Linux will need to be around as long as there's so much x86 hardware floating around. The FreeBSD folk simply aren't doing a very good job of snagging mindshare.
If the govt. ever mandates this, it'll be one hell of a takings suit and the Supreme Court has been moving towards an anti-govt. position for many years. A takings ruling of this magnitude would significantly alter govt. balance sheets.
I don't think that anybody is looking at one unitary ribbon to run an elevator but more like several ribbons running an elevator bank. The acceleration profile for an elevator would permit grandma to see orbit. I don't see grandma making splashdown or, more importantly passing the training regimen for doing so.
It's worth running a bank if you can make things (like monocrystal jet turbine blades) worth the return trip.
It's all down to money but I don't think you're designing it right. A redesign of the code as opposed to sprucing up the graphics should not be done too often. The name of the game is to get the look you want, the functionality you want, and to push out as far as possible the next time you have to do it all over again. Debacles like the IE vulnerability on spoofed sites and warning sighns like AOL moving to gecko means that it's more important now to have your code be equally good on both major browser engines. Let's say your threshold is 15% of browser share before you start catering to it, your current gecko share is 10% and you don't want to do a redesign for the next 3 years. Moves like AOL moving to gecko are going to have an effect at the margin.
Actually, AOL is worth about as much as Apple *today*. The differential was in AOL's favor a year ago and who knows what it'll be a year from now.
The question really is would Apple be better off if Steve Jobs won AOL in a card game from Steve Case? Does AOL provides a significant contribution to the user experience that Apple wants to provide. I'm guessing the answer nets out no so the relative pricing actually ends up being irrelevant.
Re:My favourite part of the FAQ
on
Going Up?
·
· Score: 2
Frankly, who cares how it gets funded before they even are sure of the engineering. If you can drop launch costs to $100/kg from $10,000/kg, that's a savings of $9,900 per kilogram and an investment by the satellite companies of a slightly smaller amount would still leave them ahead on a net basis.
Then you have all the impractical uses that become practical at some point between $10k and $100 per kilo. Let's take power transmission satellites which become practical at $200/kg. A company that wants to loft one of those babies up would be willing to invest almost $100/kg in the creation of the elevator because the investment dollars dumped in that project would still leave his power satellites practical on a net basis.
The money will be coming out of the woodwork for this *if* it gets to the point of floating a stock or bond offering.
Re:Security.....
on
Going Up?
·
· Score: 1, Redundant
Well, once you get it up once, you just stock a few spares in orbit at $100/kg so when (not if, it'll eventually happen) the ribbon gets cut, you just have to drop down one of the spares to re-establish the elevator. It's only the first one which will be expensive all subsequent ones will drop in price substantially.
I expect that you'll protect it like they protect everything else, a bunch of guys with guns will shoot you if you break out of certain paramaters.
"MSDN subscriptions in the 1-2 thousand dollar range are only for those who want to test their software on all versions of Windows (including the international ones)"
So how many acts of fraud do you have to commit before it becomes prosecutable. That's right, one.
No FUD there, it's an obvious crime and it isn't being pursued, even by MS' enemies.
The fact is the size of the ISV community is a huge factor in the success of an operating system. MS used fraud to enhance its ISV community and achieved their monopoly in part due to that fraud so they should be prosecuted, perhaps by being forced to pay the transition costs of those ISVs who were roped in fraudulently and want out.
Actually posted weight from the FAQ which you obviously haven't read is 7.5kg per kilometer so taking it as 320 kilometers (twice your assumptions that gives us a lift bill of 24 million which is a reasonable expense for lift and very easily held within a 10 billion dollar budget.
There are decimals in the wrong place alright...
Re:Think About It
on
Going Up?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Actually, I think it would be much more likely that loaded return trips would be made. Why haul around all that expensive re-entry weight when you have the perfect mechanism to come back down on the elevator itself. It's elegant, it's cheaper, and it's likely to be much less riskier than re-entry which can and has gone wrong in the past.
