I'll just remind you that in America, and elsewhere, crusaders have been trying to eliminate non-christian cultures (their written works included).
I think you miss the point. New environments and new experiences forced the idea of religious tolerance to happen in America. If you want to talk about religious intolerance, all you have to do is look at a typical Islamic country right now. In Saudi Arabia and several other countries in that region of the world, it is still the death penalty to convert to any religion besides Islam. (Converts to Islam are always welcome:) Mohammad himself forced religious conversion at the point of a sword. I never heard of that with Jesus... it is totally against any of his teachings.
You must be a Minister of Information of the Vatican? Secular schooling hint for Europe was given by Arab universities. Giving a credit for this (Renaissance) to the christian church is just a pure lie.
I take that with a compliment (about being a Vatican minister). This is not a lie, because the current incarnation of a University (with graduation robes and all of the pomp & circumstance, department organization, etc.) is a classical medeval institution. Yeah, I am more than willing to admit that Muslim scholarship (primarily from the Moors, not Arabs) contributed, but you are also seemingly discounting the scholarship that took place in Ireland and a lesser degree throughout most of "Christian" Europe as well, and much of this was based at religious institutions, but not always. Ideas and concepts went in both directions.
Back in the day, however, situation was totally different: just get a scientist, all his manuscripts, throw to a fire, and you are done. No one was "laughing all the way to the bank" when the Library of Alexandria was on fire, because those were the unique copies of the works.
Yes, there were unique copies of some manuscripts in Alexandria. That is an ancient lesson for those who think central repositories are the ultimate solution, and has reprocussions for modern data storage specialists. Still, once and idea was written down it can and often was spread arround through manuscript copiers. The invention of the printing press did help to make the job of a copier much easier and to spread the ideas around further.
BTW, I wouldn't say it is impossible to eliminate ideas in print, even mass published books. It is just harder and takes a more determined government.
I don't know how much more we can describe this in more detail.
And the 20 + contests have other complexities such as vote for 3 of the following seven people (in some localities), or perhaps allow for an instant run-off election (not often, but it can and does happen).
There are legal requirements that the full text of any constitutional referendi are also listed, or at least available to each voter, with enough information to clearly identify to each voter what the proposition is all about. Prop #117 just isn't enough.
There are other U.S. election laws that also cover the ordering of candidates on the list, which with computers may become even more complex if they would have to be shuffled for each candidate.
In short, there is a reason why rather complex computers are being used to make voting machines in America. Diebold is simply following poor engineering and P.R. practices, based on experience with the banking industry and is really over their head with voting machines.
Still, it is nice to see that electronic can be made to be trusted if proper engineering is done and the whole process is open to public inspection by anybody that would care.
While I would agree that the church did do some B.S. that I'm not happy with, but it really wasn't all that different than what other political leaders at the same time period also did.
Often the church was a major political force (England's House of Lords still has member of the clergy holding seats recognising this political authority) throughout Europe during the previous two mellenia. They would even hold territory that would be under the exclusive use of the church (as much as counties or duchies). In this regard the title of "prince of religion" has even more meaning and litteral justification. Fights between secular and religious factions were very common, just not among peasants who couldn't do anything without approval of at least the manor lord.
If the church held people back with thought and ideas, it was because the secular leaders at the time also wanted to hold people back in thought and ideas as well. It wouldn't have mattered if it were Christian, Muslim, or Norse polytheism, the religion really didn't matter. That Islam seemed to show more respect for personal rights and scientific thought at the time than Christian regions (about 1000 A.D.) is more a reflection of the political leaders at the time.
One of the incredible things about people coming to America, especially in the British part of North America, was that religion was finally seperated from political authority, if for no other reason than people coming from so many places in Europe that no single religion really could get into a dominating position (with only very localized exceptions to this rule.)
I'd also like to point out that the modern concept of a University and scientific thought is an outgrowth of Christian thought and philosophies dating from the middle ages. Somebody finally realized that if you wanted to really understand the words that Jesus was saying on the Mount of Olives, you needed to understand the context of the words he was speaking, and that also meant that you had to read other texts and information that was contemporary with the literature of the New Testament. Burning those books would mean that you wouldn't be able to understand the words of God.
As for modern example of religious bigots trying to supress ideas they don't comprehend (like Harry Potter or genetic research), it is just ignorant people who are choosing to stay ignorant. I have no emotion other than pity at the moment for people like that, because trying to supress knowledge only spreads it further. Just see what happened with deCSS. Harry Potter is even more popular because of the book burning, with the author and publisher laughing all the way to the bank.
Thank you so much for your thoughtful reply. I wish I could mod it up right now.
I would have to agree that the immediate concerns of the "Space Race" of the 1960's was certainly more pressing, and with a Presidential order from a martyr (whatever you think of JFK, defeating his ghost in the 1960's was incredibly difficult) and a deadline that was coming up in a real hurry, I would have to agree that something they already proofed would work instead of a new technology that really needed to be developed, they probabally made the correct choice at the time.
The problem I have is that NASA and Congress in 1970, seeing that Armstrong had already made it to the moon, couldn't really figure out where to go next. The ISS and the Space Shuttle (in various forms... some sort of space station was always in the works in conjunction with the Space Shuttle. I just think it was the worst of all possible solutions) was the next logical step, based on thinking at the time. Indeed, it was anticipated that the Space Shuttle would come up to Skylab and help boost it up to a higher orbit, but the Space Shuttle had production delays so bad that it was never able to perform that mission.
It is too bad that once it was obvious that the Russians weren't going to persue a Moon & Mars mission (there were plans to put a Soviet Cosmonaut on Mars in time for the Centennial of the Russian Revolution... awsome political timing of the Red Planet with the Red Flag and all, but obviously that isn't going to happen), some more measured research wasn't done to check out other flight systems rather than trying to rush into the Space Shuttle.
Of course all of this is hindsight. I do feel that the current approach of commercial spaceflight is going to be much more successful, and we will yet see orbital spacecraft come from this effort, particularly once money start to seriously pour into the space tourism industry.
Of all of the modern and current libraries that are around, the Vatican Library (yes, the Pope's own book stack) is probabally the most comprehensive collection of medeval and ancient texts that is in existance. For more technical volumes there are other places that are more extensive, but if you are trying to study history or philosophy, this is the place to go.
To suggest that Christians deliberately burn books simply to hide knowledge is totally wrong. That from time to time bullheaded idiots sometimes get control of ecclesiastical authority and abuse that same political and spiritual power to evil ends is not disputed. This happens in most religions (including atheism) or even political movements. (This is in response to the grandpartent article. I agree with you dasunt.)
The problem that happened at Alexandria, and what caused the "Dark Ages" was a total breakdown of the political & social framework of Europe due to the collapse of the Roman Empire. It didn't burn down earlier simply because the Roman Legions would have massacred anybody that tried to challenge Roman authority. By 400 A.D. the Roman government had all but stopped existing in any form, and the citizens of Rome itself were fighting off invaders into the city itself from the Vandals, Goths, and other germanic tribes that routinely sacked Rome for what was left of wealth from being an imperial capital. This was almost like the "Mad Max" movies by Mel Gibson in terms of a total lack of control by governments, except in silly irrelavent symbolism that doesn't keep my neighbor from raping my wife and killing my kids.
I'm sorry that I gave the impression that the X-projects weren't done with the participation of NASA, although the U.S. Air Force has been a major driving force with them. It usually has been (in the past) an Air Force project or a joint Air Force/NASA project.
It still is the rocket plane folks vs. the missile folks who slug it out in terms of who does what and where the funding goes. Trace where the money goes (even in FY 2004... despite absoltuely no manned launches what so ever this year) and you will see just who is still winning this battle.
The reason why the X-15 didn't get any further was strictly political, not technological.
By the time the X-15 was doing its stuff, NASA was already gearing up for the Apollo program, and the ballistic missile guys (primarily lead by Von Braun, but it did involve others) were trying to push a competing program. It should be obvious who won that debate.
The Space Shuttle should have (and in a small part did) been a technological decendant of the X-15 project, but instead most of its design technologies came from the Saturn V program and its predecessors.
The promise of the X-15 was to have routine reusable aircraft for travel into space. The pilots of the X-15 were finally granted astronaut wings, but politcally even that wasn't really appreciated by the guys at NASA. The prep crew for the X-15 was just a dozen or so people, compared to the hundreds it took even for Alan Shepard to do his sub-orbital flight. It is indeed too bad that this research wasn't followed, but not because it was a technological dead-end. It wasn't followed simply because Congress in their infinite wisdom decided that programs of this nature should be cut. And it was almost impossible to get a follow-on project to go this route.
Space Ship One really is the heir apparent now of the X-15 flights, and you had better believe that Burt Rutan knows just about all there is to know about the X-15 flights... probabally a world-class expert on the subject.
Other X-class projects have been done since the X-15 (Notably the X-33) and they have all suffered with political problems coming from folks at NASA thinking they (the X-projects) are mussling into their turf. The X-prize was even named that in honor of these X-class planes and the potential they could have had if they hadn't been abandoned.
The inspiring thing is that this ship goes higher and higher, pushing the materials and seeking refinements on what they already have.
Finally, remember the saying of Robert A. Heinlein: "Low-earth orbit is half-way to the rest of the entire solar system."
That sums up the importance of these flights. If refinements of materials and general ship design gradually lead to something that goes into orbit or even can leave the earth's gravity (like the Apollo missions), the age of manned planetary exploration will truly begin. Eventually, if you keep getting higher and higher, you are going to run out of altitude to the point that it really doesn't matter any more. You will be in orbit regardless.
But in order to disprove God with the Bablefish, you had to find one in the first place.
Seriously, D.N.A.'s diety non-existance therom is just a more recent version of many that were proposed throughout the ages, with most of them done during the Renassance/ Medeval times (roughly 900 A.D. to 1500 A.D. give or take a few centuries in each direction on both ends). In some ways, he was making a very good spoof of similar theroms regarding God.
