IIRC English is a Germanic language, though you gotta go back a bit to connect them. Still at least one of the most important words in both is very close. beer.
Am I the only one that thinks the purely one dimensional rating systems used by games and movies are a bit two simplistic to make a good decision on.
Admittedly these days the reasons for getting a rating are usually given and this does help alot, but simply rating in a few more categories makes sense to me.
As an aside it does seem a bit absurd that a topless woman can raise the rating of a game/movie faster than a body count can. I just find it a sad commentary on society that violence is more acceptable than nudity.
Why not ditch the avi part? just encode as an mpeg. Avi has potential issues with incomplete files that ordinary mpg handles better. With avi many players can't deal with eigther the first or last bit missing.
WMV is a bad choice right now due to the security isues. Not mention evil drm and I generaly dislike a format that can make a movie a piece of spyware or infection vector. So the last thing you want to do is encourage users to use it. Avi is a little better, but to fragile imho. Bittorrent is a very good solution except for it requires a client, so to go that rout make shure you you point viewers at a good client (no malware) that makes it as simple and point and click as possible. I think I'd offer a mpg (preferably divx) as well as bittorent with encouragement for users to use bittorent.
Quicktime is a pain as it requires downloading the requisit adware (or being cluefull enough to get QuickTime alternative) and last time i used it it was hijacking all sorts of file associations including jpeg and adds yet another useles startup task.
Real has many of the same problems as Quicktime, and it's MUCH more agressive about it so that even if you reset associations and pull it from the start up lists it just puts it all back next time you run it. I've found it easier to pull out stubborn malware than Real.
Maybe not technically, but tell that to marketroids and joe user. I've already seen adds for pci-x and pci-e used interchangeably. Somtimes for essentially the same product on the same website.
In many cases the 'blurb' under each item is just ripped from the marketting. Unless there is a pci-x version of ati's x500 through x800 chipsets I haven't heard of, or invidia 6?00 chipsets.
And frankly I expect the missuse/confusion to only get worse considering how both pci-x and pci-express are pronounced.
No telling which the poster who said pci-x meant. I've seen it so many times for pci-express I'd completely forgotten about there ever being a pci-x, which I assume was mostly used in server MB's or short lived like most pre pci extensions/replacements to isa. I mostly deal with desktop machines so I don't run into the oddball/server items much.
3pts for mac adress!! counting ram size at all!! And IIRC the server will only re-auth five times.
This isn't about illeagle copies, it's about forced new buys.
Many broadband isp's have braindead software that only works with supplied ethernet card, even if you already have one or built in ethernet. This was more true when xp came out. Boink 3 pt.s right there. Most common upgrade is probably ram or video card, though HD wouldn't to far behind.
That's right buy more ram and get broadband and a new video card for the latest greatest game and your activating again.
I was thinking about suse, but since I'm on dialup I'd have to buy a copy (around $80 usd). However after trying to use thier website I decided NO WAY IN HELL. It's all piss poor formatted marketting hype.
The search function just gets a you an internal server error page, they try and put in 3pt. fonts that overlap if you crt+ in FF, no sign of a hardware compatability list of any sort (what I tried to use the search for).
My thinking is if they can't make a useable website how good can thier o.s. be, especially when all they say about it is pure marketroid crap, formatted to make your eyes hurt. What screen format did they design to anyway, widescreen sidways?
Actually Microsoft backed down on the no sp2 for 'unlicensed' copies of xp IIRC.
In any event the sp2 cd works just fine in every computer I've put it into, including a few I'm >90% shure are not 'licensed'. It's also not copy protected in anyway. Why would it be when they're giving it out for free at so many places? I picked mine up from Best Buy, just walked up to the service desk and asked if they had any.
Problem is my most common re-install reason is new hardware. I realize I'm NOT the common case here, but even joe user sometimes upgrades his computer (usually paying someone else to do it).
