There have been a lot of people in this thread that say they bike in sub-zero temperatures, without much thermal protection. I realize that this works, but I would think that this would be VERY dangerous - basically if you get a flat tire and can't keep your energy up you DIE in the cold!
That said, I walk a mile to work every day, even when the Chicago weather goes way below zero...
In principal this sounds good, but in reality you run into other problems:
What about uninsured rocketeers? (No money to fix that house that got squashed)
What if a USA rocket lands on a house in Nigeria? (No extradition so no need to pay)
I'm sure there are others, these are just the ones I thought of right away. As for passenger risk, I agree that passengers should be allowed to take risks that they know, and that current legal procedures can cover companies that lie about the risk, but there is still a problem.
The passenger may agree to the risk and waive responsibility, but their estate will almost certainly sue. That's the real problem, people are not allowed by their estates (as in the lawyers that represent their children) to take risks voluntarily. I believe Congress is addressing that as well.
Funny that you bring this up. My father and I had a discussion about this - he said the computer guy was an idiot for removing the fail-safe. I disagreed, I said it just showed where he placed his faith. It was a decision, whether to trust the machine not to kill them all, or whether to trust a human not to irrationally kill the only machine that could save them. Turns out the computer guy was even "right." Even if HAL did go crazy they would have been killed in the shock wave anyway, so killing HAL could only have made things worse (because then they couldn't even control the ship they were on!).
Back to the subject at hand, perhaps the French as a society are placing too much trust in machines. This would be especially scarry considering the power source they employ. Not that nukes are inherently dangerous, more that hubris is inherently dangerous, and nukes spread the danger around...
On the other hand, perhaps making the car electric somehow saves lives? I don't know, but I don't see how it could.
Oh, one other note (I design rockets for fun also), don't eject the gas out the back. Instead inject it into the air stream in front of you. It creates a "cool" gas evelope that separates you from the really hot stuff. (Yes, the super-heated gas is actually cool compared to the hot shock gases!) Shock gasses can reach 30,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The BOILING point of tungsten is 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, for reference.
I know I'm too late so probably no one will see this, but this type of idea actually works quite well for steep angle reentry (shallow angle reentry makes the "hot" time longer, so you would need too much coolant). One suggestion though - if instead of a gas you use a liquid (say, water) that then boils to become a gas you get the advantages of easy storage and also the added cooling of the heat of vaporization.
That is true, but it is also a management failure. No software is perfect, and mission critical software must be assumed to fail at the worst possible time. ER equipment all has human powered backups, etc. The management failure in the Air Traffic Controller's case was to not have tested the backup equipment regularly, just like how some people never check there backup tape archives to see if they could really get the data back. Yes, the root problem was moving from a stable Unix platform to an unstable Microsoft platform (which was dumb, any software where the operators manual includes a forced manual reboot should never be used!), but any single failure should not impact a mission critical system.
Of course, what they overlook to try to prove the doomsday scenario is that the third failsafe - the pilots - performed well. No planes crashed, no lives lost. That's why they still have all those archaic flight path rules.
I've been researching launch costs recently. An orbital launch costs on the order of $10,000/pound, with heavier payloads getting a small price break. For a sounding rocket launch like SS1, expect to pay around $1,000/pound. So if they are launching for under about $600,000, they will come in cheaper. I suspect that they are coming in at around $100,000 per flight.
Of course, the comparable sounding rocket number is probably a more useful trajectory and altitude, so YMMV.
It sounds like you don't think a reasonable person would be for those things. Yes, I am for those things, though in real life they are not possible. (Some time I'll tell you about being turned down for disability income when I could not walk because I didn't match someone's profile.) I will not leave money to my children, I love them too much. Giving people money makes them miserable! Just look at anyone that won the lotery! How many miserable people do you know that are rich (from inheritance)? How many happy but financially poor people do you know?
We agree that there should be at least a minimal safety net for survival. I merely disagree that TV, cash, and high speed Internet is necessary for survival.
Well, maybe the internet...
As for the definition you give for welfare, correct or not it is not the one that governments use. Welfare=money to a government.
Interestingly, this says a lot about your preconceived notions:
"It's the primary function of a society to guarantee the welfare of the weak"
I personally do not want to live in such a society. Yes, everyone should be given the tools to make themselves happy (whether stupid, sick handicapped, etc.), but an external force will NEVER be able to make someone happy.