It is also a classic example where just sitting around and coming up with theorms for therom's sake is likely to get you into a logical quagmire that makes no sense, usually with a logical mistake somewhere along the line.
Also think about the mathmatical proof where 1 = 2
In this case, somebody who knows a little about Algebra but is not really a mathmatician (maybe they have had high school or college algebra, but havn't really studied mathmatics as a serious subject) can be fooled into accepting these as valid proofs that come up with illogical results.
You can't possibly distinguish data sent over the internet in the form of an e-mail as opposed to some multi-player RPG or HTML. On the level that it passes from router to router from the original computer to its destination that is how it is treated (and should be too!) Indeed, firewalls and other cute things of that nature really end up perverting the internet by assuming (incorrectly) that only port 80 (typical HTTP port) is needed (or something similar).
A firewall is needed when computers on the other side of the firewall have poorly designed IP (internet protocol, not intellectual property) stacks and some very poorly implemented miscellaneous TCP services programs (like nettime, MOTD, or some other simple service) that has methods of attack through those programs. A clean well-designed IP stack with high-quality TCP applications do not need a firewall.
The solution is not charging $$$ for e-mail either. Who collects? How much per e-mail? Does the size of the e-mail matter? What about attachments? Is this above and beyond normal TCP/IP usage charges (in terms of normal bandwidth charges)? How do you stop spammers from "collecting" money from millions of people who "sent" e-mail to them (reverse spammers in this case... a variant not seen at the moment)? This last question is also about how spoofing can be used to undermine the toll collection system of any e-mail charges, which is something significant indeed.
You could certainly set up a totally new e-mail type protocol where you personally establish some sort of toll system, and let's also assume that every piece of e-mail that goes into a typical in-box will also pay you about 1/2 cent. Answer the above questions regarding this system if you think there is a viable solution here, but also let's assume that you will use E-gold, Paypal, or some other micropayment system here as well (maybe something you also come up with for this service). You had also better get a pretty good legal team together because you will also be the target of a whole bunch of lawsuits if it gains any popularity at all.
It simply won't work. What is needed more than trying to charge is to develop trust metrics between computers. Just making up an IP address here, but let's assume that 192.168.x.x has a bunch of e-mail servers that I trust. You can then assume that this is a good server. Let's assume that 10.54.x.x has a bunch of spammers. Don't trust anything coming from those servers.
BTW, this is essentially the approach that Spamhaus, SpamCop, and the IBHL and others are using to try and block spam.
The real trick here is that you also need to prevent spoofing. One nice thing about SpamCop is that the original author/developer of the site went through a whole bunch of work to try and find the actual owner of a given internet service that is sending you a given piece of e-mail based almost exclusively on IP address. The SpamCop site then tells you if it is an open relay, or a known spammer. This anti-spoofing is often hard to do and this is where the current e-mail protocol does indeed need to be strengthed, simply to identify clearly who sent the e-mail, and make sure that the computer sending the e-mail is who they claim they are.
As it is right now, I can claim to have the e-mail address president@whitehouse.gov and send you a message, and the current e-mail protocol won't be able to proof that I really am that person or not. There are ways (fairly easy as well) to not even get the IP address of my machine anywhere in any logs of any computer or in the e-mail header. Spammers take advantage of this simple fact, and e-mail servers should not accept e-mail if the IP addresses aren't correct.
This should also be illegal in itself. If you claim to have an IP address of 10.54.66.195 and that is not who you claim to be, it is false representation and should by itself be punishable under law independent of the conte
I was a part of a "research project" funded by the U.S. Department of Education for $750,000 that was to do exactly what you are saying here. We were trying to develop multimedia development tools that could be used to help instructors put together instructional multimedia software.
The software we developed (I was the programmer on the project) was used for several classes on campus at Utah State University, where the project was based from, under the direction of Dr. R. Kent Wood (he has since retired). Our primary emphasis was more toward K-12 learning, but it proved to be quite popular with several computer-based learning groups including C.A.L.I.C.O, a group of individuals working on acquiring forign language skills through computer-based learning.
There are several issues that need to be dealt with in regards to multimedia development. Some of them have been solved compared to what I was dealing with in the past, but some still are huge problems:
Multimedia standards - This is one of the areas that due to the emergence of the World Wide Web and other generally open applications has pushed this forward quite a bit. MPEG, PNG (MNG), and other standardized formats have really made a difference over the zoo of incompatable formats that there were even 10 years ago. There is still need to do more work in this area, and there are some items that really need review. Multimedia game design and the entertainment industry, unfortunately, are the major drivers of this sort of activity.
Accessable Multimedia Materials - Due to the "eternal" copyright of many multimedia types (photos, audio clips, cinema in all its flavors) are copyrighted and impossible to use as "fair-use" for educational purposes except on a very limited basis. Court ruling on this strongly favor the media companies and make it almost impossible to use anything that is available. The Google image search is essentially worthless if you want to use it in any instructional software that would be used for more than a single section of a single course taught at only one university. I would love to see a Multi-media variant of Project Gutenberg where you could get central repository of multimedia items (a clip art library, music clips, video, etc.) that would be guarenteed to be totally public domain or released in some copyleft arrangement. There is quite a bit on the internet, but it is scattered around and really needs to be put together. There are some collections (I happen to have some content I'd like to donate) that simply needs to be put together, scanned, and released. If I had infinite resources and time I'd like to do this, and if it isn't going by the time I get close to retirement, I may get this going myself anyway. I just need to feed my family for now.
Authoring System Support - There needs to be a standardizing the "glue" format that holds all of this multimedia information together with Unicode-based text that is appropriate in a computer-based learning environment needs to be worked out. HTML and its variants are pretty good, and there some fairly decent "authoring" tools available such as Authorware or Director, but these all have some hard limitations. The High Schools that I've seen are typically either using HTML or Power Point (I am not kidding here either) for routine stuff that is developed. University-level instruction is totally non-standard and often includes custom software written for the one project, which eats up almost all the time and resources of the project. Ideally I'd love to see an open-source project that would help put this sort of instruction together. It needs to be easy to use, but powerful enough that if you are willing to learn (with a shallow learning curve) you can get progressively more features to the point that you can write the entire authoring environment in itself (aka be Turing complete). Nothing I know of has this capability at th
This isn't to say the fighters couldn't get airborne on their own, unassisted, but it does help to reduce costs of the carrier (they can have a smaller runway for launching fighters) and helps to get the fighters up to speed necessary to begin combat engagements earlier (this protects the ship as well).
Um, no. A carrier uses a catpult because the aircraft cannot get into the air *at all* without significant assistance, not and carry any useful payload and fuel anyhow. Nor does it have anything to do with getting up to speed, as usually the speed at the end of the catapult isn't much above stall speed. I.E. the same speed it would have as it lifts off the runway. (Ever seen a fighter lose it's engines just off the end of a cat? It hits the water about 100'-150' in front of the carrier.)
Ever heard of a Naval Air Station? These are traditional air bases with a paved runway on the ground. They do indeed launch and house in hangers the very same fighters that are used on aircraft carriers. Indeed, when a carrier enters & leaves port, the fighters are not on deck, instead they go back to the NAS for long-term maintainence that wasn't performed onboard during the tour of duty. I don't recall any steam catapult on the runways built into the concrete runways at any of these airstrips, although admittedly the runway is considerably longer than is found on a deck of a carrier.
That is exactly my point, that a carrier does a steam launch to make the impossible turn into something that is a real engineering accomplishment. The engines on a typical F-14 are powerful enough that it can fly straight up (for at least several thousand feet) with essentially no stall angle. Merely getting off the ground is not an issue at all for those planes.
I think the overall issue here is that the traditional approach of using expendable rockets to send people to space simply needs to end. The Space Shuttle was a wonderful idea, but the actual implementation of it has turned out to be a near nightmare. Still, even with all of the problems with the Space Shuttle it has put more people into orbit than any other vehicle system with the possible exception of Soyuz, and even then it is rather close in terms of the total number of people flown into space. Failure rates are even rather comparable (I'm not going to rehash the arguments about which has killed more people.)
NASA needs to think outside of the box, or it will no longer even exist as an agency. Looking at alternatives to current launch systems is one way to do that, and certainly they need to totally rethink the current STS approach to manned spaceflight.
The "Moon Treaty" only limits soverign governments who sign this treaty from ever claiming national territory on any place other than on the Earth. To quote:
Article II
Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.
I think this was an incredibly shortsighted viewpoint on the part of the U.S. government back in 1967 (when the treaty was signed and ratified by the U.S. Senate), but at the time most of Congress felt that we would never get even to the moon, much less be able to build any resonable space colonies, the Apollo program not withstanding.
Private ownership of extraterrestial bodies is not expressly forbidden, but the mechanism for being able to grant that ownership and the legal machinery to even file for ownership is simply not in place. There are a few people who are still trying, even without formal sanction.
Personally, I think both are total scam artists along the lines of people buying stars to name after friends and relatives. Still, this is more or less harmless fun regardless of these so-called land claims. If the USA doesn't have soverign claim to the moon, there is no way that the Lunar Embassy could possibly have legal claim through the land office of the U.S. government at San Francisco (the Lunar Embassy's claim to fame in this case).
What is going to have to happen is some legal machinery to decide what laws apply to events that happen on these planetary bodies. For example, if you kill somebody on the moon, can you be convicted in the U.S. court system? Don't be too hasty here, because remember, soverign authority doesn't apply anymore.
What about copyright laws? Do they apply in space as well? (Recording contracts are now starting to cover extraterrestial distribution rights due to a recording company executive worried about who owned distribution rights to music the Astronauts in the Apollo program were playing.)
So far these issues haven't been dealt with because for now all places except for the Apollo missions have been built on the Earth, and soverignty claims can be resolved. If you kill somebody on the ISS, it would matter what module you killed them in, then it would be either Russian, U.S.A., or E.U. courts that would be authorized to prosecute based on what module the crime happened in. That would still be a big mess, legally speaking (not to mention the physical mess on the ISS itself).