Also a LOT of people who upgrade to broadband with cheap machines wind up installing an ethernet card, sometimes even when there is built in ethernet, espcially if they do wireless or the braindead software that they get assumes the suplied/prefered card is used and won't work with anything else. This results in a new mac adress, not to mention how easy changing a mac is on some cards, and if you've changed it for whatever reason without writing down the original your screwed again.
They check mac adresses, hard drive, and cpu IIRC, all fairly likely items to change durring an upgrade. At least they don't check amount of ram.
Because you can't dowload a patch on a fixed, or otherwise non-vulnerable (Mac, Linux box, etc.) machine to copy and install on vulnerable machines.
The only machines that can be patched this way are machines vulnerable without the patch. If a vulnerability that can be exploited in less time than the verification takes (let alone downloading the patch) you can effectively have a machine you cannot ever use on the net.
You do realizes it's possible to download software for one machine running one o.s. on a different machine running a different o.s. don't you?
Supprised you didn't include the previous and following entries on that page: <i>Bidenichthys beeblebroxi</i> Paulin, 1995 (triple-fin blenny) with a false head pattern. <i>Erechthias beeblebroxi</i> Robinson & Nelson, 1993 (tineid) with a false head; after Zaphod Beeblebrox, two-headed character from Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. <i>Fiordichthys slartibartfasti</i> Paulin, 1995 (triple-fin blenny) Named for Hitchhiker's Guide character Slartibartfast, who is noted for designing fjords.
on a humorus note I also ran into:
"<i>Eristalis gatesi</i> Thompson, 1997 (flower fly) Named after Bill Gates "in recognition of his great contributions" to dipterology, presumably referring to money, not to bugs of another sort."
Lots amusing stuff on that page. Harrrison ford has two critters named for him, as does Smeagol (a.k.a. Gollum). There is at least one that used Tolkien elvish instead of latin or greek for naming (Tolkien's works are well represented in that list).
Thanks for the link, just my sort of useless but amusing knowledge (i've often contended my improves in direct ratio to the uselessness of the knowledge).
Actually it wouldn't be just one huge craft, it'd be several. Of the sizes considered to be most effective for this sort of thing there are hundreds of useable asteroids.
'Familly sized' colonization craft have only one real advantage, huge redundancy. Unfortunately they would need it as individually thier redundancy would be nearly nill.
They would also be much more vulnerable to radiation issues that several yards of rock would stop, not to mention impact with other objects.
Also larger craft gain the advantage of scale. the amount of construction material per person is much less for a craft that carries hundreds vs a few. Simply put it's the small craft that would be overly grandios as you would tens of thousands to ship enough people to colonize another stellar system vs as few as a dozen bigger craft. The cube square law is your friend here.
Also if a craft designed to carry 5 people looses 10% of ANYTHING vital, it's in desperate trouble at the least, and in that small a space you can't as easilly have a 10% buffer on everything. A craft carrying 500 people however can easilly have a 10-20% buffer on raw suplies, and every crew position vital to the mission can likely have as many as 20 people able to fill in if one dies.
In one sense the earth is just one HUGAMOUNGUS space craft. Look at how well it's survived with it's cargo (yeah there were a few bad incedents, over many many millions of years) by sheer size alone. Now look at some of the smaller moons in the solar system, or even our own rather large one , and see what kind of hits they've taken. In space bigger is safer.
And for the record this isn't my idea, real brains have sat down worked these things out. I'm only doing a rather poor job to convey some of thier conclusions and understandings.
One question. Was your account set up to run this bussiness (from earthlinks standpoint)? Because if all you ordered from them was a regular consumer account, even a high end one, and not a bussiness acount then really your complaint is significantly weakened. True warning would have been the nice and polite thing to do, but if thier bussiness relationship with you wasn't of the sort for them to reasonably expect you to have reliance on port 25 then they didn't really do anything wrong.
Of course thier tos is also significant here, if it specifically banned running servers or bussineses on the type of acount you had then you not only have no complaint, but THEY have a valid complaint.
Bassically the devil is in the details. I suspect you just had a consumer acount and got upset that they stopped giving you privilages on thier network you hadn't paid for.
