The number one problem with our capability to access space is propulsion. Chemical rockets are the all around best we can do at the moment, but are huge, expensive and slow.
The best alternative to chemical rockets in terms of speed and size, given our current knowledge of physics, is nuclear pulse propulsion (i.e. lobbing atomic bombs out the back of the ship). For obvious political reasons, this is not feasible right now. Your best chance to see it developed would be if we went on war with ET or knew we *really* had to move off planet or else...
Why not let the market sort it all out instead of you needing to poke your fingers in it. See, the price of oil/gas goes up and people will adapt naturally. Eventually either a) another energy alternative will become more viable that oil and the market will seize on it or b) people will move to the cities just like you predict will happen and mass transit will become a more productive endeavor. That way, there is no need to go mucking about with the process, people will adapt on their own without any government intervention and it is so elegantly simple.
The market is a good system. But it will not adapt quickly enough for something on the level of a fuel crisis. It will react properly after the event, not before. You need to preempt the event *before* it is untennable. By inflating the price now with extra taxes you are increasing the need to discover alternatives, before a crisis happens.
Maybe if people were taken less to consumerism this wouldn't happen. It used to be that people lived with their parents even *after* they were married. Only after a half lifetime of work could you manage to buy your own house, and some never did. How people have to get houses *now* and mortgage them to death.
Heck, food and clothing is cheap. Hence "Supporting" a family is not really expensive. It is only expensive because you are setting the bar too high.
They made a car simpler without welding the hood shut or casting the starter battery on the car. Why can't the iPod have an easily removeable battery and be simple to use?
Most pre-made food you find at a supermarket is crap. I mean, it tastes and smells poorly. Cooking is still a good skill to have, if you want to save money and actually eat something paleatable.
Most work in a modern home is cleaning and next to that is cooking. Vacuum cleaners are a good replacement for brooms, but you still need to clean up furniture and glasses yourself, for e.g. Dish washers are not perfect either.
There is a very basic formula for the value of something, regardless of its concreteness. If you put 40 hours into making a piece of IP, and you are worth $20 an hour, then your IP could be worth $800.
If I hire a cook at $20 an hour, and he spends 6 hours turning a bunch of apple (with market value) into a piece of charcoal (he burned the apple pie), what is the worth of his produce?
There IS an unmet market demand for a nice mid-range/high-end mobile phone that does NOT contain any sort of camera. Some firm is going to figure this out and do a tidy business, because people in this situation are not price sensitive but are camera sensitive.
I Quote:
Security features help provide peace-of-mind that corporate resources remain confidential.
Device lock and Device restore
The Nokia E60 has no camera, making it ideal for high security environments
Sorry to disappoint, but you will not find a single Linux distribution like that, despite what many people here will tell you. I've used Linux full-time as a desktop off and on for years, from straight Debian (hard) to Mandrake/Mandriva (fairly easy). I even tried Ubuntu/Kubuntu, the most recent release. Everyone who ever says Linux is easy really has no clue what easy means to non-technical people. I mean, come on, you have to find and run a special script just to get support for playing DVDs and configure other simple things that are essential for a typical desktop user. If you're not lucky enough to have heard of this special script you get to spend hours on the web learning about obscure and difficult to find packages like libdvdcss, blah blah blah. Your typical geek will wade through it all with infinite patience, not having a clue how difficult this stuff is for non-geeks. Then they proceed to tell everyone how easy it is to use Linux for anything and everything.
Any free Linux distro is not going to have that. DVD or MP3 playing support requires paying royalties to the software patent holders. On the other way, most Linux distros come bundled with a media player which will play the Ogg audio format, which isn't patented.
Commodore Amiga games often used obnoxious disk (floppy disk mind you) copy protection systems. Games often had their own FS and disk drivers which hit the hardware directly, making it impossible to install to hard disk or backup.
Needless to say, you could still get cracked games which you could copy and install easily. Plus, several companies made money selling tools (software and hardware) to circumvent that crap.
The Amiga market is dead, and the PC market which used to use manual based copy protection and allowed hard disk install of games still exists.
To be the GPL is free market capitalistic, while companies which thrive on software licensing revenue such as Microsoft are state granted monopolies. They are charging you for something which is essentially free (copying). The cost is in creation and services. In any competitive market system, consumer prices will be close to the production cost. Such is not the case for monopolies such as Microsoft. They are market distorting. As much market distorting as any other monopoly.
To pump water you need kinetic energy. Purifying, desalinating, etc water uses electricity basically.
To me, the energy required for tractors and transport is more of a problem.
