A train? You mean... public transit? In America?BWAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAAAHAAAHAHAAHAAA!!
Stop, stop it, you're killing me!
By the tone and implication of my posting, I have already ruled out public transit methods. American society is infrastructurally and culturally aligned with the automobile. That's not so terrible; we can work with that to make a two-tier system with it.
I'd be the first to say that public transit is a great choice, but Americans don't want to make those choices. Airlines are for the scurrying upper- and middle-classes. Trains are for small subset of middle-class, with some lower classes getting on board. And the buses are for the lower-class almost exclusively. Other than that, it's cars are far as the eye can see.
Which is fair enough, since we have a lot of roadway, pervasive automobile training and knowledge, and equally pervasive gas/diesel supplies. We can make this work, if we but try. The gas savings alone with a pervasive people-mover presence will make the endeavor worthwhile.
It seems obvious now why these registries exist. They are being used by governments to provide liability coverage for themselves in the case of continued sexual crimes from released prior offenders. "Sure, Ma'am, we released him 14 months ago, and apparently he seduced and raped your 11-yr-old daughter yesterday... but our registry had him listed all that time and you should have checked to see that he was living 4 houses down from you."
It is only a matter of time before a murder registry is put into place. Heck, Ohio already has people listed in a website database when incarcerated, and also lists their charges. With pictures!
This sex-offender registry thing is getting so much support since everybody at least says they despise such criminals. I remain convinced that no one accused of sexual offenses involving children can get a fair trial anywhere. There is no solution for this; they are a permanent oppressed minority and they can only hope to keep their heads down (and, I hope, trousers up).
I asked myself the other day what I would do if I saw some guy jerking off while watching kids on a playground. The initial swell of violent emotion was illuminating. After sober reflection on that, I now conclude that I would instead do nothing... after all, thinking and role-playing shouldn't be illegal. As long as he leaves the kids alone, what he does is fine with me... and my angry emotional responses are MY problem, not his.
Well, it's not an awful price, and yes, there are better prices, but I'd bet my left nut that there's more to this picture than the article said:
"[F]ederal authorities gave city schools just short of $1 million this year to buy 450 new desktop computers."
Assuming "just short" is $950K, then this comes to about $2100 per machine. If you set out to buy 450 computers, you will have to reach a deal with the supplier, hence it is probable that a bulk order for these resulted in a per-machine price of $1000, with everything included like shipping. Windows XP, of course. Using prior experience with buying computers with grant money, I'd wager that these are at least midrange (probably "midrange plus" of available product lines), were bought from a reputed supplier like Dell or Gateway, and came with extended service contracts, including upgrade options.
So, what's the remaining $1100/machine for? Other than sheer overpricing on any issue it touches, there's LAN wiring, planning and review by a consultant, and finally all the network equipment to allow these 450 computers to talk to the Internet. Yep, I can easily see where all the rest of that $495K went.
I work in a bank currently, if you must know, and the in-house price of computer support may seem mind-boggling. The IT dept owns all the computing infrastructure except for rare individual items that users may buy for their own departments. So, to place a computer on a person's desk, we charge $165/computer/month. This charge covers the basics... installation, 24/7 maintenance, network access, and a basic software load with the usual MS apps on Windows XP. The least computer supporting XP in our infrastructure is PII/350MHz/256MB/4GB, and this climbs to the 2.2GHz ones.
Yes! Brilliant! And just look, look!, it's revolutionized transportation already... er... it's made important contributions... er... what was your marvelous manufacturing method doing for us again?
The things you mentioned in the way you mentioned, can be done today but aren't. There are important reasons why.
The heart of the matter involves the unsexy, Old Economy, Old School methods of capital investment and filtering of bad ideas. A bad idea done on CAD is still a bad idea. And you still need significant capital to exploit an idea. At the risks of cries of "heresy!" I claim that you need as much personal capital to exploit a CAD-Internet-JIT manufacturing idea as you will to exploit a drawing-factory-inventory one.
Then there's the futher heretical idea that a man who designs and builds his prototype, then rides it down the street at maximum speed, surely understands more about it than some goobs doing calculations and pixel shadings on their CAD.
With light materials that are strong and resistant to the elements, combined with a very mature gas, propane or diesel power plant, and an equally mature industry for electronic controls... then where are these revolutionary vehicles that your CAD-Internet-JIT methods should have been producing for arguably a decade or more? (Remember, as far as corporations are concerned, there was a global communication network quite some time ago.) They should be all over the place... but aren't, and in fact those that do exist continue to exploit niche markets that have no hope of overtaking the main thrust of transit.
Instead, CAD-Internet-JIT manufacturing ideas are completely overtaken by the established transit orders, who use them to "improve" their own product lines.
Still, the way things are going, we're going to need your beloved CAD-Internet-JIT methods... because the costs of owning and maintaining the evolving vehicle are growing too large and will soon cross more threshholds. Modern vehicles have already crossed some lines that the astute can see... they are getting too expensive to repair and tune, and are driving (har har) people into renting them, not owning them -- since the disadvantage of ownership (maintenance) is becoming worse.
For individual motorized transit, other than mass transit systems, we have automobiles and motorcycles. And the automobile has vast supremacy. But it's becoming unmaintainable. Something's gotta change. And perhaps, combined with a decrease in credit-worthiness for new car buyers, some clever groups can come up with alternatives.
For example, the automobile is a Space Shuttle. It is used for long hauls and short jumps, and is ill suited for both. The automobile should stop being produced (at least in such overwhelming quantities) and a two-tiered replacement system implemented.
The first tier is a simple people mover, essentially a 3- or 4-tired vehicle about the size of a large motorcycle. Arguably, running down some side-streets and moderate roads at 45mph at most, to get a bunch of groceries, is vast overkill for the 1 to 3 ton automobiles we use today. And this first-tier vehicle is not much of a change from the various orders of motorcycles.
(These people-movers exist today, but like I said, they have been relegated to niche markets and just are not poised to replace the automobile. Since most people are basically dolts, it will take a strong negative economic push for them to invest in such a thing -- and the automobile industry is helping to create that push by making vehicles even less maintainable than the year before.)
The second tier will be a modified form of a minivan. Huge cargo capacity, alternating with passenger stations.
Any idiot can see that if this two-tier system can be adopted, it will have to
But there's a much more complicated, long answer of "no" to your question, dealing with the sheer reality of Human needs.
You didn't mention if the power-generation system was NOT for sale if you wanted one. If it's a patented system, and is NOT available, then go ahead and make one... I would. It is immoral to sit on a patent without providing the product or service that the patent is providing monopoly protection for.
You didn't mention if the power-generation system was for sale, but at an exorbitant price that far exceeds the benefits of using it. In such an instance, the patent holder is a buffoon and deserves to be undercut by infringement. When force and economics collide, I have no moral problem with siding with economics.
get coffee and read paper:
1 hour read and understand ONE application:
1/2 hour (skim submitter's corporation marks, lookup stock ticker on the NASDAQ) yak with fellow examiner about last night's ballgame or movie:
1 hour search for prior art:
0 (they applied for it, so it must be an innovation, duh) evaluate patentability:
0 (they applied for it, so it must be patentable, duh) communicate with the applicant:
0 (application+fee = all the USPTO needs) work out necessary revisions:
1/2 hour (there are always some typos) call gf and/or wife:
1 hour lunch:
1 hour (not counted... hey, it's personal time!) push some paperwork around to make it all look good:
1/2 hour reach and write up conclusions:
1/2 hour (apply cut-n-paste document praising innovation) surf web for latest 1337 g4m3 k0d3z:
3 hours (hey, it takes time to get m4d 5k1llz)
Once again, I must go into my standard rant about digital cash:
You can't loan a friend ten bucks.
Your ID can be duplicated, stolen or zeroized.
You can only buy from someone who can process your ID.
Your purchasing info can be used against you by police, courts and government agencies.
Given all that, then what's with the geek's heart going all a'flutter over digital cash? Furthermore, why do the geeks seem to think that all physical cash will be replaced?
I hope for the sake of this article, the term "replace" was used to indicate "some instances" of replacement in space and time, and not "all instances".
People blather on and on about long-term storage of waste, and how it's got to be out of everyone's hands.
The key error in this thinking is the assumption that the site has to be stable.
I propose a deep sea trench, like the Marianas.
1) The depth of the trench will provide more security than can ever be achieved on land, given the pressures of miles of ocean water.
2) The waste will have to be packaged in non-water-soluable form. These ceramic pebbles seem to be just the thing.
3) Any waste release in the trench will have to penetrate miles of ocean water to harm anyone, surface sea life included.
4) The waste will slowly be covered in silt, and even more slowly will flow with the ocean bed into the subduction zone under the opposing continental plate, ending up many, many miles beneath the surface in the mantle itself.
5) After millions of years, subduction heat will melt the waste and mix it with magma, and some will eventually appear in volcanoes beyond the trench zone, right above the subduction melt point.
Well, after millions of years, the waste will probably be no more significantly radioactive than magma normally is.