Sorry to reply to my own already over-long post, but I forgot something on the atmosphere part.
The use of liquid gasses simular in mix to our atmosphere has also been considered. It has the advantage of 'instant atmosphere' and the dissadvantages of having to ferry up cryogenic gasses, though that will have to be done to some degree anyway. Water does simplify the numbers a bit over mixed gasses and it can be broken down into two usefull gasses afterwords.
With modern computers able to simplify the math much better today than when this was first studied I suspect using liquid gasses more likely and adding the H2O later. However I can't say beyond speculation as it changes thermal characteristics and one worry was a 'blow-out' before full inflation if the heating was miss-managed.
There is no new major discoveries needed for most of this, except the bussard ramjet, and even then it's considerably more than 'just theory'. It works by magnetic constriction of hydrogen just as our hot fusion experiments do. It will require significant advancement in creating and controlling magnetic fields, and research into what living in/near such fields will do and a host of other things including a good strong power source to run the magnetic fields that is practicle to build/put into space however.
And I quite clearly described the process as heating the outside of the asteroid, by the time the water inside is sufficiently hot the outer surface will be soft and as long as it's all properly sealed the asteroid (assuming good composition, one of the biggest if's in this scenario) will expand out. At least I assume you missundertood me to mean heat the water first, that would be silly indeed. The other way around however isn't my idea, it was devloped by people who know what they're talking about and actually considered other methods and crunched the numbers.
Just riddling the asteroit with tunnles was considered, but the volume you get with expanding the asteriod added to the increase in simplicity (it IS simpler, think about it)
The heating mirror is simular to a solar sail, and in some proposed scenarios reused for the solar sail or a portion thereof.
Solar sails have already been tested as have ion drives. No new fundemental science is really needed for eigther, just refinement and maturation of the technology to make it more pratical.
The time frame of the trip is currently a bit problematic, but time dialation can help reduce the subjective time for the trip significantly. Both ion drives and solar sails have top speeds high enough to make time dialation significant.
Also the recent 'bio-dome' experiments have lent alot of data towards creating self sustaining micro-environments, with the kind of space you can get with a 'rock ballon' colony ship it's not outside of reason we could do that if needed. However 'cryo-sleep', in light of recent research into how some animals do effectively that, is not outside the realm of possibility in the next 20-50 years.
Most of the challenges are a matter of engineering and improvement in known science, no revolutionary discoveries are needed, just refinement for the most part.
In short our ability to this sort of thing now is comparable to our ability to do a moon shot in the 40's. It's not a matter of if we can do this, it's a matter of will we do this and how much we're willing to work towards it.
Your reaction is much like the reaction one would get to suggesting we'd make it to the moon by 1970 back in the 40's. One author who wrote a book about reaching the moon in the early seventies in the late fourties was told he should have picked a more realistic dat such as the beggining of the 21st century, we got there almost a year ahead of the date in his story. Of course he was an engineer by education.
Now the moon landings happened so soon in part because two world powers were throwing thier resources behind it in one of the biggest 'peace-time' efforts of the century, and it would likely take at least that level of effort, on an even larger scale (world-wide or nearly) to pull off such a scheme as I describe within the next 40-50 years.
By 2105 I see such a plan as being as do-able as another moon-shot by 2015 is, perhaps easier.
There is no 'element x' or Unobtainuim needed in this plan, just engineering, hard work, and sufficient resources.
I take it you haven't really looked into this at all.
First off no ftl is needed, and even were it needed we know general relativity is neigther complete, nor totaly prohibitive of 'ftl' travel.
We also do NOT need to strip mine every ounce of metal, or even close, to make high volume colony ships.
A simple way to do it is to find a fair sized asteroid (say.5 miles by about 2) and drill a nice long hole in the center. Then you pump in a few thousand gallons of water and seal the hole up. Next you use a fairly large mirror (which in zero g can be very lightweight) to focu light down on the long axis of your asteroid, which should be spinning along said axis.