As for the fertilizers, they are often ammonia based. You can produce ammonia through the Haber-Bosch process which requires Hydrogen, not not oil to make. Currently the Hydrogen is produced mostly from natural gas, but it is not necessary for it to be so.
Re:Lisp not accessible
on
Beyond Java
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· Score: 1
I loved learning LISP. It is wonderfully flexible. However I had some major gripes with it:
The syntax, which you can adapt to, given a good editor with auto-indent and syntax highlight.
The fact the standard libraries, despite providing a wealth of datastructures, are lame or non-existant for doing anything actually useful (heavy duty I/O, sockets, GUI, etc). Compare this with C, where nothing is standard per ANSI C, but there are libraries which do everything for free bundled in the OS.
There is no really good free and multi-platform implementation. For C you have GCC. It works on basically everything you may care about (from ARM PDAs to s390 Mainframes). For Java you have Sun's JDK, which despite not really being open source, is a free (as in beer) download and allows you to develop payware without paying a dime to Sun. The following is a couple years old info, but I am guessing things have not changed much yet: Emacs LISP isn't does not compile into native binaries and is not Common LISP compatible. CLISP does not compile into native binaries and is not 100% Common LISP compatible (almost). CMUCL is buggy, used to have an incredibly lame garbage collector which made you twiddle your thumbs every 5 minutes, and a had poor user interface to boot, GCL is not Common LISP compliant by a longshot. The good tools are payola like Allegro. Contrast this with Sun Java JDK + Eclipse. There is no contest... Even Microsoft is handing out at the moment Visual C# Express for $0 which can be used for commercial use.
Even without the dynamic core, DOSBox is fine for 286 or early 386 games. Master of Orion and Dune 2 run quite fast on an old Athlon XP. Try bumping up the cycles until DOSBox uses 80% of CPU time.
IIRC some of the solid core nuclear thermal rocket designs were supposed to have good enough thrust to weight ratios to escape Earth's gravity under their own power (e.g. DUMBO).
Besides those, you have nuclear pulse propulsion (e.g. Orion), which most definitively would have a good enough thrust to weight ratio. Such a device basically throws nuclear bombs out back and rides the shockwave. There are several other proposals which use nuclear power which could also work.
The problem with making a nuclear powered spaceship which can escape Earth's gravity under its own power is ecological (fear of emissions) and economic (lack of reason to invest in such a technology), rather than being any sort of engineering impossibility.
I guess the answer is to let the users host the content themselves. Wikipedia content could be distributed in a P2P fashion. You would still need some beefy backend servers, but I suspect they would be much less.
Uh, sorry dude, but the USA has plenty of farming subsidies of its own. Namely for milk and sugar. USA intelligence has also been known on occasion to be doing little more than corporate espionage, the USA government doing "marketing" and "persuading" other countries to deal with USA companies on, let us say, more than reasonable terms. It probably all started even before Admiral Perry shot his cannons in Japan to persuade the Japanese to open commerce with the USA.
You realize that when they started back in 79 they started from enarly nothing, and on the contrary to some country I won't citate, they did not have any NAZI to spare and get their ICBM/Launcher from ? From something made from scratch it looks quite sucessful.
Actually, Ariane 1 was based on French Diamant launcher technology, in turn based on the precious stones military launch vehicle series. Which came from Veronique, which was designed by... a bunch of "Nazis" including, among others, Eugen Sänger.
The USA, Soviet Union and France all had ex-"Nazi" scientists working on their rocket programs. IIRC the USA had the V-2 team, the Soviet Union had the Wasserfall team, and the French got the folks working on rocketplanes.
Still, I wonder why some seem to like putting Europe's space program down so much. I mean, Arianespace had for many years the commercial launch market leader in Ariane, ESA subcontractors designed some nice launchers, have working indigenous LH2 rocket designs, and manage to do Carbon/Carbon rocket nozzles. Is this not significant?
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The best alternative to chemical rockets in terms of speed and size, given our current knowledge of physics, is nuclear pulse propulsion (i.e. lobbing atomic bombs out the back of the ship). For obvious political reasons, this is not feasible right now. Your best chance to see it developed would be if we went on war with ET or knew we *really* had to move off planet or else...
Barring that, if you just want to leave LEO, you can probably settle beam powered propulsion (laser & microwave), space elevators or tethers.
My bet is beamed propulsion (probably laser) will win. Most strides recently (read post Apollo) taken in physics and engineering involve optics (e.g. solid state lasers, chirped pulse amplification, adaptive optics) and ocasionally electronics (superconductors).
