Okay I didn't spot your UID number there. Simmer down son, you don't want to get a troll mod this early in life. You aren't dealing with the response I gave, which is that in the commonly accepted format, darwinists vs creationists (there are no punctuated equilbriaists movements, if only because it sounds like something you suffer from in your later years due to a lack of fibre in the diet), there is no darwinist movement. There are religious nuts, or creationists, and biologists. Savvy? Given your UID (eh I may be wrong, maybe you have been lurking since 98, but I don't think so) I expect a rash and abusive response. Think it through, breathe. You'll last longer that way.
A wikipedia article doth not a fact make. To say there are darwinists or a movement for Darwin, implies there is some debate outside the heads of religious nuts. There is not, so don't legitimise them by making out there is a counter movement.
Or just blame piracy. See, it's win-win. Blaming piracy can never lose because it's unfalsifiable.
Blame pirates, being suing people randomly/needlessly. There are three possibilities:
1) Sales go up (The pirates were the problem! Let's kill the bastards!
2) Sales go down. (We aren't being harsh enough on the pirates! They're still stealing from us, we need to crack down harder!)
3) Sales stay the same. (The pirates are still pirating as much as they always have, we need to send a firmer message! KILL THE PIRATES!)
By blaming all their problems on the invisible spectre of "pirates" companies can justify virtually any legal action and come out looking fine since, after all, they were just protecting themselves against those damned pirates.
I also nominate myself for the Award for Post with the Most Uses of the word "Pirate."
I think I pipped you by one on the pirate count there.
I mean dear god we finally finally have everyone talking, the whole world, discussing issues, getting together and trying to understand the other's point of view, cross cultural debate and ideas being swapped, and now someone wants to take that away? The only reason I could possibly see for a balkanisation would be to control content or limit access to other cultures or ideas, probably for a higher profit. Now isn't that nicely fascist. Not to mention that ultimately someone would come up with a protocol to allow all the different networks to speak to each other. Why we could call it... an Inter Net! Heheh, it really is about time that the telcos figured out that profit is in innovation, not in creating artificial barriers and then charging to get past them. Thats where bad monopolies get spanked.
If the answer is "None," as it is with almost every creationist I've ever met, then don't bother wasting your time arguing with them.
These individuals will go on preaching their nonesense, and convincing those with a less complete understanding as to the nature of the situation to their belief. Which means more people that you can't convince, eventually leading to a critical mass of people that will become the dominant force in society, with the truest believers being the high priests. These people all aspire to positions of power and authority from which they can indulge whatever whims take their fancy, the position of gods-on-earth, beyond question. Thats why you can't convince them, and thats why they should be opposed with every means possible.
You cannot seriously take voyager as any way indicative of current technology. Thats like saying hurling a message in a bottle into the sea proves that it would take decades to cross an ocean with what we have now. And they were able to cross interstellar space in reasonable time periods back in the 1950s, with enhancements and refinements to the idea right up until recently. All this is technically possible with what we have right now, and could reach the closest star in forty odd years.
However launch demand will have to increase enormously to justify the investment.
Well the way I see it, there are numerous groups that would have an immense interest in such a project. For example, take Dubai. The city-state has very few natural resources, and no oil, but it is a main pipeline route for a lot of the oil in the middle east. Being keenly aware of the limited amount of oil that there is available, they have been trying to diversify their investments as much as possible, including a "spaceport" which would be more like the space-X effort, and the Burj Dubai, a giant sail shaped hotel.
This operation would be more of an extension on their traditional income (channelling resources through their borders), and the resources are there, albeit not easy to reach at this time. There was a lot of discussion about a trillion dollar asteroid a while back, composed largely of iron, and containing abvout 5 tons of that metal for every man, woman, and child on earth. I have a few more ideas as to the exploitation of space based resources, but thats another days work!:D Besides I think that the lack of interest in launches these days is something of a catch-22; it costs too much to get to orbit, so there is no interest, and there is no interest, so there aren't enough space flights.
You are right about the vehicle requiring some sort of propulsion, it would need that in any case to maneuver in orbit. To be honest I am neither a physicist nor an engineer, so a lot of the equations are something I am just catching up on now (or trying to). What kind of a load alleviation system would be of use for people in this case? I believe astronauts take about 5 gs during a launch, according to another discussion I had, that would be enough for GEO...
and the size of the launch tube and energy delivery is much smaller.
Yes, but the more we can leverage earth-bound energy sources, the more we can launch, and cheaper per kilogram as well. The bigger the tower gets, the harder and more expensive it is to build, but thats a once off challenge which would reduce the cost for every launch made. Ideally I'd like to see a minimal rocket propulsion requirement for that reason.
