helluva lot more sophisticated. Consider that the portion of the cable in geosync is going to be under hundreds (thousands?) of tons of tension when exactly on station, increasing rapidly if it drifts. So it isn't going to drift far. And so long as drift-induced stress doesn't exceed the ribbon's limit, who cares? (g) Given that they're talking about a floating platform to anchor Earthside, I'd be more worried about a major cable drift yanking said platform out of the water and giving the poor sods on board the ride of their lives. . . ..But I suspect the platform's design includes lots of ballast.
I'm with the earlier poster who proposed that GWB offer up a JFK-style challenge to build an operational elevator by 2010; enough so that I think I'm going to write Dubya and my congresscritters about it. Events in the Middle East notwithstanding, imho this is the perfect time to (ahem) launch such an effort. The USA needs a Shuttle replacement, pronto. We need cheap access to space. We need the national challenge, excitement, unity, and pride that the Moon missions gave us. I have a gut feeling that the technological leap needed to build this thing is less than was needed to go from semi-reliable ICBMs to Apollo 11. In constant dollars, it might even be cheaper.
It is indeed tough to get off this damn planet. And I wouldn't mind seeing that change in my lifetime.
Can you hook up a fuel tank and run it as long as the tank is kept full?
[snort] I just got a visual of some ubergeek with one of those stupid hats made to hold dual beer cans, two bottles of methanol in place, tubes running down to his laptop...
..actually, one can of methanol and one of beer wouldn't be bad. As long as you remember which tube is which.
DDB sighs, as he is wont to do in such circumstances, and wonders where to start...
Controversial? Certainly. Pointless? Hardly.
First of all, your criticism of M-U's experimental conditions is straw-man logic - you damn them for not using free O2, then promptly turn around and demonstrate the unlikeliness of free O2 in the primordial atmosphere - as you point out, it would have oxidized practically everything in reach. Despite recent evidence that the early Earth's atmosphere wasn't completly reductant after all, there's still little reason to think that free O2 in significant amounts was present before life came along. Also, please note that a typical electric discharge emits more than a little ultraviolet. Not nearly as much as solar UV flux, but let's be reasonable - their apparatus didn't simulate asteroid impacts, lava flows, or full-scale lightning strikes either.
Second: Okay, fine - a week-long experiment intended to loosely approximate conditions on Earth over the first billion-odd years of its existence didn't end with lizards crawling out of the flask. The significance of M-U isn't that it generated every chemical necessary for life, but that it managed to generate any at all. (Even if you factor in the amino acids found in meteorites, etc., those amino acids came into being somehow.) Tell you what - I'll start up an M-U-like experiment, let it run for a few million years, and let you know what happens.
Third: I rather hope Cremesti didn't pull better than a C-minus on that paper. It continually amazes me how creationists (one of which I am not necessarily assuming Cremesti is) continue to hammer away at the random-chance argument of life's origin / evolution, when I don't think there's a single evolutionary biologist out there who accepts it. Darwin didn't accept it. (It's rather a tickle to read about how this theory, such as it is, was demolished by computer analysis; with what was essentially a primordial ecological simulator. Run on "high-speed computers". In 1966. Project headed by Dr. Forbin, I assume.)
The rest of the paper is crap, full of bandwagon assertions ("Many authors believe..."...so it's obviously true. Would've been nice if he'd cited some of them.) and silliness like invoking the Second Law of Thermodynamics to show that "...[chemical evolution] will not occur in isolated or closed systems near equilibrium" when it's arguable that none of these conditions obtain even on a planetary scale, and glaringly obvious that they don't on a local scale. (Fun experiment: Hold up a tall metal pole in the middle of a thunderstorm, and determine how long your local environment remains in equilibrium.)
