One - an update on what you said - composites have already been made with 5% (a one-mile-stretch IIRC) as of March 2003 when the NIAC phase II paper was written. 25% was talked about here on slashdot a few months back, I'm too lazy to go look up the link. These things are developing rapidly, and a lot of materials labs in universities and corps all over the world are very very busy on it, and backed by very intensive funding (think billions if not tens of billions).
Second, I think you misunderstand the difference between evolution and revolution. Let's take hard-drives for an example. Evolving a circa-1990 40Meg HD into a current 400Gig one is evolution. It required some "minor" revolutions like pixie dust, but all in all it was a process of "find bottleneck, fix, repeat". Nanostorage like IBM's millepede is revolution. It does not include employing engineers to overcome technical hurdles in the "we can't cram more gigs on this platter". It involves canning the technology and coming up with something entirely new.
When you're after evolution, you know where you're headed, you just have to figure out how to get there.
When you're after revolution, you need to figure out where you want to go first.
Space Elevators require evolution in material sciences, and the 386 example was a very good one. We know what we want to do, we just need to figure out the "how" bit. And if the last 20 years taught us anything, it's that we will.
Being someone who is currently moving his life and family from one side of the world (Israel) to the other (Australia), I can clearly point out that as nostalgically charming as moving into space may sound,
** There is more to making such a decision than the presence (or lack thereof) of vaccum around the place we call home **.
Questions such as these arise: * What are the prospects of a quality life there? (which leads to further questions like how we measure quality of life - by the amount of green around our house? the amount of accessible online gadget stores that ship to our location?) * What are the prospects of economic prosperity there? Taxation? Salaries? * Can I work in my chosen field there? * Can I practice my recreation activities there? (Think diving, snowboarding, etc.) * What kind of mentality do the people who live there share? * WHAT ARE THE ALTERNATIVES?
Hell, that's just the tip of the iceberg. Would I move into space? Tell me what's waiting for me there and what I'm running from here for starters, and I'll consider it.
The only people who'd answer such a question offhand are people who are either miserable with their current lives, don't have any, or are very deep into their fantasy worlds.
That kind of problem can usually be solved using much simpler methods.
Is it just me or is the US on some utterly bizarre wild goose chase, spending (read: WASTING) trillions developing military and weapon technology to outdistance itself technologically from other world armies by a factor of 100 instead of (the supposedly insufficient) factor of 50? Just WHO are they going to fight with their Seawolf subs, Aircraft Carriers, railguns, and that entire quadgizillion-consuming army? Terrorists? North Korea? Europe?
Take a look at the UK for an example. They opted for a small fleet of SMALL aircraft carriers that are designed to rush in and handle local skirmishes and cost a helluvalot cheaper than their American leviathan counterparts and their trailing battlegroups (which are there just in case the Soviet Block comes back together and stops being poor all of a sudden, Marxism is revived, all western culture as we know it is abolished there and the Japanese decide to attack Pearl Harbor. Again.)
Yes, I know (;-)), A real live railgun will give any fps gamer who can pronounce "quake" a hard-on, but guys (I'm talking to the americans among us/.'ers), wouldn't it be nicer if your government was using YOUR taxmoney to do YOU some good? Get you more IT jobs? Encourage tech-oriented businesses with tax levys? Hell, give it to NASA and have them build a space elevator before China does, that'll be a sure way of giving all us geeks an even bigger erection...
All you have to do is look at [modern, developed, not-dirt-poor] self-oriented countries such as Australia or Germany to see how useful a taxdollar can be when put on the right track.
Okay. So on the CPU % Used / Theoretical CPU power you own The cray owns. Whoopee. Methinks that's a totally useless number. I mean, Engineering and efficiency is fun and all, but we don't write everything in Assembly now, do we? I'll put money even CRAY don't. Nobody'd get anything done that way.
How about doing the good'ol BANG FOR BUCK? A method whose benefits people can actually measure and enjoy?
Someone feel like dividing CPU benchmark by TCO?
A good TCO, including office space rent to park the setup. Including service and parts. Including finding, training and hiring the people who know how to run the setup. Including the amount of money you pay when your sysadmin[s] gets a better job offer and dump you on a week's notice. And of course, including downtime - especially the kind you get as punishment for not using off-the-shelf standard hardware (the other side of which, as someone here in an earlier post mentioned, is uber-expensive service contracts).
For people who're shopping for clusters and don't have latency on their minds, a PC-based beo cluster will probbably give the most horse per dollar, by a very, very, very long shot.
And people who shop for low-latency-interconnect superclusters tend to buy SGI origins or very big SUNs. Both companies having or being in the stages of letting their own UNIX push daisies in favor of... umm... yep. Linux.
Microsoft may seem like the opposite pole to open computing concepts (like open source, open standards, etc.) to some, and to an extent that's true.
What most people overlook is that Bill Gates is the Linus Trovalds of PC hardware.
Before MS, HARDWARE WAS PROPRIETARY. UNIX Machines had proprietary hardware. Macs had proprietary hardware. Mac wouldn't make IBM-compatible hardware, and IBM wouldn't make HP-compatible hardware, and specifications for some hardware for the purpose of driver-writing was not available.
Windows revolutionized this. (or rather made it possible for corps like Intel to start lobbying for standards and for concortiums to start emerging - think ISA, PCI, USB, etc).
If it weren't for Microsoft, EVERYTHING may not have been running on one unified platform. There may not have been such a boom of 3rd party hardware vendors. There wouldn't be an ATI and NVIDIA. Your IBM computer would still be using an IBM graphics chip. The PC may not have evolved as the universal platform we know it today. And Linus may not have written anything.
It's all assumptions and whatifs, but there is a good chance Linux owes its existance to Bill Gates winning the fight over Open Hardware with Apple (who still wants to sell us computers with welded hoods), IBM and whoever else competed with him in that neandarthal PC market of the 80s and early 90s.
First, you manage to put in place one of the strongest medical academic infrastructures on earth, with some of the best doctors around.
Then you develop this attitude where nobody cares about damn anything except for himself, his privacy and his own pocket. As mentalities break barriers of race, religion, neighborhood or whatever else, doctors, pharmacists, nurses and other medical staff are not immune.
Then you give a whole new meaning to the word "Sue" by building a whole industry around suing sidewalk engineers after you slipped on a bannana. A law industry that promptly regards the end-user's responsibility, whatever the case may be as sheer ZERO.
On top of that, you build a bizzare insurance industry that capitalizes on 2 things: 1. Punishing the MAJORITY of the doctors for the stupid mistakes that those [few] who don't give a damn, are stupid, or are just plain human do. 2. Punishing the MAJORITY of the public for the greedy, senseless, I-did-something-stupid-so-gimme-yer-money-lawsuit filing assholes.
If you polarize the world enough, you'd have two very extreme possibilities: 1. You will have doctors that make mistakes but mostly do their job and make your life better or 2. Unless you're so rich you don't bother counting smaller-than-5-figures-sums-of-money, you have either very expensive or very inexperienced doctors at your disposal, which make just SLIGHTLY LESS mistakes, and which pay you (probbably less than you overpay in the first place) if they DO make a mistake.
So collectively (by not using your electoral power to limit the damage which both dope-smoking-doctors and trigger-happy-lawsuiters can do), you're kicking your best doctors, your healthcare and your own tax-paying public [read: yourself] in the teeth, in the name of those who got hurt by one of the aforementioned parties for the benefit of some lawyers and insurance agents.
