Has to be said : what exactly do you get "for free" from freecreditreport.com? You can't get any information without paying and signing up for a service that you have to beg the phone reps to get canceled. Scarier still, the company that runs the site has the power to truly screw you over if you contest the charges on your credit card, since they ARE one of the credit reporting companies.
Is the woman illiterate? If you can read the questions on a multiple choice test with just 100 questions, you can memorize them. Heck, if you have a terrible memory, you could just memorize a few questions each attempt. Then look up all the answers. Or ask someone with a brain.
Am I reading this right? They call the 5GB a month plan "unlimited", and charge $50 PER additional gigabyte (when they were perfectly willing to accept $6/gigabyte before you went over the limit)
Why don't they control usage another way? Say, if you go over 5GB a month, your data rates get slashed to 1/5 or 1/10 the normal speed, and the phone gives you an OPTION to pay an additional fee if you want your full speed restored. I actually think a cap is a good thing FOR PHONES because radio spectrum is a finite resource. Verizon only owns so much spectrum, and using current modulation technology, can only send so much data through the air in a particular cell at one time. There are high tech ways around this problem, but they cost a lot of money, and heavy users should pay more.
But they way they are doing this is just a trap basically. I bet the phone doesn't even tell you if you go over the limit, unless you look in some deeply buried menu. They are just setting you up for a huge bill during that one month when you actually use the phone's internet capabilities to their full potential.
And the phone had so much promise. They say the screen kicks the ass of the iphone, and that the CALL QUALITY is vastly clearer and better. I believe it - I had a CDMA phone years ago, and I recall it being nearly as clear and stable a connection as a land-line. Darn nokia phone would work everywhere as well. I've never, ever gotten service this good through ATT.
"Third world medical research facilities require the latest and best equipment, just like everywhere else, because it is more reliable, requires less skill to operate, and can be serviced with available parts."
Oh really? I thought advances in technology has made the latest medical equipment both incredible feature rich and incredibly expensive.
I do have to question the rationale behind this and other "inventions."
Basically, the theory is we can improve third world medical care by making (crappy) cell phone microscopes and I've also seen a shoddy centrifuge made from an eggbeater. Thing is, perfectly working USED first world medical equipment (aka a 50 year old microscope or centrifuge) is still going to be overwhelmingly better than this stuff. Moreover, the cost of the equipment is generally not the problem in the U.S. : it's the cost of training the people to do the work. I would imagine that the same bottleneck on trained personnel is ultimately the limiting factor in the third world as well.
There's a nasty problem with the "undue financial burden" clause.
See, it doesn't matter if your business would lose a bunch of money in providing reasonable accomodation so long as the amount of money is small compared to total revenues. So, if it cost Sony 10 million/year to make games more accessible to the disabled, but only $10,000 more games were sold, then by the law Sony has to do it. (since 10 mil is nothing compared to Sony's total revenues)
Yet, as a business decision, it's lousy. No businessman would spend 10 million annually to gain 10k more annual revenue.
A doctor got sued over this. He would have had to pay thousands of dollars to provide translators for a single deaf patient who was only paying him about $100/visit.
Again, if you add up the cost of the electricity, it isn't much. A few tens of dollars per kilogram. I'll do an exact calc if you really care. Efficiency is about 10%, so you can calculate it yourself. Energy isn't the driving cost, and the improved ISP means that you don't need as much of it. You wouldn't need 28 GW. (space shuttle ISP is a mere 363, so actually an ISP of "only" a few thousand is a MASSIVE improvement)
I disagree with you 100% on the idea of the cable being "simple". Remember, this puppy is made of carbon nanotubes that don't even exist on the macroscale yet. ANY section of the 29,000 mile long cable that is "bad" due to a messup in manufacturing, and you lose ALL of it. THAT's why the space shuttle is so damn expensive : it has thousands of onboard systems, and in theory a failure in just one or two of them and you lose the orbiter. You're basically spreading your engineering problem out over 29,000 miles of a cable made of a material that does not exist yet and has to be made to incredible tolerances or it comes apart. I would venture that is no less of a problem than trying to maintain the space shuttle, which ultimately IS just a really really complex aircraft/rocket hybrid.
