if we're really serious, we need to talk about building up a permanent presence in space. That means not just sending somebody to another planet to plant a flag. That means building a permanent infrastructure that will support continued expansion.
Amen! And since it hasn't been mentioned on/. for at least 3 days: the best way to do this is to build the space elevator, which may actually be easier, faster, and cheaper to develop than a rocket-based reliable high-capacity, high-orbit vehicle.
I've converted Keisler's calculus textbook to full text-searchable DjVu and put it up in both bundled (single file to download) and unbundled (many files for fast browsing) formats. Enjoy!
For those who don't yet know, DjVu is a free, highly effective compression format for scanned documents. Conversion from PDF to DjVu shrank the Keisler from 24MB to 10MB without perceptible loss in quality, and added incremental loading, fast browsing, and (most importantly) full-text search capabilities. Get the free viewer.
Another novella capturing the nostalgia of a depopulated world full of automated machinery that keeps going is "Slow Music" by James Tiptree, Jr. Beautiful.
The cable already is in orbit . Cutting it at the bottom will simply move its center of mass infinitesimally higher, and will simply make it drift to the west very very slowly.
Not quite - it will depend on how the SE is actually being used at the time. Consider: the SE must remain in GEO *when loaded* at the bottom at its maximum payload capacity, or else it would come crashing down. Thus when operating at less than maximum capacity, the anchor must supply the missing mass to balance the SE, so there will be tension at the anchor point. When the ribbon is cut in such a situation, the SE will go into an elliptical orbit.
If 15 tons of payload are cut off at the anchor, this actually corresponds to the mass of 2'000 km of ribbon. I guess the counterweight at GEO ameliorates this, but I can't calculate by how much. (The very first counterweight can't be too massive since it will have to be lifted by rocket.)
You can bet that national governments not on friendly terms with the first owner will immediately band together to invest in their own elevator.
Maybe so - but do you currently see the US (or anybody else for that matter) rush to invest into recuperating the capability to build its own consumer electronics? If China ever were to pull the plug on that... but it's much cheaper to play nice with the Chinese than to try to compete on uneven ground (higher labor costs, etc.)
With the first space elevator up, you'll have the same situation: yes you can desperately try to play catch-up - or you can play nice with the elevator company and try to entice them to install one on your premises. Which is more likely, especially if the first space elevator is owned by an ideologically agnostic company rather than a government?
Playing catch-up is also going to be very, very hard. According to this schedule, by the time you've finally built your own renegade elevator, everybody who's played nice with the elevator company is already off colonizing Mars and mining the asteroid belt. It'll be like being a few years late for the gold rush, and all the good claims are already taken.
Don't blame Kim Stanley Robinson for the faults of his readers.
Good point, thanks. What I should have said more specifically is: descriptions of catastrophic space elevator failure in the SF literature give a misleading picture since their designs are far removed from the actual space elevator design as currently proposed.
100GPa is only about ten times as strong as good steel.
You've missed a zero - last time I've checked high-strength steel alloys were below 1 GPa.
The "cable" is going to have to be pretty substantial.
You're missing the point: since virtually all the tensile strength is required to support the mass of the ribbon, that ribbon must perforce be both extremely tough *and* extremely light. Plans call for a ribbon weight of only 7.5 grams per meter, which is actually less than a sheet of laser printer paper.
I think it would hit the ground, relatively intact, at supersonic (but nowhere near asteroid) speeds.
Nonsense. The proposed ribbon is made of carbon, and thus has the aerodynamic and chemical properties of an extremely long and tough piece of paper. In other words, any pieces accelerated to high speed by orbital dynamics will burn up; any remaining fragments will flutter harmlessly. The only extant concern is the potential release of (potentially carcinogenic) free carbon nanotubes; this needs to be investigated.
All of which you would already know if you'd bothered to follow the link I provided instead of arguing from ignorance.
if man ever lands on Titan, there won't be any problem with heating
Yes, there will be: there's no oxygen.
Think about it: there can't be free oxygen and lots of hydrocarbons in any atmosphere at the same time, at least not for long. First flash of lightning, and - BOOOOM!
1/625 possibility of 'severe damage' (aka destruction) from the 2031 Leonid Shower is a pretty damn big risk, if you ask me.
Compared to what - the 1/50 risk per flight of a space shuttle blowing up? A 1/625 risk of destruction every 33 years is *far* safer than any other means to reach orbit in existence.