I believe that the primary function of society is to give everyone an even chance. Beyond that, what you do with it is your own affair. (Yes, there should exist safety nets for people that get slammed by pure economics. But that is not the primary function of society, in my opinion.)
The key here is that what anyone believes the primary function of society is going to be opinion, not fact.
I find this kind of comment interesting, and I think you hit the nail on the head with your first (joking) line. There exists a class of people that do not have to "make a living from your work." It is sort of the opposite of the prisoner's dilemma - if only one person does it, everyone is better off since they can reuse the code. Since it works so well, there must be a critical mass of people that do not have to earn a living on it.
By the way, I think most people are earning a living assembling and maintaining the open source projects. At a high level, there are companies like Red Hat. But at a low level there are individuals employed for there knowlege of how to assemble working systems.
Still a lot of money to be made, just not from "pure code."
Basically, the electromagnetic waves go out at 3-30 KHz, the same general range as sound. When those waves hit a different medium than the one they are launched in (for example, they hit the hull of a metal ship) part of the energy is transformed from electrical to heat and sound. That sound energy may have enough power to harm mammals.
Well, if the Earth's mass was all in a point, that radius would be the Schwarzschild radius, which for the Earth is about 9mm. Of course, the Earth is bigger than this, so there is no such orbit.
Good thing too, because if there was such an orbit, the Earth would be a black hole!
Actually, space capsules are easily reusable - there were plans to do this with Apollo capsules to cut costs. A Gemini capsule actually was reused, by simply replacing the heat shield. (References)
Actually, this is right in line with what us open source people should expect. The advantage from open source is that debugging scales extremely well with user base - not that the bug fix programming scales, just that the bug finding scales well.
This is just finding the bugs in the news, open source style!
Actually, I have lived in both areas, and believe that the difference between large cities and rural areas is more economic than fear of terrorism. In big cities, there tend to be the rich and the poor with very few in between, because the cost of living is so high. There are far fewer rich than poor, and the poor need help to survive when things go wrong - ergo a large Democrat population, which votes for things like social security and government medical care.
In rural America, the difference between rich and poor is a lot smaller, and everybody seems to be about the same as you. The cost of living is FAR lower (not just the difference you read about, I used to live on $10K a year back when I couldn't walk, and I now spend a few times that just on rent in Chicago). In this case, people don't really see a need to give up their money in taxes to provide security for those that hit hard times - because hard times do not affect people as much. This makes them lean towards the Republican viewpoint.
Just my opinion, really, but it does match what I have experienced.
The thing is, as I mentioned in my previous post, it may be more expensive to operate a cable (think train with an exceptionally long track) than to operate some other method (such as an X-prize like machine). The primary factors in my opinion are that:
1) It takes more than a week to get up there, so your throughput is limited (what if only 1 airplane, or even only 10 airplanes could be flying between Chicago and New York at any one time, and the flight took a week - does that sound like a viable business?)
2) The cable will develop a break approximately every 10 days, and so will be a maintainence nightmare. (See here)
I think that cheaper ways to orbit will be found before these problems are solved. (In fact, I'm working on one right now)
I believe that the technical challenges are quickly being solved, and that the safety issues can likewise be solved. What I believe will kill space elevators are the business issues.
For the space elevator to make sense, it must be the cheapest method of getting into space. Obviously, the incremental cost is probably VERY low, like $1/lb, compared to the cost of rockets at $10,000/lb. However, there are several other costs that I project will make this non-economical:
1. Development / Deployment - new technology (lighter materials) may make this work, indeed this is where most of the work to date has been done.
2. Trip time - it will take a week or more to travel that far. This will at least be a problem for humans.
3. Maintainence - This is the big one. We are building trains to replace aircraft, except the track is VERY long (35,000 km)! This track will need to be constantly repaired (because of meteorite damage, and other damage). On average, there will be a partial structural failure every 10 days, due the unfriendly neighbors in space. (references)
That third problem is a major problem for this being cheaper than even $10,000/lb. Especially mixing in the second problem, which limits how far economies of scale can go. You would have to have repair teams running constantly, and your design margins would need to be extremely robust to survive almost weekly cable cuts.