I'm not anti-American, I really respect America for its good sides, but as an outsider, I'm looking at how you all collectively screw each other over, and as objective as I can or cannot be, you're dumb.
The Ultima series died at 7.0 It's virtue lied in a combination of a HUMONGOUS open-ended, non-linear world with SO DAMN MANY non-generic niches, It was probbably the most replayable game in the world. I played 6 and 7 maybe 3 times each, and I just kept discovering more and more stuff I didn't find the previous times.
Then things started to go down. 7 Part II was nicer than 7 graphicswise, was as complex and full of niches as 7, but it was LINEAR. So much for a huge world you could explore at your leisure. You were now guided by the nose through the game.
Then came 8. Oh, the pain, the PAIN. Not only was it non-linear, it was DUMBED DOWN into oblivion. The game-world was no longer one large map.. rather, it was a series of "screens" you go from one to the other. 90% of the niches in the game unrelated to the plot were gone. Much of the gameplay was replaced by jumping puzzles that looked like a birdseye 2D tombraider-wannabe. And here, they put the good old Ultima atmosphere (with the mandolin music that followed when you were in the forest on the way to cove) to rest with 3 0.44 magnum shots to the forehead. Let's skip 8.
Enter 9. Gariott is no longer around. Still, 9 was a good try. Really, it was. The goal was in the right direction, and they were actually going for it. First, they put in the heaviest block, a 3D engine. Second, they got the atmosphere back, and they made an almost-successful attempt at bringing back the humongous world that was U7. But they fell short. There were no niches with side-quests and goodies to discover. There was no replayability. It was still linear. And there was no future - EA pulled the plug.
Then came UO, and EA decided they did not want me to be their client no more. They shut down all of Origin except for UO.
The genre was not completely lost though. Two titles by other companies prevailed in my consiousness:
Elder Scrolls3: Morrowind made a shot at a humongous world. They did manage to get that right. But they went astray. There was no Garriot. No Lord British. There was no atmosphere. It was just an endless [beautiful] world of immensely over-recycled content, unbalanced gameplay, flat-as-a-plank characters and utterly boring [and endless] fed-ex quests that required spending too much of the game time on travel. The company who made it just wasn't Origin, it lacked a guide. And the game was a flop.
The one light that did indeed shine bright in the genre was Gothic. I truly salute the guys who made it. While it posed a slightly different atmosphere than Ultima, It was immersingly wonderful. The world was huge. The story thick, unpredictable, brutal at times. Real-world trust-noone and fend-for-yourself style. Main storyline put aside, the game world was accessible in an unlinear fassion. And in a streak of genious, they took all the effort put into making the first game world, added a similar amount of effort to create a second, and had a world twice as big for Gothic II. Kudos guys.
Ultima genre aside, we come to the lancers. The wing-commander/privateer teams were stashed (and bought by M$), making Starlancer and Freelancer, games made by great devs, having the ability to soar, and trampled to garbage by executives with the intellect of a retarded coccaroach. Freelancer could have been a "Privateer 3", and could have borne the title proudly. It had it all. Graphics, missions, weapons, secret niches. All but a decision to force down the plot on you at square one, drive you faster than you'd like towards its end, forcing you to finish it, then having you stuck in a beautiful humongous and largely-unexplored galaxy, with NO quests or goals of any kind save for random encounters and randimized generic missions to "go discover it" and make money you no longer need. Woohoo. I'd love to meet the moron who made that call. Or the one saying you can't take more than one mission at a time. DAMN. What was THAT good for?
I take solace in the fact that the team is still together, and maybe the executive
Wrong. One size does not fit all. Not every attribute of one of these technologies is "good" or "bad" (as Americans like to view the world;-)), but "good for one purpose/application, bad for another". Example: The smaller BT transmitter is "bad" because it's short-range and low-bandwidth. That same attribute, it being small and weak, is "good" because it boasts lower power consumption, and emits less radiation. I prefer to be wearing a BT headset with a tiny 10-meter-range transmitter rather than nuking my brain with a WiFi one. And lugging a humongous 40 gram battery on it to boot.
You absolutely can't make a one-tech-fits-all. Your USBlueWiFiFire will come to pass, and by trying to compete with some of the existing rival technologies, take itself out of the race in competing with others.
The first and foremost rule of SciFi (and fantasy) is exactly this.
While a SciFi story tells of something that cannot happen in the real world (at least as of the time it is written), it will first set the rules, define what can and cannot be done. This can include adding technology that doesn't exist in the real world, yet-undiscovered scientific discoveries or even completely imaginary impossible concepts such as magic or the force.
But once the pieces are set, SciFi takes extraordinary care to play fair by those exact rules. The moment this unwritten law is broken, we, the spectators/readers, instantaneously lose interest.
Try and remember how you reacted in Matrix: Revolutions when we found out Neo can make a quadgizillion sentinels explode in the real world with sheer thought alone.
We lost contact with the movie at that moment. It became illogical, according to the rules it itself had set forth. It lost consistency. And in doing that, it lost us. Doing that in any form of SciFi/Fantasy work - whether movie, book or video-game instantly repels the spectator because he cannot put himself in the shoes of th ehero and follow any of the plot when the director/writer throws "Oh yah, we didn't tell you but the hero can destroy all the bad guys instantaneously with a twitch of a finger"-type twists.
We lose interest. Most SciFi writers/producers are well aware of this, and have been since the birth of the genre. It's anything but new.
I think you need to have a look at Liftwatch. There are a lot of announcements suchasthese. There are nanotube advancements almost every month, and a whole bunch of universities and corporations worldwide are throwing rather large sums at putting it under heavy research. A 1km cable with 2% CN loading was already constructed a while ago. Smaller stretches were already made with 5% loading at the time the NIAC phase II was written, and was mentioned in said paper.
You neither need to grow a 35000km buckytube, nor do you need to reach a 100% CN-loaded ribbon. Composites will be made with a higher and higher CN loading, and once a certain percentage is reached (feel free to check the NIAC 2 paper which draws this line quite clearly), you'll have elevator-worthy material. At the rate CN loading in composites has been increasing in the past decade or so, we should [hopefully] have elevator-worthy material in about 2 years.
Actually, a SE makes a significantly better, safer and cheaper inter-solar-system-transportaion-system than dirty bombs. It's not just a tool to escape orbit - it can take us to other planets. That's what's so genious about the idea.
There are two reasons for making it 91000km long when all you technically need is 35000km.
One: because you need a very large and unfeasible mass at the top if you want to balance 35000km of cable hanging below GEO with a weight located, say, 1 meter above it. You need a significantly smaller weight at the top if you want to balance it at 91000km.
You really should read up. Deploying a fully-rolled-up SE from up above is significantly easier than from down below.
The first SE'll be built by deploying a minimal strand from above, then sending up climbers that will thicken the ribbon, eventually reaching the desired strength. sending a fully-rolled-up SE using rockets is not feasible.
The second SE is a whole different matter. In a nutshell, you construct the second elevator completely on earth, spool it, send it up using the first elevator, and unspool it downwards.
Same goes for mars and moon cables. You'll be unspooling them from the top, hence they will pose significantly less problems than the first earth cable. If you look at the schedule in the NIAC stage I document, you'll see the mars cable design, delivery and installation was already seriously considered.
