You either have a censored site, or no site at all.
No you either have marginally censored site from a US company which can fight against the Chinese government, or a probably severely censored site by a Chinese company which cannot refuse the Chinese government.
My general statement to such people who claim "nature meant it" is for them to go play Russian roulette with a half loaded gun. That will simulate how much nature meant for them to survive had it not been for all the nice inventions we humans made.
It's called having a passion. Doing what you love. What's so bad about it?
Good for you, then don't bitch about getting fired because you skipped work to play the game or not doing enough work because you stayed up till 5am to play the game. Also don't complain about having to work all your life or not making enough money or getting promoted enough, you choose to spend your time on games. Now sure YOU may not be addicted to such a degree but amazingly enough not everyone is like you.
I don't get it. Where are the priorities? I really am an advocate of being a professional idler and trying to get out of wage slavery.
The smart people find a job which they enjoy to a large degree or one that they don't enjoy but due to one they will be able to retire at 40. Don't work hard, work smart. Also it is preferable for general happiness and security (ie: I don't need much money to live happily, I need much money in case shit happens) to have a passion which is productive.
What's so bad about playing a game for 40 hours a week (something you CHOOSE to do, and ENJOY)?
When you are addicted you don't choose to play, you have to play. You can't choose to not play because your brain chemistry requires the game (to be happy, content, sane or whatever).
Compare that to working which is something you HAVE to do or else you get evicted by some property owning assholes and end up living on the streets and going crazy!
You don't have to work; you can easily stop anytime you want. Assuming you have savings (and no need for company insurance) you can continue on for a while without working. Assuming you have a good resume you can find another job easily enough. Notice a difference between that and addiction?
Look at the subject of this post, "Data mining such things is silly". Sure sounds to me like you're covering "data mining" as a whole, not just misinterpretations of the data.
Right, it's slashdot. People here don't RTFA so why would I expect them to read the posts either. Either that or you are utterly unable to perform reading comprehension and read between the lines.
So it would contain "leads", but not without a new law allowing police to use hearsay, gathered from the Internet, as evidence when obtaining arrest warrants against the general public. Sure - ignoring the multiple conflicts that law would have with the US Constitution, I guess it's not too much of a stretch.
Arrest warrants? Not really, search warrants are more likely. Then again since my post was aimed mostly at people who for some odd reason want such laws and why they're morons it's not like I care much about the details or problems involved.
Too lazy and busy to find and respond to those posts directly.
I would recommend re-reading your original message so you can sync up with yourself on what your original opinion was. I'm not going to waste any more time responding to frantic backpedaling..
Suit yourself, and frantic backpedaling? You seem to think that I care enough about this to put much mental effort into it. Unlike you I don't really give enough of a damn beyond amusement. If I did I would have spent time to write my first post more coherently but evidently I didn't.
Also, how the heck can you draw all these assumptions and conclusions from a post which was written semi-coherently and was quite visible missing half of what it was supposed to say? Not to mention that some of your conclusions are downright absurd, as there is evidently a specific aim in the original post explicit or not.
There's no such thing as a "useful lead" or a "false lead", because the data doesn't contain leads - it contains search strings.
Of course it contains potential leads; or rather it has the potential to make people think that without the anonymous ids it would contain such leads. All you need is a nice law that gives the police access to the data with full user information attached and they can parse it for all the leads they wants.
As I hear it there are more than one data miners who are making good business selling such snake oil to the government, which is not necessarily a good thing.
Really, the only way to invalidate this data would be to prove that the test subjects were conscious of AOL's intent to publish the data, causing them to alter their search habits.
I was not invalidating all usage of the data but rather a particular form of usage, as well as attempts to derive certain conclusions from such data. In other words it is a response to people who want the government to have full access to such data to find "terrorists" and whatnot. It's also a response to the people posting in blogs trying to find amusing links in the data.
Other than that, it is what it is.
My point exactly, I was simply noting a certain usage this data is not suited for.
If you don't understand the value of something like this, it's because you don't fall under AOL's original target audience for this data.
I understand the value of such data; certain people put too much value into such data.
If you do not understand or see the potential value that certain people see in this type of data then that is not my fault however it doesn't invalidate my point in any way.
