You DO know how SS works right now, right? There is no savings, whomever is working is paying the benefits for those who no longer do.
And you DO know about the baby boomers, right? You know that soon to retire group which will overwhelm the pitiful population growth like nothing else once they retire?
The current system only works if there is either a monetary buffer of stable sustained long term population growth. What is happening NOW isn't important if there is a giant bubble moving through the hose known as your population.
"- Having direct connections to the web for each terminal is more expensive than having them all behind the NAT"
Only because IPs cost money and you usually don't get that many from your ISP. So you're saying that because we don't have enough IPs we shouldn't create more IPs because no one uses that many IPs right now (again due to their low number)? Have you been taking logic classes from Bush?
Except it's not about safety, it's about money or rather the lack of it. Well that and NASA inability to send people into space, although I'm sure a few billion to Russia could fix that problem for a while. A better analogy would be moving into a city before every building is finished... because those modules are self sufficient right now. Look at Mir, you don't need a giant ISS to live and work in space.
That is also not what you said in your previous post, although that is probably what Star Trek warp looks closest to. Of course, negative energy is itself one of those fun non-yet-found physics quirks but that is a different point.
This drive does not use a massive ship or anything like that to move two points closer together. What it does it take a region of space-time and move it forward.
"While the math wasn't there, this is consistent with everything I've heard, read, or seen about Star Trek. I'm fairly certain that this is what the writers had in mind. "
I doubt the writters had that in mind, they made up some technobabel about subspace field bending space-time (they somehow lower the mass of a ship and let it go into warp, neither of which is really needed for the other) and someone found a similar theory using real physics. So fans decided the do a retcon and claim that is how it was always supposed to work.
I mostly think this since Wiki lists the original paper as being published in 1994 while TNG aired in the late 80s to 1994. So unless the Star trek writers had a time machine they did not use this theory as their basis.
It may even be the case that official material was written using the ideas in that theory and retconed the warp engines to be consistent with those theories. Even the wiki agrees with me.
"Its not that hard to come up with once you know that gravity bends space."
It has little to do with gravity bending space, neither do the star trek engines asfaik. It works as the wiki says and as I said above, by having the region of space around your ship move FTL. It seems that this is done by destroying space in front of you and creating space behind you.
As someone else said: -Fusion can probably do that, matter-antimatter conversion (or other mass to energy conversion) can easily do that if fusion isn't good enough. A continuous 1g acceleration/deceleration (accel half way then decel) can get you from earth to mars in a week... when they're on opposite sides of the sun. -Terraforming
Of course I doubt the system would be stable if the planets/moons were in such location that terraforming was viable.
I believe you've just proven the previous poster's point, thank you very much.
Nowhere does it even imply your explanation, the general one seems to be that somehow a subspace field pushes the ship faster than light. Seems that the standard explanation is that a subspace field is created around the ship, and the field somehow causes the ship to move FTL (yes move, akin to the ship being in a space time bubble). In other words, it's not making the ship massive to bend space time between two locations.
Of course, nothing is self-consistent in Star Trek so there is no point in bothering with real explanations.
FTL travel, without a lot of care and explanation, either violates Relatively or Causality, in other words you either throw out Einstein or the concept time. A drive which simply moves you from point A to point B faster than light makes it trivial to move information back in time (ie: just by going FTL you are moving back in time). You need to do such fun stuff as add special frame of reference, say subspace.
Pretty much, since wiki gives a broad definition for both. Hard sci-fi is a well known term and concept, just because YOU don't know it doesn't mean it isn't well known.
It is arguably easier and more profitable to write space operas or pure fantasy, the later it seems being where sci-fi authors go to make money.
huh? even if you have one the original poster said why it won't solve the problem: surgery on zero-g is much more difficult and more importantly no knowledge from experience of what to do/what can go wrong/etc. Not to mention that you have a surgeon who hasn't done surgery in a while, may not have ever done the surgery you need done and whose experience is limited to earth gravity.
Of course then you have the lack of a medical team, "nurses" with little experience, lack of the optimal equipment, and probably a lot more.
In other words your chances of surviving have just gone down substantially. Heck, even on Earth surgery can cause complications.
While they don't send up as many people they haven't lost one on the Soyuz since the 70s (and one of those failures resulted in the capsule landing fine although a pressure valve problem led to the people dying before landing). How many did we lose with the shuttles at regular intervals again?
Now the Soyuz program is filled with a way too many near-failures and non-lethal failures including sever injuries however no one died. In the shuttle, a near failure is the same as a failure it seems. The newest generation of the Soyuz doesn't seem to have many problems at all.
As for raw numbers overall, the soviets officially lost 4 people while the US lost 17 to 18. Add a few more for the ones the soviets may have hidden and the soviets still lost less people, although they didn't send as many up.
So yes, their simpler design is much safer it seems especially if designed and used with a decent budget.
The Russians aren't sending stuff outside orbit like the US mars probes, and they really have no future as a space program except as cargo movers to low orbit.
