It's not a massive amount of computing power given the opponent it's facing. A human mind is an absurdly powerful computer and last I checked the best supercomputers were only now beginning to match it. Deep Blue was specifically designed for chess and it only matched humans for that game.
It's like homeownership: if your boss knows you have a mortgage, you're screwed. He has no reason to offer you incentives (better pay, better hours, better perks, etc) because you have another God to pray to: your bankster. The same is true with a W2: your boss knows he's your only source of income, and as such you're stuck with bad pay, bad hours, bad perks.
Well if you're easier to replace than toiler paper then of course they don't. Then again if your value to the company is that meager, below the janitor likely, then you may wish to reexamine your life in general.
I on the other hand am more than a monkey in human clothing. My boss knows I can find another job without too much difficulty and that he can't find a replacement for me without a lot of difficulty.
Go solo, everyone. Cut the unbilical cord and if you're a hard worker, you'll prosper. Then find about 10 of your previous coworkers, offer them a few bucks more an hour, and bill them out at 5X their pay to not just your old employer but their competitors, too. 3. Profit!
Why? Instead of wasting my time on all the crap needed to run a business (which I'm neither good nor knowledgeable about) I can instead spend time improving the skills I am good at. Then again I'm not particularly obsessed with money, and instead value peace of mind and happiness quite a bit more. If I wanted to maximize income at the cost of my own happiness (ie: spending a lot of time on crap I don't even marginally enjoy) then I'd have chosen a very different career path.
If your concern is government snooping then you're hopelessly delusional. That said encryption alone will not guarantee that the data cannot be snooped which was my whole bloody point. Either learn to read or stop wasting people's time.
No one is forcing anyone since you don't need encryption to run a website. Likewise there are numerous CA authorities that you can use and I believe a free one is being added to mozilla (verification takes a while for such things). The point of https is to prevent snooping and man in the middle attacks. It's idiotic to use a scheme that doesn't prevent those instead of a scheme that does.
The problem with this is that it does not guarantee that your connection is actually encrypted. There is a reason why CAs where created and it has a lot to do with ensuring proper encryption. Basically a man in the middle attack can with self-signed CAs fake the user into accepting their CA instead of the website's CA. You now have the illusion of security and encryption which some would consider worse than no encryption at all. To the end user they would be identical and while there may be a complaint about different keys, if the user went to the site before, most users would probably ignore them (especially after they seem them a dozen times for legitimate sites that for some reason changed their keys).
A motorcycle can only be driven over vehicle accessible roads and in traffic. They provides little safety compared to a car and require lot of paranoia (ie: attention to everything around you, etc.) to be safe in.
A segway is like a bicycle in that it can be driven on bike paths and, in many places, on sidewalks (even where a bicycle legally can't). This eliminates many of the safety and traffic interaction problems that a motorcycle would have. Motorcycles also have overheating problems as I understand it (ie: you don't want to idle them).
A motorcycle is faster however in cities it won't matter anyway. Parking is easier but a segway is even easier to park than a motorcycle. Parking is also an area specific problem and in some places parking is a non issue.
Thousands of people fly every day, miles above the Earth, propelled by a controlled explosion In a machine with a whole lot of moving parts supplied by the lowest bidder. Most people in that situation get a $5, single-strap safety restraint. Even the pilots and crew don't get an $800 restraint system.
Commercial airplanes aren't supposed to experience his acceleration (ie: why you need seatbelts) and when they do experience them people get injured. The space shuttle experiences decent acceleration quite often and it's one of the lower accelerating space vehicles. I'm sure fighter jets use quite expensive safety systems for that very reason.
The Soyuz vehicles, for example, have more than once experienced enough Gs to cause permanent damage to the occupants despite the safety harnesses in place (during reentry failures or emergency ejections). In other words the EXPECTED maximum load that may be put of them (ie: during emergencies) those $500 seat belts may be the minimum that is required.
*sigh* The world population growth rate is slowing down due to the increasing number of nations becoming developed. Current estimates indicate we'll stabilize at around 13 billion people or so. Birth control is pointless when people want to and in some cases need to have many kids.