What happens next is the asteroid heats up till the rock softens. As this happens the water turns to steam from the same heat and applies presure to the inside of the rock. Done right you 'inflate' the asteroid into a hollow shell a couple miles across and several long.
This becomes the basis for your space craft. now travel times might seem like an issue, but with ion drives and solar sails, and perhaps bussard ram-jets for engines you get up to a sizeable percentage c. At these speeds time dialation can turn a 400 year trip into a 4-10 month trip for the occupants.
Now admittedly this won't hold 6+ billion people , but it could hold several hundred, many thousands if we find a way to make long term hibernation work (not as far fetched as it sounds). However quite a few of these could be built (and you wouldn't want just one big one any way) and we could send off a few billion colonist this way.
The amazing thing is we can see how to do all of this, at our current level of tech this would take a huge world wide effort, but it's not impossible and with the advancement of technology this could eventually be reduce to feasability equivilant to another moon landing.
And this isn't the only way to do this sort of thing that doesn't involve going beyond what we are almost certain to be eventually possible.
Side point, I've voted Libertarian since 1992 when I voted against Bush sr. and Clinton.
Not that I 100% agree with them, sometimes they go to far and sometimes not far enough, and sometimes they miss it completely. But they are so much better than the democans and republicrats it's crazy.
The original statement was that you failed to see the point in focusing on physical force, the point is all law resolves down to just that.
By ingoring that fact makes the imposition of law, which is a matter of force, less than it is and easier to justify it's use.
I'm not saying it invalidates your question, nor saying it even answers it, but to ask a question where one of the conditionals used to discuss it is based on faulty premises is to increase the odds of a faulty answer.
I'm sorry if the brevity of my previos posts gave you a hostile impression, I was only trying to help.
In this particular case, yes it's likely he was trying to justify a bigotted attitude.
I wasn't trying to defend him, far from it. Empirical evidince may or may not show a difference, but that in no way would justify biggotry.
As far the example being simplistic, I freely admit that to be the case, indeed even your statements about the curve are still at a level of simplification over the reality, but the examples were there to show a point, not explain the full reality.
As far as most of the people 'reasearching' differnces between the genders or 'races' (I consider us all members of the Human race myself, well except maybe politians) being biggots just looking for justification I'm sorry to have to dissagree with you. We do know some differences exist, such as risk for sickle cell anemia and stroke, but I suspect those sorts of data mostly arrise from studies that look at the problems and take all the data they can and look for correlations.
It's biggots like this guy that make all research that shows any potential differences imediatly suspect and therefore slows down scientific research. The more knowledge we have the more likely we are to find answers to problems as varied as skin cancer to longevity.
One of my favorite concepts about people is that we're each unique, just like everyone else. And that's a good thing imho.
Diversity come from difference, we should try to understand these differences and thier reasons for being irregardless of the form they take from cultural to genetic, without biggotry or fear.
Tottaly off topic here, but Coke-a-Cola got it's name from the fact they used to add cocain to thier product. They latter got sued for substituting caffine, don't remember if it was a false advertising suit or what, or even what the outcome was.
Well to be honest I was being a bit vague as I don't know exactly when Darth vaders 'look' or Dr. Dooms look was first decided on and figured someone would get pedantic with trivia and correct any specific statement.
Going by public apearance it's about 14.5 years (nov 1961 to may 1976).
Your arguments do not invalidate his statement, but rather show the relative rareity and significance of when the people finally 'have enough' and revoke the states authority to rule them.
What he said can be seen as a paraphrase of some of the declaration of independance:
... That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it,...
And yes, the people revoking the governments authority wholesale is very rarely without war.
Though smallscale it's done quite often in countries with democrated elected government, vote someone out and a tiny piece of the governments authority could be said to have been revoked by the people.
Slashdot Mirror
IIRC English is a Germanic language, though you gotta go back a bit to connect them. Still at least one of the most important words in both is very close. beer.
Mycroft
Am I the only one that thinks the purely one dimensional rating systems used by games and movies are a bit two simplistic to make a good decision on.