Which is the only area which may have potential in the near future, and the only one with commercial applications. It's also the one which everything else will rely on.
Sure we have the ability, granted to use it you need to sacrifice other functions. That is how the brain works; consider it akin to a computer with a full hard drive. Sure you it can in theory run any program however doing so will require removing an existing program. A better analogy would be a FPGA, sure it can do anything however the amount of circuitry you can program onto it at one time is limited.
The brain is quite flexible, within limits (response time of a computer can be much faster for example); however it works by hard wiring itself to perform certain actions. Changing the way it is wired is a) not easy (happens in children more easily but becomes harder with age) and b) will cause side-effects.
hopelessly flawed. First they missmanage and over use an inefficiant air/spaceframe design. During which they get two crews killed needlessly.
Blame the air force and a lack of budget for that one.
Meanwhile the Russians have a nice reusable space vehicle called Energia. In its Vulcan config it can lift up to 175 tons and has been sucessfully launched with a good safety record (so far).
You mean the one which was sent up TWICE, and only managed to get something into orbit once. Yeah, great and extensive track record there, yup. Not to mention that there are no remaining energia rockets, they've all rotted away. I mean the last companion Buran Shuttle died a few years ago when the roof of its storage building caved in.
It'd be cheaper, and safer, to simply modify the shuttle tanks/booster rockets to fulfill a similar role of which there has been some talk.
But nasa cant be bothered with existing tech that works
So can any other email host, as someone else said google (and other such large hosts) are probably much less likely to do so than say some fly-by-night webhost.
I said nations, not peoples but nations. The topic at hand was about the impact of said systems on the achievements of various nations, and I simply pointed out that they actually are beneficial in the short run. I'm simply able to look at things without mixing in stuff like morality or western values.
Human lives were in some ways the reason for those achievements, terror makes you work and cheap expendable workers build your infrastructure.
Oh, and yes I did hear of gulags. My grandparents got shipped off to Siberia after the US handed Poland over to Stalin. I would have one more uncle had they not been sent there, babies don't fare well in such situations.
Also, Mao killed a lot more than Stalin if you wish to get into death counts and all.
"You might want to think about why they had those wars in Europe, whereas we didn't have them here. Largely, it was because Europe and Asia were infested with utopian movements like Communism, Socialism and Nazism, which didn't make much of an impression on the more individualistic United States."
They didn't make an impression because the US didn't become a hell hole every few decades. And you did get socialism, that's how you kept the great depression from turning into a full out communist revolution.
Communism flourished in Russia, which was in a horrid state for quite some time. It also did well in China which was likewise in a not-so-nice state at the time, partially thanks to the US. Nazism flourished in Germany, which was in economic collapse (they would have welcomed your Great Depression with open arms and kisses). Socialism had various influences, although none were really bad per say.
Also, Nazism and Communism did wonders for some of the nations they showed up in. Germany, China and Russia became world powers in record time although long term it doesn't hold as well.
huh? If a sat dies then there are 4 working spares already in orbit which can replace it. As I said above, you'd need to have multiple sats (5, potentially less if spares can only take over certain orbits each) die in the time it takes to get replacements up for there to be any real downtime.
Redundancy is already in place, right now its all a question of "how few sats can we launch while keeping the chance of failure very low." If we launch too early then we have an extra satellite in orbit which provides unnecessary redundancy and doesn't do anything while at the same time already being subjected to aging. In other words, over time such behavior would lead to more frequent need to replace the satellites. Launching sats isn't exactly cheap.
Yeah, why replace them when they're still working fine. That would be a waste of money, extra sats which age and provide little benefit. I mean, unless 5 fail in the time it takes to get a new one up there is no problem. Given that only 2 fail per year I don't see that happening anytime soon.
I mean, come on look at this idiotic statement: 'Bonnor said launches of new satellites are "only just keeping up" with current losses of around two satellites per year.'
What they hell is the US supposed to do, send up more satellites than they lose and waste money keeping up sats when only 24 are needed (+ a few redundant ones)?
Depends, with some effort you can probably create a nice skin-colored fake patch to put over your finger. You really only need it to stay on and look real from a distance. You can probably even use a rather crude mold if you're decent at concealing it when using it.
Yes the magic heat which has absolutely nothing to do with the power consumption. Its not like the power consumed is converted to heat or anything like that...
I'm sure they'll be worrying about it as soon as they find where that darn magic is coming from.
I was thinking that as well however given how quickly some viruses/worms have spread you'd simply need to put in a timer of some sort. For example 10 hours after a computer is infected (ie: once it has spread about as much as it can) it kills itself off. However, this delay may be enough to create some counter against the threat. In addition, anything beyond simply spreading adds unnecessary payload to the virus/worm and makes it spread more slowly.
I'd be interesting to see some models of such viruses/worms.
I find it so amusing that at some point all the pro-war people lost sight of what we went to war about and just started mindlessly reciting propaganda.