I'm using murder here because that is a crime that would not be lightly brushed under the table if it were to happen in space. Lesser crimes like tax evasion (like what happened during the flight of Apollo XIII when John Swigert forgot to file his income taxes before he left) would probabally wait or could be sorted out without a big international incident.
I think this also solves rather nicely who or what would be able to enforce land rights on a place like the moon. If they can lock you up in jail and confiscate your personal property, they can also grant you real estate rights.
I would personally hate giving this power to the U.N., but at least that is an international organization that could in theory be able to establish these property rights. Just imagine though that the U.N. would also be able to pass civil laws for ordinary people and levy taxes. That's why I wouldn't want them trying to decide what would happen on the future homestead for my grandkids.
The only real legitimate route at this point is going to be the creation of a wholly new soverign entity that has no relationship to any of the signatory members of the Moon Treaty.
I do like the original poster's comments about using a railgun as an assist to get some initial velocity onto a rocket using a railgun right at launch. As he pointed out, a not insignificant percentage of the fuel is burned just trying to clear the launch tower itself... if the tower were a railgun instead, you could get some initial velocity from the launch system, just like aircraft carriers give some initial airspeed to jet fighters through a steam catapult system aboard ship. This isn't to say the fighters couldn't get airborne on their own, unassisted, but it does help to reduce costs of the carrier (they can have a smaller runway for launching fighters) and helps to get the fighters up to speed necessary to begin combat engagements earlier (this protects the ship as well).
Keep in mind that the reason NASA launches spacecraft from Florida instead of New York is in part because the rotational energy of the Earth itself can be added to the orbital delta-v of the rocket to achieve orbit. The Russians put their launch complex in Kazakstan for the very same reason (instead of near Murmansk and launching over the Arctic Ocean).
EM launchers as weapons I'm sure are being investigated. Getting a hunk of Lead or Uranium up to Mach 15-20 has many very good uses in trying to defend against other object that are also travling at Hypersonic speeds (like ICBMs). If that chunk of metal melts from atmospheric drag, it really doesn't matter.
I would have to agree though that EM launchers are more pratical in a vacuum environment (like the Moon) or some extraterrestial mining application rather than something that comes from a planet with an atmosphere. A man-rated vehicle that can be launched from the moon would also be interesting.
An alternative approach I have seen is to have a very powerful laser system help supply the energy of a launch system, where the laser is at the launch site and the ship only has mirrors and limited attitude thrusters. The problem with this approach is that the energy requirements to get this to work are incredible, and really havn't been work out that well. It gives a bonus that you can control rather precisely the acceleration of the vehicle, and the energy production is on the ground, not on the craft being accelerated. Even if this were only the 1st stage of the rocket, it would significantly cut costs.
Yes, I have heard of the research that has taken place with Ion propusion, including actual vehicles that have used it.
It is still in a very strongly experimental mode at the moment, but may become something common. Currently NASA seems to prefer chemical rockets (those have been proven) even for deep-space probes, but I think that may change in the future.
Personally, I'd also love to see solar sail research to be worked on, again for the same long-range economic costs (you don't even have to bring along a fuel supply... just a repair/replacement kit).
Scaling up equipment with higher voltage, larger "fuel" requirements and other aspects of trying to get a vehicle manned-rated (as opposed to an experimental robotic vehicle) are much harder than you seem to indicate. Still, it is a possibility that should be explored, and seriously in the case of a mission to Mars for all of the reasons that have been mentioned.
In terms of getting an ion engine to do station keeping activities (like docking manuvers or trying to achieve escape velocity from Phobos), that is presuming a compareatively powerful engine. This is much easier to accomplish with conventional chemical rockets (the thrust would only be very short... just a couple of seconds at most), and is a proven technology.
I mentioned this only to illustrate that each technology has its strengths and weaknesses. Major compoents for rocket fuel (LOX & Liquid Hydrogen) would be useful on a long-term space flight anyway (providing an engergy source for fuel cells, manufacturing H2O for the crew, ect.) so there would be many reasons to have at least some on board. You just wouldn't have to make it the primary propulsion source. Sure, solar cells could also suppliment engergy requirements, not to mention RTG's or even a nuclear reactor (I'm not kidding here either).
The whole point of my previous post was that we need to rethink the whole Mars mission, which will not be an extended repeat of the Apollo missions where the crew leaves from the ground, goes to an exterrestial body, and returns back to earth without ever interacting in person with people other than the crew they left with.
The days of doing business in space like that are over, at least for the near term.
I disagree with your premise that it would not be feasable to put somebody on the surface of mars with current technologies, but I want to hit on the Martian Orbit-only manned presence.
I think this is a worthy goal, with perhaps a "landing" on Phobos to establish a fixed and stable point to begin human activities in and around Mars. A rotating permanent team of 10-20 astronauts in some sort of international laboratory with replacements both coming from and going to the Earth, as appropriate orbital windows permit. Many minerals and other resources can be obtained from the soil of Phobos directly, and the ability to achieve escape veolcity of Phobos is relatively trivial compared to trying to get away from Mars. The whole trip could be done with Ion propulsion instead of chemical rockets, decreasing time necessary for a round-trip. Chemical rockets would only be needed for manuvering thrusters and station-keeping activities, and for the very short burst to get away from Phobos. Some of this could even be manufactured on Phobos as a back-up reserve supply (just in case).
With the sole exception of trying to get an Ion Propusion engine going (and there are current experiments trying to get that accomplished), this whole concept can be done with current technology, other than trying to rediscover some of the lessons from Apollo. The only time necessary is trying to simply put together a unique packaging of equipment to get this accomplished. Launching it directly from space also makes incredible sense, and give justification to keeping the ISS (since its science mission has already been essentially destroyed). The ship can be assembled in space, and the crew flown up on ordinary LEO shuttle rockets, and even dock at the ISS before final departure to Mars.
This would also provide an excellent back-up resource for any manned activity on the surface of Mars when that does occur. If a surface exploration team is having trouble trying to stay together (personality conflicts), it can be broken up and reassmebled with other crew member from the Phobos base. Coordination of multiple surface sites being simultaneously explored can also be controlled from one location. These can be both manned and robotic explorations.
The only real draw back that I can see (assuming a docking to the ISS) is interplanet biological contamination would be almost impossible to stop. I think that both Mars and the Earth have shared many rocks with each other in the past anyway, but is something to consider what must be done if truly sterile conditions must be kept for anything going to Mars. NASA blew it with the Apollo missions, so I seriously doubt they will really make much of a difference in regards to Mars.
This is one instance where you do indeed get sound in space... and why if you hear anything in space like an explosion or grinding metal that your bowels should suddenly start to loosen: It is the ship you are in that is falling apart!
There were some sound effects in that movie that weren't 100% accurate, but for the most part it was from the perspective of the astronauts, including in some cases the music being played.
I would agree that for some reason seeing a huge explosion and not hearing anything until several minutes later you start hearing a ping, ping, ping (from debris hitting the ship you are in) just wouldn't be satisfying to the typical Hollywood-style movie.
While I would have to agree that it may be difficult to get the stress and accent correct, the tones of ancient Egyptian can be identified fairly easily from the hyroglyphics, which are phonemic in nature (i.e. represent specific sounds... roughly anaogous to what you are more familiar with in terms of the letters you are reading right now.)
Chinese ideographs are much harder to identify what sounds or even words were used it pronounce the glyph, because there are no tonal indicators with that writing system. It expresses ideas rather than sounds.
Still, even if you were extreamly fluent in ancient egyptian and had even come up with your own interpretation of the sounds of the words, not all of your guesses would be correct and it does vary even from one period of time to the next (just look at what English has done in the past 300 years).
I was a physics student (undergrad Physics for Engineers course) of Dr. Steven Jones when this whole thing broke loose. About 3 weeks before the Pons & Fleischman announcement, he announced some interesting results that were very similar to the cold fusion announcement.
At the time, Dr. Jones was a peer-referee for the article that Pons & Fleischman were writing, and it turned out that their research was following similar lines that he and other researchers at BYU were following. He asked for permission (and was granted) to break the confidentiality agreement with the publisher to share research information. (Details of this are well documented elsewhere, including things I saw on the PBS-TV show Nova about this episode.... I can confirm this so far as this is what Dr. Jones mentioned to our class prior to the whole fiasco breaking loose).
Dr. Jones was following an earlier line of research where he was studying Muon-induced fusion (where a Muon would take the place of a normal electron and bring atomic nuclei closer together under certain conditions... potentially triggering a fusion reaction). He was also studying natural phenomina including a speculation that there might be some other process besides nuclear fission and meteoric landfall that causes volcanic hotspots around the earth. I'm not here suggesting that cold fusion causes Mauna Loa, but some isotopic measurements of gasses emitted by that volcano contained traces of Helium-3 and Helium-4 that could not otherwise be accounted for. The speculation was that perhaps a limited form of fusion might also be taking place.
The key element of Dr. Jones' research was that he was indeed measuring emitted particles instead of measuring heat. Some graphs he showed to our class (after the big fiasco) included some very telling information about some of the particles being emmitted, but at levels so low that it seemed improbable that a calorimeter would be able to measure the effect.
When all was said and done, the best that could be offered by the researchers I talked to afterward was that this research could be used to make a neutrino emmitter that could be turned on and off electronically. Now that does indeed have some interesting uses, but neutrino detectors are another problem. As a futuristic energy source, there were many other much more productive lines of research to consider.
The other nice thing about cold fusion was that it didn't require huge laboratories to study the effects, which is convient to relatively underfunded universities for research activities (like BYU), it also brings out the weirdos, scammers and crooks. As a result, research discussions tend to have a very low S/N level. This makes finding information all that more difficult.
It is also something to note that BYU is also where Philo Farsnworth did his final research on the Fusor technology. In fact, the cold fusion research was conducted in the very same laboratory (buried underground just south of the HBLL library). They were indeed worried about radiation damage, and chose to buy $20,000 worth of pennies to build a cheap radiation shield. I'm not sure if they ever put them back into circulation, but it was a sort of joke when walking into the lab and it looked more like the inside of a bank vault.