While with the lasers, you would have several thousand modular laser systems. If a few HUNDRED of them fail, at worst the rocket slowly begins to descend and you activate your escape module if it's a manned mission. AT the end of the disaster, you still have your laser array. If the cable snaps, you lose everything.
Anyways, as an engineer, I prefer real solutions that you can design today. Do you know how the laser launch people do research today on the costs? They call up the parts suppliers for the lasers and the mirrors and ask for a quote. You can buy everything you need TODAY. No super materials needed.
Anyways, you wouldn't build your launcher for 200 tons every 10 minutes. I'm just pointing out a point you could reasonably scale to once space industry and travel became common. For a long time, you'd do your launches with something like 2 tons every 10 minutes. That's plenty for most satellites. Bigger satellites would be launches in several modular pieces that would dock with each other once in orbit. Hab modules for a space station could be inflatable. Astronauts would have to go up 1 at at time.
Even 2 tons every 10 minutes is more than enough capacity for dreamed about projects like an array of mirrors to reduce incident light to the earth and thereby control global temperatures. (and, with enough ability to maneuver the mirrors, you could potentially control a hurricane by casting a big shadow over a portion of the storm as it developed)
Many of the "inane" questions in the article illustrate the stupidity of the journalist who wrote the article. Most of these questions are legitimate, with a legitimate answer.
Some examples : Can you put peroxide in your ear?
Actually, you can use it to remove earwax and to disinfect your ear if you went swimming in dirty water. It's a perfectly safe, legitimate use.
Am I going in labour?
Actually, other pains can be mistaken for labor, and it takes hours to develop in many women. Perhaps you're a woman, and you want to know if that abdominal pain was your first contraction or just a GI problem.
Am I having a heart attack?
Again, it's possible to mistake heartburn and cracked ribs for a heart attack. Maybe you should see what the symptoms are before you blow $300 at the Emergency Room.
Why can't black people swim? Why can't white people dance? Both must be stereotypical behaviors, and maybe there is a reason why it can seem like both are true.
Can you drink your own urine?
Again, a legitimate question. In a desperate situation, drinking your own urine may extend your survival under some environmental conditions. It's commonly mentioned in media.
Why would a pregnancy test be negative?
Yes, it's possible to get a negative test and be pregnant.
Can two women make a baby?
Yes, it's possible with newly developed technology to create sperm from stem cells. However, it has never been demonstrated in humans and may be quite unsafe.
Well, it isn't plausible. There's a dozen ways you could make the timing accurate to a millisecond using modern hardware IF you knew what the timings SHOULD BE.
That's the rub, though. You may not be able to tell by looking at the machine code for that ancient computer what exactly it is doing, and what timings the programmers originally intended. There might be all kind of hidden hacks needed for that particular application.
Just how many of these freak accidents in a row would be necessary to provide incontrovertible proof of the "universe doensn't want us to switch LHC on" theory?
I can imagine an objective demo : once we're sure that the principle exists, there would be a special room with a red button to turn on LHC. Skeptics would be invited to attempt to press the button...
They both CAN kill you but as other posters have pointed out, 110 VAC just doesn't have enough push behind it to electrocute you in a lot of common situations. 220 VAC does. As evidenced by the significantly higher death rate from electrocution in the UK, referenced in another post on this thread.
Sure, sure, it's amps that kill. I knew that. (actually, that's also wrong : it's ENERGY DELIVERED that kills, which is equal to volts * amps * time or per unit time sometimes)
However, it seems in a lot of common situations, it's easier for 220 VAC to kill you than 110.
Actually, the mini-disc was real handy if you were a professional musician during it's era. I think there was a period of 5 years or so when the mini-disc reined supreme in the pro audio world.
If you made your mythTV DVR able to support HD (going to need a beefier CPU to do those reencodes) you would be enjoying your favorite shows in HD. It'll be years before Boxee and other internet firms can afford the bandwidth (and you have sufficient connection speed) to deliver shows in credible HD.
Well, my degree is engineering, and I am going to simplify my argument for you to understand it.
