Judging by your replies to the other posters, I take it this is a serious question.
Honestly, presuming you have somewhere to put the humans once they get into space, it is not a difficult proposition at all. You just have to look at the physical limitations of the problem, and not expect the technologies of today to be the limiting factor. A typical human weighs less than 100 kg. The amount of energy to put this mass into low earth orbit is about 5000 MJ - or about the same amount of energy in 200 gallons of gasoline. Now, our current mechanisms of putting masses into orbit are very inefficient; typical chemical rockets have a less than 1% efficiency when viewed from the standpoint of the energy used versus the kinetic energy of their load when delivered to orbit.
Of course, if the mission were to deliver billions of people to low earth orbit, our current methods would not be feasible. However, just as the Irish didn't flee the potato famine in ships like the Santa Maria, I doubt we will be using the same methods for mass transportation a century from now that we used for exploration in the last century.
Looking at the physical limits, would you believe that billions of people would use less than 2000 kilowatt hours (about $360 dollars worth at $0.18/kwh) worth of energy to get off the planet? It seems like an emminently achievable cost to me. Of course, we would need better propulsion mechanisms than currently used. There are many possible technologies which are being developed (slowly) which could meet the stated challenge. There is nothing in the laws of physics to suggest that we could not get into space a hundred times better and cheaper than we are doing them now.
I'm afraid I have to join the chorus of voices who will inevitably respond to your modded-way-too-high-for-such-an-ill-thought-out post.
You said: A person cannot end up a single mother with 3 kids working a minimum wage job without making some stupid decisions.
Meet my mom.
Before I was born, she got a graduate degree in Zoology, and performed cutting edge genetic research. She met and married my father, a doctor, who is now one of the top anaethesiogists in the nation. She stopped doing research to raise her 3 kids - I'm the eldest.
So far so good, right?
Well, around the time my littlest sister was born, my dad was working around 100 hours a week. We'd see him once a week or so, and he'd always be angry and throwing things and cursing. Scary for a kid. Even scarier for my mom - her threw her down the stairs and rammed her head into a wall, giving her minor brain damage. Of course, she divorced him, and took us kids and headed to another state. However, ten years had passed since she worked in research, and she couldn't get a job in her field anymore. She managed to get jobs making cold calls on the telephone and secretarial jobs. So there she was, a single mother with 3 kids working a minimum wage job. Perhaps you could tell me the bad decision she had made? Was it marrying the rich doctor who loved her and treated her well for ten years? Or was it leaving her academic career to work on something much more important to her?
Now, I'm doing fine, but I'm about the same age as my mom at the "so far, so good" stage. I haven't made any seriously bad decisions, and I've made a few good ones. Who knows where I will be in a few years? Maybe struggling like my mom had to.
You are correct that there is more to life than luck - decisions do count. But you need to realize that as we are all humans, the information that people use to make their decisions is imperfect. Sometimes decisions which looked good at the time look bad only in retrospect. In addition, while bad luck isn't everything, it does happen - death, illness, abusive families. Just because giving up to bad luck isn't the answer doesn't mean that it doesn't make things much harder. I suggest before you go around judging those minimum wage mothers with 3 kids, you think about how their kids are going to judge you when you tell them from your privileged position how stupid they are.
My point was that similar fees might be helpful in the copyright field - see also The Eric Eldred proposal
In 2004, IBM received 3,248 U.S. patents from the USPTO. IBM has over 25,000 active US patents. In 2.5 years, on the year 2004 patents alone they will have to pay $2,923,200 in maintence fees. Sure, they can afford it, but if they are not using their patents it is cheaper to let the patents lapse. Cheaper enough to have one of their lawyers decide to cut, say, the least used 10 percent. I wonder how many of their patents IBM actually does keep for their full lifetime. Since they seem to be generating 3000+ and have been for a while, you would figure they should have 60,000+ patents active. But they claim only 25,000+. Anyone from IBM IPAL reading and care to comment?