D&D Adventure Camp
on
D&D Is 30
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
This is definitely a trip down memory lane.
I got into D&D as a sidebar to military wargamming, starting with Risk and moving onto several Avalon Hill games (Third Reich, Blitzkrieg, 1776 (I got massacred by my brother at this one), & Squad Leader).
When I went to the hobby shop to see what other cool games they had, I saw a box for the original Basic Edition of D&D, together with the 1st Edition Monster Manual. The DM Guide was released just a little after that, and trying to get polyhedrial dice was almost impossible. We actually used the old chit system at first to generate our characters becuase we couldn't find any polyhedrial dice at all. When I finally got some dice, the d20 was badly misshapen in manufacturing, and gave some really wild results when used (I wish I still had it now).
The best fun I had was a week at Boy Scout Camp where we also turned it into a week-long D&D marathon. The logistical planning for this was something that could only be done by a bunch of hard-core D&D players that were also boy scouts. The D&D manuals were smuggled in with the camp kitchen supplies, talked our parents into a week's worth of munchies & pop (with some extra money on the side for buying stuff that wouldn't keep in the cooler for more than a couple of days), and took off to camp looking like a group of real trustworthy, loyal, helpful (etc.) boy scouts our parents thought we were. We also hid miniatures, dice, DM screens, map graphs, and pens & paper (that was more out in the open.. . but in retrospect our parents should have realized that we took too MUCH paper and too MANY pencils with us).
Our Scoutmaster (actually an assistant who could get the time off from work) was this young guy that looking back now was just totally snowballed by us boy scouts. I was about 16 at the time, and he placed a lot of trust in me as a junior leader. I did what I could, but this adventure took a life of its own that this poor assistant SM couldn't keep under control.
After about 5 P.M. we would finish up our camping chores every evening and start playing D&D. In addition to the munchies, we brought along 4 gallons of Camp Fuel for the Coleman lanterns we placed under the tarp and played well into the night with the group of about 10 scouts in our troop. My younger brother was the D.M. for this whole affair, but there were several experienced and hard-core players, as well as a few totally new initiates into playing D&D (the kids who were really there to attend Scout Camp for real).
During the day some of these new initiates would get a chance to read the rule books and get them explained as we were building fires, cooking breakfast or supper, and doing the other camp stuff (like swimming, firing shotguns, making crafts, etc.)
For this experience, we decided to try out the Gary Gygax module series (Giants & Drow stuff) that we bought (because it was from the grand master... we bought everything from him at the time) but we always seem to put it off doing other stuff when we were normally playing D&D. I didn't realy how awful they were until after we really started to play them, and I knew just what Monty Haul Dungeons really came from.
The sad part was the aftermath to this whole event. Needless to say our parents were absolutely pissed at us (my dad was the regular Scoutmaster and was unable to attend camp due to some other things that came up in his personal life). Some of the scouts in our troop also failed to complete any merit badges while at camp, and the D&D game was directly blamed for it. (I think we did make up an "unofficial" D&D merit badge for the event, however.) One set of parents totally forbade their kids from ever playing D&D again (the born-again Pat Robertson follower type), which was quite sad. My parents were more of the attitude that neither I nor my brother should "corrupt" the minds of the innocent, but they would rather that we pour our energies into D&D rather than dating or drugs or cars. In that respect D&D was a rather cheap hobby by comparison.
Doesn't Armadillo Aerospace also use XCor engines (at least some components from XCor?)
The Private space industry is probabally going to specialize in some aspects like this anyway, and why not let that happen. There is currently a friendly rivalry between the different space companies, but I don't see it (yet) as a vicious cut-throat business. There are just too many issues right now, and they want to keep a united front to deal with bureaucratic issues being thrown up by the government.
The real question is more like when is Wall Street going to go into the private space launch business? This will be able to soak up private capital like almost no other industry that I can think of. It will also create billionaires that will be able to laugh at the pitiful sums of money Mr. Wm. Gates III has to play with.... and a bunch of broken dreams from the next big stock market crash from the dot Bomb in the sky collapse.
Spend some time looking at the FAA-AST (the specific agency granting the licenses). This group of bureaucrats has wandered from one department to another over the years.
They really didn't get serious about even trying to come up with procedures for approving the licenses until well after the X-Prize was announced. Suddenly some people started to realize that this really was a serious effort for privately financed vehicles going into space and a real debate over who exactly was going to take charge of regulating this nacient industry really started to happen.
Be grateful that it gives a legitimate reason for people to use high explosive compounds. Had the X-Prize been announced after 9/11 it is possible that it would never have been able to happen at all and we would have waited yet another 40 years before some more enlightened people elsewhere in the world would have finally come to their senses and allowed a private space launch.
There are also treaty obligations to deal with what happens to stuff from space when it comes down, and who "owns" what in space... more along the lines of international shipping registy stuff, but it is still important in terms of determining what laws apply to people while they are in space. Regardless of what licenses have been issued, the U.S. government is still responsible in this respect for the conduct of its citizens and a license will allow the government to keep that under control, and force liability insurance, etc.
Now that is an interesting thought... a Liberian Space Agency for a spaceship flag-of-convience (or even a Nigerian Space Agency... we gotta rescue that guy still trapped in space). Don't laugh (too hard)... I think it will eventually happen.
If you want to get an idea why some mechanical/electronic system of voting takes place here in America, consider the history of the United States Census Bureau, and then compare the complexity of a typical ballot in the USA on a general election.
To sum up the history of the U.S. Census Bureau, they took almost 12 years to complete the 1880 Census, the last U.S. Census done entirely by hand. The census of the USA is required by the constitution to be completed every 10 years, so they (the Census Bureau) knew they were in deep trouble. In fact, it was a result of trying to tabulate all of the information in the census that the Hollerath punch cards were invented (they were the size of a U.S. Dollar Bill at the time). Some of the very first Univac computers were purchased by the Census Bureau simply to count the number of people in America. I know they were used in the 1960 Census, but (somebody more knowledgeble than I am needs to confirm this) I think they may have even been used in the early 1950's as well. Some of the earliest computing systems were designed around 1900 (yes the date is correct) to help with the tabulation.
While it is certainly interesting to be able to have the results available by midnight of the night the election is held, the real reason for mechanical/electronic voting is so the results can be in before January 20th (in the case of Congress and the U.S. President). I'm not kidding here either. The process of trying to count up all of the votes for as many as 40 different offices up for election, together with a pile of referendi, bond approvals, and sometimes simple "official" public opinion poll questions, it can be a huge mess for people trying to keep all of these individual "elections" (but the votes are all cast at the same time) seperated. Really, it is an amazing thing that it even gets done at all.
I'm using the Census to show that even full-time professional counters can be overwhelmed with data, and the fact that the mostly volunteer election judges (my wife earns a whole $50 per election for sitting there for 12 hours + polling place setup & takedown + training meetings... not even minimum wage in the US) even are able to keep up with everything thrown at them usually is a remarkable testament that sometimes people know they are serving for a greater good.
Going back to some of the experiences my wife had, there was a very simple municipal election with only two offices up for election and no other issues on the ballot, so the city decided to use strictly paper ballots. Our voting precinct has only about 1500 people, and that election had about a 25% turnout. It still took her almost 4 hours to count up all of the votes, and with three election judges independently counting the votes, they still couldn't come up with identical totals. They did a recount twice and gave up splitting the difference in the results because they were within three votes of each other. It didn't really inspire me that my vote counted that much.
I'd suggest that you spend a little bit of time looking up Neural Nets and AI a little bit. I spent a little time a while back trying to find more information about these topics combined, and it ended up with a couple of pages that said essentially:
"We decided to try some of these techniques in trying to work with the stock market. Since we have made so much money from that, we are unwilling to disclose the exact techniques and have closed this line of research."
Or something to that effect.
If this has real world applications as you are sort of suggesting, it is very possible for these folks to start making huge piles of money... together with some financially savvy people who will make even more off of them (the physicists). The only suspicion that you should have is if they made a real breakthrough but are not telling anybody else in the world as well.
The number one problem with P2P software is that it breaks down the walls of "the priesthood of the computer operators", which dates back to the 1950's and has various forms that currently is embodied with the MIS staff at most larger business. The idea is that a central authority has control over computing resources, and that you should get "permission" to get anything or be able to access "computing resources". Much of this dates to the military involvement in the creation of the first computers, and the fact that the first computers were so expensive that security provision (as in actual human security teams with badges and billyclubs) were needed just to make sure it would be running the next day. Software development talent was so rare at the time, and the very idea of computers so new that it was treated like some sort of God-like device.
The opposite side of this is the decentralizing forces that have made things like TCP/IP and personal computers. To really understand this philosophy, you really need to go back to the hippy movement with it roots in San Francisco, and its role in the development of computers. With programmers so used to sharing girlfriends, dope, money, class notes, and beer, it is no wonder that they also felt that sharing data and computing resources was just a variation on theme, not really even an innovation. P2P networks and Grid computing are natural progressions of this philosophy.
What has been exciting is that the two cultures are colliding is some very substantive ways. P2P networks really aren't any different from normal TCP/IP networks... it is just that they have a different topology that bypasses the normal control mechanisms (I.E. Cisco routers and the MIS control freaks). Don't think that routers don't exist in P2P communication... they do. It just gets disguised a little bit more and is not where "the powers that be" are normally expecting them to be at. Instead of being in a nice air-conditioned secure facility behind bullet-proof glass and 7 levels of physical security, it is on a workstation for some high school computer lab set up by some 16 year old totally without permission of even the school district. That is the real rub of P2P communications.
Can P2P communication be linked to a specific IP address (and hence a specific user)?... usually yes. In this case sending news through a P2P network is mainly to help avoid the/. effect of millions of people crashing a server with the latest cool thing that geeks like. If a good P2P network for news protocol were establshed, it would require at most a few hundred "hits" per computer, and some way of sharing with other computers in the network what are the "new" news items, and how to exchange them without hogging bandwidth. Of course, that is the whole point of USENET, and earlier systems that did this very well like FIDONET.