It's quite possible to select on multiple criteria and income is in no way a direct criteria for getting in (aside from connections and legacy stuff). Amazingly enough the wealthy are usually intelligent and the children of intelligent people are likewise intelligent. The children of the wealthy have access to better education, stabler families, paid support/tutoring and so on.
I take it all those average SAT, grade point average, extracurricular and so on statistics don't matter to you at all because they don't support your pre-conceived notions? You can believe whatever you want to support your own insane views but that doesn't make them any less insane or idiotic.
See, unlike you, I've taken courses from many different universities and I've interacted with students from them. I was amusingly enough top of the class at a local college in heavy duty mathematics and cs classes when I was still in middle school and high school. Unlike those schools the top university I later went to actually managed to challenge and interest me. Amazingly enough my parents were at best lower middle class at the time and I still managed to get into multiple top schools.
The difference is that the students in top schools are usually smarter and harder working. If you don't understand what that entails then you're not who such school's are looking for. Simply put it's not something that matters if you'll never go beyond average however matters a lot for those way above average. As a result of this classes can be taught at a higher level, students can work together without some dragging others down, special research type projects can be run for students, students can interact with likewise intelligent pears and so on.
The US Saturn V used to launch Skylab could put 165000 lb in LEO.
This was not a full sized Saturn V and a fully loaded Saturn V could lift 200000+ lbs. Of course some Energia variants could have gone quite a bit higher but then again some planned Saturn V modification could surpass even that. The Ares V is if I understand correctly going to be somewhere above a Saturn V in lift capacity.
Then again at that point it's almost a pissing contest since your failure rates and costs are probably much higher than doing individual launches (using a smaller rocket).
Exactly. I went to one of the listed schools and in most of my CS classes the books were gravy or just for more in-depth reading (or to fill in gaps). Most of the material came from class notes which were in many cases posted online. Even beyond that what the professor said and the assignments given was where most of the information came from. It is in fact quite possible to use the same book and teach classes at two vastly different levels (some books even have extra sections for that reason).
You need to manage such people and their contributions which is not trivial. In fact with something as sensitive (to fuckups) as a spaceship it'd essentially cost more effort than you gain. It works in areas where contributions aren't tightly controlled and mistakes aren't expensive. In this case that bit of code may cause an error by interacting with another system through purely hardware means that crashes the spaceship. That logo may be too dark, absorb too much sunlight, overheat a wire and explode the spaceship. Most people probably don't think in the proper way to prevent mistakes on their own or to simply not active induce problems (ie: they don't follow directions).
The thing is that the US let's people go amazing things if they have what it takes and if they go after their dreams. Many people however expect their dreams to come to them or to have someone else tell them what their dreams are.
Well they do explode on takeoff sometimes and they do fail almost catastrophically on reentry even more often. They however have a simple enough design that allows for enough safety features/margins to not kill the crew in the process. Some of the crew may get permanent injuries and never fly again (from the G forces) but they live.
However, there's a very easy way around that, that the original poster mentions -- you can keep your own PSTs. Doing so shifts the responsibility for backing up that email from the backup group to the user. For example, I copy everything to PSTs on my laptop, which (intentionally) does not get backed up.
Except that most user laptops/desktop should be backed up and not having a backup policy in place seems just idiotic to me. In other words the backup group STILL has to deal with the data except now it's in a different format. As you pointed out in the end this will result in using even more space for backups (that 10mb file will take up 100mb of backup space).
Flying habitats are not science fiction, no. We already have long-term aircraft prototypes. Hell, given a sufficient supply of fuel, all you really need is a more corrosion-resistant aircraft.
The argument here isn't if we can dump something into venus that would stay afloat for a couple months but if we can construct a human livable long term habitat there. Also corrosion resistance is not a small problem.
When did this become a binary discussion? We have a basic grasp on technologies for habitat modules, surface or floating.
Which you are extending in arbitrary direction while claiming equally plausible extension in other directions are for some insane reason immensely more difficult.
Rotating spacecraft and space elevators are not impossible, but they are extremely implausible.