Anyway I think something like this will come to pass- probably past mid century though.
Well if I can gather enough information to support the concept (or get negative results that can be overcome), there is no reason why I can't go ahead and start a feasability study on it, and see if there aren't a few groups that might not be interested in the idea! No time like the present hey. Thank you very much for your thoughts on this, especially about the effects of pressurisation on axial loads, I was not aware of that. It is much appreciated.
I see your point here, and although I do hold in contempt the entire recording industry, just to play devils advocate here, they do in the strictest sense have a point. Not about the chewing gum thing, thats just idiocy, but about their property. They have posession of something. Whether its music or a stick of gum is irrelevant. You want what they have. So they can ask you for money, and then you (and only you) can have what they have.
Downloading stuff from P2P networks means that you have taken what is theirs, and did not pay the asking price. There are many terms you could ascribe to this situation, and theft is certainly among them. Whether or not you would have bought their property if there had been no P2P networks is irrelevant, you still have something that you shouldn't have by the laws which make society a sane and livable place. And certainly there is a percentage of people that would have bought if they couldn't download, so there is measurable economic harm to them. Of course, they have gone waaaay overboard in their efforts, and the value of their property and damages thereof has been set far too high (says me), but you can still see their point.
I'm not in the habit of taking what I would view to be an unjust situation and sitting back, however. I just think too many people here are trying to justify what isn't justifiable. To resolve this situation, as with any, we need to look at the problems. The major problem is the power bloc that is the recording industry. What is that comprised of? Middlemen, a distribution and marketing network. Thats the whole of it. What I say is to take away their power and their product; artists already have a superb marketing and distribution network available to them. Its called the internet. With recording studios becoming cheaper and cheaper to set up and run, all they have to learn how to do is leverage the power of the internet to their own advantage. Take away the artists, and the RIAA etc have no longer got any reason to exist.
Its like I said to one of my clients there recently, a musician. If you put your stuff out there, it will probably get pirated. But if you charge a small fee from your own site for one of your songs, the people who will be taking that music from you are not going to put it on P2P networks. And the file sharing types won't bother paying, since they are ripping CDs borrowed from friends and so on. There will always be a certain amount of loss, but its easily the best solution for any band or artist. And DRM just hacks off your paying customers, who didn't steal your product, and is only a mild inconvenience for those who would steal your product. Besides being technically impossible, unless someone manages to DRM eyeballs and ears.
I would like to ask your opinion of an idea I have... With all the talk lately about a space elevator, I got to thinking after a not so recent slashdot discussion, just what advantages would a space elevator offer over a tower launch? I contacted the man responsible for a similar idea, the skyramp (warning: hideous javascript menu may break firefox), Carlton Meyer, and had a dialogue in which he pointed me to a tower launch archive.
The ideas I see bandied about there are similar to what I had in mind, which would be essentially an 11km tall tower (think pylons rather than skyscrapers, based at sea), with evacuated airless launch tubes, using nuclear reactors to power a maglev or pulley system to accelerate vessels to escape velocity. These would then emerge above the end of the troposphere, with it's associated weather and air pressure, and have little to no fuel needed to reach GEO, meaning you could do a lot more while you were up there. I originally estimated reaching escape velocity with this system, but it turns out I got the numbers wrong and that would only be suitable for electronics and things that could withstand insane G-forces.
Not only would this enable multiple launches daily, it is, unlike the space elevator, readily achievable with today's technology, and financially viable as well. Consider the big dig in Boston has cost about 12 billion so far... Given NASA had an annual budget of $16.2 billion for 2005, and a nuclear power plant costs a cool billion to build, give or take, we could have this up and running in a few years.
As in arrive in the next century? Nope. With current tech we're talking about 75000 years or so. Even the most theoretical scenarios I've seen using ungodly amounts of antimatter as fuel takes about 20 years.
Could you post a link to support this please? One would have thought that with the amount of redundant nuclear warheads floating around here, we could do a little better than 75,000 years.
I firmly believe that intelligent life from Earth has a great future ahead of it in space. I just don't think it will be human life.
Actually human life has proven itself immensely resilient and adaptable to new conditions, by virtue of our intelligence. Eskimos didn't grow white fur and sharper fangs to survive in temperatures that would kill a naked ape in minutes, they used their minds. IMHO genetic engineering would be a step backwards, depending on locking ourselves into one mode of existence, which might be every bit as disadvantageous in some future arena as space is to us now.