If you don't know about FIDONET, that was a BBS newsfeed exchange service that exchanged news items between dial-up BBS services. There were many levels they worked on, and some interesting routing protocols, but it was a very effective and cheap, if not slow. You could exchange e-mail with people across the world for basically the cost of a local phone call back in the 1980's and early 1990's. If you were generous, you would send the $5 or $10 per month to the local BBS operator to keep it going, but often this was a voluntary donation even then, not something you were obliged to do to get the message sent. The only problem was because it was only dial-up connections at each exchange node (which happened only once or twice per day... to save money) it would sometime take a week or longer if your message had several hops to get to the final destination. Still, it was a great alternative when having internet access for mere mortals was impossible. As usual, most of the bugs in the system were worked out just in time for cheap commercial internet access to become available. There were some FIDONET/SMTP gateways made, but
I think the S/N ratio can be dealt with. I mean, we are doing it all of the time here on/., and there are other similar sites.
The point is that you need to form a trust relationship with the people creating the news. People that are good sources for news can be trusted, and people simply showing up and trying to push a P.R. news piece are similarly discounted.
The biggest problem with this sort of approach is that it is somewhat incompatable with technologies like Freenet, but even that is not totally impossible. The main point is that if you rate some messages as more newsworthy based on who is doing the posting, it cuts across anonymous postings that are obviously going to be down-graded unless supported by some other more trustworthy source.
This still doesn't totally dismiss P2P transactions, instead it does make it easier for police/governments/corporations/religions to censor information because they can block sources, even if they are sent through some anonymization sites.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you miss the point. New environments and new experiences forced the idea of religious tolerance to happen in America. If you want to talk about religious intolerance, all you have to do is look at a typical Islamic country right now. In Saudi Arabia and several other countries in that region of the world, it is still the death penalty to convert to any religion besides Islam. (Converts to Islam are always welcome
I take that with a compliment (about being a Vatican minister). This is not a lie, because the current incarnation of a University (with graduation robes and all of the pomp & circumstance, department organization, etc.) is a classical medeval institution. Yeah, I am more than willing to admit that Muslim scholarship (primarily from the Moors, not Arabs) contributed, but you are also seemingly discounting the scholarship that took place in Ireland and a lesser degree throughout most of "Christian" Europe as well, and much of this was based at religious institutions, but not always. Ideas and concepts went in both directions.
Yes, there were unique copies of some manuscripts in Alexandria. That is an ancient lesson for those who think central repositories are the ultimate solution, and has reprocussions for modern data storage specialists. Still, once and idea was written down it can and often was spread arround through manuscript copiers. The invention of the printing press did help to make the job of a copier much easier and to spread the ideas around further.
BTW, I wouldn't say it is impossible to eliminate ideas in print, even mass published books. It is just harder and takes a more determined government.
Indian Elections != American Elections
I don't know how much more we can describe this in more detail.
And the 20 + contests have other complexities such as vote for 3 of the following seven people (in some localities), or perhaps allow for an instant run-off election (not often, but it can and does happen).
There are legal requirements that the full text of any constitutional referendi are also listed, or at least available to each voter, with enough information to clearly identify to each voter what the proposition is all about. Prop #117 just isn't enough.
There are other U.S. election laws that also cover the ordering of candidates on the list, which with computers may become even more complex if they would have to be shuffled for each candidate.
In short, there is a reason why rather complex computers are being used to make voting machines in America. Diebold is simply following poor engineering and P.R. practices, based on experience with the banking industry and is really over their head with voting machines.
Still, it is nice to see that electronic can be made to be trusted if proper engineering is done and the whole process is open to public inspection by anybody that would care.
While I would agree that the church did do some B.S. that I'm not happy with, but it really wasn't all that different than what other political leaders at the same time period also did.
Often the church was a major political force (England's House of Lords still has member of the clergy holding seats recognising this political authority) throughout Europe during the previous two mellenia. They would even hold territory that would be under the exclusive use of the church (as much as counties or duchies). In this regard the title of "prince of religion" has even more meaning and litteral justification. Fights between secular and religious factions were very common, just not among peasants who couldn't do anything without approval of at least the manor lord.
If the church held people back with thought and ideas, it was because the secular leaders at the time also wanted to hold people back in thought and ideas as well. It wouldn't have mattered if it were Christian, Muslim, or Norse polytheism, the religion really didn't matter. That Islam seemed to show more respect for personal rights and scientific thought at the time than Christian regions (about 1000 A.D.) is more a reflection of the political leaders at the time.
One of the incredible things about people coming to America, especially in the British part of North America, was that religion was finally seperated from political authority, if for no other reason than people coming from so many places in Europe that no single religion really could get into a dominating position (with only very localized exceptions to this rule.)
I'd also like to point out that the modern concept of a University and scientific thought is an outgrowth of Christian thought and philosophies dating from the middle ages. Somebody finally realized that if you wanted to really understand the words that Jesus was saying on the Mount of Olives, you needed to understand the context of the words he was speaking, and that also meant that you had to read other texts and information that was contemporary with the literature of the New Testament. Burning those books would mean that you wouldn't be able to understand the words of God.
As for modern example of religious bigots trying to supress ideas they don't comprehend (like Harry Potter or genetic research), it is just ignorant people who are choosing to stay ignorant. I have no emotion other than pity at the moment for people like that, because trying to supress knowledge only spreads it further. Just see what happened with deCSS. Harry Potter is even more popular because of the book burning, with the author and publisher laughing all the way to the bank.
Thank you so much for your thoughtful reply. I wish I could mod it up right now.
I would have to agree that the immediate concerns of the "Space Race" of the 1960's was certainly more pressing, and with a Presidential order from a martyr (whatever you think of JFK, defeating his ghost in the 1960's was incredibly difficult) and a deadline that was coming up in a real hurry, I would have to agree that something they already proofed would work instead of a new technology that really needed to be developed, they probabally made the correct choice at the time.
The problem I have is that NASA and Congress in 1970, seeing that Armstrong had already made it to the moon, couldn't really figure out where to go next. The ISS and the Space Shuttle (in various forms... some sort of space station was always in the works in conjunction with the Space Shuttle. I just think it was the worst of all possible solutions) was the next logical step, based on thinking at the time. Indeed, it was anticipated that the Space Shuttle would come up to Skylab and help boost it up to a higher orbit, but the Space Shuttle had production delays so bad that it was never able to perform that mission.
It is too bad that once it was obvious that the Russians weren't going to persue a Moon & Mars mission (there were plans to put a Soviet Cosmonaut on Mars in time for the Centennial of the Russian Revolution... awsome political timing of the Red Planet with the Red Flag and all, but obviously that isn't going to happen), some more measured research wasn't done to check out other flight systems rather than trying to rush into the Space Shuttle.
Of course all of this is hindsight. I do feel that the current approach of commercial spaceflight is going to be much more successful, and we will yet see orbital spacecraft come from this effort, particularly once money start to seriously pour into the space tourism industry.
Of all of the modern and current libraries that are around, the Vatican Library (yes, the Pope's own book stack) is probabally the most comprehensive collection of medeval and ancient texts that is in existance. For more technical volumes there are other places that are more extensive, but if you are trying to study history or philosophy, this is the place to go.
To suggest that Christians deliberately burn books simply to hide knowledge is totally wrong. That from time to time bullheaded idiots sometimes get control of ecclesiastical authority and abuse that same political and spiritual power to evil ends is not disputed. This happens in most religions (including atheism) or even political movements. (This is in response to the grandpartent article. I agree with you dasunt.)
The problem that happened at Alexandria, and what caused the "Dark Ages" was a total breakdown of the political & social framework of Europe due to the collapse of the Roman Empire. It didn't burn down earlier simply because the Roman Legions would have massacred anybody that tried to challenge Roman authority. By 400 A.D. the Roman government had all but stopped existing in any form, and the citizens of Rome itself were fighting off invaders into the city itself from the Vandals, Goths, and other germanic tribes that routinely sacked Rome for what was left of wealth from being an imperial capital. This was almost like the "Mad Max" movies by Mel Gibson in terms of a total lack of control by governments, except in silly irrelavent symbolism that doesn't keep my neighbor from raping my wife and killing my kids.
I'm sorry that I gave the impression that the X-projects weren't done with the participation of NASA, although the U.S. Air Force has been a major driving force with them. It usually has been (in the past) an Air Force project or a joint Air Force/NASA project.
It still is the rocket plane folks vs. the missile folks who slug it out in terms of who does what and where the funding goes. Trace where the money goes (even in FY 2004... despite absoltuely no manned launches what so ever this year) and you will see just who is still winning this battle.
The reason why the X-15 didn't get any further was strictly political, not technological.
By the time the X-15 was doing its stuff, NASA was already gearing up for the Apollo program, and the ballistic missile guys (primarily lead by Von Braun, but it did involve others) were trying to push a competing program. It should be obvious who won that debate.
The Space Shuttle should have (and in a small part did) been a technological decendant of the X-15 project, but instead most of its design technologies came from the Saturn V program and its predecessors.
The promise of the X-15 was to have routine reusable aircraft for travel into space. The pilots of the X-15 were finally granted astronaut wings, but politcally even that wasn't really appreciated by the guys at NASA. The prep crew for the X-15 was just a dozen or so people, compared to the hundreds it took even for Alan Shepard to do his sub-orbital flight. It is indeed too bad that this research wasn't followed, but not because it was a technological dead-end. It wasn't followed simply because Congress in their infinite wisdom decided that programs of this nature should be cut. And it was almost impossible to get a follow-on project to go this route.
Space Ship One really is the heir apparent now of the X-15 flights, and you had better believe that Burt Rutan knows just about all there is to know about the X-15 flights... probabally a world-class expert on the subject.