Actually, you could get 4 700MB CD's for the price you get a single 4.7GB DVD-R. And it's as true in the States as it is here in Israel.
I don't know what you're counting - amount of storage space or the quantity of plastic, but for those of us who're buying storage space, DVD-R's are roughly twice as cheap.
Very simple actually. At least as far as MOON colonists go. They can want sovereignty all they like. As long as they need you to keep sending them water, they'll have to do with whatever it is you tell them to do. AFAIK, they haven't discovered water on the moon yet (though IIRC there might be some on the poles). Even then, I doubt they'll reach anything that even reminds of self-sufficiency anywhere in the foreseeable future. Think food, clothing, raw material such as plastics, rubber, silicon and metals, skilled craftsmen and knowhow in god knows how many crafts and sciences. Entertainment. Manufacturing capability. Transportation. Internet access. Computer hardware. Need I continue?
Add to that the fact that NASA or whoever won't send people off the street to colonize the moon or whatever other rock. They'll hand-pick people whose loyalty is not in question. Had I been them, I definitely would.
So if that's what keeps you up at night, I really envy you. Somehow, I just don't see that happening.
I'm a long-time hardcore gamer, and if anything, since gaming challenged hollywood and the multibillion dollar market, games took 2 steps ahead in terms of graphics and storrytelling (quite a few titles I can recall host hollywood-class voice actors). The problem lies in the 3 steps back the games took in complexity, technicallity and everything else that requires the gamer to actually use his brain. For me at least that spells L-E-S-S-F-U-N.
What's happening today is a collective takeover by large corps over many successful indipendant game makers, game makers who didn't make mass money but made very good games, at least as I, not an arcade gamer, am concerned. Said corps couldn't care less about me, as I'm not where the big money lies. The big money lies in pointa-clicka-no-thinka couch-potato arcade games, aka console games.
While earlier the arcade market co-existed with the more sophisticated PC game market, the big producers are all for buying out every last successful PC brand and its developer, and riding that brand into yet-another-dumbed-down-arcade-title. And since they're wielding the heavy paychecks, there's no way to resist them (other than to cause the vast majority of consumers to stop buying consoles, which doesn't seem like it's going to happen anytime soon).
I was outrages by Might and Magic 9. A wonderful technical hack-and-slash game that successfully earned its bread for 15 years. I was saddened by Heroes of Might and Magic 4, which looked like HOMM3 only without half the widgets. I was frustrated at Ion Storm having sold out to a... console "RPG" (where you're done leveling up on the second level of the game, because the whole XP and leveling up scheme was too much on console gamers. Sure, Warren Spector could go on all day with how they wanted to make the "open endedness" the main feature of the game. Right. Warren Spector knows as well as we do that Deus Ex 1 was designed to be a good game. Deus Ex 2 was designed to milk money). Unreal 2 wasn't even a game. It was an engine demo. Again, someone who wants money trying to call his product a "game". Wolf in sheep's clothing. And the list goes on. Black Isle went under, and with it all hopes for not only technical, but sophisticated, well-made RPG's like Torment or the first two Fallouts. Freelancer could have been a wonderful technical game, but some design decisions to dumb it down (not being able to take more than 1 mission at a time, forcing the plot on you _before_ you could explore the world), killed the game.
Since Deus Ex 2, I really can't name one _good_ sophisticated game that hit the market. I can name a lot of glamorous-graphics ones like Max Payne II, but sophisticated? Zilch. Nada. Not a single one.
And reading the article above lays my suspicions out clearly: people with my expectation of a game are a dying breed, and 'good' sophisticated games - From Star Control 2, to Ultima 7, to Privateer and to Deus Ex 1 - won't be around no more.
The recording industry didn't take one _little_ thing into account - legislation in the countries that are supposed to be blocked from distribution by having different region codes.
So the whole region thing is not supported in some countries. I happen to live in one, a small country called Israel. The outcome? 1. DVD Players legally sold in an already patched-to-RPC1 (region-free) state. 2. DVD Videotheques holding DVDs from just about every region code out there, 7 and 8 not excluded. 3. The few players that are sold in RPC2 state are sold with written instructions from the supplier on how to patch them to RPC1. In case you can't read, their help line will be happy to instruct you on how it's done. 4. Locally-licensed DVD's of hollywood films carry a region icon (which says region 2). A simple inspection with any ripping software confirms there is no encryption on the DVD.
I'll bet this is ignored by the law of most east-european countries, at least half west-european countries, and I don't even think I need to mention South America and the East.
And that's without mentioning the fact that any 6-year-old with a DVDR, CloneDVD and a certain 3rd party app I won't mention can reproduce a copyrighted DVD in less time than it takes me to write this comment.
So I fully agree with Mr. Blockbuster. The whole region idea was a bad idea which may or may not have initially set piracy back a bit, may or may not have returned the investment and saved a penny or two for the MPAA, and is nothing more than a complete nuisance today in most of the sane world. A little dialog box in CloneDVD or wherever saying "Reproducing this content is illegal in the United States. You are responsible for your actions. Press CANCEL to abort now or OK to continue" - like Roxio's CD Copier gives out for Audio CD's - would save everyone the time and hassle. Everyone INCLUDING the MPAA.
Again, if you only read the links, you'd have had the answers. First, you build large space craft in space using the elevator. Second, you build a Mars cable on Earth, spool it and raise it to the top using the elevator. Third, You slingshot it to Mars using the earth Elevator. Fourth, you unspool the mars cable above mars, lower it and dock it. You now have a 2-way slingshot transportation system requiring only little fuel to maneuver. You don't need fuel to enter/exit the atmospheres either. You've got the elevators.
Simple, cheap, efficient and feasible.
This is all yet-undone major engineering hurdles, but none of it requires any scientific breakthroughs.
Climbers won't carry fuel. They'll run on electric motors with power beamed to them from one or more (probbably more) ground stations.
There's two existing technologies to do this - Microwave and Laser. MW gives you 0.5% power up top of what you spent beaming from the bottom. Laser gives you a whopping 2%. That's more than enough to get 20 tons (and later on even a Kiloton on the bigger 10^6 cables) 35 thousand klicks up. No additional breakthroughs needed on this end.
Conventional rocketry will never be subject to the economy of scale. Too expensive. SE will.
Besides, supersonic passenger jets and Space Elevators are a bad comparison. In fact, you have it all upside down. You should be comparing the shuttle to the concorde, and the SE to the jumbo. First off, The tenth concorde is as expensive as the first. The tenth SE costs a fraction of the first, because - you can use one elevator to raise another in almost no-time. Then, and here's where you're off, A concorde has a slightly slower alternative that people find sufficient, and that costs significantly less. That's why there's 1200 747's and 12 concordes out there flying.
Next, you're assuming there will be the same amount of orbit-access demand when it costs 500$/kg or 100$/kg as there is now when it costs in the 5-digit/kg. DEAD WRONG. The cheaper the price, the more entities seeking space access as an option for their endeavor will open up their checkbooks. What you have is a completely untapped market of organizations - from poorer countries needing satellites, to research, low-grav-manufacturing of chips and medicine (offer a low-enough price and it'll be cheaper to make stuff up there than build centrifuges on earth), Communication satellite networks, power-beaming to remote and inaccessible areas that today require flying in fuel, satellites sent via SE will not need to be overengineered in a way that doubles their cost just to withstand liftoff shaking.