There are 2 places that the end results (processed ore) can go: Earth or space. Earth's enormous gravity well demarcates that... anything from low Earth orbit (LEO) upward is essentially the same, since LEO requires a velocity of about 5 miles a second to maintain.
If it's Earth, you'd have to figure out how to (1) get the material there, and (2) down to the surface. Present technology can get it there with mass drivers, even off the surface of the Moon (and especially so, I'd figure). And after that, economy dictates that it be hard landed. Thus means you package the materials into ablative shells to make it as cheap as possible, and then let them smack into a desert area. After some time of bombardment, ground crews can venture out into the shattered zone and dig it up to collect the goods. Admittedly, it'll take some hard thinking and good engineering to come up with a way to sling the stuff down Earth's energy well without it coming in like a meteor; perhaps slingshot-then-return, perhaps atmospheric-skip-n-drag, perhaps even a mass catcher in Earth orbit. But these are engineering details.
The question is, is this kind of thing worth it for materials X, Y and Z? Once the costs of space development are amortized, I suspect that few materials will be appealing. This strongly suggests materials of a more processed nature, even products, which can be made in a space environment cheaper than on Earth. Arguably, with microgravity, some things can't be made on Earth at all, hence uniqueness can ensure a market.
As for space... you have no choice but use materials mined in space in order to live in space. Hence, the cost is irrelevent. Either you mine the Lunar regolith and asteroids for your air, or you will die. There might be possibilities for mining Earth's outer atmosphere, I'd imagine... but you'd have to get close to the Earth for that, and the closer you get, the more fuel you'll need to get away with your payload.
Lunar regolith is great raw ore, in a good environment for smelting it. It contains all the stuff that you'd need to build a civilization on the Moon and in Cislunar space (even out to the asteroids, but once in the asteroids you will probably find it more economical to mine local resources). Regolith is finely pulverized from billions of years of bombardment, and not only yields aluminum, iron, silicon, magnesium and titanium, but oxygen as well. The downside to the moon is that it has almost no volatiles like nitrogen and hydrogen, and of course there's our old friend carbon. These must be imported (luckily, carbon imports for air can be tiny, although direct usage for plants and animals will be sizeable)... and as soon as possible you have to stop importing them from Earth since even that's too expensive, and start exploiting them from asteroidal sources. It also desn't seem to make economic sense to ship water to the Moon, since your cargo will be 89% oxygen, which is what the Moon has plenty of anyway (locked up in the rocks).
(According to an online source, the air we breathe has the essential component of about 20% O2. See here and here for Human and plant respiration respectively. The roughly 80% nitrogen component of air is an inert portion... divers have done without it by substituting helium. But helium is still a volatile on the moon. And plants raised in the Lunar facilities will need nitrogen for their root systems. So, nitrogen will still need to be imported in significant quantities.)
Reaching for Mars without a Earth-orbit station and Lunar station is very foolish. It'll be another Apollo program that will result in a lot of abandoned equipment and horri
So, Hubble's gonna burn. What a fucking surprise. Good ol' NASA. No matter how much money was spent getting something into orbit, it's always said to be the case that it's cheaper to let it burn.
Let's cut out the middle man and burn the money before NASA burns it into orbit and then burns it back down.
NASA is incapable of building and maintaining a space-borne infrastructure. It's obviously a shill for the aerospace companies, who benefit from the contracts to replace all the stuff that NASA lets fall and otherwise obsoletes.
NASA could have had a space station for the cost of orbit-stabilizing boost... yes, Mir. If Mir's fall doesn't convince you of NASA's hidden mandate, nothing will.
Hubble doesn't worry me like the ISS. The ISS will fall in time, since the only point was in building it. I'd like to see NASA's blubbering excuses then for all the billions of dollars lost.
Maybe you have trouble understanding written English.
Did I say I hated Rush Limbaugh? Let me check my posting... er, no, I talked about the dark side and shadows of his philosophy. The philosophy is respectable, but the shadow is just sick. But true to form, speaking in anything but glowing terms about Mr. Limbaugh raises the ire of... well, the people who represent the dark side of his philosophies. One of those would be you, it seems.
Lack of adoration is not hatred. You would do well to learn this.
I talk about alternatives to nuclear energy and how to scale it back to safer forms for further exploitation... and you equate this to hating it. I certainly don't love nuclear energy, given its propensity for terrible accidents. 1/4 inch of steel under stress saved some of the people of Ohio from a terrible blow to their health. (But who really gives a flaming fuck about them anyway, right? Surely FirstEnergy (Davis-Besse's owner) doesn't.)
But despite the accidents (and in fact, wholly because of them) nuclear power can be made safer, but may be less profitable. Awww... poor electric-industry investors. Well, that's what the power of government is for. If you see some shithead dumping toxins into a river to save some waste-processing money, you can use the power of government to stop, fine and imprison him... and (most importantly) the employer that instructed him to pollute. The same power can be used to compel industry to avoid profits-over-social-safety, and perhaps we can have more, smaller, safer nuke mini-plants scattered over America, trying to generate that "too cheap to meter" power as it was originally envisioned. It probably won't be "too cheap", but at least it won't pump out smoke like our current alternatives.
Oops... once again I've spoke about nuclear power in less than rapt terms. Bad me!
Moving right along... you have accused me AGAIN of seeing industries rolling back into oblivion without alternatives. Please relate how replacement with solar facilities equals that.
You are of course wrong, but that never stopped the talk-radioers rattling out the same drivel, since they understand intuitively that talking over the opposition tends to sway the complacent majority. Or at least they imagine it does; it's the old war of stomach over brain. It's too bad for you, then, that Slashdot is NOT the AM-radio audience. You probably never meet -- or if you do meet, even acknowledge -- the liberal conservatives that cannot help but rise in society's center. They are the beneficiaries of society's advantages, and are well enough educated to be concerned about society's shadows. Slashdot seems to be full enough of these folks. We are not so terrified about losing even a smidgen of our civilization that we oppose any change to methods of fuel exploitation, power generation, forest management (well, I have to scorn that a bit, given all the dead wood piling up on America's forest floors), transportation, etc. We do NOT buy the viewpoints of "love it or leave it" and "it's either this or bread lines".
To sum up, I have more than answered your posting, you simply choose not to acknowlege the points. Let me bullet them; perhaps that will focus your attention:
1) Space industry is added to Earth industry, then replaces some fraction of polluting energy installations on Earth. Net industrial change is positive since space-construction and eenrgy-generation facilities should be huge.
2) Between a shack and a McMansion, between a dirt road and a 6-lane highway, between raising your own chickens and pulling a package of chicken meat from a supermarket shelf, there are other options spanning the range.
3) Do you really think that we only have two choices?
4) Change is coming to bankrupt liberal and conservative alike.
Yeah, you fucking asshole, you'd BETTER post as an Anonymous Coward. I'm about to rip you to shreds.
It sure is funny for an "econazi" (a term you probably like to apply to people who proclaim their desire for cleaner air) who wants to "destroy [...] industrial power" to advocate building a rather massive, industrial effort in launch systems to build space infrastructure, leading to a moonbase, then leading to construction for Earth-orbit solar-energy structures. Wow, that is SO anti-industry.
Your "shack inna woods" comment is the tired repository of so much of the stupidity caused by Rush Limbaugh's enormous conservative shadow. Do you actually think that we have only two choices?:
1) Shack in the woods.
2) Energy-wasting, too-expensive home, car, devices, communication, lifestyle, etc.
Between options 1 and 2 is a vast range of other options. Between where we are, and where we could be, is a big gulf. Kind of like the one between your ears.
Change is coming, and you Dark Side of the (Limbaugh) Force types must adapt to scarcity. It will be allocated by supply, price or a combination of both. If you can't meet the price, or live in an area of time of no supplies, then you will have to do without, won't you? Your supply masters will de-industrialize you soon enough... not me. Heck, given America's loss of industry, it's fairly amusing to see you accuse anyone not of corporate executive level of destroying industry.
Advice: Turn off all that iconic talk radio and read some books. Come back with more reasoning than mottos.
I wouldn't be quite so quick to write off fusion power
[flabbergasted] !?!? QUICK ?!?! How on earth was I quick, in judging something I've read about for over 20 years?
"Fusion's coming"... "it's close"... shit, it's not even breathing hard. Fusion is such an evident failure that your fusionphilia is not only questionable, but downright freakish. Fella, you need therapy.
Questions: How many years of failure are enough to change course? How many years of failure will cause you to divert your investments elsewhere?
My money's not in fusion. I've told the Congress (via reps) about this enough. If you want to throw YOUR money at it, then knock yourself out. I live for the day when fusion projects go off government funds and are kicked out into the private field. Maybe then, to please their private investors, they shrug their shoulders, sigh resignedly, and start producing a commerical watt of power.