Admittedly these days the reasons for getting a rating are usually given and this does help alot, but simply rating in a few more categories makes sense to me.
As an aside it does seem a bit absurd that a topless woman can raise the rating of a game/movie faster than a body count can. I just find it a sad commentary on society that violence is more acceptable than nudity.
Mycroft
Why not ditch the avi part? just encode as an mpeg. Avi has potential issues with incomplete files that ordinary mpg handles better. With avi many players can't deal with eigther the first or last bit missing.
WMV is a bad choice right now due to the security isues. Not mention evil drm and I generaly dislike a format that can make a movie a piece of spyware or infection vector. So the last thing you want to do is encourage users to use it. Avi is a little better, but to fragile imho. Bittorrent is a very good solution except for it requires a client, so to go that rout make shure you you point viewers at a good client (no malware) that makes it as simple and point and click as possible. I think I'd offer a mpg (preferably divx) as well as bittorent with encouragement for users to use bittorent.
Quicktime is a pain as it requires downloading the requisit adware (or being cluefull enough to get QuickTime alternative) and last time i used it it was hijacking all sorts of file associations including jpeg and adds yet another useles startup task.
Real has many of the same problems as Quicktime, and it's MUCH more agressive about it so that even if you reset associations and pull it from the start up lists it just puts it all back next time you run it. I've found it easier to pull out stubborn malware than Real.
Mycroft
Maybe not technically, but tell that to marketroids and joe user. I've already seen adds for pci-x and pci-e used interchangeably. Somtimes for essentially the same product on the same website.
In many cases the 'blurb' under each item is just ripped from the marketting. Unless there is a pci-x version of ati's x500 through x800 chipsets I haven't heard of, or invidia 6?00 chipsets.
And frankly I expect the missuse/confusion to only get worse considering how both pci-x and pci-express are pronounced.
No telling which the poster who said pci-x meant. I've seen it so many times for pci-express I'd completely forgotten about there ever being a pci-x, which I assume was mostly used in server MB's or short lived like most pre pci extensions/replacements to isa. I mostly deal with desktop machines so I don't run into the oddball/server items much.
Mycroft
3pts for mac adress!! counting ram size at all!!
And IIRC the server will only re-auth five times.
This isn't about illeagle copies, it's about forced new buys.
Many broadband isp's have braindead software that only works with supplied ethernet card, even if you already have one or built in ethernet. This was more true when xp came out. Boink 3 pt.s right there. Most common upgrade is probably ram or video card, though HD wouldn't to far behind.
That's right buy more ram and get broadband and a new video card for the latest greatest game and your activating again.
Mycroft
I was thinking about suse, but since I'm on dialup I'd have to buy a copy (around $80 usd). However after trying to use thier website I decided NO WAY IN HELL. It's all piss poor formatted marketting hype.
The search function just gets a you an internal server error page, they try and put in 3pt. fonts that overlap if you crt+ in FF, no sign of a hardware compatability list of any sort (what I tried to use the search for).
My thinking is if they can't make a useable website how good can thier o.s. be, especially when all they say about it is pure marketroid crap, formatted to make your eyes hurt. What screen format did they design to anyway, widescreen sidways?
Mycroft
Actually Microsoft backed down on the no sp2 for 'unlicensed' copies of xp IIRC.
In any event the sp2 cd works just fine in every computer I've put it into, including a few I'm >90% shure are not 'licensed'. It's also not copy protected in anyway. Why would it be when they're giving it out for free at so many places? I picked mine up from Best Buy, just walked up to the service desk and asked if they had any.
Mycroft
Problem is my most common re-install reason is new hardware. I realize I'm NOT the common case here, but even joe user sometimes upgrades his computer (usually paying someone else to do it).
Also a LOT of people who upgrade to broadband with cheap machines wind up installing an ethernet card, sometimes even when there is built in ethernet, espcially if they do wireless or the braindead software that they get assumes the suplied/prefered card is used and won't work with anything else. This results in a new mac adress, not to mention how easy changing a mac is on some cards, and if you've changed it for whatever reason without writing down the original your screwed again.