See, the reason the Space Shuttle and aerospace operations in general is so darn expensive is because rockets are very large, complex assemblies of hardware whereby if a small number of failures occur, you lose the entire mission. You have to design and build a rocket to handle the enormous amounts of vibration and G-forces of launch, yet every ounce you add reduces payload because chemical rockets have such low ISP. This permeates to every aspect of design. Then, during manufacturing, you have to have ridiculous levels of quality control, with every assembly step taking place in a clean room. You have to use the most expensive available materials, such as titaniums and carbon fiber and stainless steel, because the cheaper materials are too weak and weigh too much. The whole endeavor becomes ridiculously complex, with enough paperwork to make Communist Russia proud.
A space elevator still fundamentally has the same constraint. Every bit of elevator cable has to be made in a similar clean room, paperwork happy environment. Every mission has to be done as carefully as a space shuttle mission, with many missions dedicated just to conducting yet another inspection of the cable. Every bit of weight you add to the cable as you are building it (whether that weight be for safety systems or whatnot) reduces the cargo capacity, yet making the cable lighter makes it more expensive and unsafe.
You've basically solved nothing by going with a space elevator, and cost estimates in that book you read are probably off by at least an order of magnitude.
Remember, it only costs a bit over a million dollars (I'll find the exact number if you like) to fuel the space shuttle. All the rest goes to costs like I mentioned above.
With laser launch, all the important hardware (the lasers and mirrors) stays on the ground. It can weigh any arbitrary amount, and be built to whatever shoddy standard you want. It only has to work well enough such that enough lasing modules are online during an entire launch. You can mass produce the modules in China, and you don't need to have paperwork tracking the fate of every last bolt going into a laser module : because if the module fails, it's not going to compromise the mission. (unless a LOT of modules all were to all fail at once)
Rather than a thousands of miles long cable, you have a big campus of buildings spread across many square miles. Nothing short of a megaton range nuke is going to take out your ability to launch spacecraft.
The spacecraft itself will not fail if you don't make it in a clean room. It's just a bolt of inert metal strapped to a radio beacon. You don't actually even need the beacon to work. The payload can be anything you want, and once laser launches are in full swing, spacecraft and satellites will be made to much lower, mass production standards since if the spacecraft fails while in orbit, you don't lose as much money as you would today. Even manned missions will rely on redundancy much more than high quality hardware, since it's cheaper to launch everything and the kitchen sink than it is to make your manned space habitat to the exacting standards of today.
A comparable anology is to compare the cost of computing when google does it versus the mainframes of the 1960s.
I look forward to your rational as to why laser launch "It is not and will never be a replacement for the space elevator"
Seems like you could get a lot more cargo up into space if you are launching 200 tons every 10 minutes (a full scale laser launcher with as much light output as the space shuttle main engines) than 200 tons every few days.
Go check your physics book. The force of gravity isn't reduced much.
Anyways, go read an article on laser launch. We can build the laser modules now, using ultra cheap LED pumped doped fiber optic lasers. A few billion bucks, and we'd have a launch system that could launch a small satellite dozens of times a day. 100 billion or so, and we could launch 10 space shuttle loads a day or more.
I don't really care about the details of the space elevator : it has too many problems, and is a non starter. It's friggin obvious that :
1. If enough of the ribbons snap at any one point, the whole project is lost 2. You have to manufacture every part of the cable to extreme tolerances, and if you mess up at any point, you lose it all 3. Capacity : no matter what, an enormous amount of expensive ribbon is going to be tied up and needed for every climber you have climbing.
With laser launch modules, you can build 10% more laser modules than you need, and if they fail during a launch, you lose nothing.
Nope, won't work. The limitation on a space elevator cable is that if the mass of the car(s) is too much, the cable will snap. No matter what you build it out of, it's always going to be teetering on the edge of tearing itself apart from it's own weight alone.
Economically, it's a bad investment. All that cable has to exist just to get one or two lightweight cars up. If you want to carry more cars, you gotta back the cable lots thicker. Your costs right proportionally.
A (practical) space elevator is NEVER, EVER going to be built. With any advances in technology.
Why is that? It's simple.
A space elevator, even if the cable could be made, has a ridiculous design flaw. Literally, a single failure anywhere in the cable, and there goes billions and billions worth of hardware. It is always teetering on the verge of catastrophic failure. (imagine what will happen to the station at the top of the cable)
Further, you can only launch one climber at a time, which has to slowly crawl to the top, taking hours to days.