There is nothing implausible about a rotating space station (there is a difference between that and a space ship) besides the usual engineering problems and money problems. If you think it's implausible than your grasp of technology is so absurdly bad I don't think this discussion is worth my time.
We don't even have a realistic roadmap.
We don't have one for flying something in venus either, just because you claim it's a simple extension of existing technologies means NOTHING. I claim the same thing about rotating space stations and to a lesser degree a space elevator. In fact there are studies being done on space elevators (and nasa funded competitions) which is more than I can say about things floating on venus.
I said nothing was impossible, and again, we already have working prototypes of suitable space planes. The space shuttle is one important step. Various X-projects are another.
Those are rockets that happen to have a payload that can land on as a plane. In fact none of them are able to achieve orbit in any simple fashion (multiple stages, complex solid rockets, etc.). Interestingly enough unless you want to construct a really long floating runway space planes are probably less useful than capsules. On that note where do you plan to get all the fuel to send your rocket out of the Venus atmosphere?
Rotating spacecraft and space elevators haven't even advanced to a prototype stage. They're not in the same ballpark. They're not feasible based on anything we have now.
Nothing infeasible about a rotating space station as it can be done with existing materials. Space planes of any type other than those strapped to rockets can't even claim anything close to that.
Check again. Low gravity causes loss of bone density, muscle atrophy, decreased production of red blood cells, headaches, weakened immune systems, and gastrointestinal complications. Prolonged exposure requires significant readjustment and often physical training upon returning to Earth. The closer the gravity to earth-normal, the more attenuated these effects.
Again if you have links than please share them and I'd like to once again note that earth orbit is NOT low gravity (it's in fact effectively no gravity).
Space stations can be spun to create something akin to gravity assuming there is a need for it (right now the extra complexity and potential problems aren't worth it probably). In fact compared to floating cities on another planet spinning space stations don't seem that difficult to make.
You misunderstand. The Earth-like temperature reduces the complexity of environmental systems because it naturally maintains a habitable environment. Space being an insulator is exactly the problem. Making something airtight is much less expensive than making something sufficient reinforced to persist in vacuum, on top of also being airtight. Not as easily, no. The insulation and isolation required of habitats in this environment would prevent heat transfer to those two giant rocks. It could be done, and we have the technology, but simplicity is best, and Venus maintains the edge, even over the Moon and Mars.
These are all valid concerns except that they'd need to have been solved long BEFORE we even get close to sending sustainable habitats to other planets (long term spaceships, in-orbit construction, etc, etc.). Venus would require a whole new and unique set of designs and problems. Also lots of things seem simple on paper or when written in a sentence but are total hell in practice.
No. Now you're talking about excavation. That's quite a different (and much more expensive) beast than the surface habitats the rest of your post presumes.
No it's not and I never said excavation since soil can be put on top of structures. In fact since it's insanely expensive to send any material to other planets you want to send as little material as possible. That is why most proposals for long term habitats plan to use local material instead of wasting fuel to send shielding material.
The point was earth-like gravity, and spinning space habitats are science fiction.
And floating cities in a poisonous acid atmosphere AREN'T science fiction? Just because it doesn't agree with your point doesn't make something implausible.
At the expense of fuel and risk of excursion equipment breaking down on that little joyride. Further, if clouds are going to get boring, then a different configuration of dust and rocks is going to be equally boring. People spend days lying on the grass watching the sky (or at least they used to). People don't really stare at static wastelands.
We really should tell all those mountain climbers and tourists to the grand canyon to stop wasting their time.
What natural resources would it require? If you're talking about extracting oxygen and hydrogen out of rocks, how is that different from extracting it from hydrocarbons and sulfur dioxides?
Metals, silicone and so on. Sending anything across a solar system is expensive and any colony will need to be as self sufficient as possible. In fact any colony which cannot in time become self sufficient is an utter waste of resource. It is pointless to send people somewhere if all their buildings need to be shipped with them since you can just make larger cities on earth for a fraction of the cost. Otherwise it's a scientific base not a city and then all you care about is how interesting the environment is for your scientific purposes.
Not in any meaningful way.