When we research things that occur on a time/space scale as grand as this, imho one of the biggest obstacles is the limits of human imagination. Can you picture - really grasp emotionally - intervals longer than your own lifetime? Or distances further than those you've actually traveled? I disagree with Cremesti in that I do not believe that chemical evolution is not falsifiable. I'm not so sure that it can be done by human beings, at least not for a very long time to come. Given a problem with thousands of variables, many unknown, whose domain is an entire planet (or many planets, if you accept panspermia) and hundreds of millions of years, can even the most knowledgable scientist state with confidence that any plausible event did or did not happen? No matter how fast the computer or how sophisticated the methods, is it possible to analyze such a problem and get results better than a coin flip? Again, not now, and imho not for a long time to come. The value of M-U is not that it showed the mechanism by which life originated on Earth, but that it showed a part of a plausible mechanism.
The first step is always important, even if it turns out to be in the wrong direction.
If you have bad credit it is because you are not creditworthy or trustworthy in financial matters.
(sarcastic applause) Spoken like a man who has never had a serious medical problem (with or without insurance), or lost his job at an inopportune moment, or been screwed out of a catastrophic insurance claim (successfully or otherwise) or hit with a nuisance lawsuit, or had his identity stolen, or any of the numberless other things that can ruin your finances and/or credit without the slightest bit of malfeasance on your part. Nobody with finite resources can plan for every possible disaster.
Now I suppose an "enlightened" company might take a closer look in such situations, notice that the applicant appeared to take a huge credit hit over a short period of time, and discuss the matter with him before rejecting him outright. I doubt this would happen; the behavior of a typical HR dep't in re reviewing resumes doesn't suggest they'd behave differently with credit reports. And I'm not sure that's a bad thing, because such "enlightenment" might well place one in the position of having to discuss and justify aspects of one's private life that quite possibly shouldn't be discussed with an unsympathetic stranger.
[rant]
It wouldn't surprise me if this became common practice though. Companies (American companies, anyway,) seem to have decided that having any business relationship whatsoever with a person, whether employee, customer, or whatever, entitles them to discover and/or manipulate the fine details of that person's life at will. I know; I know; businesses have the right to prevent theft and mayhem on the premises. But when did it become necessary to pervert this right into a total lack of respect, if not brazen contempt, for the people that keep you in business? Why should you have to go out of your way to demonstrate that you aren't a spendthrift, thief, or maniac in order to work? Why should you have to identify yourself (MicroCenter; Radio Shack until recently) and prove you aren't a shoplifter (Costco; CompUSA) to make a $10 cash purchase?
...and why do we put up with it?
"Innocent until proven guilty" is a lot more than a legal phrase, it's a principle that enables people to live with dignity in a free society. It's sad that so many people seem to have forgotten that.
ummmm how about getting the damn ribbon long enough and getting into orbit in the first place ? We going to have a swammi play a flute to lift it ?
Firstly: you don't lift the cable, you drop it. Start from synchronous orbit. Pay out the cable both toward and away from Earth, keeping the deployed masses equal so you don't drift. (The cable leading away from Earth is shorter and heavier.) Tidal forces orient the cable vertically as you deploy. Eventually you'll reach the ground. Note that, until you anchor, the tension at each end of the cable is zero - the weight of the cable below geosync is balanced by that of the cable above geosync. (The cable tension at geosync is rather insane, as an earlier poster put it.) Guide a small asteroid to the high end of the cable, and anchor it. At the same time, anchor the low end to bedrock. One orbital elevator, ready for use.
Secondly: you don't ship the cable up from Earth, you manufacture it in place. If you're smart, you bring the raw material down from the Moon via linear accelerator. If you're really smart, you choose a carbonaceous asteroid as your anchor weight, and mine that for material as you move it into place.
If you want a good tutorial on the practical aspects of space elevator construction, check out Arthur C. Clarke's The Fountains of Paradise. Decent read, and the depiction, given the body of knowledge in 1979, is dead on.
"The foam is fragile enough to have been damaged once in a hailstorm...
Hail? Hell, the foam is fragile enough to have been damaged by woodpeckers! And I understand that the shuttle's heat-shield tiles can be damaged by as little as an accidental brush with elbow or tool.
