Actually, this is one of the BEST arguments for the elevator. You can build orbiting, rotating tethers with the same technology that can pick up vehicles on one planet, launch them to another, catch them there, and set them down, at very little cost.
Actually, it's no argument at all. It's a dream. A nice one, but still a dream.
You will not be able to build space elevators on other planets unless you have vehicles which can go to those planets, lift enough material into orbit to build the tether and keep you alive for the time it takes to do it. That's the catch 22. If you have vehicles like that, you don't need the elevator.
Look, I'd love to be a believer too, but it relies on too many unsolved variables, one of which is the need to get the things built in the first place. It's a pretty fiction. But it IS a fiction.
You're missing the point. To get the mass required to build a space elevator, we'll need to get substantial mass into orbit. To get that mass into orbit, you'll need better lifters than we have today.
In order for a space elevator to be useful, we'll need craft which are much more effective at travelling through space than we have today.
In order to visit another gravity well (planet), we need vehicles with the capacity to leave that gravity well. A space elevator may make it cheaper to get out of this one. It won't help you at your destination.
Build competent vehicles first. Without them, the elevator is a path to nowhere. With them it's redundant.
The elevator concept is a dead end path. The false dichotomy of comparing it to other dead end paths (shuttles, chemical rockets etc) may may make you feel better, but it doesn't make the project any more sensible.
There seems to be something about the human condition that we need to see a physical connection to our goals.
Over here, one of the major parties lost an election on the basis of a plan to build a canal more than 3,000km long, at a cost of at least $A5 billion, to bring water from the Kimberlies to Perth. It didn't matter to them that it would take less energy to pump sea water against a membrane to get fresh water, and that the membrane would be cheaper to maintain than 3,000km of canal. They had a vision of this connection directly to the water, and that blurred their view of reality.
The space elevator is another one of those connections. It's a Victorian era engineering dream, a vertical railway to the planets, and while it's a beautiful mind picture, it's as much of a dead end as those cast-iron steam trains.
The key reasons why it will (deservedly) fail;
It is a single point of failure. If any one of the millions of potential problems with a space cable turns out to be a show-stopper, the whole investment is lost.
The benefits are small. The energy needed to shift a payload from the bottom to the top remains the same with or without the structure. The amount of money and energy spent on building the structure needs to be recovered in improved efficiency, and that seems unlikely.
All of the investment is up front. There is no incremental benefit to this - the elevator does not become useful until it's complete. Any return on investment (including to governments in the form of kudos or re-election benefit) is delayed until long after completion of the project.
There are also safety and technical reasons why the elevator is not a good idea, and I'm sure others will explore them. It's a shame, because it is a lovely concept, but it's better to keep it as a beautiful fiction than to divert energy, money and other resources from projects with a chance of success.
Actually, someone here on an iiNet DSLAM would probably get close to those kind of speeds if they were close to the exchange.
I'm on one of those and on their 8Mb/sec plan. If you can find a server that'll keep up, it'd be close, but normally other bottlenecks step into play. Nice when it works though...
How fucking stupid are you people? Really? Think about it, if MS pulled out, do you really think they'd give the EU time enough to switch over to Linux or OSX
Yep, I know the parent is flamebait, but I just had a vision of thousands of grey-suited Microsoft drones rising up, storming every business, government office and home in Europe to viciously uninstall each copy of Windows or Office. A rampaging horde of highly trained ninja MSCSE's leaving nothing behind but the empty husks of the ravaged PCs, millions of sobbing secretaries and weeping PFYs in their wake...
Or maybe they'd just stop selling their products in the EU?
I love the idea of this, and if it was implimented well and extended, you could end up with a device which could transcend the limitations of screen size. Unfortunately, as an ex-owner of a Siemens SL45, which was a pioneering MP3 player phone, I can categorically say Siemens is not a company which will support early adopters of their technology. The phone was fragile and unstable, and their support was arrogant and tardy, Pity, it seemed like a great idea, just like this one...
Just a quick note: in a lot of places it illegal to operate a motor vehicle of any kind with both ears covered, including by headphones.
This is in the north of Western Australia. I was a long way from any gazetted road, and in any case, out there, I'd be more likely to run into a bunyip than a copper.
Do people actually believe anything they're saying?