The sheer number of false positives makes this data useless; you'd waste so much police time following false leads that you'll be unable to use it on better methods that give back useful leads. There are dozens to hundreds or reasons to search for such things that are perfectly harmless (random curiosity, research, interest in the morbid, etc.). And the act of searching shows neither a desire to do something nor is it illegal in itself. I've searched for a lot of things that may look odd if taken out of context and without knowing the reason for it, and we should have the right to do so without scrutiny. If I want to know how to make EM weapons or how a suitcase nuke works out of sheer curiosity then I shouldn't fear the police knocking on my door.
It's akin to saying that if you play a violent video game (say one of the more realistic ones) you are a psychopath and must be investigated for potential murder.
If you don't want people to be happy when you lose your job don't work for a company that everyone hates. Consider this an opportunity to do just that.
I'll bet you'd be a lot less glib about it (and way more pissed off) if it was your job on the line. Especially if you saw people making comments like that!
You're talking about AOL, I'd be annoyed but at least from now on I wouldn't need to hide what company I work for when people asked.
Honestly if you can't handle losing your job you will not do well in the current world. Flexibility is a necessity, if I got fired I'd simply go and find something else (and live of off my saving, you do know what that is right?).
Pure math is limited although with a self study attitude and good general knowledge various companies may hire you. It would depends on the job, and possibly be research on methods and algorithms (so CS would be of much use as well). Other options include:
-Statistics: What I chose, decently easy and amazingly good opportunities it seems. Highly diverse as well so you can pretty much work in anything: finance, biology, insurance, accounting (of sorts), consulting (in various industries), data mining (ie: most companies) and so on.
-Finance/economics: Mostly self-explanatory, requires extra coursework or knowledge of finance and economics.
-CS: The math behind interesting things.
-Management science, any other such things: With a math education you'd probably be doing more research than application.
-Applied math: Modeling and so on. Government or corporate work I'd assume, performing research and analysis most likely.
It's interesting how all the attention is consistently directed at 'abuses' in countries where it's convenient for the media to report them.
Amazing how the media only talks about things it has access to, and amazing how they talk a lot about thigns which interest it's viewers. Because in all honesty the average american gives a donkey's ass about the conditions in China.
The difference between Virgin Galactic and a space program is akin to the difference between seeing Mount Everest from the bottom of the mountain and seeing it from the top of the peak. They barely go into space and are amusingly far from orbit or what NASA/The Russians do. Maybe in another decade or two they'll be closer but probably not. Going into orbit is expensive. Various commercial systems have reached $1-2k/lb but that involves using preexisting Russian infrastructure and humans need a lot of mass (all those pesky life support systems, seats and so on).
Things get even worse when it comes to actual research in space. That dinky little rocket you use to send two people into space on isn't going to get a large telescope or space station into orbit. The bigger the rocker the bigger the infrastructure costs, and that isn't linear. NASA pays up the wazoo for its infrastructure, much of it due to the Apollo program I believe (those Saturn V rockets were BIG).
Keep in mind that a government can deal with a 1% failure rate, a private company would be gone before a tenth of the lawyers even get there.
Amazingly enough there is something known as anonymity on the internet. In other words you make sure it's not easy to find your blog using whatever info you provide to your employer.
And you miss the point, congratulations. The original post was very clearly talking about such sites in general, not this site specifically.
As for that site specifically, of course right NOW the person wants google hits and cache. The gp was talking about when they wish to remove such their site. THEN they can add a robots.txt which would remove them, retroactively, from the nice indexing services (archive.org, google cache included). Also both arhive.org and google cache can be directly asked to remove their cached content, and I assume both comply.
In summary, the original posted picked two of the worst examples for why such a site is irrevocable as both of those are very removable (even "automatically" using robots.txt so it's never in the caches to begin with). And just because this site didn't do it correctly doesn't say anything about such sites in general (at least regarding those two services).
Ah yes, the hard headed realist who advocates a magical space elevator.
No I simply said that theoretically it has various advantages over your plan. I always find it funny how zealots can never understand that some people aren't like them.
I feel like I am talking to myself here. The cost of bringing things up would be much lower with a tower launch, thats the entire point. The whole. Entire. Point.
Well you apparently can't read or don't know how much sending things up costs now. In either case I wonder why you're proposing ideas. The current costs are $1 to 2k/lb to LEO and probably twice that to GEO. Nonetheless even at $100 to 200/lb the costs are still very high, and that is an order of magnitude less than current costs. Energy costs alone would probably put you in that range, and if not than maintenance and so on.