Yeah, right. "No one" is interested in my suggestions, since the result crosses their energy-intensive lifestyles and avoids socialization of the costs of pollution. MY GOD!... people don't even turn off the lights in a room when they leave it, then complain about their electic bill. Americans don't want to change... they just want cheaper energy brought to them. Well, let me tell you fella, cheaper is Earth-orbit solar (sources? read research summaries from O'Neill's work), but requires so much investment that we crash headlong into another American Myth: Rewards Without Investment. Why, Iraq demonstrates how you can even exploit oil without the investment of prospecting, drilling, and laying pipeline... just invade the people who have it! (Yes, yes.. I know all about nationalization, etc. I believe those facilities belong to the Iraqis now, thank you very much.) Why, the report on the August outage reveals the new paradigm: Fewer Electric Lines For Carrying More Power! (Kudos on that one, BTW. My pocket was nicely padded from overtime work in cleaning up my bank's downed systems.)
Well, you asked for it buddy, so here goes nothing....
1) Water Heaters... You know, with the incredibly thin insulation used in these fucking things, it's no wonder every water heater across America wastes probably $50 a year in energy costs. Too many people live alone or in groups too small to merit water heaters. We need innovation in distributed or on-demand systems. Hell's Bells!... I built (while also confirming that necessity really IS the mother of invention) a water heater for my shower head, out of $25 of materials, primarily involving an 1800W electric element (funnily enough, for a full-size electric water heater), PVC tube, and various fittings. My water heater was shut off for almost 2 years, saving me about $300.
2) Refridgerators... These take the majority of any home's electric bill. I saw an article about a couple who built an off-utility home in the woods, but they still tried to have the modern amenities. They had a 'fridge, too... built into a wall, with insulation at least 6 inches thick. Hmmm... no such 'fridge can be found for sale in America. Our 'fridges are designed to look great!... but waste energy. Conservation innovation (spurred by the inevitable spiralling of energy costs) demands that 'fridge external insulation jackets be made and sold.
3) House Solar... [snort] Well, this has been done to death. This shows much greater promise than fusion, but off-the-cuff is criminally underfunded (public and private).
4) Automobiles... Hey, here's a thought: just perhaps, just maybe, those 20 MILLION SUVs ON AMERICA'S ROADS WERE A HUGE FUCKING MISTAKE. Insanely low gas mileage? What was so terrible, especially in cities, with small people-transporters? Oh, that's right, "my bad", it was unsafe, and is now enormously unsafe with all those 2-ton-plus SUVs barrelling around... they'd crush a 500lb little vehicle like a bug. I guess there's nothing to do but go full M1A1 tanks for everyone! America's transportation system is so bad that I could spend hours laying sarcasm upon it... but what's the point? We all know it. And "no one" is willing to fix it. And we consumers are hardly able to grab some parts (like I grabbed a heating element and some plastic pipe) and construct a better alternative, energy-wise, since automobiles are a company-level construct. Our alternatives tend to lie with "scream at your local reps for better public transport" and "move closer to work so you can use a bicycle". Obviously even those alte
Sheesh, I just put 30 in my calculator, multiplied it by 1.03, did that 47 times in succession, and got a little over 120.
So, with an average of 3% inflation, if today's $30K income keeps up with the inflation, then 47 years later it's at $120K.
To reach $150K, a $30K salary will require 3.5% inflation.
What is the point of going to all that trouble when we have ample power supplies here on earth (contra to our current moral panic about power supplies).
Is this a troll?
You really don't see the point of reducing -- even eliminating -- all those coal- and oil-fueled power plants?
I do see the point -- they consume irreplaceable fuels, leave us with significant pollution, and are nearly incapable of distributed generation.
And as for suggestions of fission and fusion alternatives... HA!
Don't make me laugh.
I live too close already to a plant that was saved from a severity-one nuclear accident by a quarter-inch of a stainless steel liner.
Nuclear power's current incarnation is a failure, and should be rolled back into a niche product, even re-routed into small reactors like those being proposed.
As for fusion... you know, I have heard about fusion power all my life, and those highly-paid rat bastards haven't produced a single watt of commercial power yet.
It's another failure, and we've given them at least 40 solid years of primarily research and some development to demonstrate that.
Fusion funding should ALSO be rolled back and committed to things that can produce a useful watt (which was the point, remember?) within 5 years.
All those fusion billions could have been almost carelessly spent on hot-water systems of glass, tar paper, copper tubing and wooden frames, and resulted in a great deal more power independence, lack of pollution, and overall positive power production.
Fusion's billions now belong to solar power.
Overall, I can say: Well, OK, but you can't realistically expect to promote 1 course of action on the basis of falsehoods and flawed reasoning. You obviously prefer to go to Mars over the moon, but -- Hell's Bells! -- don't start spouting off that the "moon is dead rock"... as opposed to all the dead rock on Mars. The best we can say for Mars that a life-support system failure will kill you in hours, not minutes as is the case on the moon.
Consensus is deadly. Consensus is almost always built from the lowest common denominator... fear, greed, hate. It's not worth seeking consensus since you tend to whore your own morals in order to achieve a result. Just look at the last few years of the American Congress; that's consensus taken to the extreme.
I combine this sentiment with the fact that we are wealthy enough a society (assuming you are American) and are wealthy enough a planetary civilization to pursue some-to-many different paths to space colonization. Several nations can create space programs that pursue different routes to space... heavy lifter, mission plane, laser-launched orbiter, space elevator... there's quite a list about lifting. To get some idea, read nonfiction works by Ben Bova, Marshall Savage, Gerard O'Neill, Heppenheimer, etc. Heck, read the collected works of the Planetary Society and other such private space-promotion groups, to see what's possible.
And there's the sensible approach of routing. You want to get to Mars? No problem. Wait until we have (1) Earth orbital facilities, and (2) Lunar manufacturing, which will allow a Mars mission to be built for chump change. Hell, at that point, send 6 missions... man 4 of them, and make 2 entirely robotic. Failures among the manned missions can be backed up with the others.
Sure, it won't be sexy. It won't be glamorous. But it will be a SUCCESS! And success is what you wanted, right?
If only our expressions here on Slashdot could be found on the floor of the American Congress, instead of political drivel designed to appeal to the majority (i.e. consensus). I have no doubt that the next space effort by the Congress will be a one-off shot to Mars... pure spectacle, and with no "permanent infrastructure" that we here want. It'll be another $100 billion wasted. It is good luck for me, then, that I'd given up on the Congress after late 2001, and have saved my money illegally (by exempting myself from Federal income taxes) so that I can support private causes or public nations that pursue sustainable space enterprise. If I have to board an ocean vessel heading for, say, Spain, while the gantries of NASA burn brightly at my back, while shots are heard being fired all along the shoreline, then my philosophy will be vindicated and I will move forward with my head held high. NASA is just one log amongst all the dead timber piled up on the forest floor of America... it deserves to burn since it allowed itself to be heaped so terribly high.
My god, where have you been all my life? I want to marry you.
Seriously, your article title is very focused on the hidden problem. Disposable items are luxury items and therefore are expensive. Permanent items cost more but last so enormously longer that in the long term they are much cheaper, even considering your labor in maintaining them. And as you pointed out, who is paying for disposal? The increasing costs of pollution, waste-processing and overall site-dumping, more than show that the costs of disposable items are being socialized to everyone. Cheaper items but higher taxes... brilliant!
It would make parking a lot easier if I could just drive my car into a dumpster.
You could just drive into the Bronx, like people do today, for the same effect.
And how about clothes that last for 1 day so we can keep up with the latest trends.
Your clothes will only last a day or so, too, in the Bronx, if you stand still long enough... say, 45 seconds.
This is why pedestrians don't stop at crosswalks if they can help it.
Or pets that die after a week, for when you want some love around Christmas but don't want an 8-20 year commitment.
Just get married... it won't last more than 2 years anyway.
I'm hearing the term "starter marriage" nowadays, kind of like a "starter home" except with more practicality and less morality.
Mars is a much better place to go. The Moon is a pile of dead rock!
What can you do with the enormous gravity of Mars well compared to the gentler well of the moon? What is the fucking Lunar regolith made from?... SILICON, OXYGEN, IRON, ALUMINUM, CALCIUM, MAGNESIUM, TITANIUM, and then 1% traces of other elements. What is the sense of a 1-year supply line over 3-day one?
SSTO is too difficult and expensive!
Yet SSTO (or a space elevator) is the next necessary step to making Earth-to-orbit access routine. The routine will be necessary since a lot of material and personnel need to come from Earth initially when real orbital and lunar facilities are being built. Heavy lifters (the Big Dumb Boosters concept) will always be needed when you have a lump of cargo measured only in tonnage, but SSTO is a mission vehicle and enough missions will need to be flown in order to get the construction and deliveries done.
It's people like you that promote the underpinning emotional boondoggle nature of 90% of space missions. Screw your consensus... you've no idea on how to perform practical activities like construction and operation of an orbital spaceport and shipyard. You only mention Mars in order to drum up enthusiasm, but your 1-year-distant Mars mission can only offer us fanfare and glitter, not hard progress towards building a spacefaring civilization. The end product of a Mars mission is more equipment eroding on the Martian surface, and kilograms of samples and terabytes of data sitting on Earth while people struggle to "earn" more PhDs from them.
We don't have the technology to build a self-supporting village, much less a colony that can build new colonies.