I know that the pharmaceutical companies are "THE MAN", and therefore evil, but let's think about what that means for a little bit. You are saying that there exists a better, non-patentable method of producing a drug. And it is not being used because the pharmaceutical companies cannot patent it and thereby ensure profitability. No one else is making drugs from those sources either - even though it is known to be non-patented. So this is virtual proof that if we weaken the patent system, we will have LESS drugs available, not more. In fact, pure logic dictates that we should allow someone to patent the unpatentable natural antibiotics - at least then they would be available!
Like you, I don't really like the way this works. But my question is what can replace the "market force" of patent law to make pharmaceutical companies make these (and other similar) drugs? This is actually a pretty common dilemma. As a society we really need to figure out a way to make people rich for doing things that are obvious, but necessary - otherwise noone smart and experienced enough to build a company will bother.
This is one (of many, in my opinion) of the problems with patents as they are today. Anybody have any ideas?
What's new is that it is now better than an internal combustion engine. That means that very soon manufacturers will stop using ICEs, and start using these modified Stirling engines. The only uncertainty after reading all this is power provided per kilogram of engine. That didn't seem to be a problem, however they did not provide data for that. Cheaper to manufacture, cheaper to operate, environmentally sound - WOW!
This is correct. Another way of looking at this is that spammers take let's say 1 minute per day of time to deal with. They take it from 100,000,000 people. In one year, they have taken 36e9 minutes from others. A human lifetime is approximately 40,000,000 minutes long. So they have wasted 1000 lifetimes per year. They ARE mass murderers! (Or worse, the imprison people their entire lives!)
Just to nitpick, note that you are saying esentially new research is dumb because I can't think of a way to resolve problem X. For example, using a nuke to knock down missiles would be bad because of the EMP. But what if the research was to find a way to make the EMP directional (such as a smaller detonation surrounded by a reflector dish, dish is destroyed but only after directing the EMP)? It is hard to say what research will work and what won't, so that makes a lousy argument. It is possible to say what research is possible to have results in line with what society needs, and so that makes a better argument, at least to me.
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There have been a lot of people in this thread that say they bike in sub-zero temperatures, without much thermal protection. I realize that this works, but I would think that this would be VERY dangerous - basically if you get a flat tire and can't keep your energy up you DIE in the cold!
That said, I walk a mile to work every day, even when the Chicago weather goes way below zero...
In principal this sounds good, but in reality you run into other problems:
What about uninsured rocketeers? (No money to fix that house that got squashed)
What if a USA rocket lands on a house in Nigeria? (No extradition so no need to pay)
I'm sure there are others, these are just the ones I thought of right away. As for passenger risk, I agree that passengers should be allowed to take risks that they know, and that current legal procedures can cover companies that lie about the risk, but there is still a problem.
The passenger may agree to the risk and waive responsibility, but their estate will almost certainly sue. That's the real problem, people are not allowed by their estates (as in the lawyers that represent their children) to take risks voluntarily. I believe Congress is addressing that as well.
Not all government involvement is bad, just most!
Funny that you bring this up. My father and I had a discussion about this - he said the computer guy was an idiot for removing the fail-safe. I disagreed, I said it just showed where he placed his faith. It was a decision, whether to trust the machine not to kill them all, or whether to trust a human not to irrationally kill the only machine that could save them. Turns out the computer guy was even "right." Even if HAL did go crazy they would have been killed in the shock wave anyway, so killing HAL could only have made things worse (because then they couldn't even control the ship they were on!).
Back to the subject at hand, perhaps the French as a society are placing too much trust in machines. This would be especially scarry considering the power source they employ. Not that nukes are inherently dangerous, more that hubris is inherently dangerous, and nukes spread the danger around...
On the other hand, perhaps making the car electric somehow saves lives? I don't know, but I don't see how it could.
Oh, one other note (I design rockets for fun also), don't eject the gas out the back. Instead inject it into the air stream in front of you. It creates a "cool" gas evelope that separates you from the really hot stuff. (Yes, the super-heated gas is actually cool compared to the hot shock gases!) Shock gasses can reach 30,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The BOILING point of tungsten is 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, for reference.
I know I'm too late so probably no one will see this, but this type of idea actually works quite well for steep angle reentry (shallow angle reentry makes the "hot" time longer, so you would need too much coolant). One suggestion though - if instead of a gas you use a liquid (say, water) that then boils to become a gas you get the advantages of easy storage and also the added cooling of the heat of vaporization.