Bringing them down would be the easiest part. Since you don't have to haul up massive engines and drop them again, you can be more flexible in your re-entry vehicle design.
Only the shuttle hauls it's engines back down, most designed involve a relatively simple capsule which is still complex and costly. You're talking about millions of tons of material being brought down, in other words you'd need to bring up millions of tons of reentry vehicles.
Gravity, meet glider.
Glider meet atmosphere at 11000km/s, enjoy your fiery meeting. Oh right you need to send up a heat shield as well and design it and test it and so on.
Or even a big balloon.
Which would burn off the excess velocity how again? There is no atmosphere in space you understand right and you'd need to bring things down from GEO probably.
That would make that one asteroid worth several times the GDP of the US. Seeing any ROI yet?
Nope, I've read about this and the cost of bringing the material down and processing it far outweighs the gains you get from it.
No, you wouldn't need to bring it close.
Much easier than bringing all the required machinery to it but okay.
You could just saw it up where it is, even process it on the spot and float ingots gently back to earth orbit.
Earth based processing methods don't always work well in space, and most likely would require billions upon billions of investment. Constructing the infrastructure on the asteroid would be expensive due to the distances and probably require a manned flight.
Where will you get power for all this? There's a large star right nearby there...
You need to build solar arrays, maintain them, bring them to the correct location, replace them as they fail and so on. Can do the same thing on Earth for much less.
As for not near future possible, its already being done. [energybulletin.net].
I never said that is not possible, I know quite well what is possible. I simply said the whole scheme of doing it in space is not possible. Your argument is like saying that because we can build a tank on earth it is trivial to build a tank on Jupiter right now. A downright stupid argument.
Bleh. Who cares if it doesn't suit you. And I can see many advantages to keeping it in orbit, not least of which is fast deployment in medical emergencies....fast deployment from GEO or LEO? You require time to load it, set u pa vehicle, landing at an appropriate area, making sure it's not damage during transfer, moving it to the correct hospital and so on. Even worse if you don't have multiple such stations in orbit as that incurs even more time, and if you do then you may as well have multiple such stations on earth. Much cheaper, faster and simpler to simply have a number of local supplies (in large hospitals probably) and fly them using helicopter or plane to the required locations. Not to mention that in medical emergency and given such technology you can dump a person onto artificial life support.
More figures pulled out of your ass. The only thing stopping us getting
Let me expand on the previous post a bit, given a person requires 300lbs of food a year (I assume this is a very conservative estimate) and 15 billion people on earth you need to bring down 4.5e12 pounds of food per year to feed the world. At 200k lbs per flight you'd need to use 22.5 million such flights per year to feed the world. Add in manufactured products and it becomes even worse.
The question then becomes where do you get the raw materials from and where do they stuff the garbage. Unless they send all their garbage back up into space (See previous numbers for how many flights you'd need per year) Earth would become one giant garbage dump very quickly.
But your shortfall there is that we have not and may never have the neccessary materials.
Such a venture is not realistic or profitable for at least another 30 to 40 years so we can wait. Theoretically such a material is possible using carbon nanotubes and we'll probably know in 40 years if it is actually possible.
Well we may as well shelve the whole space program then, in case "shit happens".
The space program is a very limited, government owned, highly selective and highly unprofitable venture. This is very different from the expectations of a massive, heavily used, and publicly used launch system. If you lose 1% of your launches you're not going to get many engineers to go up there and build your space based infrastructure.
And just to belabour the point a little, would you consider it more or less risky than blasting into orbit strapped to many tons of blazing rocket fuel?
Rockets can be aborted in case of failure, the capsule can be (and has been in one Russian launch) ejected away from the rocket. In your system I'm stuck in the tube, and in addition if something goes wrong there is even less time to go to plan B than in a rocket (a rocket goes of course you have time, your maglev breaks and I'm most likely already slamming into the tower at high velocity). In addition a rocket failure costs you one, currently expendable, rocket while a catastrophic failure in your tower costs you one very expensive tower or at least heavy damage to said tower.
The early manned-space flight program used to launch astronauts at 9 Gs, the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs
Because for affordable manned space flight what we all want is to require extensive training and medical tests. Note how all of those just keep adding to the cost and lowering potential for such a system.
The period of launch here would be no more than a few seconds.
Ah yes the "I'll be dead before any that is feasible" reasons, which are really worthless in the near future.