I can tell you personally that patent maintence fees made at least one person decide to let a non-performing patent lapse. I wish the fees were a little smaller (mine comes right out of my pocket), but at least they are serving their purpose.
I had a patent which I was making no income off of, nor did ever expect to, so I stopped paying the maintence fees a couple of years ago. It's now in the public domain.
Copyrights, on the other hand, are free to create (although not to register and enforce) and last effectively forever. Copyright reform is a real necessity.
You points are good, but realize that application of Open Source methods to academia don't mean that they are going to do things the same way Linus does. Science has always been fairly "Open Source", long before that particular name was coined, simply due to the need for reproducibility of experiments.
I am sure that if new methods were introduced, that the people using those new methods would adapt to the use of those methods. If it were clear that whoever records the idea or technique is the one who is given credit, then it is to the benefit of the idea-maker to record it themselves, rather than letting a grad student take care of it for them. The advantage of the new method is that currently, who does what is not recorded at all, leading to certain ethical dilemmas which have been the subject of recent articles: http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-57/iss-11/p42.html for example.
Isn't part of open source keeping track of who made which changes? That is a beneficial thing, especially in cases where there is more than one author. I have read academic papers with 30+ authors, and I never knew which one did the modeling and who built the hardware. Sure, if I had investigated or asked, I could have find out easily, but having that recorded in the paper would be a bonus.
In addition, it would also help in cases where a grad student did all the work but the professor gets most of the credit. If the change history shows that the grad student did all the work, maybe they will actually get the credit they deserve?
Anytime someone tells me that space will never be available to large numbers of people, I remind them that the amount of energy that physics requires to send a person to space is about the same amount of energy it takes to drive a large SUV from New York to LA and back. This sometimes changes their perspective on its potential cost.
Assumptions: 100 kg person to escape velocity, SUV gets 12 mpg, mechanism for putting person in orbit is 30% efficient (about the same as a good SUV engine), energy is not used to lift objects other than the human (unless that energy is included in the efficiency calculation).
Of course, this calculation assumes much better systems than we currently have for putting people in orbit (such as a space elevator, etc.), but it does tell us that the limits are the technology, not the physics. I'm not a big fan of the space elevator not because it isn't a great idea, but because there are already better, cheaper ideas. This also assumes that we have somewhere up there to put the people once they arrive. As there is no lack of building materials up in space, but a serious lack of workers, I don't think this will be a problem either.
Actually, positron-electron annihilation reactions result in two 511 keV photons, not one 1022 keV photon (presuming the positron and electron were initially close enough to rest to neglect the velocity contribution). Conservation of momentum and all that.
I also take it you've never been poor enough to get the EITC.
Yes, actually the Earned Income Credit can result in you receiving more money from the Federal Government than you paid in income taxes. This usually occurs in households where the income is low and there are a large number of children.
I know this because I grew up poor, and my Mom used to get it.
As far as my supposition that illegal aliens might end up paying more in taxes than a similarly poor family, I was excluding state income taxes from that analysis. Of course, since state income taxes are deductible from federal income tax, it is a wash, presuming the family would get the EITC.
So do poor citizens. Yet I don't hear you complaining about them. Do you honestly think that illegal aliens are illegal because of the tax benefits? That all those people are just trying to avoid filing their 1040EZ?
There are proper channels that an illegal can take to become legal, either with a green card or citizenship.
Yeah, we make it so easy. Just pop on over to the INS on a Thursday afternoon and pledge allegiance to the flag. Ask anyone who has become a US citizen how many years (or decades) it took and how many thousands of dollars it cost them. Then talk to the people who waited years and paid the money and were still turned down. How many illegals do you think applied for citizenship and were turned down or got tired of being told 'Maybe Later'?
Lower the barriers to becoming a citizen and the vast majority of illegals will become citizens. Then you can stop worrying about how much they drive your costs up, as they will be under the same tax law that you are. Or is equality not good enough for them?
