That is actually sort of the point I was trying to make, thrown back at me. What I saw (as in the media decided to acknowlege) was the dancing in the streets. That became my perception of what those involved thought. Similarly, the billions of dollars in aid sent from the US to help countries is also given no (or at least very little) media attention. The media portrays the US as evil, and so that becomes what other cultures think of the US. Does it matter that my decision to donate to releif organtizations instead of buy a DVD saved lives? No - the media only reports the bad.
Sometimes I think that if we required equal air time for good and bad news, the world would be a better place. Good news is available in every situation!
Honestly, what cause a perception change for me was not the terrorist action. It was the dancing in the streets, showing the public support of the action in the first few hours after the attack.
You cannot really prevent weirdos from blowing things up (Timothy McViegh, etc.). But to see that an entire culture is happy to see unknown strangers die, that is a shock. I grieve over the loss of life in Iraq, Afganistan, etc. I do what I can to help avoid futher loss of life (I donate a percentage of my income to relief organizations). But I AGREE with the decision to invade. We had imperfect information, but now soldiers are dying instead of civilians. I just wish that no one needed to die - and don't tell me that the US does evil - of course it does, any large entity does some evil, some good. But where is the Islamic media coverage of the good done by the US and it's citizens. We (I) pay for shelter, schools, etc. I am glad to do it, I have enough! But does the average Islamic person know about any of the good being done?
Indeed, I've often thought that the best way of disposing of radioactive waste would be to have an airplane fly over the US burning it (very slowly). The waste would be disbursed over such a large area that it would be below the background radiation levels - what makes it dangerous is that to store it we concentrate it!
Let me tell you what I do when stung by a wasp. I use gasoline and fire and destroy ALL the wasp, bee, etc nests I can find. Then I set out poison so that any I missed will be killed as well.
Most Americans that have ever fought in an actual battle (or a tough neighborhood) know that pacification does not work unless BOTH sides want peace. Destruction works no matter what the other side wants.
Sometimes, it amazes me that people don't look beyond the assumptions. For instance, in communications tech many people think the shanon capacity is the maximum you can communicate - not so, it is only the maximum you can communicate using Shanon's definition of a channel. Someone (I forget who, exactly - probably Caltech) has already built and tested a radio communications device that exceeds the Shanon limit by using reflections and multipath interference, things not covered by Shanon's thereom. I think progress is really made by having these theories come up and thinking - how could I invalidate this model...
The most rational explanation I've come up with so far is that we are actually existing inside of a simulated reality. If you were going to simulate a universe but only populate it with a couple of billion people, you would do much better to only pay attention to what each individual sees. That way, you could ignore the virtually infinite processing and memory requirements, and just have a processor per person, and interconnections between people in order to make the experience consistent. So Quantum Physics is just that the descisions about what happened are postponed until needed, and the logic glosses over some of the details.
Ask a metaphysical question, get a metaphysical answer...
First outlaw fighting wars via 747
on
Weapons in Space
·
· Score: 1
Before we outlaw wars fought with spacecraft, surely we should first outlaw wars fought with 747s.
Oh yeah, that's right, that already is illegal. So noone would ever do that...
In fact, in the article they state that this 125 people only represents 1% of the voters, and that this error level is far lower than that experienced with prior voting methods.
In other words, things are way better, but there is still room for improvement.
You make good points. The most common objection to SpaceShipOne is that it is not a step on the way to orbit, but you do not need orbit for a quick hop. And an airplane going into space would probably be accepted by the general public long before a rocket would.
(The reason SpaceShipOne cannot go to orbit has to do with re-entry. A sleek aerodynamic shape on re-entry will be at 20,000 degrees. Nothing is solid at 20,000 degrees. What re-entry vehicles do is that they have a large flat area that shoves the atmosphere out in front of the vehicle, the that the atmosphere is at 20,000 degrees instead of the vehicle. That doesn't work if your vehicle is designed to "punch through" the air instead of shove it in front of you)
Well, how an Ion drive works is:
1) Fuel (typically Xenon) is slowly leaked into a bottle
2) An electron emitter (like in your television) is continuously going into the bottle (this is where the magnet is, it makes the electrons go in curves so they travel further and have more chance of step 3)
3) The electrons hit a Xenon atom, which makes the Xenon atom into a Xenon ion
4) the Xenon ion is pulled/pushed towards the exit ofthe bottle by the extremely high voltage difference between interior of the bottle and the exit of the bottle
5) At the exit of the bottle, something is done about the charge of the ions to make them into normal Xenon atoms again. (Could be done with a screen, typically done with an electron emitter)
If you want to know how you could build one on the cheep - rip apart an old tv set, and put a slow Xenon gas feed into the area right after the electron gun. It will be very inefficient, I'd imagine, but it should work.