Utter bulldada, considering your lack of understanding about survival. People in a position that demands they do or die, will do (and yes, unfortunately, some will die). If I was living in a Lunar base that had, say, some malfunction in the bioware that resulted in a steady build-up of CO2, I would figure the problem out eventually because the alternative would be death. But, say, even if I didn't make it, and the CO2 buildup killed me... then the colonizers who came after me would study my corpse, my bioware, and my habitat -- and eventually arrive at a solution for themselves.
We have more than enough technology to get to the moon, build sites to live in (excavation, rough manufacturing, construction), and then process regolith for materials to take further steps. If there are any problems along the way, they will be solved by the people involved... or they will die. Which is another argument AGAINST sending robots, since no one really cares if the robot dies, hence they feel no strong urge to fix whatever happened wrongly.
I recommend Bova's book "Welcome to Moonbase". Everything in it is well within modern technology... materials processing, bioware, power, excavation, etc. You might also read Marshall Savage, Gerard O'Neill, T.A. Heppenheimer, etc.
Your sentiments are otherwise correctly aligned towards space colonization. You recognize the need and requirement for self-sufficiency in all things. For example, a Lunar city that needs Hydrogen and Nitrogen shipped up from Earth is the next best thing to a city losing its atmosphere to the Lunar surface. All it takes a few slipped shipments to kill the city, or at least invoke emigration and rationing. Of course, perhaps then the stupid bastards on the moon will finally invest in comet, asteroid or Saturn-ring mining missions to go get mega- and giga-tons of volatiles that the mother world has tried to strangle them with.
1)... people like you coined the term space nut. If it's nutty, then it's not worth doing, right? It heaps ridicule upon what is the ONLY effort to lift our civilization into the next age of real prosperity... as far above our energy-intensive cities as those cities are above straw huts (I'm talking about quality, not altitude).
2)... political overpowering was always the basis for anything done at a national level in this Imperial age. Once the Americans showed the world that they had a bigger penis (space-wise) than the Soviets, the effort was over.
Nowhere in the lunar missions was there a force that said: "an expanding technical civilization needs to exploit space resources". I'm sure some astronauts and engineers believed in that force, but they had no power to direct the effort.
In the latter part of the 20th Century, America really never had the will to do the right thing. The current economic and warfare status shows that American drives are degenerating even further. Basically, they sell each other out for fraction-of-a-percent gains, and otherwise attack nations that they can't buy or sell. Under the aegis of such Imperial behavior, America won't return to the moon. There's just no significant level of prosperous spirit to do so... even if the goal WAS to expand our technological civilization.
Instead, I am counting-on and hoping-for the process of MISDIRECTION. This will allow things like colonization to occur while the Imperial States expose their genitalia to each other. In short, I'm hoping for a moon base with permanent residents that eventually either (1) declare independence, or (2) privately build their own colonizing probes who then set off for Mars, the Asteroids, and to Saturn (for ice mining).* To support this Misdirection effort, I am correspondingly hoping that more common folk (welders, excavators, etc.) are sent to the lunar facility, since sending PhDs just results in a class of idiot savants who are not broadly skilled enough to even conceive of a breakaway, much less engineer one.
* In fact, to avoid dependence upon the mother world for volatiles like Hydrogen and Nitrogen, they will HAVE to conduct ice mining at Saturn and on incoming comets. (Asteroids with carboneaceous-chrondrite composition might well have sufficient water content to prove more practical to mine for Hydrogen.)
Let's see now, the deluge of silly software patents STRONGLY SUGGEST that this is a model 8-hour day for the examiner:
get coffee and read paper:
1 hour read and understand ONE application:
1/2 hour (skim submitter's corporation marks, lookup stock ticker on the NASDAQ) yak with fellow examiner about last night's ballgame or movie:
1 hour search for prior art:
0 (they applied for it, so it must be an innovation, duh) evaluate patentability:
0 (they applied for it, so it must be patentable, duh) communicate with the applicant:
0 (application+fee = all the USPTO needs) work out necessary revisions:
1/2 hour (there are always some typos) call gf and/or wife:
1 hour lunch:
1 hour (not counted... hey, it's personal time!) push some paperwork around to make it all look good:
1/2 hour reach and write up conclusions:
1/2 hour (apply cut-n-paste document praising software innovation) surf web for latest 1337 g4m3 k0d3z:
3 hours (hey, it takes time to get m4d 5k1llz)
Seriously now, I'm sure they do spend quite a bit of time on each app, but due to political pressures, if they want to keep their jobs, they must eventually give in and approve even silly patents.
Those hours are probably spent finding any way possible to just deny the silly app, just to fail in the end due to the "writing on the wall" that essentially says if Sun, Microsoft, Oracle et al file a patent, then they should get it or there's going to be trouble of a wide ranging sort.
I'm sure the first layer of trouble is a bevy of patent lawyers sending x2 weight in paper for everything you try to issue a denial response on.
They can bury you in paper, and in the end it's just easier to give in and let the courts handle it if there's any prior art.
I'm sure the 2nd layer of trouble is Da Boss, who has to come down on you like a 16-ton weight if you actually put up a fight against a silly patent by a major corporation.
After all, he's got all his employee metrics to mind each week (or daily, if his boss is an even bigger dick), and your "quality over quantity" approach has no adherents in the upper echelons.
Finally, I'm sure the 3rd and final layer of trouble is if you and your boss stand firm against a particular silly patent from a high-profile company like Amazon (you know... one of the "engines of the modern American economy" or some other equally inane PR that is hiding our severe social problems).
Amazon's execs can just call up their buddies, who eventually reach their buddies in the USPTO and Congress, and your boss will get the tanning of his life.
Then he (or his replacement) turns around and chews out YOUR ass.
And you will either approve that Amazon app for the spectacular innovation of "clicking a mouse TWICE" or you will have to clean out your cubicle.
"Fair use" (yeh, I'm suuuuuure they go over that issue carefully in the schools) is expanding.
The reason why so many millions are performing all that copyright violation is that the laws (or their enforcement) are wrong and they must change.
No revolution is legal, and passing a law is the fastest way to create criminals.
At any rate, their educational programs may as well try to convince children not to masturbate.
The kids may feel ashamed, but they're still going to do it.
Good luck getting them to stop.
P2P is here to stay and the young (skilled, yet without cash) will continue to use it to get their songs, warez and pr0n.
However, I'll make the RIAA and other associations a deal:
I'll stop downloading songs, warez and pr0n, and will stop (or report on) others from doing the same... as long as the American Congress re-aligns patent and copyright law with the alleged, goddamn Law of the Land {tm}:
the American Constitution.
If patents and copyrights can be returned to "limited times", then We The People can return to being the entire point of all this law-making.
Like many people, you have no concept about space colonization beyond your emphatic bias towards planetary surfaces.
By this narrow view, there will never be an attempt to leave Earth, since there's no other surface with such hospitality within any sensible reach.
And, of course, the "nowhere to go" mentality leads to the action of "nothing to make".
Without a planetary surface waiting for you at the end of the journey, you aren't going to construct one in whatever sense (terraformation, space colonies, etc.).
In short -- and to use a Larry Niven convention -- you're a fucking Flatlander.
O'Neill raised the question about "is a planetary surface the right place for an expanding industrial society?" (or something like that).
Investigation so far strongly imply the answer is "no".
Planets have gravity wells that demand enormous energy consumption for transportation.
Leaving the Earth is like climbing a hill that's 4000 miles high, and returning is like surviving a tumble down the same size of hill.
For that reason, surface-to-space spaceflight is a worse undertaking than other frontier ventures of Humanity.
There are many possibilities for space colonies (0'Neill, Savage, and others... read a goddamn unauthorized book for a change) and it is plainly the case that such large projects are beyond current space programs.
The bias in current programs is to involve on-site Humans less and less... thus lessening the need more and more for Humans to be there for anything.
It's as if Spain, England and the other explorers of the "New World" sent fewer people and more robots to sail the Atlantic, eventually ending up with only robots crawling across North America... and what's the goddamn point of that?
(Obviously for my example I am dismissing the American natives.)
Sending Humans into space should be an investment for sending them there permanently.
People could even live on Luna permanently, partially fulfilling your planetary-surface bias.
Ben Bova wrote a book about that... look it up.
BUT... the Lunar surface is particularly inhospitable, so people would have to be sent there for many months, probably years, in order to construct the habitats.
It's called investment and sacrifice, pal.
People died all across this oh-so-hospitable America, too, before the infrastructure level of the civilization rose to the level where the environment rarely killed people.
If I had my druthers, I'd be sending people to three places:
Orbit - There will always be a layover point at the top of the hill. It will also be the closest microgravity point to the Earth, which is of course will be the largest market for a long time to come.
Luna - The manufacturing center. Lunar regolith is essentially pre-processed but general-purpose ore. It can provide (off the top of my head) Oxygen, Iron, elements for steels, Aluminum, Silicon, and others. However, it is quite deficient in the light and gassy elements necessary to sustain life. Which is why we also send the bold and the daring to the:
Asteroids - Where we are apt to find Carbonaceous rocks that have all the Hydrogen, Carbon, and Nitrogen we can handle in megaton loads. If there's some deficiency, then Long Rangers can set out to capture incoming comets which are guaranteed to have all manner of light and gassy elements locked into their ices.