It is a meaningful way if you need 10000 times the volume to hold up something as then you need to ship in even more material.
Only for a rocket, which would have nowhere to launch anyway.
Sure you do, you fly it out a distance then drop it. Rockets have no need for a launch pad except when it's more convenient.
Space plane.
These don't exist and all current attempts are essentially rockets, since you seem to like selectively saying things are impossible I claim space planes are impossible in turn.
So? We can't build one anyway.
It's plausible and likely would be created long before floating cities on another planet since it'd be needed for such a venture.
A functioning habitat on Venus would be the most Earth-like, particularly
Not exactly a problem unless you go outside and even then it's not much of a problem since spacesuits mostly are there to keep you from cooking to death (vacuum is a great insulator). That said equipment may benefit but that's only outside equipment and then you have the corrosion which evens it out.
2. Atmospheric Pressure
A mixed blessing given the toxic atmosphere since it will get in through holes which isn't a problem with vacuum.
3. Heat dissipation
A good argument however two of the places I mentioned are giant rocks into which heat will dissipate quite nicely.
4. Waste disposal (if you subscribe to the argument that disrupting the lunar or Martian landscape with heaps of trash would be wrong, but tossing down where sulfur, pressure, and intense heat will take care of it and where we'll never see it is not such a problem)
Garbage would likely be recycled heavily in most such colonies since unlike Earth most things wouldn't be absurdly abundant.
5. More natural radiation shielding than the Moon or Mars or space itself outside of Earth orbit
Not really, the moon and mars have soil which you can pile on top of things. Space has plenty of nicely sized rocks you can procure for the purpose. Venus only has as much protection as you can drag to it.
6. Gravity
So does the moon and mars although to lesser extents while space habitats can be spun.
7. Clouds (I'm serious. Staring at a constant, motionless lunar landscape for months would be less than pleasant once the novelty wears off. At least Venus has movement).
Clouds will also get boring and on venus the only thing you'll have is clouds. At least on the moon and mars you can go and get some nice different views.
It's not exactly a plug-n-play Earth, but it's got a lot of benefits compared to the three environments you mention, and really just two fundamental disadvantages: corrosive atmosphere and the need to stay aloft. Dealing with the former is not exactly rocket science, pun intended. It's a challenge, sure...but we've overcome greater ones to get this far. Venus may well be the most practical next step (if we solve the "keeping a city in the air" bit).
Venus also lacks natural resources that aren't in the atmosphere (ie: everything will need to be dragged there), floating cities limit maximum density of materials, failures can be much more catastrophic, it's heavier gravity well makes leaving it more difficult, it is incapable of supporting a space elevator and probably a lot more.
1) Wear suits to protect us from the poisonous atmosphere and lack of oxygen. 2) Stay under cover to protect us from the various radiation (no magnetic field as I understand it). 3) Keep a complex life support system functioning in a complex artificial environment where failure means death.
So how exactly is this different from the moon, mars or even space itself? It actually seems more difficult and worse environment for humans than any of those.
Yeah, god forbid society ever moves forward or that the unfit don't make jobs. If this was a 100 years ago you'd be screaming at the car manufacturers for depriving horse drivers of their incomes and of light bulb manufacturers decimating the poor candle makers. I also I take it you want the mentally disabled to be paid as much as a PhD? After all they have families to.
It's the first visit which is the problem in this case and I believe browsers already warn people if certs change. The browser cannot be reasonably sure that the initial cert is correct and it warns people if they wish to accept it. That said the error firefox (2.0 at least) gives isn't exactly good and it says nothing that would imply to a non-technical person that this isn't necessarily a "bad thing."
The problem as I understand it is that self-signed certificates are NOT as secure. Specifically a man in the middle attack can easily fake a certificate because your site needs to send the public key to the user in an insecure way (ie: third party intercepts public key, send their own public key, to you they look identical).
The point of a CA is to prevent this by having a public key come pre-loaded on your machine so there is no possibility of successful interception (ie: the replaced public key would be rejected by the CA).