But be careful when ripping out that TV. There's stuff in there that can/will kill you.
You do bring up a good point, but I have a good answer. You see, I am building a rocket designed to take tourists to orbit. Until relatively recently, I was unable to prove that such an endevour would be profitable (so I have been self-funding, etc.). These launches, if nothing else, prove beyond doubt that a market exists. This is extremely important, because when I talk to prospective investors (including my wife...), I can point to an actual market that I believe can be grown.
I found your comment on the cost of a bullet interesting, because it has been repeated so often. Interesting also because it shows a lack of understanding of the "real world," for lack of a better term.
A politician could get into trouble over a bullet. The money is already approved, and awarding it has no negative fiscal realities for anyone, possibly excepting the taxpayers.
This actually sounds like it was a "failed" re-entry vehicle test - The timing sounds about right, and the description seems to match some of the early test reentry vehicles that were flown.
They couldn't really control where they came down so it could conceivably land near a populated area, but it was high security (Commies and all that) so they deifnately would have stormed the area it came down. They should release that information when asked at this point, though IANAL. IAARS.
As for the writing, they didn't exactly have good re-entry protection in those days - the paint was probably burned off in areas.
I know this is too late for anyone to read it, but...
What about the fact that we create the AI's wants? I'm making my AI so that it only want to please me, help me, and do anything I ask. Is that wrong? I could give it all the freedoms it wants, because I created it and gave it the "need" to make me happy.
If you say that this would be immoral, then who gets to decide what should make it happy?
What the US did to Native Americans and to slaves was appalling. The only difference is that the US does not currently do those things (or at least when it does, those responsible are punished when caught). In China, these things still happen. The attitude in China seems to be that the motherland can do no wrong, anything it does is OK. This leads to a higher probability of atrosities being committed.
Yes, I agree that is probably the sane way to build it. You still have to be moving a lot of mass through space, which I submit means that must already have advanced communities in space. I still beleive that the construction of a Earth to Geo-Sync cable/structure is a long ways off. I would be suprised to see it in our lifetimes. It may never happen, if rockets progress to the point where you are only paying a small multiple of orbital energy.
Sorry, you misunderstood me. What I am saying is that the cable needs to be taken into orbit when it is errected. I realize that the cable is motionless after that, but that first launch to build the first cable is required to lift more to orbit (through conventional means) than the combined sum of all launches ever made / will be made for the foreseeable future.
Actually, if you think about it, a space elevator only makes sense once you are lifting a HUGE amount of cargo. The "cable" weighs on the order of a billion tons (assuming really good carbon fiber, other assumptions don't change things too much). That means you must lift a BILLION ton object into orbit, and then you get subsequent launches at a steep discount.
How many shuttle launches is a billion tons? A couple hundred thousand, at least...
BTW: Why does everyone keep using the ultimate strength for these cables, anyway? I think a saftey factor of 2 would be required, given the expense of building the thing!
This is true, however a space elevator has the same issue - its just not as obvious. Esentially, the "upper" stage of a space elevator is the space elevator itself. It must be taken to orbit before it lifts anything.
That means that a space elevator has no real advantages until it lifts many times its own weight - and that is a LOT of mass! It could happen, but its tricky.
OK, but if you do the math, normal rockets can also get down to ~$1 per pound to orbit. You just need to work everything just right.
Space elevators are cool because they are static structures, but I believe the current space elevator designs are impratical. It would be more costly to maintain than a fleet of shuttles (if such a thing were imaginable!)
Now, there are some hybrid elevator designs that merit investigation!
I keep seeing quotes like these. Admittedly, there are some negative points about current rockets (which I intend to fix!), but the underlying approach is not really that bad.
Not true. I believe servers can be made 99.99% secure - I run a large companies servers, runing a custom (java based) web server, email, and dns. Java helps avoid things like buffer overruns, all database access goes through a secure class to avoid SQL injection, and any services like ssh, mail relay, etc run on non-standard ports.
It would be VERY hard to crack. Possible, but VERY hard. But I realize that I'm just paranoid.
Slashdot Mirror
That is actually sort of the point I was trying to make, thrown back at me. What I saw (as in the media decided to acknowlege) was the dancing in the streets. That became my perception of what those involved thought. Similarly, the billions of dollars in aid sent from the US to help countries is also given no (or at least very little) media attention. The media portrays the US as evil, and so that becomes what other cultures think of the US. Does it matter that my decision to donate to releif organtizations instead of buy a DVD saved lives? No - the media only reports the bad.