They don't need to. This stuff is just fodder for metadata that ends up in marketing material for PHBs. You see it all the time; "Seven out of ten independant studies showed that black is white". It doesn't matter that anyone with a clue knows the research is paid for.
A bit over a month ago, I got back onto a dirt bike for the first time in years. I wasn't doing anything crazy, just some easy trail riding and off-road sightseeing, mostly in the same general area. I was on my way back from one of these outings, humming down the track I'd been using to get home each day, came around a corner into a narrow section only to find some kind soul had dumped a half-metre high pile of dirt across the path. I didn't have my dirt bike reflexes back by any means, and hit the pile off balance and carrying a fair bit of momentum.
The front suspension bottomed out at the same time as I pitched forward, then those big springs uncompressed and slammed the tank into my groin hard enough to crease the plastic. I'd lost a lot of speed by then and didn't so much crash as roll to a standstill and fall off. It was probably only a few minutes, but it seemed like hours before I could move enough to take a breath and turn the MP3 player off. As a result of this experience I can vouch for two things;
1. the iPod never skipped a note
2. hearing the Foo Fighters' MIA still makes my eyes water.
Let's see a band start from *nothing* and release the first album on P2P and make money.
Seventh did just that. They couldn't get airtime or a contract, so they distributed their music via MP3s. It got them the exposure they needed, and they're still giving music away and making money doing it.
These guys put out quality music, good enough that Codemasters paid to use their sounds for the Operation Flashpoint sountrack, Flashpoint MP3s and none of that would have happened if the record companies still had their stranglehold on the music industry
In any case, it got me interested in De Bortoli Wines. So I checked out their webserver OS.
You know you're in geekland when...
Personally, I prefer to check out their wines, and if anyone here's interested, they make a legendary dessert wine called Noble One. If you can get hold of a bottle, it's a worthwhile drink - amazingly intense.
Remember that this is a punishment for a crime. It's supposed to hurt.
This is not the punishment, and it isn't meant to hurt. Secret APIs are one of the weapons Microsoft has used to perpetuate its monopoly. Making them publish the APIs is equivalent to instructing them to put down the gun.
The fines are their punishment for not putting down the weapon when they were ordered to.
There have been plenty of innovations in Windows since win95
There have been very few innovations that have changed the user experience significantly, certainly none that have changed it so greatly as to be worth the ten years of development and the sixty billion dollars plus of consumer money Microsoft's Windows divisions have taken in those ten years.
What innovations do you see in Windows XP that make it so much better than Win 95?
Also consider places where old OSes are embedded into a system or bussiness
Ten year old OSes have their place, but they shouldn't make up 20% of a healthy market.
What this really demonstrates is how stifling Microsoft's OS monopoly has been. When the core functions of a product have changed so little, have offered so little innovation, that there's no compelling reason to upgrade after more than ten years, it's clear that it is a stagnant product.
When no other businesses can enter the market and compete against your stagnant product, but a significant competitor for your product can be put together by a bunch of enthusiasts, then you have a company that has been successful in suffocating an industry.
I think this is pretty cool and all as an engineering effort, but what specific purpose does this have?
Autonomous dump trucks with carrying capacities of 100+ tonnes of ore have been in use in open pit mining operations for several years now. At the moment, it's complex and expensive to set up the control systems for them. More intelligent operation with lower start-up costs will definitely interest the big mining companies.
The problem is that there just isn't much good music left; almost all music produced lately is crap.
There are a lot of people who feel the way you do, but it's just an illusion created by the *AA's need for artificial scarcities. Now that BMG et al's near monopoply of distribution channels has all but been dissolved, What I suspect what we'll see happening over the next few years is the fragmentation of the music market as niche players find their way to the music buying public.
There's somewhat of a hiatus at the moment, since the big companies still have control over marketing, but out of the limelight, there are a lot of talented artists producing their own music and taking advantage of inexpensive, high quality recording and mixing gear.
There's plenty of great musicians out there, and there are plenty of us wanting to hear great music. It's just taking some time to route around the *AA blockage and connect the two groups.
Slashdot Mirror
Genes create more genes because otherwise we wouldn't call them genes.
I've often wondered what their motivation was. Simple as that, eh?
Cool, thanks.
This will seriously hamper inovation BAD IDEA
Why?
Actually, this is one of the BEST arguments for the elevator. You can build orbiting, rotating tethers with the same technology that can pick up vehicles on one planet, launch them to another, catch them there, and set them down, at very little cost.