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It's not a massive amount of computing power given the opponent it's facing. A human mind is an absurdly powerful computer and last I checked the best supercomputers were only now beginning to match it. Deep Blue was specifically designed for chess and it only matched humans for that game.
It's like homeownership: if your boss knows you have a mortgage, you're screwed. He has no reason to offer you incentives (better pay, better hours, better perks, etc) because you have another God to pray to: your bankster. The same is true with a W2: your boss knows he's your only source of income, and as such you're stuck with bad pay, bad hours, bad perks.
Well if you're easier to replace than toiler paper then of course they don't. Then again if your value to the company is that meager, below the janitor likely, then you may wish to reexamine your life in general.
I on the other hand am more than a monkey in human clothing. My boss knows I can find another job without too much difficulty and that he can't find a replacement for me without a lot of difficulty.
Go solo, everyone. Cut the unbilical cord and if you're a hard worker, you'll prosper. Then find about 10 of your previous coworkers, offer them a few bucks more an hour, and bill them out at 5X their pay to not just your old employer but their competitors, too. 3. Profit!
Why? Instead of wasting my time on all the crap needed to run a business (which I'm neither good nor knowledgeable about) I can instead spend time improving the skills I am good at. Then again I'm not particularly obsessed with money, and instead value peace of mind and happiness quite a bit more. If I wanted to maximize income at the cost of my own happiness (ie: spending a lot of time on crap I don't even marginally enjoy) then I'd have chosen a very different career path.
If your concern is government snooping then you're hopelessly delusional. That said encryption alone will not guarantee that the data cannot be snooped which was my whole bloody point. Either learn to read or stop wasting people's time.
No one is forcing anyone since you don't need encryption to run a website. Likewise there are numerous CA authorities that you can use and I believe a free one is being added to mozilla (verification takes a while for such things). The point of https is to prevent snooping and man in the middle attacks. It's idiotic to use a scheme that doesn't prevent those instead of a scheme that does.
The problem with this is that it does not guarantee that your connection is actually encrypted. There is a reason why CAs where created and it has a lot to do with ensuring proper encryption. Basically a man in the middle attack can with self-signed CAs fake the user into accepting their CA instead of the website's CA. You now have the illusion of security and encryption which some would consider worse than no encryption at all. To the end user they would be identical and while there may be a complaint about different keys, if the user went to the site before, most users would probably ignore them (especially after they seem them a dozen times for legitimate sites that for some reason changed their keys).
A motorcycle can only be driven over vehicle accessible roads and in traffic. They provides little safety compared to a car and require lot of paranoia (ie: attention to everything around you, etc.) to be safe in.
A segway is like a bicycle in that it can be driven on bike paths and, in many places, on sidewalks (even where a bicycle legally can't). This eliminates many of the safety and traffic interaction problems that a motorcycle would have. Motorcycles also have overheating problems as I understand it (ie: you don't want to idle them).
A motorcycle is faster however in cities it won't matter anyway. Parking is easier but a segway is even easier to park than a motorcycle. Parking is also an area specific problem and in some places parking is a non issue.
Thousands of people fly every day, miles above the Earth, propelled by a controlled explosion In a machine with a whole lot of moving parts supplied by the lowest bidder. Most people in that situation get a $5, single-strap safety restraint. Even the pilots and crew don't get an $800 restraint system.
Commercial airplanes aren't supposed to experience his acceleration (ie: why you need seatbelts) and when they do experience them people get injured. The space shuttle experiences decent acceleration quite often and it's one of the lower accelerating space vehicles. I'm sure fighter jets use quite expensive safety systems for that very reason.
The Soyuz vehicles, for example, have more than once experienced enough Gs to cause permanent damage to the occupants despite the safety harnesses in place (during reentry failures or emergency ejections). In other words the EXPECTED maximum load that may be put of them (ie: during emergencies) those $500 seat belts may be the minimum that is required.
*sigh* The world population growth rate is slowing down due to the increasing number of nations becoming developed. Current estimates indicate we'll stabilize at around 13 billion people or so. Birth control is pointless when people want to and in some cases need to have many kids.