And it doesn't end there.
A SE is also a giant slingshot, making the entire solar system accessible without the need of large-scale LOX/Solid-fuel-rocket/ION/Nuke engines. All you have to do is go to the top and let go. A 91000km SE will slingshot you as far as Jupiter.
You'll get totally new markets - asteroid mining, settling the solar system (more real estate = more population = larger economies = more money to go around etc. etc. etc.).
The SE makes more financial sense than the computer or the automobile. It's a MASSIVE enabling technology that will make possible stuff you and I can't even imagine yet, the same as the people who harnessed electricity 100 years ago didn't exactly have The Internet or global cell phone networks in mind.
It's just a matter of who'll understand it first. NASA, Europe, China or India. Currently, I think China is in the lead.
One good way to get from Europe to the US is to get in a row boat and start rowing. Another is to go work someplace for a month and use the salary to buy a plane ticket.
NASA's rowing. I've taken the time to read the Space Elevator Phase II NIAC paper. For a good many years now, composite fabric with a higher and higher percentage of carbon nanotubes loading(hence a higher and higher tensile strength) is produced each year. Moreover, each year the scale of production jumps higher and in a very non-linear fasion. They were at 5% CN loading in March 2003 (as of the writing of the NIAC Phase II summary paper), promising 15% in a few months and techniques that will allow 25% and higher. According to the current estimates, this will get us to elevator-worthy fiber in mid-2006.
If NASA really wanted to get to Europa, they'd funnel the 10 bil at CN research, building power-transmission lasers, hammering out the political hurdles and building a working elevator. Then they could send a manned boomer sub to Europa if they wanted, probbably for less money than this new idea of a white elephant.
For those too lazy to go read the paper, here's the piece that'll interest us:
"The University of Kentucky has published and patented on fibers 5 km long with 1% carbon nanotube loading that achieved a tensile strength increase from 0.7 GPa to 1.1 GPa. Recent results have included producing fibers with tensile strengths of 5GPa with ~5% CNT loading. Steel has a strength of 3 GPa and Kevlar is at 3.7 GPa. This process used multi-walled carbon nanotubes. This implies a roughly 100 GPa carbon nanotube strength or an interfacial adhesion roughly 1/3 of theoretical. However, we must remember that in the current process only the outer nanotubes are being functionalized and attached to, the inner tubes are not being fully utilized. Understanding this implies that by finding a method to utilize the inner shells would enable production of material performing close to theoretical maximum. A complimentary technique now being developed at Rensealler Polytechnic Institute allows for the pinning of the walls in the multi-walled tubes together so that all of the tubes can be used. Techniques at Foster Miller will also allow for dispersion and implementation of the carbon nanotubes in the composite at much higher loadings. Loadings over 25% have been demonstrated and higher levels are possible. By combining these techniques the resulting material should have a tensile strength near theory of 150 GPa for 50% loading. Material at 12 GPa (4 times stringer than steel) is expected in the coming months and the full strength materials should be available within two years at the current research rate."
"Hear that, NASA? That is the sound of inevitablity..."
I use outlook everywhere because I need the calendar. If they could provide a simple calendar program, like the Good'Ol palm desktop, they'd open the door for quite a lot of people. I don't mean a large-scale office multi-user integrated calendar solution like MS Exchange. Sure, you could get to that later on, build it on top of MySQL or something, I mean something simple I can use at home for myself. Something that people with non-corporate needs can use to organize their life (These people _do_ exist you know. One or two of them.)
Of course you'd be fighting an uphill battle to set some form of open standard for calendar/mail/addressbook syncing. An API for handhelds/smartphones to use (as opposed to "Does it sync with Outlook?"), Microsoft would be clobbering you on the head every step of the way - Windows Mobile 200X will not support you out of the box, Outlook will continue shipping with PDA's, ActiveSync will work flawlessly with Outlook and they'd be paying non-MS mobile vendors (like palm) to support Outlook-syncing in their (even non-MS) OS and not support alternative sync standards.
And yet, if such an API did come to exist, the Open Source community would complement the software support that the PalmOS/Windows Mobile/Symbian/Linux handhelds/smartphones will lack to sync to the desktop, not to mention the desktop software itself.
In my view, FireBird seems like the mother of all places to start pushing such an API.
For those who don't understand what "Trusted" Computing, DRM, NGSCB and friends are all about, but do want to be awakened to reality - here's a red pill.
What developers should however do when making a sequel, especially when they intend to ride the wave of the previous installment of the game, is look closely at what their clients like about it, and not go and remove it.
Have a look at 3DO and Might and Magic 9. The same hack&slash pushed this game into a 9th (!!) title, having a very solid clientelle and fan base.
Then, right after #8, someone up in management decided he wants to go do what the mass-selling games do. Let's transform it into a simple-to-use "RPG" game that the masses can understand, he said. And so they did.
It may have been wiser to do such a stupid experiment on a new title (like they did when they decided on a genre-change - with Heroes of Might and Magic - which went quite well, and ended them with two hot-selling brands) rather than dumb down a game that was bought for being technical hack&slash and alienate your own paying crown, in search of some dream of the masses chasing you with money.
The mistake managers make here is thinking that many new people will buy your game in addition to those who bought the last 8 titles. They're wrong of course. Take away what people liked for 8 titles, and they won't buy the 9th. You end up relying solely on your hypothetical newly-added clientelle. In M&M9, they stayed hypothetical.
Same goes for Unreal 2, or better yet, Deus-Ex 2, being released now. DE1 was one of the best games of all time. Then Mr. Spector sold out to a big paycheck to make a console shooter and slap the DE2 title on it, dumbed down the RPG elements of the game (which is what made it stand out from the rest of dozens of shooters on the shelves 2 years ago), removed reloading, replaced ammo with universal ammo (a way of saying either all your weapons work, or none of them do). Between the lines this reads: you never run out of ammo. Whoopee.
This was done at the expense of what I suspect will be alienating the entire DE1 PC crowd.
Furthermore, where DE1 broke ice, DE2 will mingle with the crowd, be like all other console shooters, and disappear from the shelves 4 months later. I can understand why his producer takes the "exploit, trash and throw away" attitude at Spector's titles. After all, corporations are in it for a quick buck. But for someone who may have an interest in preserving the title/brand (not to mention releasing yet another one) this seems a clear no-no way to go.
Looked what happened to Unreal 2. If, that is, you remember it ever came out. In less than a year, the game utterly disappeared.
So should game devs listen to their own crowd? If that crowd paid them for making a previous title, listening to them and understanding what they paid for is the sole ticket to making them pay again.
>> Just from the physics of a unicycle wouldn't rapid stopping be a problem?
Nope. Well, depends.
If rapidly stopping the vehicle is what concerns you, the rider is still perfectly fine after the vehicle abruptly stopped and he's arcing through the air, flailing his hands in all directions.
Rider abruptly stopping by hitting hard surface at 20mph... ahm.. yep. It probbably would.
Slashdot Mirror
One - an update on what you said - composites have already been made with 5% (a one-mile-stretch IIRC) as of March 2003 when the NIAC phase II paper was written. 25% was talked about here on slashdot a few months back, I'm too lazy to go look up the link. These things are developing rapidly, and a lot of materials labs in universities and corps all over the world are very very busy on it, and backed by very intensive funding (think billions if not tens of billions).