Other X-class projects have been done since the X-15 (Notably the X-33) and they have all suffered with political problems coming from folks at NASA thinking they (the X-projects) are mussling into their turf. The X-prize was even named that in honor of these X-class planes and the potential they could have had if they hadn't been abandoned.
The inspiring thing is that this ship goes higher and higher, pushing the materials and seeking refinements on what they already have.
Finally, remember the saying of Robert A. Heinlein: "Low-earth orbit is half-way to the rest of the entire solar system."
That sums up the importance of these flights. If refinements of materials and general ship design gradually lead to something that goes into orbit or even can leave the earth's gravity (like the Apollo missions), the age of manned planetary exploration will truly begin. Eventually, if you keep getting higher and higher, you are going to run out of altitude to the point that it really doesn't matter any more. You will be in orbit regardless.
Ah....
But in order to disprove God with the Bablefish, you had to find one in the first place.
Seriously, D.N.A.'s diety non-existance therom is just a more recent version of many that were proposed throughout the ages, with most of them done during the Renassance/ Medeval times (roughly 900 A.D. to 1500 A.D. give or take a few centuries in each direction on both ends). In some ways, he was making a very good spoof of similar theroms regarding God.
It is also a classic example where just sitting around and coming up with theorms for therom's sake is likely to get you into a logical quagmire that makes no sense, usually with a logical mistake somewhere along the line.
Also think about the mathmatical proof where 1 = 2
Check it out here
In this case, somebody who knows a little about Algebra but is not really a mathmatician (maybe they have had high school or college algebra, but havn't really studied mathmatics as a serious subject) can be fooled into accepting these as valid proofs that come up with illogical results.
What are you indeed proposing?
A tarrif on raw data sent over the internet?
You can't possibly distinguish data sent over the internet in the form of an e-mail as opposed to some multi-player RPG or HTML. On the level that it passes from router to router from the original computer to its destination that is how it is treated (and should be too!) Indeed, firewalls and other cute things of that nature really end up perverting the internet by assuming (incorrectly) that only port 80 (typical HTTP port) is needed (or something similar).
A firewall is needed when computers on the other side of the firewall have poorly designed IP (internet protocol, not intellectual property) stacks and some very poorly implemented miscellaneous TCP services programs (like nettime, MOTD, or some other simple service) that has methods of attack through those programs. A clean well-designed IP stack with high-quality TCP applications do not need a firewall.
The solution is not charging $$$ for e-mail either. Who collects? How much per e-mail? Does the size of the e-mail matter? What about attachments? Is this above and beyond normal TCP/IP usage charges (in terms of normal bandwidth charges)? How do you stop spammers from "collecting" money from millions of people who "sent" e-mail to them (reverse spammers in this case... a variant not seen at the moment)? This last question is also about how spoofing can be used to undermine the toll collection system of any e-mail charges, which is something significant indeed.
You could certainly set up a totally new e-mail type protocol where you personally establish some sort of toll system, and let's also assume that every piece of e-mail that goes into a typical in-box will also pay you about 1/2 cent. Answer the above questions regarding this system if you think there is a viable solution here, but also let's assume that you will use E-gold, Paypal, or some other micropayment system here as well (maybe something you also come up with for this service). You had also better get a pretty good legal team together because you will also be the target of a whole bunch of lawsuits if it gains any popularity at all.
It simply won't work. What is needed more than trying to charge is to develop trust metrics between computers. Just making up an IP address here, but let's assume that 192.168.x.x has a bunch of e-mail servers that I trust. You can then assume that this is a good server. Let's assume that 10.54.x.x has a bunch of spammers. Don't trust anything coming from those servers.
BTW, this is essentially the approach that Spamhaus, SpamCop, and the IBHL and others are using to try and block spam.
The real trick here is that you also need to prevent spoofing. One nice thing about SpamCop is that the original author/developer of the site went through a whole bunch of work to try and find the actual owner of a given internet service that is sending you a given piece of e-mail based almost exclusively on IP address. The SpamCop site then tells you if it is an open relay, or a known spammer. This anti-spoofing is often hard to do and this is where the current e-mail protocol does indeed need to be strengthed, simply to identify clearly who sent the e-mail, and make sure that the computer sending the e-mail is who they claim they are.
As it is right now, I can claim to have the e-mail address president@whitehouse.gov and send you a message, and the current e-mail protocol won't be able to proof that I really am that person or not. There are ways (fairly easy as well) to not even get the IP address of my machine anywhere in any logs of any computer or in the e-mail header. Spammers take advantage of this simple fact, and e-mail servers should not accept e-mail if the IP addresses aren't correct.
This should also be illegal in itself. If you claim to have an IP address of 10.54.66.195 and that is not who you claim to be, it is false representation and should by itself be punishable under law independent of the conte
The software we developed (I was the programmer on the project) was used for several classes on campus at Utah State University, where the project was based from, under the direction of Dr. R. Kent Wood (he has since retired). Our primary emphasis was more toward K-12 learning, but it proved to be quite popular with several computer-based learning groups including C.A.L.I.C.O, a group of individuals working on acquiring forign language skills through computer-based learning.
There are several issues that need to be dealt with in regards to multimedia development. Some of them have been solved compared to what I was dealing with in the past, but some still are huge problems:
Ever heard of a Naval Air Station? These are traditional air bases with a paved runway on the ground. They do indeed launch and house in hangers the very same fighters that are used on aircraft carriers. Indeed, when a carrier enters & leaves port, the fighters are not on deck, instead they go back to the NAS for long-term maintainence that wasn't performed onboard during the tour of duty. I don't recall any steam catapult on the runways built into the concrete runways at any of these airstrips, although admittedly the runway is considerably longer than is found on a deck of a carrier.
That is exactly my point, that a carrier does a steam launch to make the impossible turn into something that is a real engineering accomplishment. The engines on a typical F-14 are powerful enough that it can fly straight up (for at least several thousand feet) with essentially no stall angle. Merely getting off the ground is not an issue at all for those planes.
I think the overall issue here is that the traditional approach of using expendable rockets to send people to space simply needs to end. The Space Shuttle was a wonderful idea, but the actual implementation of it has turned out to be a near nightmare. Still, even with all of the problems with the Space Shuttle it has put more people into orbit than any other vehicle system with the possible exception of Soyuz, and even then it is rather close in terms of the total number of people flown into space. Failure rates are even rather comparable (I'm not going to rehash the arguments about which has killed more people.)
NASA needs to think outside of the box, or it will no longer even exist as an agency. Looking at alternatives to current launch systems is one way to do that, and certainly they need to totally rethink the current STS approach to manned spaceflight.
I think this was an incredibly shortsighted viewpoint on the part of the U.S. government back in 1967 (when the treaty was signed and ratified by the U.S. Senate), but at the time most of Congress felt that we would never get even to the moon, much less be able to build any resonable space colonies, the Apollo program not withstanding.
Private ownership of extraterrestial bodies is not expressly forbidden, but the mechanism for being able to grant that ownership and the legal machinery to even file for ownership is simply not in place. There are a few people who are still trying, even without formal sanction.
Two sites do come to mind though:
http://www.planetaryinvestments.com/
and
http://www.lunarembassy.com/
Personally, I think both are total scam artists along the lines of people buying stars to name after friends and relatives. Still, this is more or less harmless fun regardless of these so-called land claims. If the USA doesn't have soverign claim to the moon, there is no way that the Lunar Embassy could possibly have legal claim through the land office of the U.S. government at San Francisco (the Lunar Embassy's claim to fame in this case).
What is going to have to happen is some legal machinery to decide what laws apply to events that happen on these planetary bodies. For example, if you kill somebody on the moon, can you be convicted in the U.S. court system? Don't be too hasty here, because remember, soverign authority doesn't apply anymore.
What about copyright laws? Do they apply in space as well? (Recording contracts are now starting to cover extraterrestial distribution rights due to a recording company executive worried about who owned distribution rights to music the Astronauts in the Apollo program were playing.)
So far these issues haven't been dealt with because for now all places except for the Apollo missions have been built on the Earth, and soverignty claims can be resolved. If you kill somebody on the ISS, it would matter what module you killed them in, then it would be either Russian, U.S.A., or E.U. courts that would be authorized to prosecute based on what module the crime happened in. That would still be a big mess, legally speaking (not to mention the physical mess on the ISS itself).
I'm using murder here because that is a crime that would not be lightly brushed under the table if it were to happen in space. Lesser crimes like tax evasion (like what happened during the flight of Apollo XIII when John Swigert forgot to file his income taxes before he left) would probabally wait or could be sorted out without a big international incident.
I think this also solves rather nicely who or what would be able to enforce land rights on a place like the moon. If they can lock you up in jail and confiscate your personal property, they can also grant you real estate rights.
I would personally hate giving this power to the U.N., but at least that is an international organization that could in theory be able to establish these property rights. Just imagine though that the U.N. would also be able to pass civil laws for ordinary people and levy taxes. That's why I wouldn't want them trying to decide what would happen on the future homestead for my grandkids.
The only real legitimate route at this point is going to be the creation of a wholly new soverign entity that has no relationship to any of the signatory members of the Moon Treaty.
I do like the original poster's comments about using a railgun as an assist to get some initial velocity onto a rocket using a railgun right at launch. As he pointed out, a not insignificant percentage of the fuel is burned just trying to clear the launch tower itself... if the tower were a railgun instead, you could get some initial velocity from the launch system, just like aircraft carriers give some initial airspeed to jet fighters through a steam catapult system aboard ship. This isn't to say the fighters couldn't get airborne on their own, unassisted, but it does help to reduce costs of the carrier (they can have a smaller runway for launching fighters) and helps to get the fighters up to speed necessary to begin combat engagements earlier (this protects the ship as well).
Keep in mind that the reason NASA launches spacecraft from Florida instead of New York is in part because the rotational energy of the Earth itself can be added to the orbital delta-v of the rocket to achieve orbit. The Russians put their launch complex in Kazakstan for the very same reason (instead of near Murmansk and launching over the Arctic Ocean).