That is true, but it is also a management failure. No software is perfect, and mission critical software must be assumed to fail at the worst possible time. ER equipment all has human powered backups, etc. The management failure in the Air Traffic Controller's case was to not have tested the backup equipment regularly, just like how some people never check there backup tape archives to see if they could really get the data back. Yes, the root problem was moving from a stable Unix platform to an unstable Microsoft platform (which was dumb, any software where the operators manual includes a forced manual reboot should never be used!), but any single failure should not impact a mission critical system.
Of course, what they overlook to try to prove the doomsday scenario is that the third failsafe - the pilots - performed well. No planes crashed, no lives lost. That's why they still have all those archaic flight path rules.
I've been researching launch costs recently. An orbital launch costs on the order of $10,000/pound, with heavier payloads getting a small price break. For a sounding rocket launch like SS1, expect to pay around $1,000/pound. So if they are launching for under about $600,000, they will come in cheaper. I suspect that they are coming in at around $100,000 per flight.
Of course, the comparable sounding rocket number is probably a more useful trajectory and altitude, so YMMV.
"So, you're for near..."
It sounds like you don't think a reasonable person would be for those things. Yes, I am for those things, though in real life they are not possible. (Some time I'll tell you about being turned down for disability income when I could not walk because I didn't match someone's profile.) I will not leave money to my children, I love them too much. Giving people money makes them miserable! Just look at anyone that won the lotery! How many miserable people do you know that are rich (from inheritance)? How many happy but financially poor people do you know?
We agree that there should be at least a minimal safety net for survival. I merely disagree that TV, cash, and high speed Internet is necessary for survival.
Well, maybe the internet...
As for the definition you give for welfare, correct or not it is not the one that governments use. Welfare=money to a government.
My daughter says I'm orange, so I guess I qualify...
Interestingly, this says a lot about your preconceived notions:
"It's the primary function of a society to guarantee the welfare of the weak"
I personally do not want to live in such a society. Yes, everyone should be given the tools to make themselves happy (whether stupid, sick handicapped, etc.), but an external force will NEVER be able to make someone happy.
I believe that the primary function of society is to give everyone an even chance. Beyond that, what you do with it is your own affair. (Yes, there should exist safety nets for people that get slammed by pure economics. But that is not the primary function of society, in my opinion.)
The key here is that what anyone believes the primary function of society is going to be opinion, not fact.
Oh, by the way, I am handicapped.
I find this kind of comment interesting, and I think you hit the nail on the head with your first (joking) line. There exists a class of people that do not have to "make a living from your work." It is sort of the opposite of the prisoner's dilemma - if only one person does it, everyone is better off since they can reuse the code. Since it works so well, there must be a critical mass of people that do not have to earn a living on it.
By the way, I think most people are earning a living assembling and maintaining the open source projects. At a high level, there are companies like Red Hat. But at a low level there are individuals employed for there knowlege of how to assemble working systems.
Still a lot of money to be made, just not from "pure code."
Basically, the electromagnetic waves go out at 3-30 KHz, the same general range as sound. When those waves hit a different medium than the one they are launched in (for example, they hit the hull of a metal ship) part of the energy is transformed from electrical to heat and sound. That sound energy may have enough power to harm mammals.
Well, presumably you can only tell them that once...
Well, if the Earth's mass was all in a point, that radius would be the Schwarzschild radius, which for the Earth is about 9mm. Of course, the Earth is bigger than this, so there is no such orbit.
Good thing too, because if there was such an orbit, the Earth would be a black hole!
Actually, space capsules are easily reusable - there were plans to do this with Apollo capsules to cut costs. A Gemini capsule actually was reused, by simply replacing the heat shield. (References)
The Rankine temperature scale starts at absolute zero and uses degrees Fahrenheit. But as far as I know, no one uses it.
I seem to remember seeing it in an old rocket engine design manual, talking about propellant boiling points. Weird stuff is in those old manuals!
Actually, this is right in line with what us open source people should expect. The advantage from open source is that debugging scales extremely well with user base - not that the bug fix programming scales, just that the bug finding scales well.
This is just finding the bugs in the news, open source style!
Actually, I have lived in both areas, and believe that the difference between large cities and rural areas is more economic than fear of terrorism. In big cities, there tend to be the rich and the poor with very few in between, because the cost of living is so high. There are far fewer rich than poor, and the poor need help to survive when things go wrong - ergo a large Democrat population, which votes for things like social security and government medical care.