The Apollo crew were tooling along in the spacecraft equivalent of a hollowed out log. All we need are bigger ships, and for that all we need is an economical way to get to orbit. Not mention the tremendous advances in materials science since then. It so happens I think I have such a system, but I'm too tired to fill you in now. There mght be some details left in my posting history, or you can wait till the pending story gets posted to slashdot.
Thats about the size of it. I remember the motto of the BBC special effects department, circa the early Doctor Who era; if it can be imagined, it can be made. To say something is absoloutely impossible, you need absoloutes in science, which don't really exist.
And in a quarter of that time period, we have reached the moon and made scientific advances that would have seemed like high magic to the romans. Seeing the pattern yet?
Up until relatively recent times, the only parts of Ireland (unwillingly) under direct crown control were Dublin and a few of the cities. The rest of it was largely Irish controlled. Calling that very much part of a "united kingdom" is really pushing the definition of united to its breaking point.
Interesting. One of our cycle of legends tell of the original tribes (or as original as they could be for that era, they basically beat the stuffing out of whoever was there before them, that goes back for a bit) and the leaders who claimed certain lands. I'm a bit hazy on the details, but a fellow by the name of Britta claimed the island to the east apparently. There are all sorts of interesting cross roots in Irish language and legend. For example, in places the Gaelic bears striking similarities to of all things, Chinese. Ni Hao, in China, is hello, or literally, Not good? Where hao is good. I know thats stretching it a wee bit, but stick with me. The Irish for "no" or not good is Ní Ha. Theres lots more like that as well.
And as far as I am concerned, the UK has been ruled by the French ever since the Normans.:P
British civil war encompassing England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland.
Erm, speaking as an Irishman, don't call me British. Cheers. According to Irish legend the original "brit tribe" originally came from Ireland anyway, so perhaps we had better call it an Irish civil war. Still maximum kudos on the grandparent post, it clarifies a lot of stuff. MOD GP UP!
Slashdot Mirror
Whoops too late, you already got mod-bombed in the next discussion. C'est la vie.
Okay I didn't spot your UID number there. Simmer down son, you don't want to get a troll mod this early in life. You aren't dealing with the response I gave, which is that in the commonly accepted format, darwinists vs creationists (there are no punctuated equilbriaists movements, if only because it sounds like something you suffer from in your later years due to a lack of fibre in the diet), there is no darwinist movement. There are religious nuts, or creationists, and biologists. Savvy? Given your UID (eh I may be wrong, maybe you have been lurking since 98, but I don't think so) I expect a rash and abusive response. Think it through, breathe. You'll last longer that way.
A wikipedia article doth not a fact make. To say there are darwinists or a movement for Darwin, implies there is some debate outside the heads of religious nuts. There is not, so don't legitimise them by making out there is a counter movement.
Unfortunately, the mainstream media feels compelled to provide a "balanced" story including both sides of an issue
I think you meant to say, the mainstream media likes to stir up controversy in order to sell papers.
Its like believing in the postman.
There are no "Darwinists". There are biologists.
Get out.
Or just blame piracy. See, it's win-win. Blaming piracy can never lose because it's unfalsifiable.
Blame pirates, being suing people randomly/needlessly. There are three possibilities:
1) Sales go up (The pirates were the problem! Let's kill the bastards!
2) Sales go down. (We aren't being harsh enough on the pirates! They're still stealing from us, we need to crack down harder!)
3) Sales stay the same. (The pirates are still pirating as much as they always have, we need to send a firmer message! KILL THE PIRATES!)
By blaming all their problems on the invisible spectre of "pirates" companies can justify virtually any legal action and come out looking fine since, after all, they were just protecting themselves against those damned pirates.
I also nominate myself for the Award for Post with the Most Uses of the word "Pirate."
I think I pipped you by one on the pirate count there.
I mean dear god we finally finally have everyone talking, the whole world, discussing issues, getting together and trying to understand the other's point of view, cross cultural debate and ideas being swapped, and now someone wants to take that away? The only reason I could possibly see for a balkanisation would be to control content or limit access to other cultures or ideas, probably for a higher profit. Now isn't that nicely fascist. Not to mention that ultimately someone would come up with a protocol to allow all the different networks to speak to each other. Why we could call it... an Inter Net! Heheh, it really is about time that the telcos figured out that profit is in innovation, not in creating artificial barriers and then charging to get past them. Thats where bad monopolies get spanked.
If the answer is "None," as it is with almost every creationist I've ever met, then don't bother wasting your time arguing with them.