It's quite possible to select on multiple criteria and income is in no way a direct criteria for getting in (aside from connections and legacy stuff). Amazingly enough the wealthy are usually intelligent and the children of intelligent people are likewise intelligent. The children of the wealthy have access to better education, stabler families, paid support/tutoring and so on.
I take it all those average SAT, grade point average, extracurricular and so on statistics don't matter to you at all because they don't support your pre-conceived notions? You can believe whatever you want to support your own insane views but that doesn't make them any less insane or idiotic.
See, unlike you, I've taken courses from many different universities and I've interacted with students from them. I was amusingly enough top of the class at a local college in heavy duty mathematics and cs classes when I was still in middle school and high school. Unlike those schools the top university I later went to actually managed to challenge and interest me. Amazingly enough my parents were at best lower middle class at the time and I still managed to get into multiple top schools.
The difference is that the students in top schools are usually smarter and harder working. If you don't understand what that entails then you're not who such school's are looking for. Simply put it's not something that matters if you'll never go beyond average however matters a lot for those way above average. As a result of this classes can be taught at a higher level, students can work together without some dragging others down, special research type projects can be run for students, students can interact with likewise intelligent pears and so on.
The US Saturn V used to launch Skylab could put 165000 lb in LEO.
This was not a full sized Saturn V and a fully loaded Saturn V could lift 200000+ lbs. Of course some Energia variants could have gone quite a bit higher but then again some planned Saturn V modification could surpass even that. The Ares V is if I understand correctly going to be somewhere above a Saturn V in lift capacity.
Then again at that point it's almost a pissing contest since your failure rates and costs are probably much higher than doing individual launches (using a smaller rocket).
Exactly. I went to one of the listed schools and in most of my CS classes the books were gravy or just for more in-depth reading (or to fill in gaps). Most of the material came from class notes which were in many cases posted online. Even beyond that what the professor said and the assignments given was where most of the information came from. It is in fact quite possible to use the same book and teach classes at two vastly different levels (some books even have extra sections for that reason).
You need to manage such people and their contributions which is not trivial. In fact with something as sensitive (to fuckups) as a spaceship it'd essentially cost more effort than you gain. It works in areas where contributions aren't tightly controlled and mistakes aren't expensive. In this case that bit of code may cause an error by interacting with another system through purely hardware means that crashes the spaceship. That logo may be too dark, absorb too much sunlight, overheat a wire and explode the spaceship. Most people probably don't think in the proper way to prevent mistakes on their own or to simply not active induce problems (ie: they don't follow directions).
The thing is that the US let's people go amazing things if they have what it takes and if they go after their dreams. Many people however expect their dreams to come to them or to have someone else tell them what their dreams are.
Well they do explode on takeoff sometimes and they do fail almost catastrophically on reentry even more often. They however have a simple enough design that allows for enough safety features/margins to not kill the crew in the process. Some of the crew may get permanent injuries and never fly again (from the G forces) but they live.
However, there's a very easy way around that, that the original poster mentions -- you can keep your own PSTs. Doing so shifts the responsibility for backing up that email from the backup group to the user. For example, I copy everything to PSTs on my laptop, which (intentionally) does not get backed up.
Except that most user laptops/desktop should be backed up and not having a backup policy in place seems just idiotic to me. In other words the backup group STILL has to deal with the data except now it's in a different format. As you pointed out in the end this will result in using even more space for backups (that 10mb file will take up 100mb of backup space).
A layer of dirt isn't radiation shielding.
Sure it is if it's thick enough.
Flying habitats are not science fiction, no. We already have long-term aircraft prototypes. Hell, given a sufficient supply of fuel, all you really need is a more corrosion-resistant aircraft.
The argument here isn't if we can dump something into venus that would stay afloat for a couple months but if we can construct a human livable long term habitat there. Also corrosion resistance is not a small problem.
When did this become a binary discussion? We have a basic grasp on technologies for habitat modules, surface or floating.
Which you are extending in arbitrary direction while claiming equally plausible extension in other directions are for some insane reason immensely more difficult.
Rotating spacecraft and space elevators are not impossible, but they are extremely implausible.