Second, I think you misunderstand the difference between evolution and revolution. Let's take hard-drives for an example. Evolving a circa-1990 40Meg HD into a current 400Gig one is evolution. It required some "minor" revolutions like pixie dust, but all in all it was a process of "find bottleneck, fix, repeat". Nanostorage like IBM's millepede is revolution. It does not include employing engineers to overcome technical hurdles in the "we can't cram more gigs on this platter". It involves canning the technology and coming up with something entirely new.
When you're after evolution, you know where you're headed, you just have to figure out how to get there.
When you're after revolution, you need to figure out where you want to go first.
Space Elevators require evolution in material sciences, and the 386 example was a very good one. We know what we want to do, we just need to figure out the "how" bit. And if the last 20 years taught us anything, it's that we will.
Being someone who is currently moving his life and family from one side of the world (Israel) to the other (Australia), I can clearly point out that as nostalgically charming as moving into space may sound,
** There is more to making such a decision than the presence (or lack thereof) of vaccum around the place we call home **.
Questions such as these arise:
* What are the prospects of a quality life there? (which leads to further questions like how we measure quality of life - by the amount of green around our house? the amount of accessible online gadget stores that ship to our location?)
* What are the prospects of economic prosperity there? Taxation? Salaries?
* Can I work in my chosen field there?
* Can I practice my recreation activities there? (Think diving, snowboarding, etc.)
* What kind of mentality do the people who live there share?
* WHAT ARE THE ALTERNATIVES?
Hell, that's just the tip of the iceberg. Would I move into space? Tell me what's waiting for me there and what I'm running from here for starters, and I'll consider it.
The only people who'd answer such a question offhand are people who are either miserable with their current lives, don't have any, or are very deep into their fantasy worlds.
That kind of problem can usually be solved using much simpler methods.
Is it just me or is the US on some utterly bizarre wild goose chase, spending (read: WASTING) trillions developing military and weapon technology to outdistance itself technologically from other world armies by a factor of 100 instead of (the supposedly insufficient) factor of 50? Just WHO are they going to fight with their Seawolf subs, Aircraft Carriers, railguns, and that entire quadgizillion-consuming army? Terrorists? North Korea? Europe?
/.'ers), wouldn't it be nicer if your government was using YOUR taxmoney to do YOU some good?
Take a look at the UK for an example. They opted for a small fleet of SMALL aircraft carriers that are designed to rush in and handle local skirmishes and cost a helluvalot cheaper than their American leviathan counterparts and their trailing battlegroups (which are there just in case the Soviet Block comes back together and stops being poor all of a sudden, Marxism is revived, all western culture as we know it is abolished there and the Japanese decide to attack Pearl Harbor. Again.)
Yes, I know (;-)), A real live railgun will give any fps gamer who can pronounce "quake" a hard-on, but guys (I'm talking to the americans among us
Get you more IT jobs? Encourage tech-oriented businesses with tax levys? Hell, give it to NASA and have them build a space elevator before China does, that'll be a sure way of giving all us geeks an even bigger erection...
All you have to do is look at [modern, developed, not-dirt-poor] self-oriented countries such as Australia or Germany to see how useful a taxdollar can be when put on the right track.
here.
Okay. So on the
... umm... yep. Linux.
CPU % Used / Theoretical CPU power you own
The cray owns. Whoopee.
Methinks that's a totally useless number. I mean, Engineering and efficiency is fun and all, but we don't write everything in Assembly now, do we? I'll put money even CRAY don't. Nobody'd get anything done that way.
How about doing the good'ol BANG FOR BUCK? A method whose benefits people can actually measure and enjoy?
Someone feel like dividing CPU benchmark by TCO?
A good TCO, including office space rent to park the setup. Including service and parts. Including finding, training and hiring the people who know how to run the setup. Including the amount of money you pay when your sysadmin[s] gets a better job offer and dump you on a week's notice. And of course, including downtime - especially the kind you get as punishment for not using off-the-shelf standard hardware (the other side of which, as someone here in an earlier post mentioned, is uber-expensive service contracts).
For people who're shopping for clusters and don't have latency on their minds, a PC-based beo cluster will probbably give the most horse per dollar, by a very, very, very long shot.
And people who shop for low-latency-interconnect superclusters tend to buy SGI origins or very big SUNs. Both companies having or being in the stages of letting their own UNIX push daisies in favor of
Way to go, Mr. CTO. FUD on.
Microsoft may seem like the opposite pole to open computing concepts (like open source, open standards, etc.) to some, and to an extent that's true.
What most people overlook is that Bill Gates is the Linus Trovalds of PC hardware.
Before MS, HARDWARE WAS PROPRIETARY. UNIX Machines had proprietary hardware. Macs had proprietary hardware. Mac wouldn't make IBM-compatible hardware, and IBM wouldn't make HP-compatible hardware, and specifications for some hardware for the purpose of driver-writing was not available.
Windows revolutionized this. (or rather made it possible for corps like Intel to start lobbying for standards and for concortiums to start emerging - think ISA, PCI, USB, etc).
If it weren't for Microsoft, EVERYTHING may not have been running on one unified platform. There may not have been such a boom of 3rd party hardware vendors. There wouldn't be an ATI and NVIDIA. Your IBM computer would still be using an IBM graphics chip. The PC may not have evolved as the universal platform we know it today. And Linus may not have written anything.
It's all assumptions and whatifs, but there is a good chance Linux owes its existance to Bill Gates winning the fight over Open Hardware with Apple (who still wants to sell us computers with welded hoods), IBM and whoever else competed with him in that neandarthal PC market of the 80s and early 90s.
First, you manage to put in place one of the strongest medical academic infrastructures on earth, with some of the best doctors around.
Then you develop this attitude where nobody cares about damn anything except for himself, his privacy and his own pocket. As mentalities break barriers of race, religion, neighborhood or whatever else, doctors, pharmacists, nurses and other medical staff are not immune.
Then you give a whole new meaning to the word "Sue" by building a whole industry around suing sidewalk engineers after you slipped on a bannana. A law industry that promptly regards the end-user's responsibility, whatever the case may be as sheer ZERO.
On top of that, you build a bizzare insurance industry that capitalizes on 2 things:
1. Punishing the MAJORITY of the doctors for the stupid mistakes that those [few] who don't give a damn, are stupid, or are just plain human do.
2. Punishing the MAJORITY of the public for the greedy, senseless, I-did-something-stupid-so-gimme-yer-money-lawsuit filing assholes.
If you polarize the world enough, you'd have two very extreme possibilities:
1. You will have doctors that make mistakes but mostly do their job and make your life better
or
2. Unless you're so rich you don't bother counting smaller-than-5-figures-sums-of-money, you have either very expensive or very inexperienced doctors at your disposal, which make just SLIGHTLY LESS mistakes, and which pay you (probbably less than you overpay in the first place) if they DO make a mistake.
So collectively (by not using your electoral power to limit the damage which both dope-smoking-doctors and trigger-happy-lawsuiters can do), you're kicking your best doctors, your healthcare and your own tax-paying public [read: yourself] in the teeth, in the name of those who got hurt by one of the aforementioned parties for the benefit of some lawyers and insurance agents.
I'm not anti-American, I really respect America for its good sides, but as an outsider, I'm looking at how you all collectively screw each other over, and as objective as I can or cannot be, you're dumb.