The carnage that such an event would wreak absolutely beggars the imagination.
The carnage would be non-existent. The proposed ribbon has the approximate shape, weight and composition of carbon paper (remember those?). All but the lowest few km would burn up in the atmosphere. The rest might land on your head with all the force of a fluttering sheet of newspaper.
Read Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars. Skip to the last few chapters if you just want the space elevator stuff.
The truth doesn't always make good fiction, and good fiction doesn't always tell the truth.
One thing I really question is the claim that there will be or can be only one final winner in "owning" space.
One word for you: Microsoft.
Not a monopoly cast in stone for all time, but a small player that is in the right place when a major new frontier (with subsequent exponential growth) is opened, can go on to lock competition out of the market for decades. This should be well undertood on slashdot of all places.
The most economical way by far (factor of 1000 or so) to build the *second* space elevator is to use the first one to lift the components. This provides a very simple way to lock out the competition: refuse to lift their CNT ribbon. Add to that the headstart in the technology and practical experience operating the things, and it looks pretty likely that whoever owns the first space elevator will own all of them for quite a while.
Actually, an even better analogy than Microsoft are the railroad barons. Do the names Vanderbilt, Carnegie, etc. ring a bell? Most of the "old wealth" in the US is still in the hands of those families whose ancestors controlled for a few decades the only economic means of transport to the American West.
the idea that exponential growth will begin immediately after an elevator is constructed is probably total nonsense.
That's correct, because the exponential growth will begin several years *before* the space elevator is operational, as soon as it looks like the project might actually succeed. Do you know how airplanes, satellite launches, RAM, and other items dependent on scarce, expensive manufacturing capabilities are procured? Companies purchase options for these things decades before they actually need them. In fact, much of the manufacturing capacity is *financed* through such options. Why would the space elevator be any different?
nobody invests in things [that don't exist yet]
*Investment* is by definition in things that don't exist yet. Otherwise it's called a *purchase*. Investors are very well capable of looking years ahead and weighting risk vs. profit.
it will take years of R&D before the new stuff that will be created will actually be ready to load on an elevator.
A communications satellite that goes to GEO by space elevator differs from one that goes to GEO by rocket only insofar as the former has to suffer far less g-forces on ascent and can therefore be built more cheaply.
The US would not be at all happy with the idea that China could cut of its reasonably-priced access to space, for instance.
Like they're not at all happy that China could cut off its reasonably-priced access to clothes, shoes, and electronics, for instance?
sending a rock with a 100,000 km long ribbon attached to it into space.
I do appreciate the joke, but if you were to actually cut that ribbon at ground level, all that happens is that the space elevator goes into a slighly elliptical orbit: the cut end of the ribbon ascends a few miles into the atmosphere only to come back down 12 hours later to pretty much the same location, where it can be snagged and re-anchored (same procedure as when the elevator is first lowered from orbit). A mishap for sure, but nothing more.
Yes, it does seem strange that protests can only be filed during the 18-month period in which the application remains secret anyway. I have no idea what that's supposed to achieve.
You cannot protest a patent once the application has been published (look it up). What you are looking for is a Citation of Prior Art. Prior art citations can be sent to the USPTO by anybody, at any time during the validity of the patent. They simply enter the patent file, where they'll be looked at in case of a reexamination request.
Excellent find! 3D-Desk in "linear mode with the option linear_spacing set to zero" (quoting directly from their FAQ) would indeed look *very much* like what M$ is trying to patent here.
Date-wise it looks like a very close race: the M$ application is from April 5, 2002; the first message on the 3ddesk mailing list is from May 2, 2002. It does however refer to the program as working already.
I'm sending a message to the 3ddesk developer urging him to file a statement with the USPTO. Everybody *please* don't/. the USPTO with ill-documented references to fvwm, (t?)v(t?)wm, Enlightenment, etc. It's quality, not quantity of complaints that counts with the USPTO.
I am sure Enlightenment has done this for years. It provides a icon bar where mini-sized windows and applications are viewed and you can see all the windows on all your desktops at the same time. I am sure that it was available years ago - but not sure of the exact date. I was using it in 97 or 98.
Point is, does Enlightenment (or any of the other virtual desktops bandied about) provide a button that maximizes the preview to cover the entire display? *That* is the prior art that would kill this patent. If nobody has thought of it before, they *will* get a patent for this feature, silly as that may strike us.