They check mac adresses, hard drive, and cpu IIRC, all fairly likely items to change durring an upgrade. At least they don't check amount of ram.
Mycroft
Because you can't dowload a patch on a fixed, or otherwise non-vulnerable (Mac, Linux box, etc.) machine to copy and install on vulnerable machines.
The only machines that can be patched this way are machines vulnerable without the patch. If a vulnerability that can be exploited in less time than the verification takes (let alone downloading the patch) you can effectively have a machine you cannot ever use on the net.
You do realizes it's possible to download software for one machine running one o.s. on a different machine running a different o.s. don't you?
Mycroft
Actually pci-express is supposed to be on it's way IN. agp is going though.
Mycroft
Strange, the tags worked in preview.
Mycroft
Supprised you didn't include the previous and following entries on that page:
<i>Bidenichthys beeblebroxi</i> Paulin, 1995 (triple-fin blenny) with a false head pattern.
<i>Erechthias beeblebroxi</i> Robinson & Nelson, 1993 (tineid) with a false head; after Zaphod Beeblebrox, two-headed character from Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
<i>Fiordichthys slartibartfasti</i> Paulin, 1995 (triple-fin blenny) Named for Hitchhiker's Guide character Slartibartfast, who is noted for designing fjords.
on a humorus note I also ran into:
"<i>Eristalis gatesi</i> Thompson, 1997 (flower fly) Named after Bill Gates "in recognition of his great contributions" to dipterology, presumably referring to money, not to bugs of another sort."
Lots amusing stuff on that page. Harrrison ford has two critters named for him, as does Smeagol (a.k.a. Gollum). There is at least one that used Tolkien elvish instead of latin or greek for naming (Tolkien's works are well represented in that list).
Thanks for the link, just my sort of useless but amusing knowledge (i've often contended my improves in direct ratio to the uselessness of the knowledge).
Mycroft
Actually it wouldn't be just one huge craft, it'd be several. Of the sizes considered to be most effective for this sort of thing there are hundreds of useable asteroids.
'Familly sized' colonization craft have only one real advantage, huge redundancy. Unfortunately they would need it as individually thier redundancy would be nearly nill.
They would also be much more vulnerable to radiation issues that several yards of rock would stop, not to mention impact with other objects.
Also larger craft gain the advantage of scale. the amount of construction material per person is much less for a craft that carries hundreds vs a few. Simply put it's the small craft that would be overly grandios as you would tens of thousands to ship enough people to colonize another stellar system vs as few as a dozen bigger craft. The cube square law is your friend here.
Also if a craft designed to carry 5 people looses 10% of ANYTHING vital, it's in desperate trouble at the least, and in that small a space you can't as easilly have a 10% buffer on everything. A craft carrying 500 people however can easilly have a 10-20% buffer on raw suplies, and every crew position vital to the mission can likely have as many as 20 people able to fill in if one dies.
In one sense the earth is just one HUGAMOUNGUS space craft. Look at how well it's survived with it's cargo (yeah there were a few bad incedents, over many many millions of years) by sheer size alone. Now look at some of the smaller moons in the solar system, or even our own rather large one , and see what kind of hits they've taken. In space bigger is safer.
And for the record this isn't my idea, real brains have sat down worked these things out. I'm only doing a rather poor job to convey some of thier conclusions and understandings.
Mycroft
One question. Was your account set up to run this bussiness (from earthlinks standpoint)? Because if all you ordered from them was a regular consumer account, even a high end one, and not a bussiness acount then really your complaint is significantly weakened. True warning would have been the nice and polite thing to do, but if thier bussiness relationship with you wasn't of the sort for them to reasonably expect you to have reliance on port 25 then they didn't really do anything wrong.
Of course thier tos is also significant here, if it specifically banned running servers or bussineses on the type of acount you had then you not only have no complaint, but THEY have a valid complaint.