How about on theirs, then? It's not like illegal immigrants don't pay sales tax, the primary source of state funding. You know, the state funding that supports state colleges. I'm sure that they likely don't pay federal income tax, but then, many citizens in their tax bracket get more back than they pay in, due to tax credits and such.
Chances are, they pay more taxes than citizens of equal means, without getting nearly as many benefits. Did you mean that you didn't want citizens to go to college on your tax dollars, either?
If they became citizens before applying for college, that would be one less obstacle to overcome.
Um, you do know that becoming a citizen can take longer than getting a PhD, right? I have a Romanian friend who has been here through junior high, high school, college, working at IBM, and now sysoping at an ISP. He's still waiting on his citizenship. He's a second generation green card holder.
It bugs the heck out of me, as a US citizen, that many of my fellow citizens gripe about illegal immigration, but discourage any attempts to make legal immigration easier. The best solution to illegal immigration is legal immigration. I mean, we've already got the immigration part of it - how does making it difficult or illegal help the situation?
Thank you for posting the real link for this story.
To everyone who is positing various ways of transmitting power wirelessly, they already have a method in mind:
Showcasing the first representative prototypes of Space Elevator climbers, this event will re-define public perception of the Space Elevator project by taking the first step away from mathematical models and drawing boards and into the world of real working hardware. By participating, you get the opportunity to partner in writing this unique chapter of history.
The competition provides the race track, in the form of a crane-suspended vertical ribbon, and a strong light source to power the climbers. Competing teams provide climbers, which have to use the power beamed to them and scale the ribbon while carrying some amount of payload. Climbers will be rated according to their speed and the amount of payload they carried.
The climbers (unmanned, of course) will weigh 25-50 kg [50-100 lbs], and will ascend the ribbon at about 1 m/s. [3 feet per second or 2.5 MPH]
The beam source is a 10 kWatt Xenon search-light (80 cm beam diameter, about 25% efficient), which should yield a climber power budget of about 500 watts.
The ribbon is roughly 30cm (1 foot) wide by 1 mm thick, is about 60m (200 feet) long, and is tensioned to about 1 ton.
Building a climber is not an easy task. The designers have to juggle light weight structure, efficient photo-voltaic arrays, efficient motors and power electronics, low-loss traction mechanism, thermal management, and control systems.
Not a walk in the park, but we'll make it worth your while. We will be offering $50,000, $20,000 and $10,000 to the 3 best teams.
I've always wondered why the Constitution's prohibition on ex post facto laws didn't keep Congress from extending the term of already existing copyrights. Can anyone explain to me why it doesn't? I understand that Congress has the power to grant copyrights of any limited duration, as per the recent Supreme Court judgement, but do they Constitutionally have the power to change the duration of an already granted copyright? It seems to me that if they have the power to extend the duration of an already granted copyright, then they also have the power to reduce it. As unlikely as it seems that they would do such a thing, if they did so it would seem to clearly be an ex post facto law - so why is an ex post facto law reducing the duration prohibited but one extending it is not? I am not a lawyer but I figure someone must have challenged one of the extensions on this basis at some point.
correction - the EURASIP JASP is 100 euros/page, not pounds.
The reason I mention this particular journal, is that I was considering publishing in this journal, but since I would be paying the fee out of my own pocket (not all science is funded by grants), you can bet I won't be.
$1500 per article worth of work - I don't think so!
How much do you really think it costs to edit and format a 10 page paper? Why does it cost 100 British Pounds/page to do this in say, the EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing, but if I were to hire a paid professional at $30/hour to format and edit it, they would be done in an hour or two, with a $60 cost maximum?
The company I work for pays thousands of dollars a year to advertise in scientific society journals (mainly Medical Physics - circulation 4,681). I think our marketing department would highly disagree with you.
I'm sorry, but I am not sure who this is. I have a bad habit of loaning out books and forgetting about it... Can you give me any clues? Or just send me an email or give me a call.