Listen, little Flatlander:
Like many of your kind, you have no idea how civilizations and marketplaces arise.
They aren't planned, particularly, despite my points above, and there can never be any consideration of ROI as a make-or-break point of decisions.
What is the ROI on a child?
What is the ROI on some laughing asteroid miner tumbling in his ship in free-fall?
If you don't want to help in the next leap into a frontier, then at least don't stand in the way.
Slashdot Mirror
A train? You mean ... public transit? In America? BWAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAAAHAAAHAHAAHAAA!!
Stop, stop it, you're killing me!
By the tone and implication of my posting, I have already ruled out public transit methods. American society is infrastructurally and culturally aligned with the automobile. That's not so terrible; we can work with that to make a two-tier system with it.
I'd be the first to say that public transit is a great choice, but Americans don't want to make those choices. Airlines are for the scurrying upper- and middle-classes. Trains are for small subset of middle-class, with some lower classes getting on board. And the buses are for the lower-class almost exclusively. Other than that, it's cars are far as the eye can see.
Which is fair enough, since we have a lot of roadway, pervasive automobile training and knowledge, and equally pervasive gas/diesel supplies. We can make this work, if we but try. The gas savings alone with a pervasive people-mover presence will make the endeavor worthwhile.
It seems obvious now why these registries exist. They are being used by governments to provide liability coverage for themselves in the case of continued sexual crimes from released prior offenders. "Sure, Ma'am, we released him 14 months ago, and apparently he seduced and raped your 11-yr-old daughter yesterday ... but our registry had him listed all that time and you should have checked to see that he was living 4 houses down from you."
... after all, thinking and role-playing shouldn't be illegal. As long as he leaves the kids alone, what he does is fine with me ... and my angry emotional responses are MY problem, not his.
It is only a matter of time before a murder registry is put into place. Heck, Ohio already has people listed in a website database when incarcerated, and also lists their charges. With pictures!
This sex-offender registry thing is getting so much support since everybody at least says they despise such criminals. I remain convinced that no one accused of sexual offenses involving children can get a fair trial anywhere. There is no solution for this; they are a permanent oppressed minority and they can only hope to keep their heads down (and, I hope, trousers up).
I asked myself the other day what I would do if I saw some guy jerking off while watching kids on a playground. The initial swell of violent emotion was illuminating. After sober reflection on that, I now conclude that I would instead do nothing
Well, it's not an awful price, and yes, there are better prices, but I'd bet my left nut that there's more to this picture than the article said:
... installation, 24/7 maintenance, network access, and a basic software load with the usual MS apps on Windows XP. The least computer supporting XP in our infrastructure is PII/350MHz/256MB/4GB, and this climbs to the 2.2GHz ones.
"[F]ederal authorities gave city schools just short of $1 million this year to buy 450 new desktop computers."
Assuming "just short" is $950K, then this comes to about $2100 per machine. If you set out to buy 450 computers, you will have to reach a deal with the supplier, hence it is probable that a bulk order for these resulted in a per-machine price of $1000, with everything included like shipping. Windows XP, of course. Using prior experience with buying computers with grant money, I'd wager that these are at least midrange (probably "midrange plus" of available product lines), were bought from a reputed supplier like Dell or Gateway, and came with extended service contracts, including upgrade options.
So, what's the remaining $1100/machine for? Other than sheer overpricing on any issue it touches, there's LAN wiring, planning and review by a consultant, and finally all the network equipment to allow these 450 computers to talk to the Internet. Yep, I can easily see where all the rest of that $495K went.
I work in a bank currently, if you must know, and the in-house price of computer support may seem mind-boggling. The IT dept owns all the computing infrastructure except for rare individual items that users may buy for their own departments. So, to place a computer on a person's desk, we charge $165/computer/month. This charge covers the basics
Yes! Brilliant! And just look, look!, it's revolutionized transportation already ... er ... it's made important contributions ... er ... what was your marvelous manufacturing method doing for us again?
... then where are these revolutionary vehicles that your CAD-Internet-JIT methods should have been producing for arguably a decade or more? (Remember, as far as corporations are concerned, there was a global communication network quite some time ago.) They should be all over the place ... but aren't, and in fact those that do exist continue to exploit niche markets that have no hope of overtaking the main thrust of transit.
... because the costs of owning and maintaining the evolving vehicle are growing too large and will soon cross more threshholds. Modern vehicles have already crossed some lines that the astute can see ... they are getting too expensive to repair and tune, and are driving (har har) people into renting them, not owning them -- since the disadvantage of ownership (maintenance) is becoming worse.
The things you mentioned in the way you mentioned, can be done today but aren't. There are important reasons why.
The heart of the matter involves the unsexy, Old Economy, Old School methods of capital investment and filtering of bad ideas. A bad idea done on CAD is still a bad idea. And you still need significant capital to exploit an idea. At the risks of cries of "heresy!" I claim that you need as much personal capital to exploit a CAD-Internet-JIT manufacturing idea as you will to exploit a drawing-factory-inventory one.
Then there's the futher heretical idea that a man who designs and builds his prototype, then rides it down the street at maximum speed, surely understands more about it than some goobs doing calculations and pixel shadings on their CAD.
With light materials that are strong and resistant to the elements, combined with a very mature gas, propane or diesel power plant, and an equally mature industry for electronic controls
Instead, CAD-Internet-JIT manufacturing ideas are completely overtaken by the established transit orders, who use them to "improve" their own product lines.
Still, the way things are going, we're going to need your beloved CAD-Internet-JIT methods
For individual motorized transit, other than mass transit systems, we have automobiles and motorcycles. And the automobile has vast supremacy. But it's becoming unmaintainable. Something's gotta change. And perhaps, combined with a decrease in credit-worthiness for new car buyers, some clever groups can come up with alternatives.
For example, the automobile is a Space Shuttle. It is used for long hauls and short jumps, and is ill suited for both. The automobile should stop being produced (at least in such overwhelming quantities) and a two-tiered replacement system implemented.
The first tier is a simple people mover, essentially a 3- or 4-tired vehicle about the size of a large motorcycle. Arguably, running down some side-streets and moderate roads at 45mph at most, to get a bunch of groceries, is vast overkill for the 1 to 3 ton automobiles we use today. And this first-tier vehicle is not much of a change from the various orders of motorcycles.
(These people-movers exist today, but like I said, they have been relegated to niche markets and just are not poised to replace the automobile. Since most people are basically dolts, it will take a strong negative economic push for them to invest in such a thing -- and the automobile industry is helping to create that push by making vehicles even less maintainable than the year before.)
The second tier will be a modified form of a minivan. Huge cargo capacity, alternating with passenger stations.
Any idiot can see that if this two-tier system can be adopted, it will have to
The short answer is "yes", you'd be infringing.
... I would. It is immoral to sit on a patent without providing the product or service that the patent is providing monopoly protection for.
But there's a much more complicated, long answer of "no" to your question, dealing with the sheer reality of Human needs.
You didn't mention if the power-generation system was NOT for sale if you wanted one. If it's a patented system, and is NOT available, then go ahead and make one
You didn't mention if the power-generation system was for sale, but at an exorbitant price that far exceeds the benefits of using it. In such an instance, the patent holder is a buffoon and deserves to be undercut by infringement. When force and economics collide, I have no moral problem with siding with economics.
Eight Hours, And There's Nothing Going On:
... hey, it's personal time!)
get coffee and read paper:
1 hour
read and understand ONE application:
1/2 hour (skim submitter's corporation marks, lookup stock ticker on the NASDAQ)
yak with fellow examiner about last night's ballgame or movie:
1 hour
search for prior art:
0 (they applied for it, so it must be an innovation, duh)
evaluate patentability:
0 (they applied for it, so it must be patentable, duh)
communicate with the applicant:
0 (application+fee = all the USPTO needs)
work out necessary revisions:
1/2 hour (there are always some typos)
call gf and/or wife:
1 hour
lunch:
1 hour (not counted
push some paperwork around to make it all look good:
1/2 hour
reach and write up conclusions:
1/2 hour (apply cut-n-paste document praising innovation)
surf web for latest 1337 g4m3 k0d3z:
3 hours (hey, it takes time to get m4d 5k1llz)
- You can't loan a friend ten bucks.
- Your ID can be duplicated, stolen or zeroized.
- You can only buy from someone who can process your ID.
- Your purchasing info can be used against you by police, courts and government agencies.
Given all that, then what's with the geek's heart going all a'flutter over digital cash? Furthermore, why do the geeks seem to think that all physical cash will be replaced?I hope for the sake of this article, the term "replace" was used to indicate "some instances" of replacement in space and time, and not "all instances".
People blather on and on about long-term storage of waste, and how it's got to be out of everyone's hands.
The key error in this thinking is the assumption that the site has to be stable.
I propose a deep sea trench, like the Marianas.
1) The depth of the trench will provide more security than can ever be achieved on land, given the pressures of miles of ocean water.
2) The waste will have to be packaged in non-water-soluable form. These ceramic pebbles seem to be just the thing.
3) Any waste release in the trench will have to penetrate miles of ocean water to harm anyone, surface sea life included.