One single asteroid up there contains about 5 tons of high quality steel for every man, woman, and child on earth.
Which does very little good for me as I'm right now down here and not up there. Bringing down such things is not easy (can't build your reentry vehicles in space for quite a while) and simply dropping them down would incur even more costs. You can't easily process it in space either. In addition you'd need to overcome the political and technological hurdles of getting a rock that close to earth. Keep in mind that bringing things up would cost around $100 to $200/lb not counting the cost of your investment.
How many more asteroids do you think there are?
Quite a few, all of them far away and we don't know that much about them. Many people would prefer if they stayed far away and those people have nukes with which to make sure you don't bring any too close.
Algae pods (nutrients, sunlight, and ice are abundant, albeit spread out a bit) to grow biodiesel or refine metals
Not near future and possible on earth as well. You'd need to bring all those materials close which is not feasible in the near future. Then you'd need to again bring the processed goods back down.
clone banks to hold replacement organs (eternal life anyone?).
Personally I wouldn't want a new brain and barring that I'll be dead anyway. We're losing cells up there in my noggin at a decent pace you know. This could also be more easily done on Earth.
Manufactories to process the ores retrieved and shape them into useful products.
Trillions in costs probably, you'd need to figure out new mining methods and manufacturing methods or build complex structures to use earth based ones. Not to mention the general costs of designing things for space.
The ultimate removal of all manufacturing and food production from the earths surface. And thats just orbit.
See above or something. Your investors would long shut down the project before this becomes feasible.
Would you like a few more?
Yeah, how about a few which aren't so far in the future as to be worthless due to unpredictability of scientific advance. Someone has been reading way too much sci-fi. In essence your idea is not profitable for at least the next 40 years, so you have no ROI right now.
However, just what advantages would a space elevator offer over a tower launch?
A truly reasonable acceleration (read: basically none) although this means a very long ride up (week to GEO). Much safer travel, no massive acceleration or high speeds on either the way up or down. On that note going down doesn't require being a few feet from fiery death. The structure has nicer failure conditions and less mass that can impact if it fails, and is basically impossible to take out. The construction is simpler in many ways if the correct material is found, both in the elevator itself and the actual "construction".
Shit happens, having that shit mean a 5km/s object to ripping through an 11km structure is never a good idea.
At a reasonable acceleration (5 to 7 g's) you would be in geostationary orbit.
I wouldn't consider that reasonable myself, the shuttle and soyuz are 3 to 4 G for example.
The ATI drivers are by consensus seen as shit, and a great source of laughter whenever someone buys an ATI card and tries to get usable performance in linux.
There is a difference between token support and good performance, and apparently you need to go back to school for reading comprehension as you missed the difference in the GP's post.
You suggest he write letters as oppose to just circumnavigate the issue with a little research and implementation?
Yes, or accept that actions have consequences. Quite simple, you break the rules (or law) and you get punished for it possibly. Odd how all you "freedom fighters" seem to not understand that little part, the founding father sure did (blood of patriots and all that).
How do you argue with unreasonable men?
Why was the school unreasonable, as was said in this thread they are legally required to filter internet access. They're only unreasonable to punk kids who think they're mommies special boy and everything they want should be theirs.
His goal was to beat back censorship, which he accomplished.
I wouldn't call what the school does censorship, more like liability limitation at this point. Schools are there to provide education, if unlimited internet access interferes with that then it should be limited. And in all honesty I've seen what kids do with unlimited access in schools, and "learning" is near the bottom of the list.
I at least don't have some twisted delusions of fighting censorship about the crap I did in high school. I disliked authority and I wanted to play games (online) so I did various things to do that, probably should have studied instead. I wasn't stupid enough to get caught, even though the network admin knew I did shit.
I suppose the American Revolutionists would have been better off writing letters to the editor until they were blue in the face as opposed to taking up arms like a bunch of 'dumb kids' or 'crazy nut-jobs causing trouble'.
They spent quite a bit of time writing letter, protesting and so on before taking up arms. Only idiots go straight for the gun.
Slashdot Mirror
You either have a censored site, or no site at all.
No you either have marginally censored site from a US company which can fight against the Chinese government, or a probably severely censored site by a Chinese company which cannot refuse the Chinese government.
My general statement to such people who claim "nature meant it" is for them to go play Russian roulette with a half loaded gun. That will simulate how much nature meant for them to survive had it not been for all the nice inventions we humans made.
