The government can print the money it needed to forgive all student loans and pay off everyone's mortgage. That will move the economy forward and upward much faster than you can imagine.
Umm, total private debt is in the same general range as total public debt - $10 trillion or so.
If the government prints enough money to make that go away, they've just caused hyperinflation, as well as nearly doubling the national debt (and interest on same).
We stuck in a cycle of workers have less money -> demand slows -> economy slows -> businesses cut jobs -> less workers have disposable income...
Speaking of this, heard an interesting discussion recently on the subject of the recession hanging on so long.
Basically, it concluded that the reason people haven't gotten back to pre-recession levels of spending is more a matter of people are paying down debt rather than spending money on (relative) luxuries.
Rather than buying a new car/computer/house/vacation, they're getting their personal debt down to managable levels. But by doing so, they're keeping the economy from picking up steam.
If these people are to be believed, in a couple more years, when personal debt levels have been worked down a ways, the economy will pick back up again.
And nothing that governnment (or anyone else) does in the meantime will move things along faster...
I don't think either really applies to the behavior at issue here.
Hmm, looks to me like...
BLOCKQUOTE>(d) Whoever, with intent to extort from any person, firm, association, or corporation, any money or other thing of value, transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication containing any threat to injure the property or reputation of the addressee or of another or the reputation of a deceased person or any threat to accuse the addressee or any other person of a crime, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.
...might very well apply. That whole "property or reputation" of "the addressee or another" seems to fit nicely.
Since noone has bothered to mention her juveniles.
Time Traders, first three or four novels,
Witch World, most, if not all of them
Almost any of the stories that mention the Dipple, though you'll probably have to explain that part to him (or might have to have someone explain it to you, if you're young enough for an 8-year-old son still).
Not sure whether her post atomic war stories (Stars Are Ours, Star Man's Son, etc) would fit within his worldview (it's been a very long time since that was a big concern), but the stories are reasonably entertaining, usually involving a teenage boy as protagonist....
Microsoft is stopping people installing rival browsers too.
Hmm, obviously MS has developed a version of IE that looks JUST LIKE Firefox, then, because I'm using (what I thought was) FF on a Windows system to type this.
Looks like Obama is the most pro-gun anti-crime president the US has seen in decades.
While it is arguable that "pro-gun" or "anti-gun" has much meaning for a President (he doesn't write the laws, and doesn't even have a veto over any but federal laws, and most gun laws are State-based), "anti-crime" (or "pro-crime") is almost completely meaningless, since almost all crime (with the exception of kidnapping) is handled at the State level.
Note, by the by, that the last time but one that we had a surge in gun ownership was just before Clinton did his "assault weapon ban", when people were buying guns because they were afraid they were about to be unavailable. It's quite possible that people were buying guns since Obama got to be President because they feared that a Dem President and a Dem Congress meant new gun control laws were soon to be introduced (which didn't happen, of course, but it's the way a lot of people think).
It is a dumb statement that china is supposedly 50 years behind with respect to the US.
Let's see, they're doing in 2012 what we did in 1966. Not quite 50 years, so perhaps we should be saying they're 45 years behind us.
It is an irrelevant statement.
I agree here.
Much more important is the fact that China's development is rising rapidly while the development of the US is in decline.
If you're talking about space, then I disagree here. China's development in manned spaceflight is proceeding at a glacial pace. In nine years they've managed four manned flights, with a total of seven different astronauts (one of them went up twice).
US spaceflight, on the other hand, is on the decline (if you're talking about the US government), but seems to be on the rise if you're talking private spaceflight.
I'm looking forward to watching a Dragon deliver seven men to orbit. Which I expect to see within five years.
Hell, perhaps the moon even has some valuable ores itself. It's big enough. If you build products that have sufficient value, you can ship them back to earth and still make profit.
You don't have to ship them to Earth to make a profit. Raising, for instance, rocket fuel into LEO cost ~$10K per kg. If it's cheaper to mine O2 on the Moon and deliver it to the ISS to be used as the oxidizer for rocket fuel, then you'll be able to sell lunar oxygen and make money.
Ditto aluminium. And iron. And magnesium.
It's not all that hard to foresee a time in the not very distant future when you can build a spacecraft with Earth-manufactured rocket engines and computers, but the rest is made on the Moon. And 80+% of the fuel comes from the moon.
Which would make going places comparatively VERY cheap.
The simple fact is that the journey now is ~6 months minimum, but if you can stage the launch from the moon where you start off with 1/6 gravity you can get there a hell of a lot faster.
Not necessarily. It's certainly possible that you can do it that way, but the main advantage you get from a moon launch is that you can do a gravity slingshot around Earth.