There's a much better launch method, that has been around for years. Instead of building just enough laser to power a climber, why not build 1000 times as many lasers and beam up enough energy to get into orbit in about 10 minutes?
The spacecraft would just be an inert block of propellant and some stabilizing fins and gyros. The intense light would vaporize the propellant block in sections, and the pulses would be timed to give planar shockwaves. Presto, a high ISP engine with no nozzles or complex flight hardware needed. Laser modules stay on the ground, run on electricity. Could make another launch every 10 minutes or so. Look at the old laser launch usenet posts archived on google, where some NASA PhDs discuss the idea.
For a technology site, most of the comments here are surprisingly anti-technology.
A new graphics card comes out? Commentors will gripe that old school games with shitty graphics are better anyway.
A new CPU comes out? Same thing : commentors will complain that extra CPU power is just more cycles for crummy, inefficient programming to squander with useless eye candy features.
A laser that eliminates that annoying plastic label on fruit and the FCKING ARTICLE says that it's safe? Commentors say that THEY won't benefit because THEY always peel and wash their fruit, and they're afraid that the lasering will make fruit decay sooner (without reading the article that says the lasering does not appreciably damage the fruit's skin)
Dude, I suspect ultra cheap photovoltaics + compressed air caverns is cheaper than powered mirrors and a heat reservoir.
Reason? The technology for mirrors and solar thermal has existed for 30+ years with little improvement
The technology for ultra-cheap thin film photovoltaics JUST got invented as of a couple years ago. And nanosolar and the rest of the firms are still working on ramping up the mass production.
Google for "coal gassification" or "synthetic natural gas".
Sure, plain oil coal doesn't have the energy density, but natural gas has enough for running cars and trucks, at least. (airliners would need to be fueled using the remaining reserves of oil or using a biodiesel like fuel product. Unfortunately, this would boost ticket prices considerably from current levels since about 1/3 the cost of a ticket today is fuel. That in turn would make high speed electric trains more economically feasible)
No, you turned the graphics down because either you couldn't afford or were too cheap to buy a new video card. Not "to maintain high frame rates". Your hardware was inadequate to the challenge.
Wrong. Solar is nearly as cheap as burning oil or coal to make electricity RIGHT NOW. Yes, it only works in the day, but if it came down to it, we could adapt. (via variable pricing : in the extreme case, power at night could cost 5 to 10 times what it does in the day)
We could use solar energy to convert biomass, or coal, or CO2 from the air right into vehicle fuel. Obviously the plants that did this would only run in the day time.
The fuel would probably be synthetic methane : it's the simplest to make, obviously, and can be readily transported and stored. (hint : another name for it is natural gas, and there are cars and trucks you can buy right now that will run on it, and it's possible to convert virtually any gasoline burning vehicle to run on it)
If you're wondering, nuclear is off the table. As it stands right now, it's already more expensive to create energy using nuclear power at current prices for building and running a reactor than solar or wind. INCLUDING the cost of energy storage. (underground caverns filled with compressed air is how you store wind or solar energy) Yes, you do need some methane/natural gas to use the compressed air, but you can get that a couple of ways, including from gassifying coal.
The reason all this conversion hasn't already happened? Because the cost of the wars is not included in the price of oil. If the U.S. government were funding the wars with extra taxes on oil products (even just to make the payments on bonds used to fund the wars), we'd already be frantically converting to electric and natural gas cars, since gas would be at least $5 a gallon.
Dude. That hardly counts. My PC made in January 2007 had a 7900GS. A year later, I upgraded to an 8800GT. Point is, with an 8800GT and a 3.2 GHZ overclocked CPU, I had to turn Crysis Warhead down to medium to keep the framerates steady. (original crysis ran on High) I wouldn't even call playing Crysis on a low end card like a 6800 as playing the same game. The whole point of the game is to have some of the best graphics ever seen.
Slashdot Mirror
Has to be said : what exactly do you get "for free" from freecreditreport.com? You can't get any information without paying and signing up for a service that you have to beg the phone reps to get canceled. Scarier still, the company that runs the site has the power to truly screw you over if you contest the charges on your credit card, since they ARE one of the credit reporting companies.