It's called having a passion. Doing what you love. What's so bad about it?
Good for you, then don't bitch about getting fired because you skipped work to play the game or not doing enough work because you stayed up till 5am to play the game. Also don't complain about having to work all your life or not making enough money or getting promoted enough, you choose to spend your time on games. Now sure YOU may not be addicted to such a degree but amazingly enough not everyone is like you.
I don't get it. Where are the priorities? I really am an advocate of being a professional idler and trying to get out of wage slavery.
The smart people find a job which they enjoy to a large degree or one that they don't enjoy but due to one they will be able to retire at 40. Don't work hard, work smart. Also it is preferable for general happiness and security (ie: I don't need much money to live happily, I need much money in case shit happens) to have a passion which is productive.
What's so bad about playing a game for 40 hours a week (something you CHOOSE to do, and ENJOY)?
When you are addicted you don't choose to play, you have to play. You can't choose to not play because your brain chemistry requires the game (to be happy, content, sane or whatever).
Compare that to working which is something you HAVE to do or else you get evicted by some property owning assholes and end up living on the streets and going crazy!
You don't have to work; you can easily stop anytime you want. Assuming you have savings (and no need for company insurance) you can continue on for a while without working. Assuming you have a good resume you can find another job easily enough. Notice a difference between that and addiction?
Look at the subject of this post, "Data mining such things is silly". Sure sounds to me like you're covering "data mining" as a whole, not just misinterpretations of the data.
..
Right, it's slashdot. People here don't RTFA so why would I expect them to read the posts either. Either that or you are utterly unable to perform reading comprehension and read between the lines.
So it would contain "leads", but not without a new law allowing police to use hearsay, gathered from the Internet, as evidence when obtaining arrest warrants against the general public. Sure - ignoring the multiple conflicts that law would have with the US Constitution, I guess it's not too much of a stretch.
Arrest warrants? Not really, search warrants are more likely. Then again since my post was aimed mostly at people who for some odd reason want such laws and why they're morons it's not like I care much about the details or problems involved.
Too lazy and busy to find and respond to those posts directly.
I would recommend re-reading your original message so you can sync up with yourself on what your original opinion was. I'm not going to waste any more time responding to frantic backpedaling
Suit yourself, and frantic backpedaling? You seem to think that I care enough about this to put much mental effort into it. Unlike you I don't really give enough of a damn beyond amusement. If I did I would have spent time to write my first post more coherently but evidently I didn't.
Also, how the heck can you draw all these assumptions and conclusions from a post which was written semi-coherently and was quite visible missing half of what it was supposed to say? Not to mention that some of your conclusions are downright absurd, as there is evidently a specific aim in the original post explicit or not.
There's no such thing as a "useful lead" or a "false lead", because the data doesn't contain leads - it contains search strings.
Of course it contains potential leads; or rather it has the potential to make people think that without the anonymous ids it would contain such leads. All you need is a nice law that gives the police access to the data with full user information attached and they can parse it for all the leads they wants.
As I hear it there are more than one data miners who are making good business selling such snake oil to the government, which is not necessarily a good thing.
Really, the only way to invalidate this data would be to prove that the test subjects were conscious of AOL's intent to publish the data, causing them to alter their search habits.
I was not invalidating all usage of the data but rather a particular form of usage, as well as attempts to derive certain conclusions from such data. In other words it is a response to people who want the government to have full access to such data to find "terrorists" and whatnot. It's also a response to the people posting in blogs trying to find amusing links in the data.
Other than that, it is what it is.
My point exactly, I was simply noting a certain usage this data is not suited for.
If you don't understand the value of something like this, it's because you don't fall under AOL's original target audience for this data.
I understand the value of such data; certain people put too much value into such data.
If you do not understand or see the potential value that certain people see in this type of data then that is not my fault however it doesn't invalidate my point in any way.
The sheer number of false positives makes this data useless; you'd waste so much police time following false leads that you'll be unable to use it on better methods that give back useful leads. There are dozens to hundreds or reasons to search for such things that are perfectly harmless (random curiosity, research, interest in the morbid, etc.). And the act of searching shows neither a desire to do something nor is it illegal in itself. I've searched for a lot of things that may look odd if taken out of context and without knowing the reason for it, and we should have the right to do so without scrutiny. If I want to know how to make EM weapons or how a suitcase nuke works out of sheer curiosity then I shouldn't fear the police knocking on my door.