It's a standard ploy for patent applications: you cast your net wide (all virtual desktops with pagers) in your primary claim, then focus on what you *really* want to get through (the full-screen preview feature) in the subclaims. If you're unlucky and the patent office (or, later, a judge) strikes your primary claim as unreasonably general, you still have the subclaims standing. If you're lucky and the primary claim sneaks through, you have a large impressive club with which to extort license fees, justly or not.
But if you arrive at the same result with your software, and have not consulted the patent, are you OK then?
No, you're not. Even if you had the idea first, the patent holder can prevent you from using it, even in your own home (if they catch you). Patents are very different from copyright: there are no exemptions for fair use or independent derivation. Your only remedy is to challenge the patent, and one way to do this is by documenting that the patented idea was public knowledge before the date of the patent application. What's "public" is interpreted very loosely here: a presentation of the idea before a few reliable witnesses suffices in principle.
They're not actually trying to patent virtual desktops, they're trying to patent a pager with a preview of each desktop. You know, kind of like Gnome has (and probably KDE as well; can't remember).
No, they're not - they're actually showing the Gnome pager as prior art (Figure 1c). You have to go up to Figure 5 to see what they're actually claiming: a method to preview your virtual desktops on the entire display. So you'd click a button on your pager to get, say, all your 2x2 desktops displayed simultaneously at half size. The undeniable advantage is that at half-size you'll see a lot more detail than at pager (say, 1/16) size.
If anyone knows of prior art specifically relating to this kind of preview, please *do* contact the patent office. This isn't going to be so easy to defeat as some here are spouting off without bothering to look at the blasted thing. Give the MS-lawyers some credit - they may be evil, but stupid they're not.
Slashdot Mirror
We've already blown tens of billions of dollars sending government bureaucrats to one barren rock
Have to agree, that's an accurate though not very nice description of Baghdad.
if we're really serious, we need to talk about building up a permanent presence in space. That means not just sending somebody to another planet to plant a flag. That means building a permanent infrastructure that will support continued expansion.
/. for at least 3 days: the best way to do this is to build the space elevator, which may actually be easier, faster, and cheaper to develop than a rocket-based reliable high-capacity, high-orbit vehicle.
Amen! And since it hasn't been mentioned on
The Blue team with the CyberRider (the motorcycle entry)
Ummm... the Blue Team's motorcycle entry is known as Ghostrider. CyberRider uses a 4-wheeled vehicle.
I dno't konw whcih stroy you are tnalikg aubot, but as lnog as you lavee the fsirt and lsat ltertes anole it wrkos qitue wlel.
I've converted Keisler's calculus textbook to full text-searchable DjVu and put it up in both bundled (single file to download) and unbundled (many files for fast browsing) formats. Enjoy!
For those who don't yet know, DjVu is a free, highly effective compression format for scanned documents. Conversion from PDF to DjVu shrank the Keisler from 24MB to 10MB without perceptible loss in quality, and added incremental loading, fast browsing, and (most importantly) full-text search capabilities. Get the free viewer.
Is exploring the planet by random walk really an optimal use of resources?
On a planet we know practically nothing about at all yet, it comes pretty damn close.
Dihydrogen Monoxide is arguably the most abundant lethal chemical on this planet.
Another novella capturing the nostalgia of a depopulated world full of automated machinery that keeps going is "Slow Music" by James Tiptree, Jr. Beautiful.
The cable already is in orbit . Cutting it at the bottom will simply move its center of mass infinitesimally higher, and will simply make it drift to the west very very slowly.
Not quite - it will depend on how the SE is actually being used at the time. Consider: the SE must remain in GEO *when loaded* at the bottom at its maximum payload capacity, or else it would come crashing down. Thus when operating at less than maximum capacity, the anchor must supply the missing mass to balance the SE, so there will be tension at the anchor point. When the ribbon is cut in such a situation, the SE will go into an elliptical orbit.
If 15 tons of payload are cut off at the anchor, this actually corresponds to the mass of 2'000 km of ribbon. I guess the counterweight at GEO ameliorates this, but I can't calculate by how much. (The very first counterweight can't be too massive since it will have to be lifted by rocket.)
You can bet that national governments not on friendly terms with the first owner will immediately band together to invest in their own elevator.