Plus, there's the whole "we don't have to lift most of the mass of the spacecraft into LEO" thing - if you're using H2/O2 rockets, 80%+ of the mass (the O2 part) can be manufactured on Luna, obviating the need for launching from Earth....
Yeah there are still issues regarding radiation and such, but when you're now talking about a few weeks instead of months the issues are far easier to deal with.
Even assuming that target velocity only scales linearly with gravity, you're looking at instantly cutting a 6 month trip to 1 month. The truth is though that it's closer to an exponential increase since you can carry the same amount of energy but only use 1/6th or less getting out of the gravity well, and then "nearly 100%" of your energy expended is converted directly into speed.
Umm, no.
deltaV scales as the natural logarithm of the mass ratio of the spacecraft, mass ratio being defined as the ratio of the takeoff mass to the mass after you've burned the fuel.
Which means, among other things, that it doesn't even scale linearly.
Much less linearly with surface G, which is largely irrelevant - last I checked the numbers, you basically wasted about 1.5 km/s of deltaV getting into LEO. Of the 9+ km/s deltaV required for same.
So assuming that the GP was talking about a minor jump after a moon base is established, they're right. Taking away most of the gravity allows you to make much quicker journeys, that alone brings Mars missions about a bajillion steps closer to immediate reality.
No, it doesn't do that. What it mostly makes for is much cheaper flights to Mars. Which is also a good thing.
I'm not sure we could even replicate China's docking-to-a-station performance in 10 years, now that we've abandoned all of our previously successful manned spaceflight programs.
Hmm, didn't SpaceX just do that last month?
Unmanned, admittedly, but the Dragon is basically designed to be manned, it just hasn't been approved for such use by NASA.
The problem you failed to recognize is that sitting in micro-gravity for a year is very deterious on the body.
Hmm, current record for a stay in space...437.7 days. Seems a bit longer than the eight months to Mars.
And that's ignoring that there are ways to provide spin gravity that are currently feasible.
The other problem is once you leave the Earth's magnetic field, you are bombarded by high energy particles from the Sun and need a radiation shield which would undoubtedly be lead.
Seems to me that the transhab (which was designed for a Mars mission) used water as radiation shielding. And since you're carrying water along anyway, why not use it as shielding?
The whole ship would have be enormous to even have a hope of carrying all the supplies...
etc...
Yah, you have to take a lot of stuff with you. On the order of 10-15 kg per man-day. Which adds up to somewhere around 50 tons for a free-return trajectory for six men.
Assuming that you don't find some way to recycle - perhaps hydroponics to make oxygen and some of the food, as an example.
Note that you don't actually need to carry all the supplies with you for the entire mission. Supply shots can be delivered to Mars orbit in advance of the mission, along with things like the lander(s), ground base, that sort of thing.
Maybe in 500 years it will be.
500 years ago, they were saying the same sorts of things about sailing around the world.
There are NO insurmountable technical obstacles to going to Mars. It's just a matter of putting enough stuff in orbit, and assembling an assortment of space vehicles there for the trip to Mars.
The only question is how much it will cost, and who is going to pay for it.
Note also that getting launch costs down will make it easier or cheaper or both - we can build the same expensive spacecraft and loft them cheaper, or we can build cheaper spacecraft that have more mass, or some combination.
Did the US actually sign the human rights declarations or is it another one of those examples where they get everyone else to comply but then just ignore it?
The USA did NOT ratify it.
Also, the USA did NOT propose it, support it, or otherwise push it upon anyone.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is INTERNATIONAL LAW, and which the UK is a signatory of,
The UDHR is NOT "international law".
It isn't even a Treaty, for god's sake.
So, no, it's not especially binding on anyone.
You might also be interested in reading Article 29 (2). In case you're not aware, it's the escape clause - it lets you do pretty much anything by claiming it's necessary for "just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society"....
But SS2 isn't leading in that direction. I can't even see any technology developed for SS2 being of any relevance to an orbiter with an aerodynamic first stage.
Note that an aerodynamic booster for an orbiter will require either:
a) a hypersonic booster, or
b) a VERY LARGE orbiter.
Can't see any part of SS2 that points in either of those directions...
What we need is to propose counter legislation FORBIDDING proposals of this type.
Meaningless.
New laws automagically supersede older laws. So as soon as they pass the next generation of privacy-invading law, it'll supersede the "you can't invade people's privacy" law...
In the USA, we'd have to have Constitutional Amendment to make these things go away forever.
And that's not going to happen, since it requires a supermajority in both the House and Senate, plus the approval by 38 States.