4) The waste will slowly be covered in silt, and even more slowly will flow with the ocean bed into the subduction zone under the opposing continental plate, ending up many, many miles beneath the surface in the mantle itself.
5) After millions of years, subduction heat will melt the waste and mix it with magma, and some will eventually appear in volcanoes beyond the trench zone, right above the subduction melt point.
Well, after millions of years, the waste will probably be no more significantly radioactive than magma normally is.
There are 2 places that the end results (processed ore) can go: Earth or space. Earth's enormous gravity well demarcates that ... anything from low Earth orbit (LEO) upward is essentially the same, since LEO requires a velocity of about 5 miles a second to maintain.
... you have no choice but use materials mined in space in order to live in space. Hence, the cost is irrelevent. Either you mine the Lunar regolith and asteroids for your air, or you will die. There might be possibilities for mining Earth's outer atmosphere, I'd imagine ... but you'd have to get close to the Earth for that, and the closer you get, the more fuel you'll need to get away with your payload.
... and as soon as possible you have to stop importing them from Earth since even that's too expensive, and start exploiting them from asteroidal sources. It also desn't seem to make economic sense to ship water to the Moon, since your cargo will be 89% oxygen, which is what the Moon has plenty of anyway (locked up in the rocks).
... divers have done without it by substituting helium. But helium is still a volatile on the moon. And plants raised in the Lunar facilities will need nitrogen for their root systems. So, nitrogen will still need to be imported in significant quantities.)
If it's Earth, you'd have to figure out how to (1) get the material there, and (2) down to the surface. Present technology can get it there with mass drivers, even off the surface of the Moon (and especially so, I'd figure). And after that, economy dictates that it be hard landed. Thus means you package the materials into ablative shells to make it as cheap as possible, and then let them smack into a desert area. After some time of bombardment, ground crews can venture out into the shattered zone and dig it up to collect the goods. Admittedly, it'll take some hard thinking and good engineering to come up with a way to sling the stuff down Earth's energy well without it coming in like a meteor; perhaps slingshot-then-return, perhaps atmospheric-skip-n-drag, perhaps even a mass catcher in Earth orbit. But these are engineering details.
The question is, is this kind of thing worth it for materials X, Y and Z? Once the costs of space development are amortized, I suspect that few materials will be appealing. This strongly suggests materials of a more processed nature, even products, which can be made in a space environment cheaper than on Earth. Arguably, with microgravity, some things can't be made on Earth at all, hence uniqueness can ensure a market.
As for space
Lunar regolith is great raw ore, in a good environment for smelting it. It contains all the stuff that you'd need to build a civilization on the Moon and in Cislunar space (even out to the asteroids, but once in the asteroids you will probably find it more economical to mine local resources). Regolith is finely pulverized from billions of years of bombardment, and not only yields aluminum, iron, silicon, magnesium and titanium, but oxygen as well. The downside to the moon is that it has almost no volatiles like nitrogen and hydrogen, and of course there's our old friend carbon. These must be imported (luckily, carbon imports for air can be tiny, although direct usage for plants and animals will be sizeable)
(According to an online source, the air we breathe has the essential component of about 20% O2. See here and here for Human and plant respiration respectively. The roughly 80% nitrogen component of air is an inert portion
Reaching for Mars without a Earth-orbit station and Lunar station is very foolish. It'll be another Apollo program that will result in a lot of abandoned equipment and horri
So, Hubble's gonna burn. What a fucking surprise. Good ol' NASA. No matter how much money was spent getting something into orbit, it's always said to be the case that it's cheaper to let it burn.
... yes, Mir. If Mir's fall doesn't convince you of NASA's hidden mandate, nothing will.
Let's cut out the middle man and burn the money before NASA burns it into orbit and then burns it back down.
NASA is incapable of building and maintaining a space-borne infrastructure. It's obviously a shill for the aerospace companies, who benefit from the contracts to replace all the stuff that NASA lets fall and otherwise obsoletes.
NASA could have had a space station for the cost of orbit-stabilizing boost
Hubble doesn't worry me like the ISS. The ISS will fall in time, since the only point was in building it. I'd like to see NASA's blubbering excuses then for all the billions of dollars lost.
Maybe you have trouble understanding written English.
... er, no, I talked about the dark side and shadows of his philosophy. The philosophy is respectable, but the shadow is just sick. But true to form, speaking in anything but glowing terms about Mr. Limbaugh raises the ire of ... well, the people who represent the dark side of his philosophies. One of those would be you, it seems.
... and you equate this to hating it. I certainly don't love nuclear energy, given its propensity for terrible accidents. 1/4 inch of steel under stress saved some of the people of Ohio from a terrible blow to their health. (But who really gives a flaming fuck about them anyway, right? Surely FirstEnergy (Davis-Besse's owner) doesn't.)
... poor electric-industry investors. Well, that's what the power of government is for. If you see some shithead dumping toxins into a river to save some waste-processing money, you can use the power of government to stop, fine and imprison him ... and (most importantly) the employer that instructed him to pollute. The same power can be used to compel industry to avoid profits-over-social-safety, and perhaps we can have more, smaller, safer nuke mini-plants scattered over America, trying to generate that "too cheap to meter" power as it was originally envisioned. It probably won't be "too cheap", but at least it won't pump out smoke like our current alternatives.
... once again I've spoke about nuclear power in less than rapt terms. Bad me!
... you have accused me AGAIN of seeing industries rolling back into oblivion without alternatives. Please relate how replacement with solar facilities equals that.
Did I say I hated Rush Limbaugh? Let me check my posting
Lack of adoration is not hatred. You would do well to learn this.
I talk about alternatives to nuclear energy and how to scale it back to safer forms for further exploitation
But despite the accidents (and in fact, wholly because of them) nuclear power can be made safer, but may be less profitable. Awww
Oops
Moving right along
You are of course wrong, but that never stopped the talk-radioers rattling out the same drivel, since they understand intuitively that talking over the opposition tends to sway the complacent majority. Or at least they imagine it does; it's the old war of stomach over brain. It's too bad for you, then, that Slashdot is NOT the AM-radio audience. You probably never meet -- or if you do meet, even acknowledge -- the liberal conservatives that cannot help but rise in society's center. They are the beneficiaries of society's advantages, and are well enough educated to be concerned about society's shadows. Slashdot seems to be full enough of these folks. We are not so terrified about losing even a smidgen of our civilization that we oppose any change to methods of fuel exploitation, power generation, forest management (well, I have to scorn that a bit, given all the dead wood piling up on America's forest floors), transportation, etc. We do NOT buy the viewpoints of "love it or leave it" and "it's either this or bread lines".
To sum up, I have more than answered your posting, you simply choose not to acknowlege the points. Let me bullet them; perhaps that will focus your attention:
1) Space industry is added to Earth industry, then replaces some fraction of polluting energy installations on Earth. Net industrial change is positive since space-construction and eenrgy-generation facilities should be huge.
2) Between a shack and a McMansion, between a dirt road and a 6-lane highway, between raising your own chickens and pulling a package of chicken meat from a supermarket shelf, there are other options spanning the range.
3) Do you really think that we only have two choices?
4) Change is coming to bankrupt liberal and conservative alike.
Yeah, you fucking asshole, you'd BETTER post as an Anonymous Coward. I'm about to rip you to shreds.
... not me. Heck, given America's loss of industry, it's fairly amusing to see you accuse anyone not of corporate executive level of destroying industry.
It sure is funny for an "econazi" (a term you probably like to apply to people who proclaim their desire for cleaner air) who wants to "destroy [...] industrial power" to advocate building a rather massive, industrial effort in launch systems to build space infrastructure, leading to a moonbase, then leading to construction for Earth-orbit solar-energy structures. Wow, that is SO anti-industry.
Your "shack inna woods" comment is the tired repository of so much of the stupidity caused by Rush Limbaugh's enormous conservative shadow. Do you actually think that we have only two choices?:
1) Shack in the woods.
2) Energy-wasting, too-expensive home, car, devices, communication, lifestyle, etc.
Between options 1 and 2 is a vast range of other options. Between where we are, and where we could be, is a big gulf. Kind of like the one between your ears.
Change is coming, and you Dark Side of the (Limbaugh) Force types must adapt to scarcity. It will be allocated by supply, price or a combination of both. If you can't meet the price, or live in an area of time of no supplies, then you will have to do without, won't you? Your supply masters will de-industrialize you soon enough
Advice: Turn off all that iconic talk radio and read some books. Come back with more reasoning than mottos.
I wouldn't be quite so quick to write off fusion power
... "it's close" ... shit, it's not even breathing hard. Fusion is such an evident failure that your fusionphilia is not only questionable, but downright freakish. Fella, you need therapy.
[flabbergasted] !?!? QUICK ?!?! How on earth was I quick, in judging something I've read about for over 20 years?
"Fusion's coming"
Questions: How many years of failure are enough to change course? How many years of failure will cause you to divert your investments elsewhere?