Bassically the devil is in the details. I suspect you just had a consumer acount and got upset that they stopped giving you privilages on thier network you hadn't paid for.
Mycroft
Sorry to reply to my own already over-long post, but I forgot something on the atmosphere part.
The use of liquid gasses simular in mix to our atmosphere has also been considered. It has the advantage of 'instant atmosphere' and the dissadvantages of having to ferry up cryogenic gasses, though that will have to be done to some degree anyway. Water does simplify the numbers a bit over mixed gasses and it can be broken down into two usefull gasses afterwords.
With modern computers able to simplify the math much better today than when this was first studied I suspect using liquid gasses more likely and adding the H2O later. However I can't say beyond speculation as it changes thermal characteristics and one worry was a 'blow-out' before full inflation if the heating was miss-managed.
Mycroft
There is no new major discoveries needed for most of this, except the bussard ramjet, and even then it's considerably more than 'just theory'. It works by magnetic constriction of hydrogen just as our hot fusion experiments do. It will require significant advancement in creating and controlling magnetic fields, and research into what living in/near such fields will do and a host of other things including a good strong power source to run the magnetic fields that is practicle to build/put into space however.
And I quite clearly described the process as heating the outside of the asteroid, by the time the water inside is sufficiently hot the outer surface will be soft and as long as it's all properly sealed the asteroid (assuming good composition, one of the biggest if's in this scenario) will expand out. At least I assume you missundertood me to mean heat the water first, that would be silly indeed. The other way around however isn't my idea, it was devloped by people who know what they're talking about and actually considered other methods and crunched the numbers.
Just riddling the asteroit with tunnles was considered, but the volume you get with expanding the asteriod added to the increase in simplicity (it IS simpler, think about it)
The heating mirror is simular to a solar sail, and in some proposed scenarios reused for the solar sail or a portion thereof.
Solar sails have already been tested as have ion drives. No new fundemental science is really needed for eigther, just refinement and maturation of the technology to make it more pratical.
The time frame of the trip is currently a bit problematic, but time dialation can help reduce the subjective time for the trip significantly. Both ion drives and solar sails have top speeds high enough to make time dialation significant.
Also the recent 'bio-dome' experiments have lent alot of data towards creating self sustaining micro-environments, with the kind of space you can get with a 'rock ballon' colony ship it's not outside of reason we could do that if needed. However 'cryo-sleep', in light of recent research into how some animals do effectively that, is not outside the realm of possibility in the next 20-50 years.
Most of the challenges are a matter of engineering and improvement in known science, no revolutionary discoveries are needed, just refinement for the most part.
In short our ability to this sort of thing now is comparable to our ability to do a moon shot in the 40's. It's not a matter of if we can do this, it's a matter of will we do this and how much we're willing to work towards it.
Your reaction is much like the reaction one would get to suggesting we'd make it to the moon by 1970 back in the 40's. One author who wrote a book about reaching the moon in the early seventies in the late fourties was told he should have picked a more realistic dat such as the beggining of the 21st century, we got there almost a year ahead of the date in his story. Of course he was an engineer by education.
Now the moon landings happened so soon in part because two world powers were throwing thier resources behind it in one of the biggest 'peace-time' efforts of the century, and it would likely take at least that level of effort, on an even larger scale (world-wide or nearly) to pull off such a scheme as I describe within the next 40-50 years.
By 2105 I see such a plan as being as do-able as another moon-shot by 2015 is, perhaps easier.
There is no 'element x' or Unobtainuim needed in this plan, just engineering, hard work, and sufficient resources.
Mycroft
I take it you haven't really looked into this at all. .5 miles by about 2) and drill a nice long hole in the center. Then you pump in a few thousand gallons of water and seal the hole up. Next you use a fairly large mirror (which in zero g can be very lightweight) to focu light down on the long axis of your asteroid, which should be spinning along said axis.
First off no ftl is needed, and even were it needed we know general relativity is neigther complete, nor totaly prohibitive of 'ftl' travel.