Maybe so - but do you currently see the US (or anybody else for that matter) rush to invest into recuperating the capability to build its own consumer electronics? If China ever were to pull the plug on that... but it's much cheaper to play nice with the Chinese than to try to compete on uneven ground (higher labor costs, etc.)
With the first space elevator up, you'll have the same situation: yes you can desperately try to play catch-up - or you can play nice with the elevator company and try to entice them to install one on your premises. Which is more likely, especially if the first space elevator is owned by an ideologically agnostic company rather than a government?
Playing catch-up is also going to be very, very hard. According to this schedule, by the time you've finally built your own renegade elevator, everybody who's played nice with the elevator company is already off colonizing Mars and mining the asteroid belt. It'll be like being a few years late for the gold rush, and all the good claims are already taken.
Don't blame Kim Stanley Robinson for the faults of his readers.
Good point, thanks. What I should have said more specifically is: descriptions of catastrophic space elevator failure in the SF literature give a misleading picture since their designs are far removed from the actual space elevator design as currently proposed.
100GPa is only about ten times as strong as good steel.
You've missed a zero - last time I've checked high-strength steel alloys were below 1 GPa.
The "cable" is going to have to be pretty substantial.
You're missing the point: since virtually all the tensile strength is required to support the mass of the ribbon, that ribbon must perforce be both extremely tough *and* extremely light. Plans call for a ribbon weight of only 7.5 grams per meter, which is actually less than a sheet of laser printer paper.
I think it would hit the ground, relatively intact, at supersonic (but nowhere near asteroid) speeds.
Nonsense. The proposed ribbon is made of carbon, and thus has the aerodynamic and chemical properties of an extremely long and tough piece of paper. In other words, any pieces accelerated to high speed by orbital dynamics will burn up; any remaining fragments will flutter harmlessly. The only extant concern is the potential release of (potentially carcinogenic) free carbon nanotubes; this needs to be investigated.
All of which you would already know if you'd bothered to follow the link I provided instead of arguing from ignorance.
if man ever lands on Titan, there won't be any problem with heating
Yes, there will be: there's no oxygen.
Think about it: there can't be free oxygen and lots of hydrocarbons in any atmosphere at the same time, at least not for long. First flash of lightning, and - BOOOOM!
1/625 possibility of 'severe damage' (aka destruction) from the 2031 Leonid Shower is a pretty damn big risk, if you ask me.
Compared to what - the 1/50 risk per flight of a space shuttle blowing up? A 1/625 risk of destruction every 33 years is *far* safer than any other means to reach orbit in existence.
The carnage that such an event would wreak absolutely beggars the imagination.
The carnage would be non-existent. The proposed ribbon has the approximate shape, weight and composition of carbon paper (remember those?). All but the lowest few km would burn up in the atmosphere. The rest might land on your head with all the force of a fluttering sheet of newspaper.
Read Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars. Skip to the last few chapters if you just want the space elevator stuff.
The truth doesn't always make good fiction, and good fiction doesn't always tell the truth.
One thing I really question is the claim that there will be or can be only one final winner in "owning" space.
One word for you: Microsoft.
Not a monopoly cast in stone for all time, but a small player that is in the right place when a major new frontier (with subsequent exponential growth) is opened, can go on to lock competition out of the market for decades. This should be well undertood on slashdot of all places.
The most economical way by far (factor of 1000 or so) to build the *second* space elevator is to use the first one to lift the components. This provides a very simple way to lock out the competition: refuse to lift their CNT ribbon. Add to that the headstart in the technology and practical experience operating the things, and it looks pretty likely that whoever owns the first space elevator will own all of them for quite a while.
Actually, an even better analogy than Microsoft are the railroad barons. Do the names Vanderbilt, Carnegie, etc. ring a bell? Most of the "old wealth" in the US is still in the hands of those families whose ancestors controlled for a few decades the only economic means of transport to the American West.
the idea that exponential growth will begin immediately after an elevator is constructed is probably total nonsense.
That's correct, because the exponential growth will begin several years *before* the space elevator is operational, as soon as it looks like the project might actually succeed. Do you know how airplanes, satellite launches, RAM, and other items dependent on scarce, expensive manufacturing capabilities are procured? Companies purchase options for these things decades before they actually need them. In fact, much of the manufacturing capacity is *financed* through such options. Why would the space elevator be any different?
nobody invests in things [that don't exist yet]
*Investment* is by definition in things that don't exist yet. Otherwise it's called a *purchase*. Investors are very well capable of looking years ahead and weighting risk vs. profit.
it will take years of R&D before the new stuff that will be created will actually be ready to load on an elevator.