Anyone who follows the news already knew they used them for training at home. This is not a public secret. In fact, they filmed it from the control centres themselves and military personal even explained this on camera.
And ofcourse the US government is going to use them on their own territory when they need them. Who couldn't do the same thing?
Actually, it's against the law for the US military to perform military operations in the USA (with exceptions for insurrection and war, of course - both of which require an Act of Congress)....
Sure makes it easier to confiscate the guns if the govt want to....
The kind of person who believes the black helicopters are coming for his guns is the kind of person I am not happy about having a basement full of firearms. You need psychiatric care, not more guns.
It should, perhaps, be noted that in 1999, California decided to confiscate some firearms that were previously legal.
All it took was changing a definition in an existing law....
Amazing what can happen when the government has a little list....
Slashdot Mirror
Umm, total private debt is in the same general range as total public debt - $10 trillion or so.
If the government prints enough money to make that go away, they've just caused hyperinflation, as well as nearly doubling the national debt (and interest on same).
So, what you're saying is that after I've paid down my debt, my problems will be exacerbated by lower prices?
Somehow, I can't see the problem of having more money to spend and lower prices for the things I want to buy....
Speaking of this, heard an interesting discussion recently on the subject of the recession hanging on so long.
Basically, it concluded that the reason people haven't gotten back to pre-recession levels of spending is more a matter of people are paying down debt rather than spending money on (relative) luxuries.
Rather than buying a new car/computer/house/vacation, they're getting their personal debt down to managable levels. But by doing so, they're keeping the economy from picking up steam.
If these people are to be believed, in a couple more years, when personal debt levels have been worked down a ways, the economy will pick back up again.
And nothing that governnment (or anyone else) does in the meantime will move things along faster...
By increasing the money supply, there will be more to be hoarded?
Hmm, looks to me like...
BLOCKQUOTE>(d) Whoever, with intent to extort from any person, firm, association, or corporation, any money or other thing of value, transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication containing any threat to injure the property or reputation of the addressee or of another or the reputation of a deceased person or any threat to accuse the addressee or any other person of a crime, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.
...might very well apply. That whole "property or reputation" of "the addressee or another" seems to fit nicely.
Oracle was also suing over the use of two patents.
The jury ruled that no patent infringement occurred.
Then the judge ruled that APIs weren't copyrightable.
Which left Oracle with only the jury's ruling that the Rangecheck() function was used in violation of copyright.
Which was what the $0 award was for - Google's use of rangecheck....
Just a plug for Scalzi's new book, "Redshirts" - it's only indirectly about Star Trek, but well worth the read if you want to get into Trek....
I take it noone explained to you that spacesuits aren't radiation shields?
Since noone has bothered to mention her juveniles. Time Traders, first three or four novels, Witch World, most, if not all of them Almost any of the stories that mention the Dipple, though you'll probably have to explain that part to him (or might have to have someone explain it to you, if you're young enough for an 8-year-old son still). Not sure whether her post atomic war stories (Stars Are Ours, Star Man's Son, etc) would fit within his worldview (it's been a very long time since that was a big concern), but the stories are reasonably entertaining, usually involving a teenage boy as protagonist....
Hmm, obviously MS has developed a version of IE that looks JUST LIKE Firefox, then, because I'm using (what I thought was) FF on a Windows system to type this.
While it is arguable that "pro-gun" or "anti-gun" has much meaning for a President (he doesn't write the laws, and doesn't even have a veto over any but federal laws, and most gun laws are State-based), "anti-crime" (or "pro-crime") is almost completely meaningless, since almost all crime (with the exception of kidnapping) is handled at the State level.
Note, by the by, that the last time but one that we had a surge in gun ownership was just before Clinton did his "assault weapon ban", when people were buying guns because they were afraid they were about to be unavailable. It's quite possible that people were buying guns since Obama got to be President because they feared that a Dem President and a Dem Congress meant new gun control laws were soon to be introduced (which didn't happen, of course, but it's the way a lot of people think).
Obviously, that physics degree didn't amount to much...
So, describe my mistakes. In reasonable detail.
Or would you prefer that I put the numbers out?
Let's see, they're doing in 2012 what we did in 1966. Not quite 50 years, so perhaps we should be saying they're 45 years behind us.
I agree here.
If you're talking about space, then I disagree here. China's development in manned spaceflight is proceeding at a glacial pace. In nine years they've managed four manned flights, with a total of seven different astronauts (one of them went up twice).
US spaceflight, on the other hand, is on the decline (if you're talking about the US government), but seems to be on the rise if you're talking private spaceflight.
I'm looking forward to watching a Dragon deliver seven men to orbit. Which I expect to see within five years.