We also do NOT need to strip mine every ounce of metal, or even close, to make high volume colony ships.
A simple way to do it is to find a fair sized asteroid (say
What happens next is the asteroid heats up till the rock softens. As this happens the water turns to steam from the same heat and applies presure to the inside of the rock. Done right you 'inflate' the asteroid into a hollow shell a couple miles across and several long.
This becomes the basis for your space craft.
now travel times might seem like an issue, but with ion drives and solar sails, and perhaps bussard ram-jets for engines you get up to a sizeable percentage c. At these speeds time dialation can turn a 400 year trip into a 4-10 month trip for the occupants.
Now admittedly this won't hold 6+ billion people , but it could hold several hundred, many thousands if we find a way to make long term hibernation work (not as far fetched as it sounds). However quite a few of these could be built (and you wouldn't want just one big one any way) and we could send off a few billion colonist this way.
The amazing thing is we can see how to do all of this, at our current level of tech this would take a huge world wide effort, but it's not impossible and with the advancement of technology this could eventually be reduce to feasability equivilant to another moon landing.
And this isn't the only way to do this sort of thing that doesn't involve going beyond what we are almost certain to be eventually possible.
Mycroft
Side point, I've voted Libertarian since 1992 when I voted against Bush sr. and Clinton.
Not that I 100% agree with them, sometimes they go to far and sometimes not far enough, and sometimes they miss it completely. But they are so much better than the democans and republicrats it's crazy.
Mycroft
The original statement was that you failed to see the point in focusing on physical force, the point is all law resolves down to just that.
By ingoring that fact makes the imposition of law, which is a matter of force, less than it is and easier to justify it's use.
I'm not saying it invalidates your question, nor saying it even answers it, but to ask a question where one of the conditionals used to discuss it is based on faulty premises is to increase the odds of a faulty answer.
I'm sorry if the brevity of my previos posts gave you a hostile impression, I was only trying to help.
Mycroft
In this particular case, yes it's likely he was trying to justify a bigotted attitude.
I wasn't trying to defend him, far from it. Empirical evidince may or may not show a difference, but that in no way would justify biggotry.
As far the example being simplistic, I freely admit that to be the case, indeed even your statements about the curve are still at a level of simplification over the reality, but the examples were there to show a point, not explain the full reality.
As far as most of the people 'reasearching' differnces between the genders or 'races' (I consider us all members of the Human race myself, well except maybe politians) being biggots just looking for justification I'm sorry to have to dissagree with you. We do know some differences exist, such as risk for sickle cell anemia and stroke, but I suspect those sorts of data mostly arrise from studies that look at the problems and take all the data they can and look for correlations.
It's biggots like this guy that make all research that shows any potential differences imediatly suspect and therefore slows down scientific research. The more knowledge we have the more likely we are to find answers to problems as varied as skin cancer to longevity.
One of my favorite concepts about people is that we're each unique, just like everyone else. And that's a good thing imho.
Diversity come from difference, we should try to understand these differences and thier reasons for being irregardless of the form they take from cultural to genetic, without biggotry or fear.
Mycroft
Tottaly off topic here, but Coke-a-Cola got it's name from the fact they used to add cocain to thier product. They latter got sued for substituting caffine, don't remember if it was a false advertising suit or what, or even what the outcome was.
Mycroft
Well to be honest I was being a bit vague as I don't know exactly when Darth vaders 'look' or Dr. Dooms look was first decided on and figured someone would get pedantic with trivia and correct any specific statement.
Going by public apearance it's about 14.5 years (nov 1961 to may 1976).
Mycroft
The person I responded to seemed to imply otherwise.
Mycroft
All law is backed by physical force.
Mycroft
What he said can be seen as a paraphrase of some of the declaration of independance:
And yes, the people revoking the governments authority wholesale is very rarely without war.
Though smallscale it's done quite often in countries with democrated elected government, vote someone out and a tiny piece of the governments authority could be said to have been revoked by the people.
Mycroft