It's akin to saying that if you play a violent video game (say one of the more realistic ones) you are a psychopath and must be investigated for potential murder.
If you don't want people to be happy when you lose your job don't work for a company that everyone hates. Consider this an opportunity to do just that.
I'll bet you'd be a lot less glib about it (and way more pissed off) if it was your job on the line. Especially if you saw people making comments like that!
You're talking about AOL, I'd be annoyed but at least from now on I wouldn't need to hide what company I work for when people asked.
Honestly if you can't handle losing your job you will not do well in the current world. Flexibility is a necessity, if I got fired I'd simply go and find something else (and live of off my saving, you do know what that is right?).
Pure math is limited although with a self study attitude and good general knowledge various companies may hire you. It would depends on the job, and possibly be research on methods and algorithms (so CS would be of much use as well). Other options include:
-Statistics: What I chose, decently easy and amazingly good opportunities it seems. Highly diverse as well so you can pretty much work in anything: finance, biology, insurance, accounting (of sorts), consulting (in various industries), data mining (ie: most companies) and so on.
-Finance/economics: Mostly self-explanatory, requires extra coursework or knowledge of finance and economics.
-CS: The math behind interesting things.
-Management science, any other such things: With a math education you'd probably be doing more research than application.
-Applied math: Modeling and so on. Government or corporate work I'd assume, performing research and analysis most likely.
And since the plane was purchased by the founders not by Google you are an idiot it seems.
It's interesting how all the attention is consistently directed at 'abuses' in countries where it's convenient for the media to report them.
Amazing how the media only talks about things it has access to, and amazing how they talk a lot about thigns which interest it's viewers. Because in all honesty the average american gives a donkey's ass about the conditions in China.
People dont care about grand thinker ideas.
You mean like communism... I think my grandparents would have prefered if a lot fewer people had listened to such ideas.
The difference between Virgin Galactic and a space program is akin to the difference between seeing Mount Everest from the bottom of the mountain and seeing it from the top of the peak. They barely go into space and are amusingly far from orbit or what NASA/The Russians do. Maybe in another decade or two they'll be closer but probably not. Going into orbit is expensive. Various commercial systems have reached $1-2k/lb but that involves using preexisting Russian infrastructure and humans need a lot of mass (all those pesky life support systems, seats and so on).
Things get even worse when it comes to actual research in space. That dinky little rocket you use to send two people into space on isn't going to get a large telescope or space station into orbit. The bigger the rocker the bigger the infrastructure costs, and that isn't linear. NASA pays up the wazoo for its infrastructure, much of it due to the Apollo program I believe (those Saturn V rockets were BIG).
Keep in mind that a government can deal with a 1% failure rate, a private company would be gone before a tenth of the lawyers even get there.
Amazingly enough there is something known as anonymity on the internet. In other words you make sure it's not easy to find your blog using whatever info you provide to your employer.
And you miss the point, congratulations. The original post was very clearly talking about such sites in general, not this site specifically.
As for that site specifically, of course right NOW the person wants google hits and cache. The gp was talking about when they wish to remove such their site. THEN they can add a robots.txt which would remove them, retroactively, from the nice indexing services (archive.org, google cache included). Also both arhive.org and google cache can be directly asked to remove their cached content, and I assume both comply.
In summary, the original posted picked two of the worst examples for why such a site is irrevocable as both of those are very removable (even "automatically" using robots.txt so it's never in the caches to begin with). And just because this site didn't do it correctly doesn't say anything about such sites in general (at least regarding those two services).
Maybe you should learn about things before talking about them, both of those respect the robots.txt file and the later has a manual removal page
Well I expected that, it seems whenever a zealot meets reality he goes and finds an excuse to run away. Well enjoy your fantasy.
Ah yes, the hard headed realist who advocates a magical space elevator.
...fast deployment from GEO or LEO? You require time to load it, set u pa vehicle, landing at an appropriate area, making sure it's not damage during transfer, moving it to the correct hospital and so on. Even worse if you don't have multiple such stations in orbit as that incurs even more time, and if you do then you may as well have multiple such stations on earth. Much cheaper, faster and simpler to simply have a number of local supplies (in large hospitals probably) and fly them using helicopter or plane to the required locations. Not to mention that in medical emergency and given such technology you can dump a person onto artificial life support.