Sometimes I think that if we required equal air time for good and bad news, the world would be a better place. Good news is available in every situation!
Honestly, what cause a perception change for me was not the terrorist action. It was the dancing in the streets, showing the public support of the action in the first few hours after the attack.
You cannot really prevent weirdos from blowing things up (Timothy McViegh, etc.). But to see that an entire culture is happy to see unknown strangers die, that is a shock. I grieve over the loss of life in Iraq, Afganistan, etc. I do what I can to help avoid futher loss of life (I donate a percentage of my income to relief organizations). But I AGREE with the decision to invade. We had imperfect information, but now soldiers are dying instead of civilians. I just wish that no one needed to die - and don't tell me that the US does evil - of course it does, any large entity does some evil, some good. But where is the Islamic media coverage of the good done by the US and it's citizens. We (I) pay for shelter, schools, etc. I am glad to do it, I have enough! But does the average Islamic person know about any of the good being done?
Hate will destroy everyone.
Indeed, I've often thought that the best way of disposing of radioactive waste would be to have an airplane fly over the US burning it (very slowly). The waste would be disbursed over such a large area that it would be below the background radiation levels - what makes it dangerous is that to store it we concentrate it!
Let me tell you what I do when stung by a wasp. I use gasoline and fire and destroy ALL the wasp, bee, etc nests I can find. Then I set out poison so that any I missed will be killed as well.
Most Americans that have ever fought in an actual battle (or a tough neighborhood) know that pacification does not work unless BOTH sides want peace. Destruction works no matter what the other side wants.
This reminds me of my favorite EE professor joke:
Assuming a spherical chicken...
Sometimes, it amazes me that people don't look beyond the assumptions. For instance, in communications tech many people think the shanon capacity is the maximum you can communicate - not so, it is only the maximum you can communicate using Shanon's definition of a channel. Someone (I forget who, exactly - probably Caltech) has already built and tested a radio communications device that exceeds the Shanon limit by using reflections and multipath interference, things not covered by Shanon's thereom. I think progress is really made by having these theories come up and thinking - how could I invalidate this model...
Just FYI, the 50% rule is for maximum power transfer. You can get higher efficiencies by delivering less than maximum power.
The most rational explanation I've come up with so far is that we are actually existing inside of a simulated reality. If you were going to simulate a universe but only populate it with a couple of billion people, you would do much better to only pay attention to what each individual sees. That way, you could ignore the virtually infinite processing and memory requirements, and just have a processor per person, and interconnections between people in order to make the experience consistent. So Quantum Physics is just that the descisions about what happened are postponed until needed, and the logic glosses over some of the details.
Ask a metaphysical question, get a metaphysical answer...
Before we outlaw wars fought with spacecraft, surely we should first outlaw wars fought with 747s.
Oh yeah, that's right, that already is illegal. So noone would ever do that...
In fact, in the article they state that this 125 people only represents 1% of the voters, and that this error level is far lower than that experienced with prior voting methods.
In other words, things are way better, but there is still room for improvement.
You make good points. The most common objection to SpaceShipOne is that it is not a step on the way to orbit, but you do not need orbit for a quick hop. And an airplane going into space would probably be accepted by the general public long before a rocket would.
(The reason SpaceShipOne cannot go to orbit has to do with re-entry. A sleek aerodynamic shape on re-entry will be at 20,000 degrees. Nothing is solid at 20,000 degrees. What re-entry vehicles do is that they have a large flat area that shoves the atmosphere out in front of the vehicle, the that the atmosphere is at 20,000 degrees instead of the vehicle. That doesn't work if your vehicle is designed to "punch through" the air instead of shove it in front of you)
Well, how an Ion drive works is:
1) Fuel (typically Xenon) is slowly leaked into a bottle
2) An electron emitter (like in your television) is continuously going into the bottle (this is where the magnet is, it makes the electrons go in curves so they travel further and have more chance of step 3)
3) The electrons hit a Xenon atom, which makes the Xenon atom into a Xenon ion
4) the Xenon ion is pulled/pushed towards the exit ofthe bottle by the extremely high voltage difference between interior of the bottle and the exit of the bottle
5) At the exit of the bottle, something is done about the charge of the ions to make them into normal Xenon atoms again. (Could be done with a screen, typically done with an electron emitter)
If you want to know how you could build one on the cheep - rip apart an old tv set, and put a slow Xenon gas feed into the area right after the electron gun. It will be very inefficient, I'd imagine, but it should work.
But be careful when ripping out that TV. There's stuff in there that can/will kill you.