Actually, it's no argument at all. It's a dream. A nice one, but still a dream.
You will not be able to build space elevators on other planets unless you have vehicles which can go to those planets, lift enough material into orbit to build the tether and keep you alive for the time it takes to do it. That's the catch 22. If you have vehicles like that, you don't need the elevator.
Look, I'd love to be a believer too, but it relies on too many unsolved variables, one of which is the need to get the things built in the first place. It's a pretty fiction. But it IS a fiction.
You're missing the point. To get the mass required to build a space elevator, we'll need to get substantial mass into orbit. To get that mass into orbit, you'll need better lifters than we have today.
In order for a space elevator to be useful, we'll need craft which are much more effective at travelling through space than we have today.
In order to visit another gravity well (planet), we need vehicles with the capacity to leave that gravity well. A space elevator may make it cheaper to get out of this one. It won't help you at your destination.
Build competent vehicles first. Without them, the elevator is a path to nowhere. With them it's redundant.
The elevator concept is a dead end path. The false dichotomy of comparing it to other dead end paths (shuttles, chemical rockets etc) may may make you feel better, but it doesn't make the project any more sensible.
Over here, one of the major parties lost an election on the basis of a plan to build a canal more than 3,000km long, at a cost of at least $A5 billion, to bring water from the Kimberlies to Perth. It didn't matter to them that it would take less energy to pump sea water against a membrane to get fresh water, and that the membrane would be cheaper to maintain than 3,000km of canal. They had a vision of this connection directly to the water, and that blurred their view of reality.
The space elevator is another one of those connections. It's a Victorian era engineering dream, a vertical railway to the planets, and while it's a beautiful mind picture, it's as much of a dead end as those cast-iron steam trains.
The key reasons why it will (deservedly) fail;
There are also safety and technical reasons why the elevator is not a good idea, and I'm sure others will explore them. It's a shame, because it is a lovely concept, but it's better to keep it as a beautiful fiction than to divert energy, money and other resources from projects with a chance of success.
Let it go.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=why+doesn't+t his+work+on+google.co.uk&btnG=Google+Search&meta=. ..
Actually, someone here on an iiNet DSLAM would probably get close to those kind of speeds if they were close to the exchange.
I'm on one of those and on their 8Mb/sec plan. If you can find a server that'll keep up, it'd be close, but normally other bottlenecks step into play.
Nice when it works though...
How fucking stupid are you people? Really? Think about it, if MS pulled out, do you really think they'd give the EU time enough to switch over to Linux or OSX
Yep, I know the parent is flamebait, but I just had a vision of thousands of grey-suited Microsoft drones rising up, storming every business, government office and home in Europe to viciously uninstall each copy of Windows or Office. A rampaging horde of highly trained ninja MSCSE's leaving nothing behind but the empty husks of the ravaged PCs, millions of sobbing secretaries and weeping PFYs in their wake...
Or maybe they'd just stop selling their products in the EU?
What is it you suggest they do?
Make their OS secure, so that spammers can't control massive botnets to spam from.
Maybe it's my tinfoil hat speaking, but isn't it strange that Microsoft release a 64bit OS just a few weeks after Intel releases their 64bit x86 cpu http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/ 22/0235246&tid=118&tid=137 even though AMD have had their processor out for more than eighteen months?
I love the idea of this, and if it was implimented well and extended, you could end up with a device which could transcend the limitations of screen size. Unfortunately, as an ex-owner of a Siemens SL45, which was a pioneering MP3 player phone, I can categorically say Siemens is not a company which will support early adopters of their technology. The phone was fragile and unstable, and their support was arrogant and tardy, Pity, it seemed like a great idea, just like this one...
Just a quick note: in a lot of places it illegal to operate a motor vehicle of any kind with both ears covered, including by headphones.
This is in the north of Western Australia. I was a long way from any gazetted road, and in any case, out there, I'd be more likely to run into a bunyip than a copper.
Do people actually believe anything they're saying?
They don't need to. This stuff is just fodder for metadata that ends up in marketing material for PHBs. You see it all the time; "Seven out of ten independant studies showed that black is white". It doesn't matter that anyone with a clue knows the research is paid for.