A communications satellite that goes to GEO by space elevator differs from one that goes to GEO by rocket only insofar as the former has to suffer far less g-forces on ascent and can therefore be built more cheaply.
The US would not be at all happy with the idea that China could cut of its reasonably-priced access to space, for instance.
Like they're not at all happy that China could cut off its reasonably-priced access to clothes, shoes, and electronics, for instance?
sending a rock with a 100,000 km long ribbon attached to it into space.
I do appreciate the joke, but if you were to actually cut that ribbon at ground level, all that happens is that the space elevator goes into a slighly elliptical orbit: the cut end of the ribbon ascends a few miles into the atmosphere only to come back down 12 hours later to pretty much the same location, where it can be snagged and re-anchored (same procedure as when the elevator is first lowered from orbit). A mishap for sure, but nothing more.
flying without fuel: skydiving!
Nope - skydivers still need a fueled airplane to "get it up". Try hanggliding or paragliding for true fuel-free (actually solar-powered) flight.
Yes, it does seem strange that protests can only be filed during the 18-month period in which the application remains secret anyway. I have no idea what that's supposed to achieve.
Here is the link to the Patent Protest Document.
You cannot protest a patent once the application has been published (look it up). What you are looking for is a Citation of Prior Art. Prior art citations can be sent to the USPTO by anybody, at any time during the validity of the patent. They simply enter the patent file, where they'll be looked at in case of a reexamination request.
Sounds a little like 3d-desk
/. the USPTO with ill-documented references to fvwm, (t?)v(t?)wm, Enlightenment, etc. It's quality, not quantity of complaints that counts with the USPTO.
Excellent find! 3D-Desk in "linear mode with the option linear_spacing set to zero" (quoting directly from their FAQ) would indeed look *very much* like what M$ is trying to patent here.
Date-wise it looks like a very close race: the M$ application is from April 5, 2002; the first message on the 3ddesk mailing list is from May 2, 2002. It does however refer to the program as working already.
I'm sending a message to the 3ddesk developer urging him to file a statement with the USPTO. Everybody *please* don't
I am sure Enlightenment has done this for years. It provides a icon bar where mini-sized windows and applications are viewed and you can see all the windows on all your desktops at the same time. I am sure that it was available years ago - but not sure of the exact date. I was using it in 97 or 98.
Point is, does Enlightenment (or any of the other virtual desktops bandied about) provide a button that maximizes the preview to cover the entire display? *That* is the prior art that would kill this patent. If nobody has thought of it before, they *will* get a patent for this feature, silly as that may strike us.
It's a standard ploy for patent applications: you cast your net wide (all virtual desktops with pagers) in your primary claim, then focus on what you *really* want to get through (the full-screen preview feature) in the subclaims. If you're unlucky and the patent office (or, later, a judge) strikes your primary claim as unreasonably general, you still have the subclaims standing. If you're lucky and the primary claim sneaks through, you have a large impressive club with which to extort license fees, justly or not.
But if you arrive at the same result with your software, and have not consulted the patent, are you OK then?
No, you're not. Even if you had the idea first, the patent holder can prevent you from using it, even in your own home (if they catch you). Patents are very different from copyright: there are no exemptions for fair use or independent derivation. Your only remedy is to challenge the patent, and one way to do this is by documenting that the patented idea was public knowledge before the date of the patent application. What's "public" is interpreted very loosely here: a presentation of the idea before a few reliable witnesses suffices in principle.
They're not actually trying to patent virtual desktops, they're trying to patent a pager with a preview of each desktop. You know, kind of like Gnome has (and probably KDE as well; can't remember).
No, they're not - they're actually showing the Gnome pager as prior art (Figure 1c). You have to go up to Figure 5 to see what they're actually claiming: a method to preview your virtual desktops on the entire display. So you'd click a button on your pager to get, say, all your 2x2 desktops displayed simultaneously at half size. The undeniable advantage is that at half-size you'll see a lot more detail than at pager (say, 1/16) size.
If anyone knows of prior art specifically relating to this kind of preview, please *do* contact the patent office. This isn't going to be so easy to defeat as some here are spouting off without bothering to look at the blasted thing. Give the MS-lawyers some credit - they may be evil, but stupid they're not.