There is nothing implausible about a rotating space station (there is a difference between that and a space ship) besides the usual engineering problems and money problems. If you think it's implausible than your grasp of technology is so absurdly bad I don't think this discussion is worth my time.
We don't even have a realistic roadmap.
We don't have one for flying something in venus either, just because you claim it's a simple extension of existing technologies means NOTHING. I claim the same thing about rotating space stations and to a lesser degree a space elevator. In fact there are studies being done on space elevators (and nasa funded competitions) which is more than I can say about things floating on venus.
I said nothing was impossible, and again, we already have working prototypes of suitable space planes. The space shuttle is one important step. Various X-projects are another.
Those are rockets that happen to have a payload that can land on as a plane. In fact none of them are able to achieve orbit in any simple fashion (multiple stages, complex solid rockets, etc.). Interestingly enough unless you want to construct a really long floating runway space planes are probably less useful than capsules. On that note where do you plan to get all the fuel to send your rocket out of the Venus atmosphere?
Rotating spacecraft and space elevators haven't even advanced to a prototype stage. They're not in the same ballpark. They're not feasible based on anything we have now.
Nothing infeasible about a rotating space station as it can be done with existing materials. Space planes of any type other than those strapped to rockets can't even claim anything close to that.
Check again. Low gravity causes loss of bone density, muscle atrophy, decreased production of red blood cells, headaches, weakened immune systems, and gastrointestinal complications. Prolonged exposure requires significant readjustment and often physical training upon returning to Earth. The closer the gravity to earth-normal, the more attenuated these effects.
Again if you have links than please share them and I'd like to once again note that earth orbit is NOT low gravity (it's in fact effectively no gravity).
Space stations can be spun to create something akin to gravity assuming there is a need for it (right now the extra complexity and potential problems aren't worth it probably). In fact compared to floating cities on another planet spinning space stations don't seem that difficult to make.
Mars and the moon have gravity although lower than Earth. Space habitats can be spun to create something akin to gravity.
You misunderstand. The Earth-like temperature reduces the complexity of environmental systems because it naturally maintains a habitable environment. Space being an insulator is exactly the problem.
Making something airtight is much less expensive than making something sufficient reinforced to persist in vacuum, on top of also being airtight.
Not as easily, no. The insulation and isolation required of habitats in this environment would prevent heat transfer to those two giant rocks. It could be done, and we have the technology, but simplicity is best, and Venus maintains the edge, even over the Moon and Mars.
These are all valid concerns except that they'd need to have been solved long BEFORE we even get close to sending sustainable habitats to other planets (long term spaceships, in-orbit construction, etc, etc.). Venus would require a whole new and unique set of designs and problems.
Also lots of things seem simple on paper or when written in a sentence but are total hell in practice.
No. Now you're talking about excavation. That's quite a different (and much more expensive) beast than the surface habitats the rest of your post presumes.
No it's not and I never said excavation since soil can be put on top of structures. In fact since it's insanely expensive to send any material to other planets you want to send as little material as possible. That is why most proposals for long term habitats plan to use local material instead of wasting fuel to send shielding material.
The point was earth-like gravity, and spinning space habitats are science fiction.
And floating cities in a poisonous acid atmosphere AREN'T science fiction? Just because it doesn't agree with your point doesn't make something implausible.
At the expense of fuel and risk of excursion equipment breaking down on that little joyride. Further, if clouds are going to get boring, then a different configuration of dust and rocks is going to be equally boring. People spend days lying on the grass watching the sky (or at least they used to). People don't really stare at static wastelands.
We really should tell all those mountain climbers and tourists to the grand canyon to stop wasting their time.
What natural resources would it require? If you're talking about extracting oxygen and hydrogen out of rocks, how is that different from extracting it from hydrocarbons and sulfur dioxides?
Metals, silicone and so on. Sending anything across a solar system is expensive and any colony will need to be as self sufficient as possible. In fact any colony which cannot in time become self sufficient is an utter waste of resource. It is pointless to send people somewhere if all their buildings need to be shipped with them since you can just make larger cities on earth for a fraction of the cost. Otherwise it's a scientific base not a city and then all you care about is how interesting the environment is for your scientific purposes.