My money's not in fusion. I've told the Congress (via reps) about this enough. If you want to throw YOUR money at it, then knock yourself out. I live for the day when fusion projects go off government funds and are kicked out into the private field. Maybe then, to please their private investors, they shrug their shoulders, sigh resignedly, and start producing a commerical watt of power.
ON THE MARGINALIZATION OF GOOD SENSE
... people don't even turn off the lights in a room when they leave it, then complain about their electic bill. Americans don't want to change ... they just want cheaper energy brought to them. Well, let me tell you fella, cheaper is Earth-orbit solar (sources? read research summaries from O'Neill's work), but requires so much investment that we crash headlong into another American Myth: Rewards Without Investment. Why, Iraq demonstrates how you can even exploit oil without the investment of prospecting, drilling, and laying pipeline ... just invade the people who have it! (Yes, yes .. I know all about nationalization, etc. I believe those facilities belong to the Iraqis now, thank you very much.) Why, the report on the August outage reveals the new paradigm: Fewer Electric Lines For Carrying More Power! (Kudos on that one, BTW. My pocket was nicely padded from overtime work in cleaning up my bank's downed systems.)
....
... You know, with the incredibly thin insulation used in these fucking things, it's no wonder every water heater across America wastes probably $50 a year in energy costs. Too many people live alone or in groups too small to merit water heaters. We need innovation in distributed or on-demand systems. Hell's Bells! ... I built (while also confirming that necessity really IS the mother of invention) a water heater for my shower head, out of $25 of materials, primarily involving an 1800W electric element (funnily enough, for a full-size electric water heater), PVC tube, and various fittings. My water heater was shut off for almost 2 years, saving me about $300.
... These take the majority of any home's electric bill. I saw an article about a couple who built an off-utility home in the woods, but they still tried to have the modern amenities. They had a 'fridge, too ... built into a wall, with insulation at least 6 inches thick. Hmmm ... no such 'fridge can be found for sale in America. Our 'fridges are designed to look great! ... but waste energy. Conservation innovation (spurred by the inevitable spiralling of energy costs) demands that 'fridge external insulation jackets be made and sold.
... [snort] Well, this has been done to death. This shows much greater promise than fusion, but off-the-cuff is criminally underfunded (public and private).
... Hey, here's a thought: just perhaps, just maybe, those 20 MILLION SUVs ON AMERICA'S ROADS WERE A HUGE FUCKING MISTAKE. Insanely low gas mileage? What was so terrible, especially in cities, with small people-transporters? Oh, that's right, "my bad", it was unsafe, and is now enormously unsafe with all those 2-ton-plus SUVs barrelling around ... they'd crush a 500lb little vehicle like a bug. I guess there's nothing to do but go full M1A1 tanks for everyone! America's transportation system is so bad that I could spend hours laying sarcasm upon it ... but what's the point? We all know it. And "no one" is willing to fix it. And we consumers are hardly able to grab some parts (like I grabbed a heating element and some plastic pipe) and construct a better alternative, energy-wise, since automobiles are a company-level construct. Our alternatives tend to lie with "scream at your local reps for better public transport" and "move closer to work so you can use a bicycle". Obviously even those alte
Yeah, right. "No one" is interested in my suggestions, since the result crosses their energy-intensive lifestyles and avoids socialization of the costs of pollution. MY GOD!
Well, you asked for it buddy, so here goes nothing
1) Water Heaters
2) Refridgerators
3) House Solar
4) Automobiles
Sheesh, I just put 30 in my calculator, multiplied it by 1.03, did that 47 times in succession, and got a little over 120. So, with an average of 3% inflation, if today's $30K income keeps up with the inflation, then 47 years later it's at $120K.
To reach $150K, a $30K salary will require 3.5% inflation.
What is the point of going to all that trouble when we have ample power supplies here on earth (contra to our current moral panic about power supplies).
... HA!
Don't make me laugh.
I live too close already to a plant that was saved from a severity-one nuclear accident by a quarter-inch of a stainless steel liner.
Nuclear power's current incarnation is a failure, and should be rolled back into a niche product, even re-routed into small reactors like those being proposed.
As for fusion ... you know, I have heard about fusion power all my life, and those highly-paid rat bastards haven't produced a single watt of commercial power yet.
It's another failure, and we've given them at least 40 solid years of primarily research and some development to demonstrate that.
Fusion funding should ALSO be rolled back and committed to things that can produce a useful watt (which was the point, remember?) within 5 years.
All those fusion billions could have been almost carelessly spent on hot-water systems of glass, tar paper, copper tubing and wooden frames, and resulted in a great deal more power independence, lack of pollution, and overall positive power production.
Fusion's billions now belong to solar power.
Is this a troll?
You really don't see the point of reducing -- even eliminating -- all those coal- and oil-fueled power plants? I do see the point -- they consume irreplaceable fuels, leave us with significant pollution, and are nearly incapable of distributed generation.
And as for suggestions of fission and fusion alternatives
Good reply.
... as opposed to all the dead rock on Mars. The best we can say for Mars that a life-support system failure will kill you in hours, not minutes as is the case on the moon.
... fear, greed, hate. It's not worth seeking consensus since you tend to whore your own morals in order to achieve a result. Just look at the last few years of the American Congress; that's consensus taken to the extreme.
... heavy lifter, mission plane, laser-launched orbiter, space elevator ... there's quite a list about lifting. To get some idea, read nonfiction works by Ben Bova, Marshall Savage, Gerard O'Neill, Heppenheimer, etc. Heck, read the collected works of the Planetary Society and other such private space-promotion groups, to see what's possible.
... man 4 of them, and make 2 entirely robotic. Failures among the manned missions can be backed up with the others.
... pure spectacle, and with no "permanent infrastructure" that we here want. It'll be another $100 billion wasted. It is good luck for me, then, that I'd given up on the Congress after late 2001, and have saved my money illegally (by exempting myself from Federal income taxes) so that I can support private causes or public nations that pursue sustainable space enterprise. If I have to board an ocean vessel heading for, say, Spain, while the gantries of NASA burn brightly at my back, while shots are heard being fired all along the shoreline, then my philosophy will be vindicated and I will move forward with my head held high. NASA is just one log amongst all the dead timber piled up on the forest floor of America ... it deserves to burn since it allowed itself to be heaped so terribly high.
Overall, I can say: Well, OK, but you can't realistically expect to promote 1 course of action on the basis of falsehoods and flawed reasoning. You obviously prefer to go to Mars over the moon, but -- Hell's Bells! -- don't start spouting off that the "moon is dead rock"
Consensus is deadly. Consensus is almost always built from the lowest common denominator
I combine this sentiment with the fact that we are wealthy enough a society (assuming you are American) and are wealthy enough a planetary civilization to pursue some-to-many different paths to space colonization. Several nations can create space programs that pursue different routes to space
And there's the sensible approach of routing. You want to get to Mars? No problem. Wait until we have (1) Earth orbital facilities, and (2) Lunar manufacturing, which will allow a Mars mission to be built for chump change. Hell, at that point, send 6 missions
Sure, it won't be sexy. It won't be glamorous. But it will be a SUCCESS! And success is what you wanted, right?
If only our expressions here on Slashdot could be found on the floor of the American Congress, instead of political drivel designed to appeal to the majority (i.e. consensus). I have no doubt that the next space effort by the Congress will be a one-off shot to Mars
My god, where have you been all my life? I want to marry you.
... brilliant!
Seriously, your article title is very focused on the hidden problem. Disposable items are luxury items and therefore are expensive. Permanent items cost more but last so enormously longer that in the long term they are much cheaper, even considering your labor in maintaining them. And as you pointed out, who is paying for disposal? The increasing costs of pollution, waste-processing and overall site-dumping, more than show that the costs of disposable items are being socialized to everyone. Cheaper items but higher taxes
It would make parking a lot easier if I could just drive my car into a dumpster.
... say, 45 seconds.
This is why pedestrians don't stop at crosswalks if they can help it.
... it won't last more than 2 years anyway.
I'm hearing the term "starter marriage" nowadays, kind of like a "starter home" except with more practicality and less morality.
You could just drive into the Bronx, like people do today, for the same effect.
And how about clothes that last for 1 day so we can keep up with the latest trends.
Your clothes will only last a day or so, too, in the Bronx, if you stand still long enough
Or pets that die after a week, for when you want some love around Christmas but don't want an 8-20 year commitment.
Just get married
Mars is a much better place to go. The Moon is a pile of dead rock!
... SILICON, OXYGEN, IRON, ALUMINUM, CALCIUM, MAGNESIUM, TITANIUM, and then 1% traces of other elements. What is the sense of a 1-year supply line over 3-day one?
... you've no idea on how to perform practical activities like construction and operation of an orbital spaceport and shipyard. You only mention Mars in order to drum up enthusiasm, but your 1-year-distant Mars mission can only offer us fanfare and glitter, not hard progress towards building a spacefaring civilization. The end product of a Mars mission is more equipment eroding on the Martian surface, and kilograms of samples and terabytes of data sitting on Earth while people struggle to "earn" more PhDs from them.
What can you do with the enormous gravity of Mars well compared to the gentler well of the moon? What is the fucking Lunar regolith made from?
SSTO is too difficult and expensive!