In the US, the compulsory license rate for webcasting is $ 0.0014 per listener. That equates to an average of 66800 listeners per song, presuming that Norway has comparable rates.
That's rather high, I'm thinking, but perhaps half of Oslo was downloading from this guy's site. I think it's more likely that there are some penalties added.
I really think that the compulsory license is the best means of "freeing" the music industry - I'd love to see someone make 'internet radio' where you could listen to whatever channel (song) you wanted and pay the same rate that Clear Channel has to pay. I'd be very willing to pay $0.0014 to hear any song I wanted, any time I wanted. Of course, the record industry would try to change the compulsory license rate - and probably succeed - but at least then, their lapdog Big Radio would suffer along with the rest of us.
I'd start up an internet radio thing like this, but I'm a science geek, not an internet geek. I have my own fish to fry.
The site you linked had the following statement: "There is a proposal to test experimentally whether frame dragging occurs. This involves using the rotating earth as the massive body and putting a satellite into orbit with a gyroscope which keeps it pointing in a fixed direction. Although the Earth would only have a tiny frame dragging effect it is close to the limits of present day experiment to detect the extremely small precession of the gyroscope which should be caused. So far no mission to try this experiment has been approved."
This is incorrect. This mission is currently running.
I highly agree! Einstein was rare among scientists in that he could clearly explain his ideas to a lay audience. I have read a number of books on relativity but NOBODY does a better job of explaining it than the man himself. Think about it - this guy had to sell people on his idea long before it was fully accepted by the scientific community.
Slashdot Mirror
Judging by your replies to the other posters, I take it this is a serious question.
Honestly, presuming you have somewhere to put the humans once they get into space, it is not a difficult proposition at all. You just have to look at the physical limitations of the problem, and not expect the technologies of today to be the limiting factor. A typical human weighs less than 100 kg. The amount of energy to put this mass into low earth orbit is about 5000 MJ - or about the same amount of energy in 200 gallons of gasoline. Now, our current mechanisms of putting masses into orbit are very inefficient; typical chemical rockets have a less than 1% efficiency when viewed from the standpoint of the energy used versus the kinetic energy of their load when delivered to orbit.
Of course, if the mission were to deliver billions of people to low earth orbit, our current methods would not be feasible. However, just as the Irish didn't flee the potato famine in ships like the Santa Maria, I doubt we will be using the same methods for mass transportation a century from now that we used for exploration in the last century.
Looking at the physical limits, would you believe that billions of people would use less than 2000 kilowatt hours (about $360 dollars worth at $0.18/kwh) worth of energy to get off the planet? It seems like an emminently achievable cost to me. Of course, we would need better propulsion mechanisms than currently used. There are many possible technologies which are being developed (slowly) which could meet the stated challenge. There is nothing in the laws of physics to suggest that we could not get into space a hundred times better and cheaper than we are doing them now.
I'm afraid I have to join the chorus of voices who will inevitably respond to your modded-way-too-high-for-such-an-ill-thought-out post.
You said: A person cannot end up a single mother with 3 kids working a minimum wage job without making some stupid decisions.
Meet my mom.
Before I was born, she got a graduate degree in Zoology, and performed cutting edge genetic research. She met and married my father, a doctor, who is now one of the top anaethesiogists in the nation. She stopped doing research to raise her 3 kids - I'm the eldest.
So far so good, right?
Well, around the time my littlest sister was born, my dad was working around 100 hours a week. We'd see him once a week or so, and he'd always be angry and throwing things and cursing. Scary for a kid. Even scarier for my mom - her threw her down the stairs and rammed her head into a wall, giving her minor brain damage. Of course, she divorced him, and took us kids and headed to another state. However, ten years had passed since she worked in research, and she couldn't get a job in her field anymore. She managed to get jobs making cold calls on the telephone and secretarial jobs. So there she was, a single mother with 3 kids working a minimum wage job. Perhaps you could tell me the bad decision she had made? Was it marrying the rich doctor who loved her and treated her well for ten years? Or was it leaving her academic career to work on something much more important to her?