In rural America, the difference between rich and poor is a lot smaller, and everybody seems to be about the same as you. The cost of living is FAR lower (not just the difference you read about, I used to live on $10K a year back when I couldn't walk, and I now spend a few times that just on rent in Chicago). In this case, people don't really see a need to give up their money in taxes to provide security for those that hit hard times - because hard times do not affect people as much. This makes them lean towards the Republican viewpoint.
Just my opinion, really, but it does match what I have experienced.
The thing is, as I mentioned in my previous post, it may be more expensive to operate a cable (think train with an exceptionally long track) than to operate some other method (such as an X-prize like machine). The primary factors in my opinion are that:
1) It takes more than a week to get up there, so your throughput is limited (what if only 1 airplane, or even only 10 airplanes could be flying between Chicago and New York at any one time, and the flight took a week - does that sound like a viable business?)
2) The cable will develop a break approximately every 10 days, and so will be a maintainence nightmare. (See here)
I think that cheaper ways to orbit will be found before these problems are solved. (In fact, I'm working on one right now)
I believe that the technical challenges are quickly being solved, and that the safety issues can likewise be solved. What I believe will kill space elevators are the business issues.
For the space elevator to make sense, it must be the cheapest method of getting into space. Obviously, the incremental cost is probably VERY low, like $1/lb, compared to the cost of rockets at $10,000/lb. However, there are several other costs that I project will make this non-economical:
1. Development / Deployment - new technology (lighter materials) may make this work, indeed this is where most of the work to date has been done.
2. Trip time - it will take a week or more to travel that far. This will at least be a problem for humans.
3. Maintainence - This is the big one. We are building trains to replace aircraft, except the track is VERY long (35,000 km)! This track will need to be constantly repaired (because of meteorite damage, and other damage). On average, there will be a partial structural failure every 10 days, due the unfriendly neighbors in space. (references)
That third problem is a major problem for this being cheaper than even $10,000/lb. Especially mixing in the second problem, which limits how far economies of scale can go. You would have to have repair teams running constantly, and your design margins would need to be extremely robust to survive almost weekly cable cuts.
I wish this would work, but I'm afraid it won't.
I know that the pharmaceutical companies are "THE MAN", and therefore evil, but let's think about what that means for a little bit. You are saying that there exists a better, non-patentable method of producing a drug. And it is not being used because the pharmaceutical companies cannot patent it and thereby ensure profitability. No one else is making drugs from those sources either - even though it is known to be non-patented. So this is virtual proof that if we weaken the patent system, we will have LESS drugs available, not more. In fact, pure logic dictates that we should allow someone to patent the unpatentable natural antibiotics - at least then they would be available!
Like you, I don't really like the way this works. But my question is what can replace the "market force" of patent law to make pharmaceutical companies make these (and other similar) drugs? This is actually a pretty common dilemma. As a society we really need to figure out a way to make people rich for doing things that are obvious, but necessary - otherwise noone smart and experienced enough to build a company will bother.
This is one (of many, in my opinion) of the problems with patents as they are today. Anybody have any ideas?
What's new is that it is now better than an internal combustion engine. That means that very soon manufacturers will stop using ICEs, and start using these modified Stirling engines. The only uncertainty after reading all this is power provided per kilogram of engine. That didn't seem to be a problem, however they did not provide data for that. Cheaper to manufacture, cheaper to operate, environmentally sound - WOW!
This is correct. Another way of looking at this is that spammers take let's say 1 minute per day of time to deal with. They take it from 100,000,000 people. In one year, they have taken 36e9 minutes from others. A human lifetime is approximately 40,000,000 minutes long. So they have wasted 1000 lifetimes per year. They ARE mass murderers! (Or worse, the imprison people their entire lives!)
No, no, no, it's that he's a haughty, French-looking Massachusetts Democrat who, by the way, served for Vietnam.
Sorry, I will stop, I promise!
Just to nitpick, note that you are saying esentially new research is dumb because I can't think of a way to resolve problem X. For example, using a nuke to knock down missiles would be bad because of the EMP. But what if the research was to find a way to make the EMP directional (such as a smaller detonation surrounded by a reflector dish, dish is destroyed but only after directing the EMP)? It is hard to say what research will work and what won't, so that makes a lousy argument. It is possible to say what research is possible to have results in line with what society needs, and so that makes a better argument, at least to me.