EM launchers as weapons I'm sure are being investigated. Getting a hunk of Lead or Uranium up to Mach 15-20 has many very good uses in trying to defend against other object that are also travling at Hypersonic speeds (like ICBMs). If that chunk of metal melts from atmospheric drag, it really doesn't matter.
I would have to agree though that EM launchers are more pratical in a vacuum environment (like the Moon) or some extraterrestial mining application rather than something that comes from a planet with an atmosphere. A man-rated vehicle that can be launched from the moon would also be interesting.
An alternative approach I have seen is to have a very powerful laser system help supply the energy of a launch system, where the laser is at the launch site and the ship only has mirrors and limited attitude thrusters. The problem with this approach is that the energy requirements to get this to work are incredible, and really havn't been work out that well. It gives a bonus that you can control rather precisely the acceleration of the vehicle, and the energy production is on the ground, not on the craft being accelerated. Even if this were only the 1st stage of the rocket, it would significantly cut costs.
Yes, I have heard of the research that has taken place with Ion propusion, including actual vehicles that have used it.
It is still in a very strongly experimental mode at the moment, but may become something common. Currently NASA seems to prefer chemical rockets (those have been proven) even for deep-space probes, but I think that may change in the future.
Personally, I'd also love to see solar sail research to be worked on, again for the same long-range economic costs (you don't even have to bring along a fuel supply... just a repair/replacement kit).
Scaling up equipment with higher voltage, larger "fuel" requirements and other aspects of trying to get a vehicle manned-rated (as opposed to an experimental robotic vehicle) are much harder than you seem to indicate. Still, it is a possibility that should be explored, and seriously in the case of a mission to Mars for all of the reasons that have been mentioned.
In terms of getting an ion engine to do station keeping activities (like docking manuvers or trying to achieve escape velocity from Phobos), that is presuming a compareatively powerful engine. This is much easier to accomplish with conventional chemical rockets (the thrust would only be very short... just a couple of seconds at most), and is a proven technology.
I mentioned this only to illustrate that each technology has its strengths and weaknesses. Major compoents for rocket fuel (LOX & Liquid Hydrogen) would be useful on a long-term space flight anyway (providing an engergy source for fuel cells, manufacturing H2O for the crew, ect.) so there would be many reasons to have at least some on board. You just wouldn't have to make it the primary propulsion source. Sure, solar cells could also suppliment engergy requirements, not to mention RTG's or even a nuclear reactor (I'm not kidding here either).
The whole point of my previous post was that we need to rethink the whole Mars mission, which will not be an extended repeat of the Apollo missions where the crew leaves from the ground, goes to an exterrestial body, and returns back to earth without ever interacting in person with people other than the crew they left with.
The days of doing business in space like that are over, at least for the near term.
I disagree with your premise that it would not be feasable to put somebody on the surface of mars with current technologies, but I want to hit on the Martian Orbit-only manned presence.
I think this is a worthy goal, with perhaps a "landing" on Phobos to establish a fixed and stable point to begin human activities in and around Mars. A rotating permanent team of 10-20 astronauts in some sort of international laboratory with replacements both coming from and going to the Earth, as appropriate orbital windows permit. Many minerals and other resources can be obtained from the soil of Phobos directly, and the ability to achieve escape veolcity of Phobos is relatively trivial compared to trying to get away from Mars. The whole trip could be done with Ion propulsion instead of chemical rockets, decreasing time necessary for a round-trip. Chemical rockets would only be needed for manuvering thrusters and station-keeping activities, and for the very short burst to get away from Phobos. Some of this could even be manufactured on Phobos as a back-up reserve supply (just in case).
With the sole exception of trying to get an Ion Propusion engine going (and there are current experiments trying to get that accomplished), this whole concept can be done with current technology, other than trying to rediscover some of the lessons from Apollo. The only time necessary is trying to simply put together a unique packaging of equipment to get this accomplished. Launching it directly from space also makes incredible sense, and give justification to keeping the ISS (since its science mission has already been essentially destroyed). The ship can be assembled in space, and the crew flown up on ordinary LEO shuttle rockets, and even dock at the ISS before final departure to Mars.
This would also provide an excellent back-up resource for any manned activity on the surface of Mars when that does occur. If a surface exploration team is having trouble trying to stay together (personality conflicts), it can be broken up and reassmebled with other crew member from the Phobos base. Coordination of multiple surface sites being simultaneously explored can also be controlled from one location. These can be both manned and robotic explorations.
The only real draw back that I can see (assuming a docking to the ISS) is interplanet biological contamination would be almost impossible to stop. I think that both Mars and the Earth have shared many rocks with each other in the past anyway, but is something to consider what must be done if truly sterile conditions must be kept for anything going to Mars. NASA blew it with the Apollo missions, so I seriously doubt they will really make much of a difference in regards to Mars.
This is one instance where you do indeed get sound in space... and why if you hear anything in space like an explosion or grinding metal that your bowels should suddenly start to loosen: It is the ship you are in that is falling apart!
There were some sound effects in that movie that weren't 100% accurate, but for the most part it was from the perspective of the astronauts, including in some cases the music being played.
I would agree that for some reason seeing a huge explosion and not hearing anything until several minutes later you start hearing a ping, ping, ping (from debris hitting the ship you are in) just wouldn't be satisfying to the typical Hollywood-style movie.
While I would have to agree that it may be difficult to get the stress and accent correct, the tones of ancient Egyptian can be identified fairly easily from the hyroglyphics, which are phonemic in nature (i.e. represent specific sounds... roughly anaogous to what you are more familiar with in terms of the letters you are reading right now.)
Chinese ideographs are much harder to identify what sounds or even words were used it pronounce the glyph, because there are no tonal indicators with that writing system. It expresses ideas rather than sounds.
Still, even if you were extreamly fluent in ancient egyptian and had even come up with your own interpretation of the sounds of the words, not all of your guesses would be correct and it does vary even from one period of time to the next (just look at what English has done in the past 300 years).
I was a physics student (undergrad Physics for Engineers course) of Dr. Steven Jones when this whole thing broke loose. About 3 weeks before the Pons & Fleischman announcement, he announced some interesting results that were very similar to the cold fusion announcement.
At the time, Dr. Jones was a peer-referee for the article that Pons & Fleischman were writing, and it turned out that their research was following similar lines that he and other researchers at BYU were following. He asked for permission (and was granted) to break the confidentiality agreement with the publisher to share research information. (Details of this are well documented elsewhere, including things I saw on the PBS-TV show Nova about this episode.... I can confirm this so far as this is what Dr. Jones mentioned to our class prior to the whole fiasco breaking loose).
Dr. Jones was following an earlier line of research where he was studying Muon-induced fusion (where a Muon would take the place of a normal electron and bring atomic nuclei closer together under certain conditions... potentially triggering a fusion reaction). He was also studying natural phenomina including a speculation that there might be some other process besides nuclear fission and meteoric landfall that causes volcanic hotspots around the earth. I'm not here suggesting that cold fusion causes Mauna Loa, but some isotopic measurements of gasses emitted by that volcano contained traces of Helium-3 and Helium-4 that could not otherwise be accounted for. The speculation was that perhaps a limited form of fusion might also be taking place.
The key element of Dr. Jones' research was that he was indeed measuring emitted particles instead of measuring heat. Some graphs he showed to our class (after the big fiasco) included some very telling information about some of the particles being emmitted, but at levels so low that it seemed improbable that a calorimeter would be able to measure the effect.
When all was said and done, the best that could be offered by the researchers I talked to afterward was that this research could be used to make a neutrino emmitter that could be turned on and off electronically. Now that does indeed have some interesting uses, but neutrino detectors are another problem. As a futuristic energy source, there were many other much more productive lines of research to consider.
The other nice thing about cold fusion was that it didn't require huge laboratories to study the effects, which is convient to relatively underfunded universities for research activities (like BYU), it also brings out the weirdos, scammers and crooks. As a result, research discussions tend to have a very low S/N level. This makes finding information all that more difficult.
It is also something to note that BYU is also where Philo Farsnworth did his final research on the Fusor technology. In fact, the cold fusion research was conducted in the very same laboratory (buried underground just south of the HBLL library). They were indeed worried about radiation damage, and chose to buy $20,000 worth of pennies to build a cheap radiation shield. I'm not sure if they ever put them back into circulation, but it was a sort of joke when walking into the lab and it looked more like the inside of a bank vault.
This is definitely a trip down memory lane.
I got into D&D as a sidebar to military wargamming, starting with Risk and moving onto several Avalon Hill games (Third Reich, Blitzkrieg, 1776 (I got massacred by my brother at this one), & Squad Leader).
When I went to the hobby shop to see what other cool games they had, I saw a box for the original Basic Edition of D&D, together with the 1st Edition Monster Manual. The DM Guide was released just a little after that, and trying to get polyhedrial dice was almost impossible. We actually used the old chit system at first to generate our characters becuase we couldn't find any polyhedrial dice at all. When I finally got some dice, the d20 was badly misshapen in manufacturing, and gave some really wild results when used (I wish I still had it now).
The best fun I had was a week at Boy Scout Camp where we also turned it into a week-long D&D marathon. The logistical planning for this was something that could only be done by a bunch of hard-core D&D players that were also boy scouts. The D&D manuals were smuggled in with the camp kitchen supplies, talked our parents into a week's worth of munchies & pop (with some extra money on the side for buying stuff that wouldn't keep in the cooler for more than a couple of days), and took off to camp looking like a group of real trustworthy, loyal, helpful (etc.) boy scouts our parents thought we were. We also hid miniatures, dice, DM screens, map graphs, and pens & paper (that was more out in the open.. . but in retrospect our parents should have realized that we took too MUCH paper and too MANY pencils with us).
Our Scoutmaster (actually an assistant who could get the time off from work) was this young guy that looking back now was just totally snowballed by us boy scouts. I was about 16 at the time, and he placed a lot of trust in me as a junior leader. I did what I could, but this adventure took a life of its own that this poor assistant SM couldn't keep under control.