Now, I'm doing fine, but I'm about the same age as my mom at the "so far, so good" stage. I haven't made any seriously bad decisions, and I've made a few good ones. Who knows where I will be in a few years? Maybe struggling like my mom had to.
You are correct that there is more to life than luck - decisions do count. But you need to realize that as we are all humans, the information that people use to make their decisions is imperfect. Sometimes decisions which looked good at the time look bad only in retrospect. In addition, while bad luck isn't everything, it does happen - death, illness, abusive families. Just because giving up to bad luck isn't the answer doesn't mean that it doesn't make things much harder. I suggest before you go around judging those minimum wage mothers with 3 kids, you think about how their kids are going to judge you when you tell them from your privileged position how stupid they are.
My point was that similar fees might be helpful in the copyright field - see also The Eric Eldred proposal
In 2004, IBM received 3,248 U.S. patents from the USPTO. IBM has over 25,000 active US patents. In 2.5 years, on the year 2004 patents alone they will have to pay $2,923,200 in maintence fees. Sure, they can afford it, but if they are not using their patents it is cheaper to let the patents lapse. Cheaper enough to have one of their lawyers decide to cut, say, the least used 10 percent. I wonder how many of their patents IBM actually does keep for their full lifetime. Since they seem to be generating 3000+ and have been for a while, you would figure they should have 60,000+ patents active. But they claim only 25,000+. Anyone from IBM IPAL reading and care to comment?
I can tell you personally that patent maintence fees made at least one person decide to let a non-performing patent lapse. I wish the fees were a little smaller (mine comes right out of my pocket), but at least they are serving their purpose.
They already have it, for patents at least: scroll down to Patent Maintence Fees
I had a patent which I was making no income off of, nor did ever expect to, so I stopped paying the maintence fees a couple of years ago. It's now in the public domain.
Copyrights, on the other hand, are free to create (although not to register and enforce) and last effectively forever. Copyright reform is a real necessity.
You points are good, but realize that application of Open Source methods to academia don't mean that they are going to do things the same way Linus does. Science has always been fairly "Open Source", long before that particular name was coined, simply due to the need for reproducibility of experiments.
l for example.
I am sure that if new methods were introduced, that the people using those new methods would adapt to the use of those methods. If it were clear that whoever records the idea or technique is the one who is given credit, then it is to the benefit of the idea-maker to record it themselves, rather than letting a grad student take care of it for them. The advantage of the new method is that currently, who does what is not recorded at all, leading to certain ethical dilemmas which have been the subject of recent articles: http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-57/iss-11/p42.htm
Isn't part of open source keeping track of who made which changes? That is a beneficial thing, especially in cases where there is more than one author. I have read academic papers with 30+ authors, and I never knew which one did the modeling and who built the hardware. Sure, if I had investigated or asked, I could have find out easily, but having that recorded in the paper would be a bonus.
In addition, it would also help in cases where a grad student did all the work but the professor gets most of the credit. If the change history shows that the grad student did all the work, maybe they will actually get the credit they deserve?
Anytime someone tells me that space will never be available to large numbers of people, I remind them that the amount of energy that physics requires to send a person to space is about the same amount of energy it takes to drive a large SUV from New York to LA and back. This sometimes changes their perspective on its potential cost.
Assumptions: 100 kg person to escape velocity, SUV gets 12 mpg, mechanism for putting person in orbit is 30% efficient (about the same as a good SUV engine), energy is not used to lift objects other than the human (unless that energy is included in the efficiency calculation).
Of course, this calculation assumes much better systems than we currently have for putting people in orbit (such as a space elevator, etc.), but it does tell us that the limits are the technology, not the physics. I'm not a big fan of the space elevator not because it isn't a great idea, but because there are already better, cheaper ideas. This also assumes that we have somewhere up there to put the people once they arrive. As there is no lack of building materials up in space, but a serious lack of workers, I don't think this will be a problem either.