A bit over a month ago, I got back onto a dirt bike for the first time in years. I wasn't doing anything crazy, just some easy trail riding and off-road sightseeing, mostly in the same general area. I was on my way back from one of these outings, humming down the track I'd been using to get home each day, came around a corner into a narrow section only to find some kind soul had dumped a half-metre high pile of dirt across the path. I didn't have my dirt bike reflexes back by any means, and hit the pile off balance and carrying a fair bit of momentum.
The front suspension bottomed out at the same time as I pitched forward, then those big springs uncompressed and slammed the tank into my groin hard enough to crease the plastic. I'd lost a lot of speed by then and didn't so much crash as roll to a standstill and fall off. It was probably only a few minutes, but it seemed like hours before I could move enough to take a breath and turn the MP3 player off. As a result of this experience I can vouch for two things;
1. the iPod never skipped a note
2. hearing the Foo Fighters' MIA still makes my eyes water.
Let's see a band start from *nothing* and release the first album on P2P and make money.
Seventh did just that. They couldn't get airtime or a contract, so they distributed their music via MP3s. It got them the exposure they needed, and they're still giving music away and making money doing it.
These guys put out quality music, good enough that Codemasters paid to use their sounds for the Operation Flashpoint sountrack, Flashpoint MP3s and none of that would have happened if the record companies still had their stranglehold on the music industry
You'll probably need it if you want to turn on the eye candy in Longhorn...
In any case, it got me interested in De Bortoli Wines. So I checked out their webserver OS.
You know you're in geekland when...
Personally, I prefer to check out their wines, and if anyone here's interested, they make a legendary dessert wine called Noble One. If you can get hold of a bottle, it's a worthwhile drink - amazingly intense.
Remember that this is a punishment for a crime. It's supposed to hurt.
This is not the punishment, and it isn't meant to hurt. Secret APIs are one of the weapons Microsoft has used to perpetuate its monopoly. Making them publish the APIs is equivalent to instructing them to put down the gun.
The fines are their punishment for not putting down the weapon when they were ordered to.
Why in the world is this modded up?
Because Slashdot has no "Bleeding Obvious" tag?
There have been plenty of innovations in Windows since win95
There have been very few innovations that have changed the user experience significantly, certainly none that have changed it so greatly as to be worth the ten years of development and the sixty billion dollars plus of consumer money Microsoft's Windows divisions have taken in those ten years.
What innovations do you see in Windows XP that make it so much better than Win 95?
Also consider places where old OSes are embedded into a system or bussiness
Ten year old OSes have their place, but they shouldn't make up 20% of a healthy market.
What this really demonstrates is how stifling Microsoft's OS monopoly has been. When the core functions of a product have changed so little, have offered so little innovation, that there's no compelling reason to upgrade after more than ten years, it's clear that it is a stagnant product.
When no other businesses can enter the market and compete against your stagnant product, but a significant competitor for your product can be put together by a bunch of enthusiasts, then you have a company that has been successful in suffocating an industry.
Do they simply not know any better? Do they not know how people react to them riding dangerously? I wonder.
They know they have no number plates and are almost impossible to catch.
There will never ever be a perpetual motion device of any kind ever. It is 100% impossible.
Unless you have one of Maxwell's demons...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_demon
I think this is pretty cool and all as an engineering effort, but what specific purpose does this have?
Autonomous dump trucks with carrying capacities of 100+ tonnes of ore have been in use in open pit mining operations for several years now. At the moment, it's complex and expensive to set up the control systems for them. More intelligent operation with lower start-up costs will definitely interest the big mining companies.
This Australia we're talking about here. Not the US. They run things their way. We run things our way.
Not any more. With Howard's Liberal government (famously referred to as a conga-line of arselickers) in power, we run things your way as well.
Just look at our government's total lack of response when you lock up our citizens without charge.
The problem is that there just isn't much good music left; almost all music produced lately is crap.
There are a lot of people who feel the way you do, but it's just an illusion created by the *AA's need for artificial scarcities. Now that BMG et al's near monopoply of distribution channels has all but been dissolved, What I suspect what we'll see happening over the next few years is the fragmentation of the music market as niche players find their way to the music buying public.
There's somewhat of a hiatus at the moment, since the big companies still have control over marketing, but out of the limelight, there are a lot of talented artists producing their own music and taking advantage of inexpensive, high quality recording and mixing gear.
There's plenty of great musicians out there, and there are plenty of us wanting to hear great music. It's just taking some time to route around the *AA blockage and connect the two groups.