Does it make anyone else just a tad uncomfortable that such critical systems, exposed to such extreme temperature and pressure stresses, are so bloody delicate? In a way, it's remarkable that the shuttles made it through as many flights as they did without serious re-entry damage.
A REALLY big seal, with sharp teeth and attitude...kinda like an elephant seal after exposure to some of those spent fuel rods...:)
I agree that it would probably be easier to detect tampering with a sealed reactor, if only because they'd need a fair amount of time & equipment to crack it, and you could build some of the detectors inside the sealed part where they'd be hard to defeat. The solution N Korea used - throw out the inspectors, shut off the cameras, ignore the griping until you've accomplished what you want to do - does, though, make me a tad nervous re the viability of any preventive measures that have to be carried out on foreign soil. Personally I'd have preferred we built the nukes in S. Korea, and ran a big power line across the DMZ.
I did read the article, and I get what they're trying to accomplish. What I don't get is your point. Assuming that it has to do with the non-proliferation aspect of CAESAR, the article made it clear that, even though it isn't necessary to remove and reprocess fuel, there's nothing that prevents a government bent on building Da Bomb from doing so anyway. A CAESAR built, say, by France or the US for a third-world country could be sealed to complicate access to whatever fissionables would be generated therein. But the fissionables will be there, and, short of encasing the reactor in invulnerable unobtanium, they can be removed. My point was that the integrity of that "sealed" reactor depends heavily on the trustworthiness of the government on whose territory it sits. And I suspect you can think of more than a couple of governments not deserving of such trust.
I think the really interesting thing here is that the reactor cannot be used as a breeder.
...huh? Quote from The Economist article:
By adjusting the configuration of the core in the right way--by judicious positioning of graphite, for example--almost any civilian reactor can be made to produce plutonium, and thus to make weapons. Access to the core is not necessary with CAESAR, as it could run for decades without any need for refuelling. Thus it could be sealed. Countries could then adopt the design to show that their nuclear intentions were entirely peaceful.
The way I read this, the difference with CAESAR is that the fuel doesn't require periodic replacement, so the reactor could be sealed to prevent, e.g., terrorists from making off with plutonium-laden spent fuel. The key word here is "could". Nothing appears to prevent a gov't from designing a CAESAR to allow harvest of plutonium, or from covertly retrofitting a sealed reactor. (Granted, it almost certainly wouldn't produce as much Pu as quickly as would a fast breeder, but those are purpose-built devices that the nuclear powers would discover & stop in a heartbeat. And you don't need all that much Pu to build a bomb.) The sealed-fuel concept would work well if the government controlling it were trustworthy, or if verification methods were foolproof. Unfortunately, in the case of an Iraq or a N. Korea, those are mighty big IFs.
If there's anything to this, it's simultaneously VERY big and VERY scary. Enriching uranium, even to power-plant specs (only 5% or so U235) is extremely difficult, expensive, and both physically & environmentally hazardous, not to mention that the end product must be replaced every few years (resulting in tons of high-level waste) as that small percentage of U235 is "burned up". A workable CAESAR would eliminate nearly all of this, drastically lowering the cost of building & fueling reactors while increasing their fuel supply by a factor of 98 or so. (This of course excludes the artifically inflated costs of the nightmarish regulatory/legal labyrinth builders/operators must run in many countries.)
The dark side of all this is, of course, that a lowered cost of entry makes it just that much easier for "nuclear club" wannabe countries to produce plutonium for less benign applications. The author of the Economist article notes that countries could seal their CAESAR reactors (thus, I assume, burning the created plutonium for power alongside the U238) "to show that their nuclear intentions were entirely peaceful." Yeah, right. I'm sure Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong would be perfectly content to have their CAESARs crank out power, with nary a thought to the goodies sealed therein.
Yet another two-edged sword, but a damned intriguing one.
SonyEricsson P800. Looks like it's one of the few, if not the only, full-featured cellphone + full-featured PDA out there.
Downsides (for US users): - It's GSM, so carrier options are somewhat limited - It isn't widely available yet.