1. They're already planning on putting it in the middle of the Pacific in a zone of low/no Hurricanes and electrical storms
2. Why, oh why would you give this to the UN? It's a russian idea, popularized by an american author, and being funded by the US govt (NASA). through a grant to a US company. Most likely it will be built by 1 or more space companies (let's face it 10 billion isn't that hard to raise) and will place it under whatever jurisdiction they themselves find convenient which is likely to be the US.
The UN can't find it's backside with both hands. What's convenient about placing this under their jurisdiction? The Pacific is big. There's no reason that others couldn't pull together another $10B to build a competing one and considering the fact that would drop orbital costs to $100/Kg it's quite likely to be much less.
The sin of the builders of the tower of Babel wasn't that they were trying to go high (our space launches have empirically demonstrated that isn't a problem) but that they were trying to reach Heaven. This elevator doesn't have a 'heavan' button so I doubt God will be offended.
Whatever source you're using for your religious enlightenment, broaden it.
Re:Environmental impact
on
Going Up?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Actually, if you break the cable then it flutters down like a newspaper dropped from the... damn, start over....like a newspaper dropped from the Sears Tower. In the site's FAQ list they address the problem and the biggest unknown seems to be whether it's going to disintigrate into powder and cause some people to have a breathing problem. It's ~23.5 lbs per mile of cable so it isn't going to cause a tidal wave or anything. It's light, it's chemically very stable, it's unlikely to cause problems and has a projected space lifetime of about a thousand years.
Actually, to gain access to the documentation of the API as well as development tools, you need to buy yearly kits that are priced at $1-2 thousand dollars a year. While it might be theoretically possible to program to the Win32 API without this, in practical circumstances no professional development house would ever write for a platform and not join their development program. It would be an irresponsible and fairly suicidal act.
So it's pretty obvious who the class would be, the purchasers of the MSDN kits who were new entrants to the Microsoft ISV community during the several years when MS made false claims of no hidden APIs up through when they started to explicitly deny it.
Discovery in this little fraud would be delicious because you would end up having internal MS e-mails discussing whether or not to maintain an advantage over their own community by releasing or keeping secret various APIs.
With these revelations, it is likely that the MS ISV community will shrink somewhat. That is a death blow for MS because if they lose the ISVs they lose their monopolies and the ability to leverage from one dominant position to another.
Another point about conservative/libertarians. From what I can tell, even the most rabid anti-activist will agree that stopping fraud is a legitimate government function.
When we open up the flood gates of immigration so that we have a similar population density, rail will make equal sense. Of course since we have 1/10th the population density of Europe currently, that will give us a population of 2.8 billion people in these United States.
Somehow, I doubt that highly developed rail systems based on an equivalent economic rationale as the EU rail system is coming anytime soon.
Actually, this would make it worse. Apparently it is part of the state constitution now so scaring people over security will just get them spending more money to harden it, armor the cars, etc.
Re:it says more than 160 and Altivec=162
on
PowerPC Goes 64 bit
·
· Score: 2
Duh! Apple never talks about unreleased hardware this far in advance. It's a slam dunk that the sales force that is going to be tasked to sell this will be looking at Apple as a large client for the chip and that they will be pressuring the engineering team on making their SIMD system Altivec.
I suspect that the engineers aren't going to resist that too much.
OK, you seem to be one of the more active people in the anti-MS movement, perhaps you can answer my question. Why is it that nobody has gone after MS for this (no hidden api claims) and other frauds? The intellectual defense of MS by the libertarian and conservative factions is almost entirely predicated on their anti-trust ideology. They certainly have no tolerance for fraud. Beyond that, the current corporate climate would certainly punish MS heavily if their corporate name was on the nightly news every week associated with a fraud accusation.
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The funny thing is this is a person who would want his own children to home school so they get a better education.
Linux will need to be around as long as there's so much x86 hardware floating around. The FreeBSD folk simply aren't doing a very good job of snagging mindshare.