The market is a good system. But it will not adapt quickly enough for something on the level of a fuel crisis. It will react properly after the event, not before. You need to preempt the event *before* it is untennable. By inflating the price now with extra taxes you are increasing the need to discover alternatives, before a crisis happens.
Heck, food and clothing is cheap. Hence "Supporting" a family is not really expensive. It is only expensive because you are setting the bar too high.
They made a car simpler without welding the hood shut or casting the starter battery on the car. Why can't the iPod have an easily removeable battery and be simple to use?
Still, I think the iPod should be more decoupled from iTunes. Shame on the French from chickening out on this one.
The Russians did most of the fighing anyway.
Which is why I am still living with my parents.
What if they make their own versions iTunes, eBay and Paypal like the rumours are saying?
Most work in a modern home is cleaning and next to that is cooking. Vacuum cleaners are a good replacement for brooms, but you still need to clean up furniture and glasses yourself, for e.g. Dish washers are not perfect either.
If I hire a cook at $20 an hour, and he spends 6 hours turning a bunch of apple (with market value) into a piece of charcoal (he burned the apple pie), what is the worth of his produce?
That formula makes no sense to me.
I Quote:
Security features help provide peace-of-mind that corporate resources remain confidential.
From the Nokia E60 benefits page.
DosBox? eMule?
Any free Linux distro is not going to have that. DVD or MP3 playing support requires paying royalties to the software patent holders. On the other way, most Linux distros come bundled with a media player which will play the Ogg audio format, which isn't patented.
Software patents suck.
Needless to say, you could still get cracked games which you could copy and install easily. Plus, several companies made money selling tools (software and hardware) to circumvent that crap.
The Amiga market is dead, and the PC market which used to use manual based copy protection and allowed hard disk install of games still exists.
Domestic EU companies? IBM, Sun Microsystems, Oracle and Novell?
To be the GPL is free market capitalistic, while companies which thrive on software licensing revenue such as Microsoft are state granted monopolies. They are charging you for something which is essentially free (copying). The cost is in creation and services. In any competitive market system, consumer prices will be close to the production cost. Such is not the case for monopolies such as Microsoft. They are market distorting. As much market distorting as any other monopoly.
Oh there is profit. But the profit is in services, not a software copy.
High temperatures and pressures may be generated by other ways than burning petroleum. Nuclear Fission, Solar Thermal, are just two examples.
To pump water you need kinetic energy. Purifying, desalinating, etc water uses electricity basically. To me, the energy required for tractors and transport is more of a problem.
As for the fertilizers, they are often ammonia based. You can produce ammonia through the Haber-Bosch process which requires Hydrogen, not not oil to make. Currently the Hydrogen is produced mostly from natural gas, but it is not necessary for it to be so.
Even without the dynamic core, DOSBox is fine for 286 or early 386 games. Master of Orion and Dune 2 run quite fast on an old Athlon XP. Try bumping up the cycles until DOSBox uses 80% of CPU time.
Besides those, you have nuclear pulse propulsion (e.g. Orion), which most definitively would have a good enough thrust to weight ratio. Such a device basically throws nuclear bombs out back and rides the shockwave. There are several other proposals which use nuclear power which could also work.
The problem with making a nuclear powered spaceship which can escape Earth's gravity under its own power is ecological (fear of emissions) and economic (lack of reason to invest in such a technology), rather than being any sort of engineering impossibility.
I guess the answer is to let the users host the content themselves. Wikipedia content could be distributed in a P2P fashion. You would still need some beefy backend servers, but I suspect they would be much less.
Uh, sorry dude, but the USA has plenty of farming subsidies of its own. Namely for milk and sugar. USA intelligence has also been known on occasion to be doing little more than corporate espionage, the USA government doing "marketing" and "persuading" other countries to deal with USA companies on, let us say, more than reasonable terms. It probably all started even before Admiral Perry shot his cannons in Japan to persuade the Japanese to open commerce with the USA.
Actually, Ariane 1 was based on French Diamant launcher technology, in turn based on the precious stones military launch vehicle series. Which came from Veronique, which was designed by... a bunch of "Nazis" including, among others, Eugen Sänger.
The USA, Soviet Union and France all had ex-"Nazi" scientists working on their rocket programs. IIRC the USA had the V-2 team, the Soviet Union had the Wasserfall team, and the French got the folks working on rocketplanes.
Still, I wonder why some seem to like putting Europe's space program down so much. I mean, Arianespace had for many years the commercial launch market leader in Ariane, ESA subcontractors designed some nice launchers, have working indigenous LH2 rocket designs, and manage to do Carbon/Carbon rocket nozzles. Is this not significant?