Is the woman illiterate? If you can read the questions on a multiple choice test with just 100 questions, you can memorize them. Heck, if you have a terrible memory, you could just memorize a few questions each attempt. Then look up all the answers. Or ask someone with a brain.
I'm suspecting the woman is simply not literate.
Am I reading this right? They call the 5GB a month plan "unlimited", and charge $50 PER additional gigabyte (when they were perfectly willing to accept $6/gigabyte before you went over the limit)
Why don't they control usage another way? Say, if you go over 5GB a month, your data rates get slashed to 1/5 or 1/10 the normal speed, and the phone gives you an OPTION to pay an additional fee if you want your full speed restored. I actually think a cap is a good thing FOR PHONES because radio spectrum is a finite resource. Verizon only owns so much spectrum, and using current modulation technology, can only send so much data through the air in a particular cell at one time. There are high tech ways around this problem, but they cost a lot of money, and heavy users should pay more.
But they way they are doing this is just a trap basically. I bet the phone doesn't even tell you if you go over the limit, unless you look in some deeply buried menu. They are just setting you up for a huge bill during that one month when you actually use the phone's internet capabilities to their full potential.
And the phone had so much promise. They say the screen kicks the ass of the iphone, and that the CALL QUALITY is vastly clearer and better. I believe it - I had a CDMA phone years ago, and I recall it being nearly as clear and stable a connection as a land-line. Darn nokia phone would work everywhere as well. I've never, ever gotten service this good through ATT.
"Third world medical research facilities require the latest and best equipment, just like everywhere else, because it is more reliable, requires less skill to operate, and can be serviced with available parts."
Oh really? I thought advances in technology has made the latest medical equipment both incredible feature rich and incredibly expensive.
I do have to question the rationale behind this and other "inventions."
Basically, the theory is we can improve third world medical care by making (crappy) cell phone microscopes and I've also seen a shoddy centrifuge made from an eggbeater. Thing is, perfectly working USED first world medical equipment (aka a 50 year old microscope or centrifuge) is still going to be overwhelmingly better than this stuff. Moreover, the cost of the equipment is generally not the problem in the U.S. : it's the cost of training the people to do the work. I would imagine that the same bottleneck on trained personnel is ultimately the limiting factor in the third world as well.
Or maybe you just saw a television program where the idea was mentioned, and you wanted to know if it was possible or not.
There's a nasty problem with the "undue financial burden" clause.
See, it doesn't matter if your business would lose a bunch of money in providing reasonable accomodation so long as the amount of money is small compared to total revenues. So, if it cost Sony 10 million/year to make games more accessible to the disabled, but only $10,000 more games were sold, then by the law Sony has to do it. (since 10 mil is nothing compared to Sony's total revenues)
Yet, as a business decision, it's lousy. No businessman would spend 10 million annually to gain 10k more annual revenue.
A doctor got sued over this. He would have had to pay thousands of dollars to provide translators for a single deaf patient who was only paying him about $100/visit.
A few comments :
Again, if you add up the cost of the electricity, it isn't much. A few tens of dollars per kilogram. I'll do an exact calc if you really care. Efficiency is about 10%, so you can calculate it yourself. Energy isn't the driving cost, and the improved ISP means that you don't need as much of it. You wouldn't need 28 GW. (space shuttle ISP is a mere 363, so actually an ISP of "only" a few thousand is a MASSIVE improvement)
I disagree with you 100% on the idea of the cable being "simple". Remember, this puppy is made of carbon nanotubes that don't even exist on the macroscale yet. ANY section of the 29,000 mile long cable that is "bad" due to a messup in manufacturing, and you lose ALL of it. THAT's why the space shuttle is so damn expensive : it has thousands of onboard systems, and in theory a failure in just one or two of them and you lose the orbiter. You're basically spreading your engineering problem out over 29,000 miles of a cable made of a material that does not exist yet and has to be made to incredible tolerances or it comes apart. I would venture that is no less of a problem than trying to maintain the space shuttle, which ultimately IS just a really really complex aircraft/rocket hybrid.