These individuals will go on preaching their nonesense, and convincing those with a less complete understanding as to the nature of the situation to their belief. Which means more people that you can't convince, eventually leading to a critical mass of people that will become the dominant force in society, with the truest believers being the high priests. These people all aspire to positions of power and authority from which they can indulge whatever whims take their fancy, the position of gods-on-earth, beyond question. Thats why you can't convince them, and thats why they should be opposed with every means possible.
The expensive part is getting stuff to the orbit.
Yes indeed, you are exactly correct, and I think I have the solution to that.
You cannot seriously take voyager as any way indicative of current technology. Thats like saying hurling a message in a bottle into the sea proves that it would take decades to cross an ocean with what we have now. And they were able to cross interstellar space in reasonable time periods back in the 1950s, with enhancements and refinements to the idea right up until recently. All this is technically possible with what we have right now, and could reach the closest star in forty odd years.
However launch demand will have to increase enormously to justify the investment.
:D Besides I think that the lack of interest in launches these days is something of a catch-22; it costs too much to get to orbit, so there is no interest, and there is no interest, so there aren't enough space flights.
Well the way I see it, there are numerous groups that would have an immense interest in such a project. For example, take Dubai. The city-state has very few natural resources, and no oil, but it is a main pipeline route for a lot of the oil in the middle east. Being keenly aware of the limited amount of oil that there is available, they have been trying to diversify their investments as much as possible, including a "spaceport" which would be more like the space-X effort, and the Burj Dubai, a giant sail shaped hotel.
This operation would be more of an extension on their traditional income (channelling resources through their borders), and the resources are there, albeit not easy to reach at this time. There was a lot of discussion about a trillion dollar asteroid a while back, composed largely of iron, and containing abvout 5 tons of that metal for every man, woman, and child on earth. I have a few more ideas as to the exploitation of space based resources, but thats another days work!
You are right about the vehicle requiring some sort of propulsion, it would need that in any case to maneuver in orbit. To be honest I am neither a physicist nor an engineer, so a lot of the equations are something I am just catching up on now (or trying to). What kind of a load alleviation system would be of use for people in this case? I believe astronauts take about 5 gs during a launch, according to another discussion I had, that would be enough for GEO...
and the size of the launch tube and energy delivery is much smaller.
Yes, but the more we can leverage earth-bound energy sources, the more we can launch, and cheaper per kilogram as well. The bigger the tower gets, the harder and more expensive it is to build, but thats a once off challenge which would reduce the cost for every launch made. Ideally I'd like to see a minimal rocket propulsion requirement for that reason.
Anyway I think something like this will come to pass- probably past mid century though.
Well if I can gather enough information to support the concept (or get negative results that can be overcome), there is no reason why I can't go ahead and start a feasability study on it, and see if there aren't a few groups that might not be interested in the idea! No time like the present hey. Thank you very much for your thoughts on this, especially about the effects of pressurisation on axial loads, I was not aware of that. It is much appreciated.
I see your point here, and although I do hold in contempt the entire recording industry, just to play devils advocate here, they do in the strictest sense have a point. Not about the chewing gum thing, thats just idiocy, but about their property. They have posession of something. Whether its music or a stick of gum is irrelevant. You want what they have. So they can ask you for money, and then you (and only you) can have what they have.
Downloading stuff from P2P networks means that you have taken what is theirs, and did not pay the asking price. There are many terms you could ascribe to this situation, and theft is certainly among them. Whether or not you would have bought their property if there had been no P2P networks is irrelevant, you still have something that you shouldn't have by the laws which make society a sane and livable place. And certainly there is a percentage of people that would have bought if they couldn't download, so there is measurable economic harm to them. Of course, they have gone waaaay overboard in their efforts, and the value of their property and damages thereof has been set far too high (says me), but you can still see their point.
I'm not in the habit of taking what I would view to be an unjust situation and sitting back, however. I just think too many people here are trying to justify what isn't justifiable. To resolve this situation, as with any, we need to look at the problems. The major problem is the power bloc that is the recording industry. What is that comprised of? Middlemen, a distribution and marketing network. Thats the whole of it. What I say is to take away their power and their product; artists already have a superb marketing and distribution network available to them. Its called the internet. With recording studios becoming cheaper and cheaper to set up and run, all they have to learn how to do is leverage the power of the internet to their own advantage. Take away the artists, and the RIAA etc have no longer got any reason to exist.