You've pretty much answered your own questions.
on
Improving Your Help Desk?
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· Score: 3, Informative
Credibility
Users don't see the help desk as competent and helpful. Fine: train, equip, and motivate them until they are competent and helpful. An earlier poster hit it right on the head: he doesn't use the help desk because (paraphrasing) "they know less about the product than I do." Until that situation is turned around (to a degree that makes it obvious to everyone that it has turned around), they'll keep right on going to the people who do know; e.g. the developers. Can you blame them?
Poor Processes. ..they should know how to bold and underline, change email settings and know whether or not the web server is having problems. This requires cooperation from other groups...
Why? What's the problem with giving support people the ability to tweak mail settings, and setting up simple is-alive monitors to let them see at a glance if a server or whatever is up/down? Routine maintenance matters e.g. password resets can be made simple and secure enough (via scripts or such) for CS technicians to use safely with nominal training. These have been BIG win-wins for help desk / tech support / customers on the two occasions I've helped implement them.
What would be wrong with using some sort of decision tree. ..They have some sort of knowledge base, but either it is poorly maintained or it is not easy to sue because they don't use it.
Nothing whatsoever is wrong with this approach; that's why just about every help-desk operation of any real size uses both. From your description of the situation, I'd estimate that (1) you're using the wrong software, and/or (2) the chicken/egg syndrome - they don't use the KB because it isn't well-populated, and it isn't well-populated because they don't use it. You should be able to find decent integrated call-center / knowledge-base software within your co's budget; that should take care of the ease-of-use and KB population problem. Put the decision trees on keyword-searchable HTML pages for ease of retrieval & maintenance; the higher-end call center systems have this integrated in.
N.B.: Decision trees are NOT a substitute for operators' knowledge & experience - having to deal with CC ops that mindlessly walk the tree from "Is the computer plugged in?" for every call will quickly send non-novice callers scurrying back to the developers.
Poor Follow Up. ..I think they should implement some sort of follow up procedure to track overall effectiveness and user satisfaction.
And to make sure that incidents don't fall through the cracks. And to track the effectiveness of improvements to the CC process. You're right. Any decent CC application will track calls through follow-up, and the better ones will auto-escalate aged calls and/or flag them for mgmt. action.
You have the right idea; all you need to do now is gain mgmt support, then act.
Oh, and here's one thing not to do: Put policy / procedures in place arbitrarily compelling users to go to the help desk. If the help desk's act hasn't been thoroughly cleaned up it won't work, and if it has, busy developers will start pushing users that way on their own. And you'll spare yourselves a great deal of grief from users, and their management, and your management.
People just have to trust their peers, courts, etc.
Imho, sadly, that's the Achilles heel of any remote-presence voting method. I won't speak for Switzerland or other countries where I'm sure honest, honorable people conduct the voting process. In the USA, however, elections have become so much a zero-sum, us-vs-them, win-at-all-costs spectacle that imho-again any possible exploit in a voting process will be exploited by zealots of either/both parties. And, as we all were reminded in Nov-Dec '00, even a very small degree of (alleged) irregularity in the process can bring the results of a close election into question.
I don't think electronic voting is inherently untrustworthy, but it introduces a lot of new, subtle threats that appear to be a long way from satisfactory resolution. Securing the process itself isn't all that hard. But how do you safeguard against, for example, sudden DDoS attacks in a dozen or so heavily-Democratic cities, frustrating several thousand people into giving up on voting? How do you remediate something like that in a fair manner?
The same problem obtains with voting by mail. A few dozen well-placed people in USPS uniforms could quite probably steal enough votes from mailboxes to swing a close election, or several well-compensated mail carriers could "lose" those special envelopes. Yes, it's risky, but we know that there are more than a few people out there willing to go to jail to help their candidate win.