While with the lasers, you would have several thousand modular laser systems. If a few HUNDRED of them fail, at worst the rocket slowly begins to descend and you activate your escape module if it's a manned mission. AT the end of the disaster, you still have your laser array. If the cable snaps, you lose everything.
Anyways, as an engineer, I prefer real solutions that you can design today. Do you know how the laser launch people do research today on the costs? They call up the parts suppliers for the lasers and the mirrors and ask for a quote. You can buy everything you need TODAY. No super materials needed.
Anyways, you wouldn't build your launcher for 200 tons every 10 minutes. I'm just pointing out a point you could reasonably scale to once space industry and travel became common. For a long time, you'd do your launches with something like 2 tons every 10 minutes. That's plenty for most satellites. Bigger satellites would be launches in several modular pieces that would dock with each other once in orbit. Hab modules for a space station could be inflatable. Astronauts would have to go up 1 at at time.
Even 2 tons every 10 minutes is more than enough capacity for dreamed about projects like an array of mirrors to reduce incident light to the earth and thereby control global temperatures. (and, with enough ability to maneuver the mirrors, you could potentially control a hurricane by casting a big shadow over a portion of the storm as it developed)
Many of the "inane" questions in the article illustrate the stupidity of the journalist who wrote the article. Most of these questions are legitimate, with a legitimate answer.
Some examples :
Can you put peroxide in your ear?
Actually, you can use it to remove earwax and to disinfect your ear if you went swimming in dirty water. It's a perfectly safe, legitimate use.
Am I going in labour?
Actually, other pains can be mistaken for labor, and it takes hours to develop in many women. Perhaps you're a woman, and you want to know if that abdominal pain was your first contraction or just a GI problem.
Am I having a heart attack?
Again, it's possible to mistake heartburn and cracked ribs for a heart attack. Maybe you should see what the symptoms are before you blow $300 at the Emergency Room.
Why can't black people swim? Why can't white people dance? Both must be stereotypical behaviors, and maybe there is a reason why it can seem like both are true.
Can you drink your own urine?
Again, a legitimate question. In a desperate situation, drinking your own urine may extend your survival under some environmental conditions. It's commonly mentioned in media.
Why would a pregnancy test be negative?
Yes, it's possible to get a negative test and be pregnant.
Can two women make a baby?
Yes, it's possible with newly developed technology to create sperm from stem cells. However, it has never been demonstrated in humans and may be quite unsafe.
Well, it isn't plausible. There's a dozen ways you could make the timing accurate to a millisecond using modern hardware IF you knew what the timings SHOULD BE.
That's the rub, though. You may not be able to tell by looking at the machine code for that ancient computer what exactly it is doing, and what timings the programmers originally intended. There might be all kind of hidden hacks needed for that particular application.
Just how many of these freak accidents in a row would be necessary to provide incontrovertible proof of the "universe doensn't want us to switch LHC on" theory?
I can imagine an objective demo : once we're sure that the principle exists, there would be a special room with a red button to turn on LHC. Skeptics would be invited to attempt to press the button...
They both CAN kill you but as other posters have pointed out, 110 VAC just doesn't have enough push behind it to electrocute you in a lot of common situations. 220 VAC does. As evidenced by the significantly higher death rate from electrocution in the UK, referenced in another post on this thread.
Sure, sure, it's amps that kill. I knew that. (actually, that's also wrong : it's ENERGY DELIVERED that kills, which is equal to volts * amps * time or per unit time sometimes)
However, it seems in a lot of common situations, it's easier for 220 VAC to kill you than 110.
Actually, the mini-disc was real handy if you were a professional musician during it's era. I think there was a period of 5 years or so when the mini-disc reined supreme in the pro audio world.
If you made your mythTV DVR able to support HD (going to need a beefier CPU to do those reencodes) you would be enjoying your favorite shows in HD. It'll be years before Boxee and other internet firms can afford the bandwidth (and you have sufficient connection speed) to deliver shows in credible HD.
Well, my degree is engineering, and I am going to simplify my argument for you to understand it.