Its like I said to one of my clients there recently, a musician. If you put your stuff out there, it will probably get pirated. But if you charge a small fee from your own site for one of your songs, the people who will be taking that music from you are not going to put it on P2P networks. And the file sharing types won't bother paying, since they are ripping CDs borrowed from friends and so on. There will always be a certain amount of loss, but its easily the best solution for any band or artist. And DRM just hacks off your paying customers, who didn't steal your product, and is only a mild inconvenience for those who would steal your product. Besides being technically impossible, unless someone manages to DRM eyeballs and ears.
I would like to ask your opinion of an idea I have... With all the talk lately about a space elevator, I got to thinking after a not so recent slashdot discussion, just what advantages would a space elevator offer over a tower launch? I contacted the man responsible for a similar idea, the skyramp (warning: hideous javascript menu may break firefox), Carlton Meyer, and had a dialogue in which he pointed me to a tower launch archive.
The ideas I see bandied about there are similar to what I had in mind, which would be essentially an 11km tall tower (think pylons rather than skyscrapers, based at sea), with evacuated airless launch tubes, using nuclear reactors to power a maglev or pulley system to accelerate vessels to escape velocity. These would then emerge above the end of the troposphere, with it's associated weather and air pressure, and have little to no fuel needed to reach GEO, meaning you could do a lot more while you were up there. I originally estimated reaching escape velocity with this system, but it turns out I got the numbers wrong and that would only be suitable for electronics and things that could withstand insane G-forces.
Not only would this enable multiple launches daily, it is, unlike the space elevator, readily achievable with today's technology, and financially viable as well. Consider the big dig in Boston has cost about 12 billion so far... Given NASA had an annual budget of $16.2 billion for 2005, and a nuclear power plant costs a cool billion to build, give or take, we could have this up and running in a few years.
As in arrive in the next century? Nope. With current tech we're talking about 75000 years or so. Even the most theoretical scenarios I've seen using ungodly amounts of antimatter as fuel takes about 20 years.
Could you post a link to support this please? One would have thought that with the amount of redundant nuclear warheads floating around here, we could do a little better than 75,000 years.
I firmly believe that intelligent life from Earth has a great future ahead of it in space. I just don't think it will be human life.
Actually human life has proven itself immensely resilient and adaptable to new conditions, by virtue of our intelligence. Eskimos didn't grow white fur and sharper fangs to survive in temperatures that would kill a naked ape in minutes, they used their minds. IMHO genetic engineering would be a step backwards, depending on locking ourselves into one mode of existence, which might be every bit as disadvantageous in some future arena as space is to us now.
The Apollo crew were tooling along in the spacecraft equivalent of a hollowed out log. All we need are bigger ships, and for that all we need is an economical way to get to orbit. Not mention the tremendous advances in materials science since then. It so happens I think I have such a system, but I'm too tired to fill you in now. There mght be some details left in my posting history, or you can wait till the pending story gets posted to slashdot.
Everything is possible?
Thats about the size of it. I remember the motto of the BBC special effects department, circa the early Doctor Who era; if it can be imagined, it can be made. To say something is absoloutely impossible, you need absoloutes in science, which don't really exist.
Did anyone else read the summary as this...?
Claria has hired Douche Bag to help them sell off the software tools that were previously supported by their adware.
A shitload less than the modern world did for the modern world.
And in a quarter of that time period, we have reached the moon and made scientific advances that would have seemed like high magic to the romans. Seeing the pattern yet?
Up until relatively recent times, the only parts of Ireland (unwillingly) under direct crown control were Dublin and a few of the cities. The rest of it was largely Irish controlled. Calling that very much part of a "united kingdom" is really pushing the definition of united to its breaking point.
Interesting. One of our cycle of legends tell of the original tribes (or as original as they could be for that era, they basically beat the stuffing out of whoever was there before them, that goes back for a bit) and the leaders who claimed certain lands. I'm a bit hazy on the details, but a fellow by the name of Britta claimed the island to the east apparently. There are all sorts of interesting cross roots in Irish language and legend. For example, in places the Gaelic bears striking similarities to of all things, Chinese. Ni Hao, in China, is hello, or literally, Not good? Where hao is good. I know thats stretching it a wee bit, but stick with me. The Irish for "no" or not good is Ní Ha. Theres lots more like that as well.
:P
And as far as I am concerned, the UK has been ruled by the French ever since the Normans.
How do you think we kept the colonies in check for a century when the entire empire spaned the globe
That would have been the machine guns and similar advanced weapons, then.
British civil war encompassing England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland.
Erm, speaking as an Irishman, don't call me British. Cheers. According to Irish legend the original "brit tribe" originally came from Ireland anyway, so perhaps we had better call it an Irish civil war. Still maximum kudos on the grandparent post, it clarifies a lot of stuff. MOD GP UP!