And then there are the other issues raised in this thread: that of ensuring one person - one vote, preventing coerced / proxy voting, etc. Much as I hate to say it, I don't see a workable solution that does not involve the voters' presence at a polling place. Heinlein offers what may be a reasonable compromise: voting at banks, either through ATMs or dedicated kiosks, where secure networks and ID methods are already in place, and there's enough supervision to prevent someone from, say, showing up with a couple hundred voter cards gathered from senior citizen complexes as a "favor" to those unable/unwilling to travel. Or stolen from mailboxes.
(1) governments routinely abuse (certification) (licensing) (permit) requirements . Whether through apathy (obsolete or irrelevant requirements), do-goodness (limiting licenses because some bottom-feeder pol decided there were "too many vendors" (see link)), or leverage (a politically-connected group lobbies to make the cost of entry for new competitors prohibitive), it usually happens, at which point holding a license has little to do with the holder's competence, and lots to do with the holder's $$$ and/or political pull.
(2) We're already well down the slippery slope to where we'll have to get gov't permits to wipe our arses, and imho that slope doesn't need any more lubricant.
(3) Private credentialing bodies, insurance companies, and (arguably) the courts do a much better job of regulating professions than any government body can. Which do you trust more: the FDA, or Underwriters Labs?
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Anyway, I agree with you 100% on the need to develop modern reactor technologies, be they used to pump hydrogen or electrons. The nukes we have now are nearing the end of their useful lifetimes, and if newer, safe(r) reactors aren't available, they'll be replaced with coal- or gas-fired plants - yecch.
If the natural light simply isn't available, try a brace of full-spectrum fluorescents, as earlier posters suggested (NOT plant grow-lights, as others have), a couple of halogen torchier lamps indirected off a bright-white ceiling, or, if you want a real S.A.D.-killer, a small (~150W) metal halide lamp in the 4000-5000K range. The latter is a total geek effort as you'll probably have to build it from components (Home Depot, Lowes, or any good lighting supply store). Research & experiment to determine proper wattage, positioning, etc., and bounce the light off the aforementioned white ceiling - don't illuminate directly and don't build it into a fixture - those suckers are bright, and at least as hot as a halogen lamp.
Beyond lighting, I've found what works best for me is a mix of warm colors - Monochrome Is Boring - (Home Depot / Lowes again; check out their recommended color combos; they're really very good at putting together eye-friendly stuff), the aforementioned white ceiling for light distribution, and liberal use of stained wood if you're good at finish work. And of course, liberal amounts of geek toys as accents. :) I can't say I'm there yet, but it's a lot better than the beige-and-blue-grey atrocity I work in during the day.
My goal is to create a home-office environment that's visually (& every other way) comfortable for long work sessions, but not so much so that the creative juices dry up & I doze off.
Look, the Shuttle debacle just illustrates my point that a real space program absolutely requires cheap access to orbit, and we need to move beyond rocket propulsion to make that happen. The Shuttle's engines boost within shouting distance of the theoretical limit for chemical propellants; most of the beast is at least sort-of reusable; and it still costs $20K per kg delivered to low orbit. There are ways to improve upon this, but I hope we can agree that we don't want nuclear-powered rockets operating anywhere near Earth's gravity well anytime soon.
The thing is, this insane transport cost is the show-stopper when contemplating any non-trivial project outside the atmosphere. Nothing technological prevented us from building O'Neill colonies in the '70s. Nothing technological is preventing us from building solar power satellites, or huge orbiting or Lunar telescopes, or hotels in geosync, or settlements on the Moon or Mars with scheduled transports twice weekly. The limiting factor is that no private organization can afford to boost several thousand tons of material into space, and no elected government would dare to try. (Some non-elected ones might, but they can't afford it. [g]) The transport cost has to come down by a factor of at least 100 to make these things possible, and there's good reason to think that even a completely reusable single-stage-to-orbit "space plane" won't cut it. Given this, any reasonable budget for R&D on a solution with potential to drive that cost to orbit down to a few $$ per ton is cheap at the price.