The Ultima series died at 7.0
It's virtue lied in a combination of a HUMONGOUS open-ended, non-linear world with SO DAMN MANY non-generic niches, It was probbably the most replayable game in the world. I played 6 and 7 maybe 3 times each, and I just kept discovering more and more stuff I didn't find the previous times.
Then things started to go down. 7 Part II was nicer than 7 graphicswise, was as complex and full of niches as 7, but it was LINEAR. So much for a huge world you could explore at your leisure. You were now guided by the nose through the game.
Then came 8. Oh, the pain, the PAIN. Not only was it non-linear, it was DUMBED DOWN into oblivion. The game-world was no longer one large map.. rather, it was a series of "screens" you go from one to the other. 90% of the niches in the game unrelated to the plot were gone. Much of the gameplay was replaced by jumping puzzles that looked like a birdseye 2D tombraider-wannabe. And here, they put the good old Ultima atmosphere (with the mandolin music that followed when you were in the forest on the way to cove) to rest with 3 0.44 magnum shots to the forehead. Let's skip 8.
Enter 9. Gariott is no longer around. Still, 9 was a good try. Really, it was. The goal was in the right direction, and they were actually going for it. First, they put in the heaviest block, a 3D engine. Second, they got the atmosphere back, and they made an almost-successful attempt at bringing back the humongous world that was U7. But they fell short. There were no niches with side-quests and goodies to discover. There was no replayability. It was still linear. And there was no future - EA pulled the plug.
Then came UO, and EA decided they did not want me to be their client no more. They shut down all of Origin except for UO.
The genre was not completely lost though.
Two titles by other companies prevailed in my consiousness:
Elder Scrolls3: Morrowind made a shot at a humongous world. They did manage to get that right. But they went astray. There was no Garriot. No Lord British. There was no atmosphere. It was just an endless [beautiful] world of immensely over-recycled content, unbalanced gameplay, flat-as-a-plank characters and utterly boring [and endless] fed-ex quests that required spending too much of the game time on travel. The company who made it just wasn't Origin, it lacked a guide. And the game was a flop.
The one light that did indeed shine bright in the genre was Gothic. I truly salute the guys who made it. While it posed a slightly different atmosphere than Ultima, It was immersingly wonderful. The world was huge. The story thick, unpredictable, brutal at times. Real-world trust-noone and fend-for-yourself style. Main storyline put aside, the game world was accessible in an unlinear fassion.
And in a streak of genious, they took all the effort put into making the first game world, added a similar amount of effort to create a second, and had a world twice as big for Gothic II. Kudos guys.
Ultima genre aside, we come to the lancers. The wing-commander/privateer teams were stashed (and bought by M$), making Starlancer and Freelancer, games made by great devs, having the ability to soar, and trampled to garbage by executives with the intellect of a retarded coccaroach. Freelancer could have been a "Privateer 3", and could have borne the title proudly. It had it all. Graphics, missions, weapons, secret niches.
All but a decision to force down the plot on you at square one, drive you faster than you'd like towards its end, forcing you to finish it, then having you stuck in a beautiful humongous and largely-unexplored galaxy, with NO quests or goals of any kind save for random encounters and randimized generic missions to "go discover it" and make money you no longer need. Woohoo.
I'd love to meet the moron who made that call.
Or the one saying you can't take more than one mission at a time. DAMN. What was THAT good for?
I take solace in the fact that the team is still together, and maybe the executive
Wrong. ;-)), but "good for one purpose/application, bad for another".
One size does not fit all. Not every attribute of one of these technologies is "good" or "bad" (as Americans like to view the world
Example: The smaller BT transmitter is "bad" because it's short-range and low-bandwidth. That same attribute, it being small and weak, is "good" because it boasts lower power consumption, and emits less radiation. I prefer to be wearing a BT headset with a tiny 10-meter-range transmitter rather than nuking my brain with a WiFi one. And lugging a humongous 40 gram battery on it to boot.
You absolutely can't make a one-tech-fits-all. Your USBlueWiFiFire will come to pass, and by trying to compete with some of the existing rival technologies, take itself out of the race in competing with others.
Cheers.
The first and foremost rule of SciFi (and fantasy) is exactly this.
While a SciFi story tells of something that cannot happen in the real world (at least as of the time it is written), it will first set the rules, define what can and cannot be done. This can include adding technology that doesn't exist in the real world, yet-undiscovered scientific discoveries or even completely imaginary impossible concepts such as magic or the force.
But once the pieces are set, SciFi takes extraordinary care to play fair by those exact rules. The moment this unwritten law is broken, we, the spectators/readers, instantaneously lose interest.
Try and remember how you reacted in Matrix: Revolutions when we found out Neo can make a quadgizillion sentinels explode in the real world with sheer thought alone.
We lost contact with the movie at that moment. It became illogical, according to the rules it itself had set forth. It lost consistency. And in doing that, it lost us. Doing that in any form of SciFi/Fantasy work - whether movie, book or video-game instantly repels the spectator because he cannot put himself in the shoes of th ehero and follow any of the plot when the director/writer throws "Oh yah, we didn't tell you but the hero can destroy all the bad guys instantaneously with a twitch of a finger"-type twists.
We lose interest. Most SciFi writers/producers are well aware of this, and have been since the birth of the genre. It's anything but new.
I think you need to have a look at Liftwatch. There are a lot of announcements such as these. There are nanotube advancements almost every month, and a whole bunch of universities and corporations worldwide are throwing rather large sums at putting it under heavy research. A 1km cable with 2% CN loading was already constructed a while ago. Smaller stretches were already made with 5% loading at the time the NIAC phase II was written, and was mentioned in said paper.
You neither need to grow a 35000km buckytube, nor do you need to reach a 100% CN-loaded ribbon.
Composites will be made with a higher and higher CN loading, and once a certain percentage is reached (feel free to check the NIAC 2 paper which draws this line quite clearly), you'll have elevator-worthy material. At the rate CN loading in composites has been increasing in the past decade or so, we should [hopefully] have elevator-worthy material in about 2 years.
Cheers.
Actually, a SE makes a significantly better, safer and cheaper inter-solar-system-transportaion-system than dirty bombs. It's not just a tool to escape orbit - it can take us to other planets. That's what's so genious about the idea.
There are two reasons for making it 91000km long when all you technically need is 35000km.
One: because you need a very large and unfeasible mass at the top if you want to balance 35000km of cable hanging below GEO with a weight located, say, 1 meter above it. You need a significantly smaller weight at the top if you want to balance it at 91000km.
Two: (which brings us back to our point of discussion) If you go as far as 91000km, you can slingshot payloads as far as jupiter and its moons. If you build even higher, at 140000km you can get as far as pluto.
Of course, the first thing you'd want to send to your destination is a pre-fabricated and spooled SE to deploy there, so you can send stuff back...
You really should read up. Deploying a fully-rolled-up SE from up above is significantly easier than from down below.
The first SE'll be built by deploying a minimal strand from above, then sending up climbers that will thicken the ribbon, eventually reaching the desired strength. sending a fully-rolled-up SE using rockets is not feasible.
The second SE is a whole different matter. In a nutshell, you construct the second elevator completely on earth, spool it, send it up using the first elevator, and unspool it downwards.