See, the reason the Space Shuttle and aerospace operations in general is so darn expensive is because rockets are very large, complex assemblies of hardware whereby if a small number of failures occur, you lose the entire mission. You have to design and build a rocket to handle the enormous amounts of vibration and G-forces of launch, yet every ounce you add reduces payload because chemical rockets have such low ISP. This permeates to every aspect of design. Then, during manufacturing, you have to have ridiculous levels of quality control, with every assembly step taking place in a clean room. You have to use the most expensive available materials, such as titaniums and carbon fiber and stainless steel, because the cheaper materials are too weak and weigh too much. The whole endeavor becomes ridiculously complex, with enough paperwork to make Communist Russia proud.
A space elevator still fundamentally has the same constraint. Every bit of elevator cable has to be made in a similar clean room, paperwork happy environment. Every mission has to be done as carefully as a space shuttle mission, with many missions dedicated just to conducting yet another inspection of the cable. Every bit of weight you add to the cable as you are building it (whether that weight be for safety systems or whatnot) reduces the cargo capacity, yet making the cable lighter makes it more expensive and unsafe.
You've basically solved nothing by going with a space elevator, and cost estimates in that book you read are probably off by at least an order of magnitude.
Remember, it only costs a bit over a million dollars (I'll find the exact number if you like) to fuel the space shuttle. All the rest goes to costs like I mentioned above.
With laser launch, all the important hardware (the lasers and mirrors) stays on the ground. It can weigh any arbitrary amount, and be built to whatever shoddy standard you want. It only has to work well enough such that enough lasing modules are online during an entire launch. You can mass produce the modules in China, and you don't need to have paperwork tracking the fate of every last bolt going into a laser module : because if the module fails, it's not going to compromise the mission. (unless a LOT of modules all were to all fail at once)
Rather than a thousands of miles long cable, you have a big campus of buildings spread across many square miles. Nothing short of a megaton range nuke is going to take out your ability to launch spacecraft.
The spacecraft itself will not fail if you don't make it in a clean room. It's just a bolt of inert metal strapped to a radio beacon. You don't actually even need the beacon to work. The payload can be anything you want, and once laser launches are in full swing, spacecraft and satellites will be made to much lower, mass production standards since if the spacecraft fails while in orbit, you don't lose as much money as you would today. Even manned missions will rely on redundancy much more than high quality hardware, since it's cheaper to launch everything and the kitchen sink than it is to make your manned space habitat to the exacting standards of today.
A comparable anology is to compare the cost of computing when google does it versus the mainframes of the 1960s.
I look forward to your rational as to why laser launch "It is not and will never be a replacement for the space elevator"
Seems like you could get a lot more cargo up into space if you are launching 200 tons every 10 minutes (a full scale laser launcher with as much light output as the space shuttle main engines) than 200 tons every few days.
Yes, but this is more like losing all of Cape Canaveral and Houston whenever a bolt breaks in a Space Shuttle during liftoff.
Go check your physics book. The force of gravity isn't reduced much.
Anyways, go read an article on laser launch. We can build the laser modules now, using ultra cheap LED pumped doped fiber optic lasers. A few billion bucks, and we'd have a launch system that could launch a small satellite dozens of times a day. 100 billion or so, and we could launch 10 space shuttle loads a day or more.
I don't really care about the details of the space elevator : it has too many problems, and is a non starter. It's friggin obvious that :
1. If enough of the ribbons snap at any one point, the whole project is lost
2. You have to manufacture every part of the cable to extreme tolerances, and if you mess up at any point, you lose it all
3. Capacity : no matter what, an enormous amount of expensive ribbon is going to be tied up and needed for every climber you have climbing.
With laser launch modules, you can build 10% more laser modules than you need, and if they fail during a launch, you lose nothing.
Nope, won't work. The limitation on a space elevator cable is that if the mass of the car(s) is too much, the cable will snap. No matter what you build it out of, it's always going to be teetering on the edge of tearing itself apart from it's own weight alone.
Economically, it's a bad investment. All that cable has to exist just to get one or two lightweight cars up. If you want to carry more cars, you gotta back the cable lots thicker. Your costs right proportionally.
A (practical) space elevator is NEVER, EVER going to be built. With any advances in technology.
Why is that? It's simple.