As to specific points:
Who the hell said anything about "a walk in the park?" I believe I was clear enough, by implication at least, that I was talking about a project on the scale of the Mercury / Gemini / Apollo programs. At it's peak, Apollo involved something like a quarter-million people and $20 billion / year (2003 dollars). Hardly a "walk in the park." The way I read the article, they were talking about $6 billion as the manufacturing cost of the elevator itself. R&D not included, and I suspect they didn't figure in the cost of shipping all those nanotubes up to geosync the soon-to-be-old-fashioned way. So what? So it takes 7 or 8 years and $100-odd billion to ramp up to build the first one. Still cheap at the price (maybe 10 years to recover costs through all the Shuttle flights that NASA won't have to conduct, and all the dumb boosters that the Air Force / France / China / et al won't have to launch), and the second elevator would come in reasonably close to that $6 billion, complete. Probably less. In 1900, the technologies needed for heavier-than-air flight did not exist. In 1962, the technologies to land men on the moon did not exist. What's your point? We have a solid theoretical basis for development of space-elevator technology, which is a lot more than Wilbur & Orville had when they started. Maybe. Does that make this project any less so? And I'd argue that you'd have a hard time finding such a project. There's something about exploration and New Frontiers that fascinates us insatiably-curious humans in a way nothing else can. Fun experiment: Have an AIDS or cancer researcher speak to a 5th-grade class. Then send an astronaut in. Guess which one spends an extra hour signing autographs.And now we have the possibility of developing technology which would be the equivalent of the Trans-continental Railroad, opening those frontiers to more than a select few and making "trade" with those pioneers dirt-cheap compared to what we have now. Even if nanotube construction ultimately proves to be impractical, isn't it worth a fraction of a percent of the national budget to find out?? As government programs go, it certainly beats hell out of corporate welfare and Lawrence Welk museums.
I'm with the earlier poster who proposed that GWB offer up a JFK-style challenge to build an operational elevator by 2010; enough so that I think I'm going to write Dubya and my congresscritters about it. Events in the Middle East notwithstanding, imho this is the perfect time to (ahem) launch such an effort. The USA needs a Shuttle replacement, pronto. We need cheap access to space. We need the national challenge, excitement, unity, and pride that the Moon missions gave us. I have a gut feeling that the technological leap needed to build this thing is less than was needed to go from semi-reliable ICBMs to Apollo 11. In constant dollars, it might even be cheaper.
It is indeed tough to get off this damn planet. And I wouldn't mind seeing that change in my lifetime.
..actually, one can of methanol and one of beer wouldn't be bad. As long as you remember which tube is which.
Controversial? Certainly. Pointless? Hardly.
First of all, your criticism of M-U's experimental conditions is straw-man logic - you damn them for not using free O2, then promptly turn around and demonstrate the unlikeliness of free O2 in the primordial atmosphere - as you point out, it would have oxidized practically everything in reach. Despite recent evidence that the early Earth's atmosphere wasn't completly reductant after all, there's still little reason to think that free O2 in significant amounts was present before life came along. Also, please note that a typical electric discharge emits more than a little ultraviolet. Not nearly as much as solar UV flux, but let's be reasonable - their apparatus didn't simulate asteroid impacts, lava flows, or full-scale lightning strikes either.
Second: Okay, fine - a week-long experiment intended to loosely approximate conditions on Earth over the first billion-odd years of its existence didn't end with lizards crawling out of the flask. The significance of M-U isn't that it generated every chemical necessary for life, but that it managed to generate any at all. (Even if you factor in the amino acids found in meteorites, etc., those amino acids came into being somehow.) Tell you what - I'll start up an M-U-like experiment, let it run for a few million years, and let you know what happens.
Third: I rather hope Cremesti didn't pull better than a C-minus on that paper. It continually amazes me how creationists (one of which I am not necessarily assuming Cremesti is) continue to hammer away at the random-chance argument of life's origin / evolution, when I don't think there's a single evolutionary biologist out there who accepts it. Darwin didn't accept it. (It's rather a tickle to read about how this theory, such as it is, was demolished by computer analysis; with what was essentially a primordial ecological simulator. Run on "high-speed computers". In 1966. Project headed by Dr. Forbin, I assume.)