Not in any meaningful way.
It is a meaningful way if you need 10000 times the volume to hold up something as then you need to ship in even more material.
Only for a rocket, which would have nowhere to launch anyway.
Sure you do, you fly it out a distance then drop it. Rockets have no need for a launch pad except when it's more convenient.
Space plane.
These don't exist and all current attempts are essentially rockets, since you seem to like selectively saying things are impossible I claim space planes are impossible in turn.
So? We can't build one anyway.
It's plausible and likely would be created long before floating cities on another planet since it'd be needed for such a venture.
A functioning habitat on Venus would be the most Earth-like, particularly
1. Temperature
Not exactly a problem unless you go outside and even then it's not much of a problem since spacesuits mostly are there to keep you from cooking to death (vacuum is a great insulator). That said equipment may benefit but that's only outside equipment and then you have the corrosion which evens it out.
2. Atmospheric Pressure
A mixed blessing given the toxic atmosphere since it will get in through holes which isn't a problem with vacuum.
3. Heat dissipation
A good argument however two of the places I mentioned are giant rocks into which heat will dissipate quite nicely.
4. Waste disposal (if you subscribe to the argument that disrupting the lunar or Martian landscape with heaps of trash would be wrong, but tossing down where sulfur, pressure, and intense heat will take care of it and where we'll never see it is not such a problem)
Garbage would likely be recycled heavily in most such colonies since unlike Earth most things wouldn't be absurdly abundant.
5. More natural radiation shielding than the Moon or Mars or space itself outside of Earth orbit
Not really, the moon and mars have soil which you can pile on top of things. Space has plenty of nicely sized rocks you can procure for the purpose. Venus only has as much protection as you can drag to it.
6. Gravity
So does the moon and mars although to lesser extents while space habitats can be spun.
7. Clouds (I'm serious. Staring at a constant, motionless lunar landscape for months would be less than pleasant once the novelty wears off. At least Venus has movement).
Clouds will also get boring and on venus the only thing you'll have is clouds. At least on the moon and mars you can go and get some nice different views.
It's not exactly a plug-n-play Earth, but it's got a lot of benefits compared to the three environments you mention, and really just two fundamental disadvantages: corrosive atmosphere and the need to stay aloft. Dealing with the former is not exactly rocket science, pun intended. It's a challenge, sure...but we've overcome greater ones to get this far. Venus may well be the most practical next step (if we solve the "keeping a city in the air" bit).
Venus also lacks natural resources that aren't in the atmosphere (ie: everything will need to be dragged there), floating cities limit maximum density of materials, failures can be much more catastrophic, it's heavier gravity well makes leaving it more difficult, it is incapable of supporting a space elevator and probably a lot more.
1) Wear suits to protect us from the poisonous atmosphere and lack of oxygen.
2) Stay under cover to protect us from the various radiation (no magnetic field as I understand it).
3) Keep a complex life support system functioning in a complex artificial environment where failure means death.
So how exactly is this different from the moon, mars or even space itself? It actually seems more difficult and worse environment for humans than any of those.
Yeah, god forbid society ever moves forward or that the unfit don't make jobs. If this was a 100 years ago you'd be screaming at the car manufacturers for depriving horse drivers of their incomes and of light bulb manufacturers decimating the poor candle makers. I also I take it you want the mentally disabled to be paid as much as a PhD? After all they have families to.
It's the first visit which is the problem in this case and I believe browsers already warn people if certs change. The browser cannot be reasonably sure that the initial cert is correct and it warns people if they wish to accept it. That said the error firefox (2.0 at least) gives isn't exactly good and it says nothing that would imply to a non-technical person that this isn't necessarily a "bad thing."
The problem as I understand it is that self-signed certificates are NOT as secure. Specifically a man in the middle attack can easily fake a certificate because your site needs to send the public key to the user in an insecure way (ie: third party intercepts public key, send their own public key, to you they look identical).
The point of a CA is to prevent this by having a public key come pre-loaded on your machine so there is no possibility of successful interception (ie: the replaced public key would be rejected by the CA).
What a guy!