Same goes for mars and moon cables. You'll be unspooling them from the top, hence they will pose significantly less problems than the first earth cable. If you look at the schedule in the NIAC stage I document, you'll see the mars cable design, delivery and installation was already seriously considered.
Actually, you could get 4 700MB CD's for the price you get a single 4.7GB DVD-R. And it's as true in the States as it is here in Israel.
I don't know what you're counting - amount of storage space or the quantity of plastic, but for those of us who're buying storage space, DVD-R's are roughly twice as cheap.
Very simple actually. At least as far as MOON colonists go. They can want sovereignty all they like. As long as they need you to keep sending them water, they'll have to do with whatever it is you tell them to do. AFAIK, they haven't discovered water on the moon yet (though IIRC there might be some on the poles). Even then, I doubt they'll reach anything that even reminds of self-sufficiency anywhere in the foreseeable future. Think food, clothing, raw material such as plastics, rubber, silicon and metals, skilled craftsmen and knowhow in god knows how many crafts and sciences. Entertainment. Manufacturing capability. Transportation. Internet access. Computer hardware. Need I continue?
Add to that the fact that NASA or whoever won't send people off the street to colonize the moon or whatever other rock. They'll hand-pick people whose loyalty is not in question. Had I been them, I definitely would.
So if that's what keeps you up at night, I really envy you.
Somehow, I just don't see that happening.
I'm a long-time hardcore gamer, and if anything, since gaming challenged hollywood and the multibillion dollar market, games took 2 steps ahead in terms of graphics and storrytelling (quite a few titles I can recall host hollywood-class voice actors).
... console "RPG" (where you're done leveling up on the second level of the game, because the whole XP and leveling up scheme was too much on console gamers. Sure, Warren Spector could go on all day with how they wanted to make the "open endedness" the main feature of the game. Right. Warren Spector knows as well as we do that Deus Ex 1 was designed to be a good game. Deus Ex 2 was designed to milk money).
The problem lies in the 3 steps back the games took in complexity, technicallity and everything else that requires the gamer to actually use his brain. For me at least that spells L-E-S-S-F-U-N.
What's happening today is a collective takeover by large corps over many successful indipendant game makers, game makers who didn't make mass money but made very good games, at least as I, not an arcade gamer, am concerned. Said corps couldn't care less about me, as I'm not where the big money lies. The big money lies in pointa-clicka-no-thinka couch-potato arcade games, aka console games.
While earlier the arcade market co-existed with the more sophisticated PC game market, the big producers are all for buying out every last successful PC brand and its developer, and riding that brand into yet-another-dumbed-down-arcade-title. And since they're wielding the heavy paychecks, there's no way to resist them (other than to cause the vast majority of consumers to stop buying consoles, which doesn't seem like it's going to happen anytime soon).
I was outrages by Might and Magic 9. A wonderful technical hack-and-slash game that successfully earned its bread for 15 years.
I was saddened by Heroes of Might and Magic 4, which looked like HOMM3 only without half the widgets.
I was frustrated at Ion Storm having sold out to a
Unreal 2 wasn't even a game. It was an engine demo. Again, someone who wants money trying to call his product a "game". Wolf in sheep's clothing.
And the list goes on. Black Isle went under, and with it all hopes for not only technical, but sophisticated, well-made RPG's like Torment or the first two Fallouts.
Freelancer could have been a wonderful technical game, but some design decisions to dumb it down (not being able to take more than 1 mission at a time, forcing the plot on you _before_ you could explore the world), killed the game.
Since Deus Ex 2, I really can't name one _good_ sophisticated game that hit the market. I can name a lot of glamorous-graphics ones like Max Payne II, but sophisticated? Zilch. Nada. Not a single one.
And reading the article above lays my suspicions out clearly: people with my expectation of a game are a dying breed, and 'good' sophisticated games - From Star Control 2, to Ultima 7, to Privateer and to Deus Ex 1 - won't be around no more.
Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust.
The recording industry didn't take one _little_ thing into account - legislation in the countries that are supposed to be blocked from distribution by having different region codes.
So the whole region thing is not supported in some countries. I happen to live in one, a small country called Israel.
The outcome?
1. DVD Players legally sold in an already patched-to-RPC1 (region-free) state.
2. DVD Videotheques holding DVDs from just about every region code out there, 7 and 8 not excluded.
3. The few players that are sold in RPC2 state are sold with written instructions from the supplier on how to patch them to RPC1. In case you can't read, their help line will be happy to instruct you on how it's done.
4. Locally-licensed DVD's of hollywood films carry a region icon (which says region 2). A simple inspection with any ripping software confirms there is no encryption on the DVD.
I'll bet this is ignored by the law of most east-european countries, at least half west-european countries, and I don't even think I need to mention South America and the East.
And that's without mentioning the fact that any 6-year-old with a DVDR, CloneDVD and a certain 3rd party app I won't mention can reproduce a copyrighted DVD in less time than it takes me to write this comment.
So I fully agree with Mr. Blockbuster. The whole region idea was a bad idea which may or may not have initially set piracy back a bit, may or may not have returned the investment and saved a penny or two for the MPAA, and is nothing more than a complete nuisance today in most of the sane world. A little dialog box in CloneDVD or wherever saying "Reproducing this content is illegal in the United States. You are responsible for your actions. Press CANCEL to abort now or OK to continue" - like Roxio's CD Copier gives out for Audio CD's - would save everyone the time and hassle. Everyone INCLUDING the MPAA.
My 2 cents.
Again, if you only read the links, you'd have had the answers.
First, you build large space craft in space using the elevator.
Second, you build a Mars cable on Earth, spool it and raise it to the top using the elevator.
Third, You slingshot it to Mars using the earth Elevator.
Fourth, you unspool the mars cable above mars, lower it and dock it. You now have a 2-way slingshot transportation system requiring only little fuel to maneuver. You don't need fuel to enter/exit the atmospheres either. You've got the elevators.
Simple, cheap, efficient and feasible.
This is all yet-undone major engineering hurdles, but none of it requires any scientific breakthroughs.
Climbers won't carry fuel. They'll run on electric motors with power beamed to them from one or more (probbably more) ground stations.
There's two existing technologies to do this - Microwave and Laser. MW gives you 0.5% power up top of what you spent beaming from the bottom. Laser gives you a whopping 2%. That's more than enough to get 20 tons (and later on even a Kiloton on the bigger 10^6 cables) 35 thousand klicks up. No additional breakthroughs needed on this end.
Your arguments don't hold water mate.
Conventional rocketry will never be subject to the economy of scale. Too expensive. SE will.
Besides, supersonic passenger jets and Space Elevators are a bad comparison. In fact, you have it all upside down. You should be comparing the shuttle to the concorde, and the SE to the jumbo.
First off,
The tenth concorde is as expensive as the first.
The tenth SE costs a fraction of the first, because - you can use one elevator to raise another in almost no-time.
Then, and here's where you're off, A concorde has a slightly slower alternative that people find sufficient, and that costs significantly less. That's why there's 1200 747's and 12 concordes out there flying.
Next, you're assuming there will be the same amount of orbit-access demand when it costs 500$/kg or 100$/kg as there is now when it costs in the 5-digit/kg.
DEAD WRONG.