If the govt. ever mandates this, it'll be one hell of a takings suit and the Supreme Court has been moving towards an anti-govt. position for many years. A takings ruling of this magnitude would significantly alter govt. balance sheets.
Congratulations, the next step in your theory is to outlaw long hair/bangs
So what happens to the smaller ribbon? I don't think it gets combined with the other one, does it?
I don't think that anybody is looking at one unitary ribbon to run an elevator but more like several ribbons running an elevator bank. The acceleration profile for an elevator would permit grandma to see orbit. I don't see grandma making splashdown or, more importantly passing the training regimen for doing so.
It's worth running a bank if you can make things (like monocrystal jet turbine blades) worth the return trip.
It's all down to money but I don't think you're designing it right. A redesign of the code as opposed to sprucing up the graphics should not be done too often. The name of the game is to get the look you want, the functionality you want, and to push out as far as possible the next time you have to do it all over again. Debacles like the IE vulnerability on spoofed sites and warning sighns like AOL moving to gecko means that it's more important now to have your code be equally good on both major browser engines. Let's say your threshold is 15% of browser share before you start catering to it, your current gecko share is 10% and you don't want to do a redesign for the next 3 years. Moves like AOL moving to gecko are going to have an effect at the margin.
Actually, AOL is worth about as much as Apple *today*. The differential was in AOL's favor a year ago and who knows what it'll be a year from now.
The question really is would Apple be better off if Steve Jobs won AOL in a card game from Steve Case? Does AOL provides a significant contribution to the user experience that Apple wants to provide. I'm guessing the answer nets out no so the relative pricing actually ends up being irrelevant.
Frankly, who cares how it gets funded before they even are sure of the engineering. If you can drop launch costs to $100/kg from $10,000/kg, that's a savings of $9,900 per kilogram and an investment by the satellite companies of a slightly smaller amount would still leave them ahead on a net basis.
Then you have all the impractical uses that become practical at some point between $10k and $100 per kilo. Let's take power transmission satellites which become practical at $200/kg. A company that wants to loft one of those babies up would be willing to invest almost $100/kg in the creation of the elevator because the investment dollars dumped in that project would still leave his power satellites practical on a net basis.
The money will be coming out of the woodwork for this *if* it gets to the point of floating a stock or bond offering.
Well, once you get it up once, you just stock a few spares in orbit at $100/kg so when (not if, it'll eventually happen) the ribbon gets cut, you just have to drop down one of the spares to re-establish the elevator. It's only the first one which will be expensive all subsequent ones will drop in price substantially.
I expect that you'll protect it like they protect everything else, a bunch of guys with guns will shoot you if you break out of certain paramaters.
Space elevator slowing down the earth's rotation?
Hey! I always wanted to fit more time into a day, now here's my chance.
"you only have to buy the development tools once"
"MSDN subscriptions in the 1-2 thousand dollar range are only for those who want to test their software on all versions of Windows (including the international ones)"
So how many acts of fraud do you have to commit before it becomes prosecutable. That's right, one.
No FUD there, it's an obvious crime and it isn't being pursued, even by MS' enemies.
The fact is the size of the ISV community is a huge factor in the success of an operating system. MS used fraud to enhance its ISV community and achieved their monopoly in part due to that fraud so they should be prosecuted, perhaps by being forced to pay the transition costs of those ISVs who were roped in fraudulently and want out.
Actually posted weight from the FAQ which you obviously haven't read is 7.5kg per kilometer so taking it as 320 kilometers (twice your assumptions that gives us a lift bill of 24 million which is a reasonable expense for lift and very easily held within a 10 billion dollar budget.
There are decimals in the wrong place alright...
Actually, I think it would be much more likely that loaded return trips would be made. Why haul around all that expensive re-entry weight when you have the perfect mechanism to come back down on the elevator itself. It's elegant, it's cheaper, and it's likely to be much less riskier than re-entry which can and has gone wrong in the past.