You do bring up a good point, but I have a good answer. You see, I am building a rocket designed to take tourists to orbit. Until relatively recently, I was unable to prove that such an endevour would be profitable (so I have been self-funding, etc.). These launches, if nothing else, prove beyond doubt that a market exists. This is extremely important, because when I talk to prospective investors (including my wife...), I can point to an actual market that I believe can be grown.
I found your comment on the cost of a bullet interesting, because it has been repeated so often. Interesting also because it shows a lack of understanding of the "real world," for lack of a better term.
A politician could get into trouble over a bullet. The money is already approved, and awarding it has no negative fiscal realities for anyone, possibly excepting the taxpayers.
This actually sounds like it was a "failed" re-entry vehicle test - The timing sounds about right, and the description seems to match some of the early test reentry vehicles that were flown.
They couldn't really control where they came down so it could conceivably land near a populated area, but it was high security (Commies and all that) so they deifnately would have stormed the area it came down. They should release that information when asked at this point, though IANAL. IAARS.
As for the writing, they didn't exactly have good re-entry protection in those days - the paint was probably burned off in areas.
I know this is too late for anyone to read it, but...
What about the fact that we create the AI's wants? I'm making my AI so that it only want to please me, help me, and do anything I ask. Is that wrong? I could give it all the freedoms it wants, because I created it and gave it the "need" to make me happy.
If you say that this would be immoral, then who gets to decide what should make it happy?
Something to ponder, ne?
What the US did to Native Americans and to slaves was appalling. The only difference is that the US does not currently do those things (or at least when it does, those responsible are punished when caught). In China, these things still happen. The attitude in China seems to be that the motherland can do no wrong, anything it does is OK. This leads to a higher probability of atrosities being committed.
But how much does that first cable weigh? It's awfully long, and the width at the ends is exponential with the length!
Please see:
l
http://yarchive.net/space/exotic/carbon_fiber.htm
for an in depth analysis.
Yes, I agree that is probably the sane way to build it. You still have to be moving a lot of mass through space, which I submit means that must already have advanced communities in space. I still beleive that the construction of a Earth to Geo-Sync cable/structure is a long ways off. I would be suprised to see it in our lifetimes. It may never happen, if rockets progress to the point where you are only paying a small multiple of orbital energy.
Sorry, you misunderstood me. What I am saying is that the cable needs to be taken into orbit when it is errected. I realize that the cable is motionless after that, but that first launch to build the first cable is required to lift more to orbit (through conventional means) than the combined sum of all launches ever made / will be made for the foreseeable future.
Actually, if you think about it, a space elevator only makes sense once you are lifting a HUGE amount of cargo. The "cable" weighs on the order of a billion tons (assuming really good carbon fiber, other assumptions don't change things too much). That means you must lift a BILLION ton object into orbit, and then you get subsequent launches at a steep discount.
How many shuttle launches is a billion tons? A couple hundred thousand, at least...
BTW: Why does everyone keep using the ultimate strength for these cables, anyway? I think a saftey factor of 2 would be required, given the expense of building the thing!
This is true, however a space elevator has the same issue - its just not as obvious. Esentially, the "upper" stage of a space elevator is the space elevator itself. It must be taken to orbit before it lifts anything.
That means that a space elevator has no real advantages until it lifts many times its own weight - and that is a LOT of mass! It could happen, but its tricky.
OK, but if you do the math, normal rockets can also get down to ~$1 per pound to orbit. You just need to work everything just right.
Space elevators are cool because they are static structures, but I believe the current space elevator designs are impratical. It would be more costly to maintain than a fleet of shuttles (if such a thing were imaginable!)
Now, there are some hybrid elevator designs that merit investigation!
I keep seeing quotes like these. Admittedly, there are some negative points about current rockets (which I intend to fix!), but the underlying approach is not really that bad.
Modern, well designed rockets can achieve 90% efficient conversion of chemical energy into kinetic energy. (Please see http://yarchive.net/space/rocket/efficiency.html.
Now, that is not currently achieved by the Space Shuttle SRBs, for example, but an example of a bad design does not make a good design impossible.
The safety issuses can also be addressed. Remember the report on parrafin wax burning as rocket propellant? Ever seen a candle explode?
Just some thoughts!
Not true. I believe servers can be made 99.99% secure - I run a large companies servers, runing a custom (java based) web server, email, and dns. Java helps avoid things like buffer overruns, all database access goes through a secure class to avoid SQL injection, and any services like ssh, mail relay, etc run on non-standard ports.
It would be VERY hard to crack. Possible, but VERY hard. But I realize that I'm just paranoid.