The rest of the paper is crap, full of bandwagon assertions ("Many authors believe..."...so it's obviously true. Would've been nice if he'd cited some of them.) and silliness like invoking the Second Law of Thermodynamics to show that "...[chemical evolution] will not occur in isolated or closed systems near equilibrium" when it's arguable that none of these conditions obtain even on a planetary scale, and glaringly obvious that they don't on a local scale. (Fun experiment: Hold up a tall metal pole in the middle of a thunderstorm, and determine how long your local environment remains in equilibrium.)
When we research things that occur on a time/space scale as grand as this, imho one of the biggest obstacles is the limits of human imagination. Can you picture - really grasp emotionally - intervals longer than your own lifetime? Or distances further than those you've actually traveled? I disagree with Cremesti in that I do not believe that chemical evolution is not falsifiable. I'm not so sure that it can be done by human beings, at least not for a very long time to come. Given a problem with thousands of variables, many unknown, whose domain is an entire planet (or many planets, if you accept panspermia) and hundreds of millions of years, can even the most knowledgable scientist state with confidence that any plausible event did or did not happen? No matter how fast the computer or how sophisticated the methods, is it possible to analyze such a problem and get results better than a coin flip? Again, not now, and imho not for a long time to come. The value of M-U is not that it showed the mechanism by which life originated on Earth, but that it showed a part of a plausible mechanism.
The first step is always important, even if it turns out to be in the wrong direction.
DDB (having a slow day at work)
Now I suppose an "enlightened" company might take a closer look in such situations, notice that the applicant appeared to take a huge credit hit over a short period of time, and discuss the matter with him before rejecting him outright. I doubt this would happen; the behavior of a typical HR dep't in re reviewing resumes doesn't suggest they'd behave differently with credit reports. And I'm not sure that's a bad thing, because such "enlightenment" might well place one in the position of having to discuss and justify aspects of one's private life that quite possibly shouldn't be discussed with an unsympathetic stranger.
[rant]
It wouldn't surprise me if this became common practice though. Companies (American companies, anyway,) seem to have decided that having any business relationship whatsoever with a person, whether employee, customer, or whatever, entitles them to discover and/or manipulate the fine details of that person's life at will.
I know; I know; businesses have the right to prevent theft and mayhem on the premises. But when did it become necessary to pervert this right into a total lack of respect, if not brazen contempt, for the people that keep you in business? Why should you have to go out of your way to demonstrate that you aren't a spendthrift, thief, or maniac in order to work? Why should you have to identify yourself (MicroCenter; Radio Shack until recently) and prove you aren't a shoplifter (Costco; CompUSA) to make a $10 cash purchase?
...and why do we put up with it?
"Innocent until proven guilty" is a lot more than a legal phrase, it's a principle that enables people to live with dignity in a free society. It's sad that so many people seem to have forgotten that.
[/rant]
Secondly: you don't ship the cable up from Earth, you manufacture it in place. If you're smart, you bring the raw material down from the Moon via linear accelerator. If you're really smart, you choose a carbonaceous asteroid as your anchor weight, and mine that for material as you move it into place.
If you want a good tutorial on the practical aspects of space elevator construction, check out Arthur C. Clarke's The Fountains of Paradise. Decent read, and the depiction, given the body of knowledge in 1979, is dead on.
Does it make anyone else just a tad uncomfortable that such critical systems, exposed to such extreme temperature and pressure stresses, are so bloody delicate? In a way, it's remarkable that the shuttles made it through as many flights as they did without serious re-entry damage.
I agree that it would probably be easier to detect tampering with a sealed reactor, if only because they'd need a fair amount of time & equipment to crack it, and you could build some of the detectors inside the sealed part where they'd be hard to defeat. The solution N Korea used - throw out the inspectors, shut off the cameras, ignore the griping until you've accomplished what you want to do - does, though, make me a tad nervous re the viability of any preventive measures that have to be carried out on foreign soil. Personally I'd have preferred we built the nukes in S. Korea, and ran a big power line across the DMZ.