1. They're already planning on putting it in the middle of the Pacific in a zone of low/no Hurricanes and electrical storms
2. Why, oh why would you give this to the UN? It's a russian idea, popularized by an american author, and being funded by the US govt (NASA). through a grant to a US company. Most likely it will be built by 1 or more space companies (let's face it 10 billion isn't that hard to raise) and will place it under whatever jurisdiction they themselves find convenient which is likely to be the US.
The UN can't find it's backside with both hands. What's convenient about placing this under their jurisdiction? The Pacific is big. There's no reason that others couldn't pull together another $10B to build a competing one and considering the fact that would drop orbital costs to $100/Kg it's quite likely to be much less.
In that case, I want two of them so they can be deuling banjos.
The sin of the builders of the tower of Babel wasn't that they were trying to go high (our space launches have empirically demonstrated that isn't a problem) but that they were trying to reach Heaven. This elevator doesn't have a 'heavan' button so I doubt God will be offended.
Whatever source you're using for your religious enlightenment, broaden it.
Actually, if you break the cable then it flutters down like a newspaper dropped from the... damn, start over. ...like a newspaper dropped from the Sears Tower. In the site's FAQ list they address the problem and the biggest unknown seems to be whether it's going to disintigrate into powder and cause some people to have a breathing problem. It's ~23.5 lbs per mile of cable so it isn't going to cause a tidal wave or anything. It's light, it's chemically very stable, it's unlikely to cause problems and has a projected space lifetime of about a thousand years.
Actually, to gain access to the documentation of the API as well as development tools, you need to buy yearly kits that are priced at $1-2 thousand dollars a year. While it might be theoretically possible to program to the Win32 API without this, in practical circumstances no professional development house would ever write for a platform and not join their development program. It would be an irresponsible and fairly suicidal act.
So it's pretty obvious who the class would be, the purchasers of the MSDN kits who were new entrants to the Microsoft ISV community during the several years when MS made false claims of no hidden APIs up through when they started to explicitly deny it.
Discovery in this little fraud would be delicious because you would end up having internal MS e-mails discussing whether or not to maintain an advantage over their own community by releasing or keeping secret various APIs.
With these revelations, it is likely that the MS ISV community will shrink somewhat. That is a death blow for MS because if they lose the ISVs they lose their monopolies and the ability to leverage from one dominant position to another.
Another point about conservative/libertarians. From what I can tell, even the most rabid anti-activist will agree that stopping fraud is a legitimate government function.
That's what you get when you have a democracy, not a republic.
When we open up the flood gates of immigration so that we have a similar population density, rail will make equal sense. Of course since we have 1/10th the population density of Europe currently, that will give us a population of 2.8 billion people in these United States.
Somehow, I doubt that highly developed rail systems based on an equivalent economic rationale as the EU rail system is coming anytime soon.
Complain to the FAA. If they would get off their butt and get an ATC system that could handle flying cars, you'd have one pretty quick.
Currently, the ATC system that can handle flying cars is projected to deploy somewhere between 2015 and 2020.
Actually, this would make it worse. Apparently it is part of the state constitution now so scaring people over security will just get them spending more money to harden it, armor the cars, etc.
Duh! Apple never talks about unreleased hardware this far in advance. It's a slam dunk that the sales force that is going to be tasked to sell this will be looking at Apple as a large client for the chip and that they will be pressuring the engineering team on making their SIMD system Altivec.
I suspect that the engineers aren't going to resist that too much.
OK, you seem to be one of the more active people in the anti-MS movement, perhaps you can answer my question. Why is it that nobody has gone after MS for this (no hidden api claims) and other frauds? The intellectual defense of MS by the libertarian and conservative factions is almost entirely predicated on their anti-trust ideology. They certainly have no tolerance for fraud. Beyond that, the current corporate climate would certainly punish MS heavily if their corporate name was on the nightly news every week associated with a fraud accusation.