No I simply said that theoretically it has various advantages over your plan. I always find it funny how zealots can never understand that some people aren't like them.
I feel like I am talking to myself here. The cost of bringing things up would be much lower with a tower launch, thats the entire point. The whole. Entire. Point.
Well you apparently can't read or don't know how much sending things up costs now. In either case I wonder why you're proposing ideas. The current costs are $1 to 2k/lb to LEO and probably twice that to GEO. Nonetheless even at $100 to 200/lb the costs are still very high, and that is an order of magnitude less than current costs. Energy costs alone would probably put you in that range, and if not than maintenance and so on.
Bringing them down would be the easiest part. Since you don't have to haul up massive engines and drop them again, you can be more flexible in your re-entry vehicle design.
Only the shuttle hauls it's engines back down, most designed involve a relatively simple capsule which is still complex and costly. You're talking about millions of tons of material being brought down, in other words you'd need to bring up millions of tons of reentry vehicles.
Gravity, meet glider.
Glider meet atmosphere at 11000km/s, enjoy your fiery meeting. Oh right you need to send up a heat shield as well and design it and test it and so on.
Or even a big balloon.
Which would burn off the excess velocity how again? There is no atmosphere in space you understand right and you'd need to bring things down from GEO probably.
That would make that one asteroid worth several times the GDP of the US. Seeing any ROI yet?
Nope, I've read about this and the cost of bringing the material down and processing it far outweighs the gains you get from it.
No, you wouldn't need to bring it close.
Much easier than bringing all the required machinery to it but okay.
You could just saw it up where it is, even process it on the spot and float ingots gently back to earth orbit.
Earth based processing methods don't always work well in space, and most likely would require billions upon billions of investment. Constructing the infrastructure on the asteroid would be expensive due to the distances and probably require a manned flight.
Where will you get power for all this? There's a large star right nearby there...
You need to build solar arrays, maintain them, bring them to the correct location, replace them as they fail and so on. Can do the same thing on Earth for much less.
As for not near future possible, its already being done. [energybulletin.net].
I never said that is not possible, I know quite well what is possible. I simply said the whole scheme of doing it in space is not possible. Your argument is like saying that because we can build a tank on earth it is trivial to build a tank on Jupiter right now. A downright stupid argument.
Bleh. Who cares if it doesn't suit you. And I can see many advantages to keeping it in orbit, not least of which is fast deployment in medical emergencies.
More figures pulled out of your ass. The only thing stopping us getting
Let me expand on the previous post a bit, given a person requires 300lbs of food a year (I assume this is a very conservative estimate) and 15 billion people on earth you need to bring down 4.5e12 pounds of food per year to feed the world. At 200k lbs per flight you'd need to use 22.5 million such flights per year to feed the world. Add in manufactured products and it becomes even worse.
The question then becomes where do you get the raw materials from and where do they stuff the garbage. Unless they send all their garbage back up into space (See previous numbers for how many flights you'd need per year) Earth would become one giant garbage dump very quickly.
But your shortfall there is that we have not and may never have the neccessary materials.
Such a venture is not realistic or profitable for at least another 30 to 40 years so we can wait. Theoretically such a material is possible using carbon nanotubes and we'll probably know in 40 years if it is actually possible.
Well we may as well shelve the whole space program then, in case "shit happens".
The space program is a very limited, government owned, highly selective and highly unprofitable venture. This is very different from the expectations of a massive, heavily used, and publicly used launch system. If you lose 1% of your launches you're not going to get many engineers to go up there and build your space based infrastructure.
And just to belabour the point a little, would you consider it more or less risky than blasting into orbit strapped to many tons of blazing rocket fuel?
Rockets can be aborted in case of failure, the capsule can be (and has been in one Russian launch) ejected away from the rocket. In your system I'm stuck in the tube, and in addition if something goes wrong there is even less time to go to plan B than in a rocket (a rocket goes of course you have time, your maglev breaks and I'm most likely already slamming into the tower at high velocity). In addition a rocket failure costs you one, currently expendable, rocket while a catastrophic failure in your tower costs you one very expensive tower or at least heavy damage to said tower.
The early manned-space flight program used to launch astronauts at 9 Gs, the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs
Because for affordable manned space flight what we all want is to require extensive training and medical tests. Note how all of those just keep adding to the cost and lowering potential for such a system.