A space elevator, even if the cable could be made, has a ridiculous design flaw. Literally, a single failure anywhere in the cable, and there goes billions and billions worth of hardware. It is always teetering on the verge of catastrophic failure. (imagine what will happen to the station at the top of the cable)
Further, you can only launch one climber at a time, which has to slowly crawl to the top, taking hours to days.
There's a much better launch method, that has been around for years. Instead of building just enough laser to power a climber, why not build 1000 times as many lasers and beam up enough energy to get into orbit in about 10 minutes?
The spacecraft would just be an inert block of propellant and some stabilizing fins and gyros. The intense light would vaporize the propellant block in sections, and the pulses would be timed to give planar shockwaves. Presto, a high ISP engine with no nozzles or complex flight hardware needed. Laser modules stay on the ground, run on electricity. Could make another launch every 10 minutes or so. Look at the old laser launch usenet posts archived on google, where some NASA PhDs discuss the idea.
For a technology site, most of the comments here are surprisingly anti-technology.
A new graphics card comes out? Commentors will gripe that old school games with shitty graphics are better anyway.
A new CPU comes out? Same thing : commentors will complain that extra CPU power is just more cycles for crummy, inefficient programming to squander with useless eye candy features.
A laser that eliminates that annoying plastic label on fruit and the FCKING ARTICLE says that it's safe? Commentors say that THEY won't benefit because THEY always peel and wash their fruit, and they're afraid that the lasering will make fruit decay sooner (without reading the article that says the lasering does not appreciably damage the fruit's skin)
Dude, I suspect ultra cheap photovoltaics + compressed air caverns is cheaper than powered mirrors and a heat reservoir.
Reason? The technology for mirrors and solar thermal has existed for 30+ years with little improvement
The technology for ultra-cheap thin film photovoltaics JUST got invented as of a couple years ago. And nanosolar and the rest of the firms are still working on ramping up the mass production.
Google for "coal gassification" or "synthetic natural gas".
Sure, plain oil coal doesn't have the energy density, but natural gas has enough for running cars and trucks, at least. (airliners would need to be fueled using the remaining reserves of oil or using a biodiesel like fuel product. Unfortunately, this would boost ticket prices considerably from current levels since about 1/3 the cost of a ticket today is fuel. That in turn would make high speed electric trains more economically feasible)
No, you turned the graphics down because either you couldn't afford or were too cheap to buy a new video card. Not "to maintain high frame rates". Your hardware was inadequate to the challenge.
Wrong. Solar is nearly as cheap as burning oil or coal to make electricity RIGHT NOW. Yes, it only works in the day, but if it came down to it, we could adapt. (via variable pricing : in the extreme case, power at night could cost 5 to 10 times what it does in the day)
We could use solar energy to convert biomass, or coal, or CO2 from the air right into vehicle fuel. Obviously the plants that did this would only run in the day time.
The fuel would probably be synthetic methane : it's the simplest to make, obviously, and can be readily transported and stored. (hint : another name for it is natural gas, and there are cars and trucks you can buy right now that will run on it, and it's possible to convert virtually any gasoline burning vehicle to run on it)
If you're wondering, nuclear is off the table. As it stands right now, it's already more expensive to create energy using nuclear power at current prices for building and running a reactor than solar or wind. INCLUDING the cost of energy storage. (underground caverns filled with compressed air is how you store wind or solar energy) Yes, you do need some methane/natural gas to use the compressed air, but you can get that a couple of ways, including from gassifying coal.
The reason all this conversion hasn't already happened? Because the cost of the wars is not included in the price of oil. If the U.S. government were funding the wars with extra taxes on oil products (even just to make the payments on bonds used to fund the wars), we'd already be frantically converting to electric and natural gas cars, since gas would be at least $5 a gallon.
Why should our good men and (and a few women) have to die to 'help' these people?
Dude. That hardly counts. My PC made in January 2007 had a 7900GS. A year later, I upgraded to an 8800GT. Point is, with an 8800GT and a 3.2 GHZ overclocked CPU, I had to turn Crysis Warhead down to medium to keep the framerates steady. (original crysis ran on High) I wouldn't even call playing Crysis on a low end card like a 6800 as playing the same game. The whole point of the game is to have some of the best graphics ever seen.