Actually, positron-electron annihilation reactions result in two 511 keV photons, not one 1022 keV photon (presuming the positron and electron were initially close enough to rest to neglect the velocity contribution). Conservation of momentum and all that.
AC, I take it you use H&R Block.
I also take it you've never been poor enough to get the EITC.
Yes, actually the Earned Income Credit can result in you receiving more money from the Federal Government than you paid in income taxes. This usually occurs in households where the income is low and there are a large number of children.
I know this because I grew up poor, and my Mom used to get it.
As far as my supposition that illegal aliens might end up paying more in taxes than a similarly poor family, I was excluding state income taxes from that analysis. Of course, since state income taxes are deductible from federal income tax, it is a wash, presuming the family would get the EITC.
As an accountant, I'm sure you knew that.
illegals help drive all those costs up
So do poor citizens. Yet I don't hear you complaining about them. Do you honestly think that illegal aliens are illegal because of the tax benefits? That all those people are just trying to avoid filing their 1040EZ?
There are proper channels that an illegal can take to become legal, either with a green card or citizenship.
Yeah, we make it so easy. Just pop on over to the INS on a Thursday afternoon and pledge allegiance to the flag. Ask anyone who has become a US citizen how many years (or decades) it took and how many thousands of dollars it cost them. Then talk to the people who waited years and paid the money and were still turned down. How many illegals do you think applied for citizenship and were turned down or got tired of being told 'Maybe Later'?
Lower the barriers to becoming a citizen and the vast majority of illegals will become citizens. Then you can stop worrying about how much they drive your costs up, as they will be under the same tax law that you are. Or is equality not good enough for them?
That's fine, just don't do it on my tax dollars.
How about on theirs, then? It's not like illegal immigrants don't pay sales tax, the primary source of state funding. You know, the state funding that supports state colleges. I'm sure that they likely don't pay federal income tax, but then, many citizens in their tax bracket get more back than they pay in, due to tax credits and such.
Chances are, they pay more taxes than citizens of equal means, without getting nearly as many benefits. Did you mean that you didn't want citizens to go to college on your tax dollars, either?
If they became citizens before applying for college, that would be one less obstacle to overcome.
Um, you do know that becoming a citizen can take longer than getting a PhD, right? I have a Romanian friend who has been here through junior high, high school, college, working at IBM, and now sysoping at an ISP. He's still waiting on his citizenship. He's a second generation green card holder.
It bugs the heck out of me, as a US citizen, that many of my fellow citizens gripe about illegal immigration, but discourage any attempts to make legal immigration easier. The best solution to illegal immigration is legal immigration. I mean, we've already got the immigration part of it - how does making it difficult or illegal help the situation?
Challenger blew up on mine:
5 05919
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=137610&cid=11
Thank you for posting the real link for this story.
To everyone who is positing various ways of transmitting power wirelessly, they already have a method in mind:
Showcasing the first representative prototypes of Space Elevator climbers, this event will re-define public perception of the Space Elevator project by taking the first step away from mathematical models and drawing boards and into the world of real working hardware. By participating, you get the opportunity to partner in writing this unique chapter of history.
The competition provides the race track, in the form of a crane-suspended vertical ribbon, and a strong light source to power the climbers. Competing teams provide climbers, which have to use the power beamed to them and scale the ribbon while carrying some amount of payload. Climbers will be rated according to their speed and the amount of payload they carried.
The climbers (unmanned, of course) will weigh 25-50 kg [50-100 lbs], and will ascend the ribbon at about 1 m/s. [3 feet per second or 2.5 MPH]
The beam source is a 10 kWatt Xenon search-light (80 cm beam diameter, about 25% efficient), which should yield a climber power budget of about 500 watts.
The ribbon is roughly 30cm (1 foot) wide by 1 mm thick, is about 60m (200 feet) long, and is tensioned to about 1 ton.