The cheaper the price, the more entities seeking space access as an option for their endeavor will open up their checkbooks. What you have is a completely untapped market of organizations - from poorer countries needing satellites, to research, low-grav-manufacturing of chips and medicine (offer a low-enough price and it'll be cheaper to make stuff up there than build centrifuges on earth), Communication satellite networks, power-beaming to remote and inaccessible areas that today require flying in fuel, satellites sent via SE will not need to be overengineered in a way that doubles their cost just to withstand liftoff shaking.
And it doesn't end there.
A SE is also a giant slingshot, making the entire solar system accessible without the need of large-scale LOX/Solid-fuel-rocket/ION/Nuke engines. All you have to do is go to the top and let go. A 91000km SE will slingshot you as far as Jupiter.
You'll get totally new markets - asteroid mining, settling the solar system (more real estate = more population = larger economies = more money to go around etc. etc. etc.).
The SE makes more financial sense than the computer or the automobile. It's a MASSIVE enabling technology that will make possible stuff you and I can't even imagine yet, the same as the people who harnessed electricity 100 years ago didn't exactly have The Internet or global cell phone networks in mind.
It's just a matter of who'll understand it first. NASA, Europe, China or India. Currently, I think China is in the lead.
One good way to get from Europe to the US is to get in a row boat and start rowing.
Another is to go work someplace for a month and use the salary to buy a plane ticket.
NASA's rowing. I've taken the time to read the Space Elevator Phase II NIAC paper. For a good many years now, composite fabric with a higher and higher percentage of carbon nanotubes loading(hence a higher and higher tensile strength) is produced each year. Moreover, each year the scale of production jumps higher and in a very non-linear fasion. They were at 5% CN loading in March 2003 (as of the writing of the NIAC Phase II summary paper), promising 15% in a few months and techniques that will allow 25% and higher.
According to the current estimates, this will get us to elevator-worthy fiber in mid-2006.
If NASA really wanted to get to Europa, they'd funnel the 10 bil at CN research, building power-transmission lasers, hammering out the political hurdles and building a working elevator. Then they could send a manned boomer sub to Europa if they wanted, probbably for less money than this new idea of a white elephant.
For those too lazy to go read the paper, here's the piece that'll interest us:
"The University of Kentucky has published and patented on fibers 5 km long with 1% carbon
nanotube loading that achieved a tensile strength increase from 0.7 GPa to 1.1 GPa. Recent
results have included producing fibers with tensile strengths of 5GPa with ~5% CNT loading.
Steel has a strength of 3 GPa and Kevlar is at 3.7 GPa. This process used multi-walled carbon
nanotubes. This implies a roughly 100 GPa carbon nanotube strength or an interfacial adhesion
roughly 1/3 of theoretical. However, we must remember that in the current process only the
outer nanotubes are being functionalized and attached to, the inner tubes are not being fully
utilized. Understanding this implies that by finding a method to utilize the inner shells would
enable production of material performing close to theoretical maximum. A complimentary
technique now being developed at Rensealler Polytechnic Institute allows for the pinning of
the walls in the multi-walled tubes together so that all of the tubes can be used. Techniques at Foster
Miller will also allow for dispersion and implementation of the carbon nanotubes in the
composite at much higher loadings. Loadings over 25% have been demonstrated and higher
levels are possible. By combining these techniques the resulting material should have a tensile
strength near theory of 150 GPa for 50% loading. Material at 12 GPa (4 times stringer than
steel) is expected in the coming months and the full strength materials should be available within
two years at the current research rate."
"Hear that, NASA? That is the sound of inevitablity..."
...me and half the world that is.
The CALENDAR.
I use outlook everywhere because I need the calendar.
If they could provide a simple calendar program, like the Good'Ol palm desktop, they'd open the door for quite a lot of people.
I don't mean a large-scale office multi-user integrated calendar solution like MS Exchange.
Sure, you could get to that later on, build it on top of MySQL or something, I mean something simple I can use at home for myself. Something that people with non-corporate needs can use to organize their life (These people _do_ exist you know. One or two of them.)
Of course you'd be fighting an uphill battle to set some form of open standard for calendar/mail/addressbook syncing. An API for handhelds/smartphones to use (as opposed to "Does it sync with Outlook?"), Microsoft would be clobbering you on the head every step of the way - Windows Mobile 200X will not support you out of the box, Outlook will continue shipping with PDA's, ActiveSync will work flawlessly with Outlook and they'd be paying non-MS mobile vendors (like palm) to support Outlook-syncing in their (even non-MS) OS and not support alternative sync standards.
And yet, if such an API did come to exist, the Open Source community would complement the software support that the PalmOS/Windows Mobile/Symbian/Linux handhelds/smartphones will lack to sync to the desktop, not to mention the desktop software itself.
In my view, FireBird seems like the mother of all places to start pushing such an API.
Bit until that happens, I'll stick with Outlook.
For those who don't understand what "Trusted" Computing, DRM, NGSCB and friends are all about, but do want to be awakened to reality - here's a red pill.
What developers should however do when making a sequel, especially when they intend to ride the wave of the previous installment of the game, is look closely at what their clients like about it, and not go and remove it.
Have a look at 3DO and Might and Magic 9. The same hack&slash pushed this game into a 9th (!!) title, having a very solid clientelle and fan base.
Then, right after #8, someone up in management decided he wants to go do what the mass-selling games do. Let's transform it into a simple-to-use "RPG" game that the masses can understand, he said. And so they did.
It may have been wiser to do such a stupid experiment on a new title (like they did when they decided on a genre-change - with Heroes of Might and Magic - which went quite well, and ended them with two hot-selling brands) rather than dumb down a game that was bought for being technical hack&slash and alienate your own paying crown, in search of some dream of the masses chasing you with money.
The mistake managers make here is thinking that many new people will buy your game in addition to those who bought the last 8 titles. They're wrong of course. Take away what people liked for 8 titles, and they won't buy the 9th. You end up relying solely on your hypothetical newly-added clientelle. In M&M9, they stayed hypothetical.
Same goes for Unreal 2, or better yet, Deus-Ex 2, being released now. DE1 was one of the best games of all time. Then Mr. Spector sold out to a big paycheck to make a console shooter and slap the DE2 title on it, dumbed down the RPG elements of the game (which is what made it stand out from the rest of dozens of shooters on the shelves 2 years ago), removed reloading, replaced ammo with universal ammo (a way of saying either all your weapons work, or none of them do). Between the lines this reads: you never run out of ammo. Whoopee. This was done at the expense of what I suspect will be alienating the entire DE1 PC crowd.
Furthermore, where DE1 broke ice, DE2 will mingle with the crowd, be like all other console shooters, and disappear from the shelves 4 months later. I can understand why his producer takes the "exploit, trash and throw away" attitude at Spector's titles. After all, corporations are in it for a quick buck. But for someone who may have an interest in preserving the title/brand (not to mention releasing yet another one) this seems a clear no-no way to go. Looked what happened to Unreal 2. If, that is, you remember it ever came out. In less than a year, the game utterly disappeared.
So should game devs listen to their own crowd? If that crowd paid them for making a previous title, listening to them and understanding what they paid for is the sole ticket to making them pay again.
Cheers.
>> Just from the physics of a unicycle wouldn't rapid stopping be a problem?
Nope. Well, depends.
If rapidly stopping the vehicle is what concerns you, the rider is still perfectly fine after the vehicle abruptly stopped and he's arcing through the air, flailing his hands in all directions.
Rider abruptly stopping by hitting hard surface at 20mph... ahm.. yep. It probbably would.