I did read the article, and I get what they're trying to accomplish. What I don't get is your point. Assuming that it has to do with the non-proliferation aspect of CAESAR, the article made it clear that, even though it isn't necessary to remove and reprocess fuel, there's nothing that prevents a government bent on building Da Bomb from doing so anyway. A CAESAR built, say, by France or the US for a third-world country could be sealed to complicate access to whatever fissionables would be generated therein. But the fissionables will be there, and, short of encasing the reactor in invulnerable unobtanium, they can be removed. My point was that the integrity of that "sealed" reactor depends heavily on the trustworthiness of the government on whose territory it sits. And I suspect you can think of more than a couple of governments not deserving of such trust.
The dark side of all this is, of course, that a lowered cost of entry makes it just that much easier for "nuclear club" wannabe countries to produce plutonium for less benign applications. The author of the Economist article notes that countries could seal their CAESAR reactors (thus, I assume, burning the created plutonium for power alongside the U238) "to show that their nuclear intentions were entirely peaceful." Yeah, right. I'm sure Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong would be perfectly content to have their CAESARs crank out power, with nary a thought to the goodies sealed therein.
Yet another two-edged sword, but a damned intriguing one.
Downsides (for US users):
- It's GSM, so carrier options are somewhat limited
- It isn't widely available yet.
N.B.: Decision trees are NOT a substitute for operators' knowledge & experience - having to deal with CC ops that mindlessly walk the tree from "Is the computer plugged in?" for every call will quickly send non-novice callers scurrying back to the developers. And to make sure that incidents don't fall through the cracks. And to track the effectiveness of improvements to the CC process. You're right. Any decent CC application will track calls through follow-up, and the better ones will auto-escalate aged calls and/or flag them for mgmt. action.
You have the right idea; all you need to do now is gain mgmt support, then act.
Oh, and here's one thing not to do: Put policy / procedures in place arbitrarily compelling users to go to the help desk. If the help desk's act hasn't been thoroughly cleaned up it won't work, and if it has, busy developers will start pushing users that way on their own. And you'll spare yourselves a great deal of grief from users, and their management, and your management.
I don't think electronic voting is inherently untrustworthy, but it introduces a lot of new, subtle threats that appear to be a long way from satisfactory resolution. Securing the process itself isn't all that hard. But how do you safeguard against, for example, sudden DDoS attacks in a dozen or so heavily-Democratic cities, frustrating several thousand people into giving up on voting? How do you remediate something like that in a fair manner?
The same problem obtains with voting by mail. A few dozen well-placed people in USPS uniforms could quite probably steal enough votes from mailboxes to swing a close election, or several well-compensated mail carriers could "lose" those special envelopes. Yes, it's risky, but we know that there are more than a few people out there willing to go to jail to help their candidate win.
And then there are the other issues raised in this thread: that of ensuring one person - one vote, preventing coerced / proxy voting, etc. Much as I hate to say it, I don't see a workable solution that does not involve the voters' presence at a polling place. Heinlein offers what may be a reasonable compromise: voting at banks, either through ATMs or dedicated kiosks, where secure networks and ID methods are already in place, and there's enough supervision to prevent someone from, say, showing up with a couple hundred voter cards gathered from senior citizen complexes as a "favor" to those unable/unwilling to travel. Or stolen from mailboxes.
With colliding gold nuclei. Jeez, didn't those people read Cosm!? When they start working with uranium, I'm staying the hell out of New England.
Wow. I had no idea George Orwell had been a DoD consultant.
(2) We're already well down the slippery slope to where we'll have to get gov't permits to wipe our arses, and imho that slope doesn't need any more lubricant.
(3) Private credentialing bodies, insurance companies, and (arguably) the courts do a much better job of regulating professions than any government body can. Which do you trust more: the FDA, or Underwriters Labs?
DDB
Ewww - reminds me of an ex-girlfriend.