Yet SSTO (or a space elevator) is the next necessary step to making Earth-to-orbit access routine. The routine will be necessary since a lot of material and personnel need to come from Earth initially when real orbital and lunar facilities are being built. Heavy lifters (the Big Dumb Boosters concept) will always be needed when you have a lump of cargo measured only in tonnage, but SSTO is a mission vehicle and enough missions will need to be flown in order to get the construction and deliveries done.
It's people like you that promote the underpinning emotional boondoggle nature of 90% of space missions. Screw your consensus
We don't have the technology to build a self-supporting village, much less a colony that can build new colonies.
... then the colonizers who came after me would study my corpse, my bioware, and my habitat -- and eventually arrive at a solution for themselves.
... or they will die. Which is another argument AGAINST sending robots, since no one really cares if the robot dies, hence they feel no strong urge to fix whatever happened wrongly.
... materials processing, bioware, power, excavation, etc. You might also read Marshall Savage, Gerard O'Neill, T.A. Heppenheimer, etc.
Utter bulldada, considering your lack of understanding about survival. People in a position that demands they do or die, will do (and yes, unfortunately, some will die). If I was living in a Lunar base that had, say, some malfunction in the bioware that resulted in a steady build-up of CO2, I would figure the problem out eventually because the alternative would be death. But, say, even if I didn't make it, and the CO2 buildup killed me
We have more than enough technology to get to the moon, build sites to live in (excavation, rough manufacturing, construction), and then process regolith for materials to take further steps. If there are any problems along the way, they will be solved by the people involved
I recommend Bova's book "Welcome to Moonbase". Everything in it is well within modern technology
Your sentiments are otherwise correctly aligned towards space colonization. You recognize the need and requirement for self-sufficiency in all things. For example, a Lunar city that needs Hydrogen and Nitrogen shipped up from Earth is the next best thing to a city losing its atmosphere to the Lunar surface. All it takes a few slipped shipments to kill the city, or at least invoke emigration and rationing. Of course, perhaps then the stupid bastards on the moon will finally invest in comet, asteroid or Saturn-ring mining missions to go get mega- and giga-tons of volatiles that the mother world has tried to strangle them with.
We stopped going to the moon for several reasons:
... people like you coined the term space nut . If it's nutty, then it's not worth doing, right? It heaps ridicule upon what is the ONLY effort to lift our civilization into the next age of real prosperity ... as far above our energy-intensive cities as those cities are above straw huts (I'm talking about quality, not altitude).
... political overpowering was always the basis for anything done at a national level in this Imperial age. Once the Americans showed the world that they had a bigger penis (space-wise) than the Soviets, the effort was over.
... even if the goal WAS to expand our technological civilization.
1)
2)
Nowhere in the lunar missions was there a force that said: "an expanding technical civilization needs to exploit space resources". I'm sure some astronauts and engineers believed in that force, but they had no power to direct the effort.
In the latter part of the 20th Century, America really never had the will to do the right thing. The current economic and warfare status shows that American drives are degenerating even further. Basically, they sell each other out for fraction-of-a-percent gains, and otherwise attack nations that they can't buy or sell. Under the aegis of such Imperial behavior, America won't return to the moon. There's just no significant level of prosperous spirit to do so
Instead, I am counting-on and hoping-for the process of MISDIRECTION. This will allow things like colonization to occur while the Imperial States expose their genitalia to each other. In short, I'm hoping for a moon base with permanent residents that eventually either (1) declare independence, or (2) privately build their own colonizing probes who then set off for Mars, the Asteroids, and to Saturn (for ice mining).* To support this Misdirection effort, I am correspondingly hoping that more common folk (welders, excavators, etc.) are sent to the lunar facility, since sending PhDs just results in a class of idiot savants who are not broadly skilled enough to even conceive of a breakaway, much less engineer one.
* In fact, to avoid dependence upon the mother world for volatiles like Hydrogen and Nitrogen, they will HAVE to conduct ice mining at Saturn and on incoming comets. (Asteroids with carboneaceous-chrondrite composition might well have sufficient water content to prove more practical to mine for Hydrogen.)
Let's see now, the deluge of silly software patents STRONGLY SUGGEST that this is a model 8-hour day for the examiner:
... hey, it's personal time!)
... one of the "engines of the modern American economy" or some other equally inane PR that is hiding our severe social problems).
Amazon's execs can just call up their buddies, who eventually reach their buddies in the USPTO and Congress, and your boss will get the tanning of his life.
Then he (or his replacement) turns around and chews out YOUR ass.
And you will either approve that Amazon app for the spectacular innovation of "clicking a mouse TWICE" or you will have to clean out your cubicle.
get coffee and read paper:
1 hour
read and understand ONE application:
1/2 hour (skim submitter's corporation marks, lookup stock ticker on the NASDAQ)
yak with fellow examiner about last night's ballgame or movie:
1 hour
search for prior art:
0 (they applied for it, so it must be an innovation, duh)
evaluate patentability:
0 (they applied for it, so it must be patentable, duh)
communicate with the applicant:
0 (application+fee = all the USPTO needs)
work out necessary revisions:
1/2 hour (there are always some typos)
call gf and/or wife:
1 hour
lunch:
1 hour (not counted
push some paperwork around to make it all look good:
1/2 hour
reach and write up conclusions:
1/2 hour (apply cut-n-paste document praising software innovation)
surf web for latest 1337 g4m3 k0d3z:
3 hours (hey, it takes time to get m4d 5k1llz)
Seriously now, I'm sure they do spend quite a bit of time on each app, but due to political pressures, if they want to keep their jobs, they must eventually give in and approve even silly patents. Those hours are probably spent finding any way possible to just deny the silly app, just to fail in the end due to the "writing on the wall" that essentially says if Sun, Microsoft, Oracle et al file a patent, then they should get it or there's going to be trouble of a wide ranging sort.
I'm sure the first layer of trouble is a bevy of patent lawyers sending x2 weight in paper for everything you try to issue a denial response on. They can bury you in paper, and in the end it's just easier to give in and let the courts handle it if there's any prior art.
I'm sure the 2nd layer of trouble is Da Boss, who has to come down on you like a 16-ton weight if you actually put up a fight against a silly patent by a major corporation. After all, he's got all his employee metrics to mind each week (or daily, if his boss is an even bigger dick), and your "quality over quantity" approach has no adherents in the upper echelons.
Finally, I'm sure the 3rd and final layer of trouble is if you and your boss stand firm against a particular silly patent from a high-profile company like Amazon (you know
"Fair use" (yeh, I'm suuuuuure they go over that issue carefully in the schools) is expanding. The reason why so many millions are performing all that copyright violation is that the laws (or their enforcement) are wrong and they must change. No revolution is legal, and passing a law is the fastest way to create criminals.
... as long as the American Congress re-aligns patent and copyright law with the alleged, goddamn Law of the Land {tm}:
the American Constitution.
If patents and copyrights can be returned to "limited times", then We The People can return to being the entire point of all this law-making.
At any rate, their educational programs may as well try to convince children not to masturbate. The kids may feel ashamed, but they're still going to do it. Good luck getting them to stop. P2P is here to stay and the young (skilled, yet without cash) will continue to use it to get their songs, warez and pr0n.
However, I'll make the RIAA and other associations a deal: I'll stop downloading songs, warez and pr0n, and will stop (or report on) others from doing the same
O'Neill raised the question about "is a planetary surface the right place for an expanding industrial society?" (or something like that). Investigation so far strongly imply the answer is "no". Planets have gravity wells that demand enormous energy consumption for transportation. Leaving the Earth is like climbing a hill that's 4000 miles high, and returning is like surviving a tumble down the same size of hill. For that reason, surface-to-space spaceflight is a worse undertaking than other frontier ventures of Humanity.
There are many possibilities for space colonies (0'Neill, Savage, and others
Sending Humans into space should be an investment for sending them there permanently. People could even live on Luna permanently, partially fulfilling your planetary-surface bias. Ben Bova wrote a book about that
If I had my druthers, I'd be sending people to three places:
- Orbit - There will always be a layover point at the top of the hill. It will also be the closest microgravity point to the Earth, which is of course will be the largest market for a long time to come.
- Luna - The manufacturing center. Lunar regolith is essentially pre-processed but general-purpose ore. It can provide (off the top of my head) Oxygen, Iron, elements for steels, Aluminum, Silicon, and others. However, it is quite deficient in the light and gassy elements necessary to sustain life. Which is why we also send the bold and the daring to the:
- Asteroids - Where we are apt to find Carbonaceous rocks that have all the Hydrogen, Carbon, and Nitrogen we can handle in megaton loads. If there's some deficiency, then Long Rangers can set out to capture incoming comets which are guaranteed to have all manner of light and gassy elements locked into their ices.
Listen, little Flatlander: Like many of your kind, you have no idea how civilizations and marketplaces arise. They aren't planned, particularly, despite my points above, and there can never be any consideration of ROI as a make-or-break point of decisions. What is the ROI on a child? What is the ROI on some laughing asteroid miner tumbling in his ship in free-fall? If you don't want to help in the next leap into a frontier, then at least don't stand in the way.