After about 5 P.M. we would finish up our camping chores every evening and start playing D&D. In addition to the munchies, we brought along 4 gallons of Camp Fuel for the Coleman lanterns we placed under the tarp and played well into the night with the group of about 10 scouts in our troop. My younger brother was the D.M. for this whole affair, but there were several experienced and hard-core players, as well as a few totally new initiates into playing D&D (the kids who were really there to attend Scout Camp for real).
During the day some of these new initiates would get a chance to read the rule books and get them explained as we were building fires, cooking breakfast or supper, and doing the other camp stuff (like swimming, firing shotguns, making crafts, etc.)
For this experience, we decided to try out the Gary Gygax module series (Giants & Drow stuff) that we bought (because it was from the grand master... we bought everything from him at the time) but we always seem to put it off doing other stuff when we were normally playing D&D. I didn't realy how awful they were until after we really started to play them, and I knew just what Monty Haul Dungeons really came from.
The sad part was the aftermath to this whole event. Needless to say our parents were absolutely pissed at us (my dad was the regular Scoutmaster and was unable to attend camp due to some other things that came up in his personal life). Some of the scouts in our troop also failed to complete any merit badges while at camp, and the D&D game was directly blamed for it. (I think we did make up an "unofficial" D&D merit badge for the event, however.) One set of parents totally forbade their kids from ever playing D&D again (the born-again Pat Robertson follower type), which was quite sad. My parents were more of the attitude that neither I nor my brother should "corrupt" the minds of the innocent, but they would rather that we pour our energies into D&D rather than dating or drugs or cars. In that respect D&D was a rather cheap hobby by comparison.
Doesn't Armadillo Aerospace also use XCor engines (at least some components from XCor?)
The Private space industry is probabally going to specialize in some aspects like this anyway, and why not let that happen. There is currently a friendly rivalry between the different space companies, but I don't see it (yet) as a vicious cut-throat business. There are just too many issues right now, and they want to keep a united front to deal with bureaucratic issues being thrown up by the government.
The real question is more like when is Wall Street going to go into the private space launch business? This will be able to soak up private capital like almost no other industry that I can think of. It will also create billionaires that will be able to laugh at the pitiful sums of money Mr. Wm. Gates III has to play with.... and a bunch of broken dreams from the next big stock market crash from the dot Bomb in the sky collapse.
Spend some time looking at the FAA-AST (the specific agency granting the licenses). This group of bureaucrats has wandered from one department to another over the years.
They really didn't get serious about even trying to come up with procedures for approving the licenses until well after the X-Prize was announced. Suddenly some people started to realize that this really was a serious effort for privately financed vehicles going into space and a real debate over who exactly was going to take charge of regulating this nacient industry really started to happen.
Be grateful that it gives a legitimate reason for people to use high explosive compounds. Had the X-Prize been announced after 9/11 it is possible that it would never have been able to happen at all and we would have waited yet another 40 years before some more enlightened people elsewhere in the world would have finally come to their senses and allowed a private space launch.
There are also treaty obligations to deal with what happens to stuff from space when it comes down, and who "owns" what in space... more along the lines of international shipping registy stuff, but it is still important in terms of determining what laws apply to people while they are in space. Regardless of what licenses have been issued, the U.S. government is still responsible in this respect for the conduct of its citizens and a license will allow the government to keep that under control, and force liability insurance, etc.
Now that is an interesting thought... a Liberian Space Agency for a spaceship flag-of-convience (or even a Nigerian Space Agency... we gotta rescue that guy still trapped in space). Don't laugh (too hard)... I think it will eventually happen.
If you want to get an idea why some mechanical/electronic system of voting takes place here in America, consider the history of the United States Census Bureau, and then compare the complexity of a typical ballot in the USA on a general election.
To sum up the history of the U.S. Census Bureau, they took almost 12 years to complete the 1880 Census, the last U.S. Census done entirely by hand. The census of the USA is required by the constitution to be completed every 10 years, so they (the Census Bureau) knew they were in deep trouble. In fact, it was a result of trying to tabulate all of the information in the census that the Hollerath punch cards were invented (they were the size of a U.S. Dollar Bill at the time). Some of the very first Univac computers were purchased by the Census Bureau simply to count the number of people in America. I know they were used in the 1960 Census, but (somebody more knowledgeble than I am needs to confirm this) I think they may have even been used in the early 1950's as well. Some of the earliest computing systems were designed around 1900 (yes the date is correct) to help with the tabulation.
While it is certainly interesting to be able to have the results available by midnight of the night the election is held, the real reason for mechanical/electronic voting is so the results can be in before January 20th (in the case of Congress and the U.S. President). I'm not kidding here either. The process of trying to count up all of the votes for as many as 40 different offices up for election, together with a pile of referendi, bond approvals, and sometimes simple "official" public opinion poll questions, it can be a huge mess for people trying to keep all of these individual "elections" (but the votes are all cast at the same time) seperated. Really, it is an amazing thing that it even gets done at all.
I'm using the Census to show that even full-time professional counters can be overwhelmed with data, and the fact that the mostly volunteer election judges (my wife earns a whole $50 per election for sitting there for 12 hours + polling place setup & takedown + training meetings... not even minimum wage in the US) even are able to keep up with everything thrown at them usually is a remarkable testament that sometimes people know they are serving for a greater good.
Going back to some of the experiences my wife had, there was a very simple municipal election with only two offices up for election and no other issues on the ballot, so the city decided to use strictly paper ballots. Our voting precinct has only about 1500 people, and that election had about a 25% turnout. It still took her almost 4 hours to count up all of the votes, and with three election judges independently counting the votes, they still couldn't come up with identical totals. They did a recount twice and gave up splitting the difference in the results because they were within three votes of each other. It didn't really inspire me that my vote counted that much.
I'd suggest that you spend a little bit of time looking up Neural Nets and AI a little bit. I spent a little time a while back trying to find more information about these topics combined, and it ended up with a couple of pages that said essentially:
"We decided to try some of these techniques in trying to work with the stock market. Since we have made so much money from that, we are unwilling to disclose the exact techniques and have closed this line of research."
Or something to that effect.
If this has real world applications as you are sort of suggesting, it is very possible for these folks to start making huge piles of money... together with some financially savvy people who will make even more off of them (the physicists). The only suspicion that you should have is if they made a real breakthrough but are not telling anybody else in the world as well.
The number one problem with P2P software is that it breaks down the walls of "the priesthood of the computer operators", which dates back to the 1950's and has various forms that currently is embodied with the MIS staff at most larger business. The idea is that a central authority has control over computing resources, and that you should get "permission" to get anything or be able to access "computing resources". Much of this dates to the military involvement in the creation of the first computers, and the fact that the first computers were so expensive that security provision (as in actual human security teams with badges and billyclubs) were needed just to make sure it would be running the next day. Software development talent was so rare at the time, and the very idea of computers so new that it was treated like some sort of God-like device.
... usually yes. In this case sending news through a P2P network is mainly to help avoid the /. effect of millions of people crashing a server with the latest cool thing that geeks like. If a good P2P network for news protocol were establshed, it would require at most a few hundred "hits" per computer, and some way of sharing with other computers in the network what are the "new" news items, and how to exchange them without hogging bandwidth. Of course, that is the whole point of USENET, and earlier systems that did this very well like FIDONET.
The opposite side of this is the decentralizing forces that have made things like TCP/IP and personal computers. To really understand this philosophy, you really need to go back to the hippy movement with it roots in San Francisco, and its role in the development of computers. With programmers so used to sharing girlfriends, dope, money, class notes, and beer, it is no wonder that they also felt that sharing data and computing resources was just a variation on theme, not really even an innovation. P2P networks and Grid computing are natural progressions of this philosophy.
What has been exciting is that the two cultures are colliding is some very substantive ways. P2P networks really aren't any different from normal TCP/IP networks... it is just that they have a different topology that bypasses the normal control mechanisms (I.E. Cisco routers and the MIS control freaks). Don't think that routers don't exist in P2P communication... they do. It just gets disguised a little bit more and is not where "the powers that be" are normally expecting them to be at. Instead of being in a nice air-conditioned secure facility behind bullet-proof glass and 7 levels of physical security, it is on a workstation for some high school computer lab set up by some 16 year old totally without permission of even the school district. That is the real rub of P2P communications.
Can P2P communication be linked to a specific IP address (and hence a specific user)?
If you don't know about FIDONET, that was a BBS newsfeed exchange service that exchanged news items between dial-up BBS services. There were many levels they worked on, and some interesting routing protocols, but it was a very effective and cheap, if not slow. You could exchange e-mail with people across the world for basically the cost of a local phone call back in the 1980's and early 1990's. If you were generous, you would send the $5 or $10 per month to the local BBS operator to keep it going, but often this was a voluntary donation even then, not something you were obliged to do to get the message sent. The only problem was because it was only dial-up connections at each exchange node (which happened only once or twice per day... to save money) it would sometime take a week or longer if your message had several hops to get to the final destination. Still, it was a great alternative when having internet access for mere mortals was impossible. As usual, most of the bugs in the system were worked out just in time for cheap commercial internet access to become available. There were some FIDONET/SMTP gateways made, but
I think the S/N ratio can be dealt with. I mean, we are doing it all of the time here on /., and there are other similar sites.
The point is that you need to form a trust relationship with the people creating the news. People that are good sources for news can be trusted, and people simply showing up and trying to push a P.R. news piece are similarly discounted.
The biggest problem with this sort of approach is that it is somewhat incompatable with technologies like Freenet, but even that is not totally impossible. The main point is that if you rate some messages as more newsworthy based on who is doing the posting, it cuts across anonymous postings that are obviously going to be down-graded unless supported by some other more trustworthy source.
This still doesn't totally dismiss P2P transactions, instead it does make it easier for police/governments/corporations/religions to censor information because they can block sources, even if they are sent through some anonymization sites.