You don't have to ship them to Earth to make a profit. Raising, for instance, rocket fuel into LEO cost ~$10K per kg. If it's cheaper to mine O2 on the Moon and deliver it to the ISS to be used as the oxidizer for rocket fuel, then you'll be able to sell lunar oxygen and make money.
Ditto aluminium. And iron. And magnesium.
It's not all that hard to foresee a time in the not very distant future when you can build a spacecraft with Earth-manufactured rocket engines and computers, but the rest is made on the Moon. And 80+% of the fuel comes from the moon.
Which would make going places comparatively VERY cheap.
Not necessarily. It's certainly possible that you can do it that way, but the main advantage you get from a moon launch is that you can do a gravity slingshot around Earth.
Plus, there's the whole "we don't have to lift most of the mass of the spacecraft into LEO" thing - if you're using H2/O2 rockets, 80%+ of the mass (the O2 part) can be manufactured on Luna, obviating the need for launching from Earth....
Umm, no.
deltaV scales as the natural logarithm of the mass ratio of the spacecraft, mass ratio being defined as the ratio of the takeoff mass to the mass after you've burned the fuel.
Which means, among other things, that it doesn't even scale linearly.
Much less linearly with surface G, which is largely irrelevant - last I checked the numbers, you basically wasted about 1.5 km/s of deltaV getting into LEO. Of the 9+ km/s deltaV required for same.
No, it doesn't do that. What it mostly makes for is much cheaper flights to Mars. Which is also a good thing.
Hmm, didn't SpaceX just do that last month?
Unmanned, admittedly, but the Dragon is basically designed to be manned, it just hasn't been approved for such use by NASA.
A few problems with your little theory.
Hmm, current record for a stay in space...437.7 days. Seems a bit longer than the eight months to Mars.
And that's ignoring that there are ways to provide spin gravity that are currently feasible.
Seems to me that the transhab (which was designed for a Mars mission) used water as radiation shielding. And since you're carrying water along anyway, why not use it as shielding?
etc...
Yah, you have to take a lot of stuff with you. On the order of 10-15 kg per man-day. Which adds up to somewhere around 50 tons for a free-return trajectory for six men.
Assuming that you don't find some way to recycle - perhaps hydroponics to make oxygen and some of the food, as an example.
Note that you don't actually need to carry all the supplies with you for the entire mission. Supply shots can be delivered to Mars orbit in advance of the mission, along with things like the lander(s), ground base, that sort of thing.
500 years ago, they were saying the same sorts of things about sailing around the world.
There are NO insurmountable technical obstacles to going to Mars. It's just a matter of putting enough stuff in orbit, and assembling an assortment of space vehicles there for the trip to Mars.
The only question is how much it will cost, and who is going to pay for it.
Note also that getting launch costs down will make it easier or cheaper or both - we can build the same expensive spacecraft and loft them cheaper, or we can build cheaper spacecraft that have more mass, or some combination.
The USA did NOT ratify it.
Also, the USA did NOT propose it, support it, or otherwise push it upon anyone.
The UDHR is NOT "international law".
It isn't even a Treaty, for god's sake.
So, no, it's not especially binding on anyone.
You might also be interested in reading Article 29 (2). In case you're not aware, it's the escape clause - it lets you do pretty much anything by claiming it's necessary for "just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society"....
Well, no.
Last I looked into the subject, smallpox blankets were unlikely to have done much of anything.
Much more likely that smallpox spread to the Indians the old-fahioned way - from a white guy with smallpox.
But SS2 isn't leading in that direction. I can't even see any technology developed for SS2 being of any relevance to an orbiter with an aerodynamic first stage.
Note that an aerodynamic booster for an orbiter will require either:
a) a hypersonic booster, or
b) a VERY LARGE orbiter.
Can't see any part of SS2 that points in either of those directions...
Meaningless.
New laws automagically supersede older laws. So as soon as they pass the next generation of privacy-invading law, it'll supersede the "you can't invade people's privacy" law...
In the USA, we'd have to have Constitutional Amendment to make these things go away forever.
And that's not going to happen, since it requires a supermajority in both the House and Senate, plus the approval by 38 States.
Not sure why TFS includes the comment about Spaceship Two having wings, since SS2 is not intended to reach orbit.
Nor is it intended to lead to an orbital vehicle.
Actually, it's against the law for the US military to perform military operations in the USA (with exceptions for insurrection and war, of course - both of which require an Act of Congress)....
It should, perhaps, be noted that in 1999, California decided to confiscate some firearms that were previously legal.
All it took was changing a definition in an existing law....
Amazing what can happen when the government has a little list....