The period of launch here would be no more than a few seconds.
20s at 5g, 18s at 7g.
Ah yes the "I'll be dead before any that is feasible" reasons, which are really worthless in the near future.
One single asteroid up there contains about 5 tons of high quality steel for every man, woman, and child on earth.
Which does very little good for me as I'm right now down here and not up there. Bringing down such things is not easy (can't build your reentry vehicles in space for quite a while) and simply dropping them down would incur even more costs. You can't easily process it in space either. In addition you'd need to overcome the political and technological hurdles of getting a rock that close to earth. Keep in mind that bringing things up would cost around $100 to $200/lb not counting the cost of your investment.
How many more asteroids do you think there are?
Quite a few, all of them far away and we don't know that much about them. Many people would prefer if they stayed far away and those people have nukes with which to make sure you don't bring any too close.
Algae pods (nutrients, sunlight, and ice are abundant, albeit spread out a bit) to grow biodiesel or refine metals
Not near future and possible on earth as well. You'd need to bring all those materials close which is not feasible in the near future. Then you'd need to again bring the processed goods back down.
clone banks to hold replacement organs (eternal life anyone?).
Personally I wouldn't want a new brain and barring that I'll be dead anyway. We're losing cells up there in my noggin at a decent pace you know. This could also be more easily done on Earth.
Manufactories to process the ores retrieved and shape them into useful products.
Trillions in costs probably, you'd need to figure out new mining methods and manufacturing methods or build complex structures to use earth based ones. Not to mention the general costs of designing things for space.
The ultimate removal of all manufacturing and food production from the earths surface. And thats just orbit.
See above or something. Your investors would long shut down the project before this becomes feasible.
Would you like a few more?
Yeah, how about a few which aren't so far in the future as to be worthless due to unpredictability of scientific advance. Someone has been reading way too much sci-fi. In essence your idea is not profitable for at least the next 40 years, so you have no ROI right now.
However, just what advantages would a space elevator offer over a tower launch?
A truly reasonable acceleration (read: basically none) although this means a very long ride up (week to GEO). Much safer travel, no massive acceleration or high speeds on either the way up or down. On that note going down doesn't require being a few feet from fiery death. The structure has nicer failure conditions and less mass that can impact if it fails, and is basically impossible to take out. The construction is simpler in many ways if the correct material is found, both in the elevator itself and the actual "construction".
Shit happens, having that shit mean a 5km/s object to ripping through an 11km structure is never a good idea.
At a reasonable acceleration (5 to 7 g's) you would be in geostationary orbit.
I wouldn't consider that reasonable myself, the shuttle and soyuz are 3 to 4 G for example.
ROI from what? I do expect concrete answers.
The ATI drivers are by consensus seen as shit, and a great source of laughter whenever someone buys an ATI card and tries to get usable performance in linux.
There is a difference between token support and good performance, and apparently you need to go back to school for reading comprehension as you missed the difference in the GP's post.
You suggest he write letters as oppose to just circumnavigate the issue with a little research and implementation?
Yes, or accept that actions have consequences. Quite simple, you break the rules (or law) and you get punished for it possibly. Odd how all you "freedom fighters" seem to not understand that little part, the founding father sure did (blood of patriots and all that).
How do you argue with unreasonable men?
Why was the school unreasonable, as was said in this thread they are legally required to filter internet access. They're only unreasonable to punk kids who think they're mommies special boy and everything they want should be theirs.
His goal was to beat back censorship, which he accomplished.
I wouldn't call what the school does censorship, more like liability limitation at this point. Schools are there to provide education, if unlimited internet access interferes with that then it should be limited. And in all honesty I've seen what kids do with unlimited access in schools, and "learning" is near the bottom of the list.
I at least don't have some twisted delusions of fighting censorship about the crap I did in high school. I disliked authority and I wanted to play games (online) so I did various things to do that, probably should have studied instead. I wasn't stupid enough to get caught, even though the network admin knew I did shit.
I suppose the American Revolutionists would have been better off writing letters to the editor until they were blue in the face as opposed to taking up arms like a bunch of 'dumb kids' or 'crazy nut-jobs causing trouble'.
They spent quite a bit of time writing letter, protesting and so on before taking up arms. Only idiots go straight for the gun.
Yup. First thing that came to me when I saw this was: "God, this is a great counter when people claim OSS is less secure."