Building a climber is not an easy task. The designers have to juggle light weight structure, efficient photo-voltaic arrays, efficient motors and power electronics, low-loss traction mechanism, thermal management, and control systems.
Not a walk in the park, but we'll make it worth your while. We will be offering $50,000, $20,000 and $10,000 to the 3 best teams.
link:click here
The competition rules are at the bottom (pdf). Frankly, this sounds more like a college/high school technology building competition than an X-prize.
I've always wondered why the Constitution's prohibition on ex post facto laws didn't keep Congress from extending the term of already existing copyrights. Can anyone explain to me why it doesn't? I understand that Congress has the power to grant copyrights of any limited duration, as per the recent Supreme Court judgement, but do they Constitutionally have the power to change the duration of an already granted copyright? It seems to me that if they have the power to extend the duration of an already granted copyright, then they also have the power to reduce it. As unlikely as it seems that they would do such a thing, if they did so it would seem to clearly be an ex post facto law - so why is an ex post facto law reducing the duration prohibited but one extending it is not? I am not a lawyer but I figure someone must have challenged one of the extensions on this basis at some point.
correction - the EURASIP JASP is 100 euros/page, not pounds.
The reason I mention this particular journal, is that I was considering publishing in this journal, but since I would be paying the fee out of my own pocket (not all science is funded by grants), you can bet I won't be.
A non-trivial amount of work - agreed.
$1500 per article worth of work - I don't think so!
How much do you really think it costs to edit and format a 10 page paper? Why does it cost 100 British Pounds/page to do this in say, the EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing, but if I were to hire a paid professional at $30/hour to format and edit it, they would be done in an hour or two, with a $60 cost maximum?
Someone's getting screwed.
The company I work for pays thousands of dollars a year to advertise in scientific society journals (mainly Medical Physics - circulation 4,681). I think our marketing department would highly disagree with you.
Email me at "randomnumerals" at yahoo dot com, please.
I'm sorry, but I am not sure who this is. I have a bad habit of loaning out books and forgetting about it... Can you give me any clues? Or just send me an email or give me a call.
In the US, the compulsory license rate for webcasting is $ 0.0014 per listener. That equates to an average of 66800 listeners per song, presuming that Norway has comparable rates.
That's rather high, I'm thinking, but perhaps half of Oslo was downloading from this guy's site. I think it's more likely that there are some penalties added.
I really think that the compulsory license is the best means of "freeing" the music industry - I'd love to see someone make 'internet radio' where you could listen to whatever channel (song) you wanted and pay the same rate that Clear Channel has to pay. I'd be very willing to pay $0.0014 to hear any song I wanted, any time I wanted. Of course, the record industry would try to change the compulsory license rate - and probably succeed - but at least then, their lapdog Big Radio would suffer along with the rest of us.
I'd start up an internet radio thing like this, but I'm a science geek, not an internet geek. I have my own fish to fry.
The site you linked had the following statement: "There is a proposal to test experimentally whether frame dragging occurs. This involves using the rotating earth as the massive body and putting a satellite into orbit with a gyroscope which keeps it pointing in a fixed direction. Although the Earth would only have a tiny frame dragging effect it is close to the limits of present day experiment to detect the extremely small precession of the gyroscope which should be caused. So far no mission to try this experiment has been approved."
This is incorrect. This mission is currently running.
I suggest you begin your search here here:
I highly agree! Einstein was rare among scientists in that he could clearly explain his ideas to a lay audience. I have read a number of books on relativity but NOBODY does a better job of explaining it than the man himself. Think about it - this guy had to sell people on his idea long before it was fully accepted by the scientific community.
Uh, I think you forgot about the Battle of Warsaw , where Poland really saved Europe!
"Over the corpse of White Poland lies the road to worldwide conflagration." - General Tukhachevsky, Red Army, 1920.
My guess is that they will most likely use The Black-Scholes Option pricing model with a few refinements.