Let me put it in words you understand since you may not grasp what the other poster implied: Iraq did not help terrorist who fought against the US, at best it helped a few terrorist fighting against Israel in Israel. We never went to war with Iraq to fight against Al-Queda or any terrorists who targeted the US. Even the stated reasons avoided such terms, originally referring to WMDs and now referring to "freeing the Iraqi people."
Anon so I doubt you'll even read this but morons have to be countered an all.
"It's also worth noting that while North Korea may or may not possess the ability to land a nuclear strike on the west coast of the continental US, China most certainly does, and we all know that China and N. Korea are essentially allies."
Allies? Hardy, more like China's annoying little neighbor who can't be gotten rid off. NK is tolerated since it doesn't jeopardize anything important (ie: trade with the west) and provides a buffer between SK. Also, China has more to fear from those NK nukes than anyone else except SK.
"(using tech Clinton sold them no doubt)"
Wow, how much tin foil do YOU cover your head with? OR are you simply as dense as DU? They're using Soviet technology, heck they copied decent amounts of it exactly.
"If they can put a person in orbit, they can land a warhead anywhere on earth they choose."
Not really, aiming and so on become more problematic and less accurate. In addition, such a weapon is easy to detect and potentially intercept. Right now China has 20 icbms it can lob at the West Coast, and either does or soon will have nuclear missiles on submarines (may have one, I'm not sure) which can hit more or less anywhere. It also would be committing economic suicide if it ever used them.
"The bottom of a blimp can look like swiss cheese and still hold it's helium pretty darn well"
So I'll shoot just a bit to the left and fill its side with holes.
Slashdot Mirror
You DO know how SS works right now, right? There is no savings, whomever is working is paying the benefits for those who no longer do.
And you DO know about the baby boomers, right? You know that soon to retire group which will overwhelm the pitiful population growth like nothing else once they retire?
The current system only works if there is either a monetary buffer of stable sustained long term population growth. What is happening NOW isn't important if there is a giant bubble moving through the hose known as your population.
"- Having direct connections to the web for each terminal is more expensive than having them all behind the NAT"
Only because IPs cost money and you usually don't get that many from your ISP. So you're saying that because we don't have enough IPs we shouldn't create more IPs because no one uses that many IPs right now (again due to their low number)? Have you been taking logic classes from Bush?
"while in the same breath the administration announces NASA's funds being cut"
Yes funding is getting cut... you mean like those negative cuts they got the last two years right?
Except it's not about safety, it's about money or rather the lack of it. Well that and NASA inability to send people into space, although I'm sure a few billion to Russia could fix that problem for a while. A better analogy would be moving into a city before every building is finished... because those modules are self sufficient right now. Look at Mir, you don't need a giant ISS to live and work in space.
"Pardon? I think not."
That is also not what you said in your previous post, although that is probably what Star Trek warp looks closest to. Of course, negative energy is itself one of those fun non-yet-found physics quirks but that is a different point.
This drive does not use a massive ship or anything like that to move two points closer together. What it does it take a region of space-time and move it forward.
"While the math wasn't there, this is consistent with everything I've heard, read, or seen about Star Trek. I'm fairly certain that this is what the writers had in mind. "
I doubt the writters had that in mind, they made up some technobabel about subspace field bending space-time (they somehow lower the mass of a ship and let it go into warp, neither of which is really needed for the other) and someone found a similar theory using real physics. So fans decided the do a retcon and claim that is how it was always supposed to work.
I mostly think this since Wiki lists the original paper as being published in 1994 while TNG aired in the late 80s to 1994. So unless the Star trek writers had a time machine they did not use this theory as their basis.
It may even be the case that official material was written using the ideas in that theory and retconed the warp engines to be consistent with those theories. Even the wiki agrees with me.
"Its not that hard to come up with once you know that gravity bends space."
It has little to do with gravity bending space, neither do the star trek engines asfaik. It works as the wiki says and as I said above, by having the region of space around your ship move FTL. It seems that this is done by destroying space in front of you and creating space behind you.
As someone else said:
-Fusion can probably do that, matter-antimatter conversion (or other mass to energy conversion) can easily do that if fusion isn't good enough. A continuous 1g acceleration/deceleration (accel half way then decel) can get you from earth to mars in a week... when they're on opposite sides of the sun.
-Terraforming
Of course I doubt the system would be stable if the planets/moons were in such location that terraforming was viable.
I believe you've just proven the previous poster's point, thank you very much.
Nowhere does it even imply your explanation, the general one seems to be that somehow a subspace field pushes the ship faster than light. Seems that the standard explanation is that a subspace field is created around the ship, and the field somehow causes the ship to move FTL (yes move, akin to the ship being in a space time bubble). In other words, it's not making the ship massive to bend space time between two locations.
Of course, nothing is self-consistent in Star Trek so there is no point in bothering with real explanations.
FTL travel, without a lot of care and explanation, either violates Relatively or Causality, in other words you either throw out Einstein or the concept time. A drive which simply moves you from point A to point B faster than light makes it trivial to move information back in time (ie: just by going FTL you are moving back in time). You need to do such fun stuff as add special frame of reference, say subspace.
Pretty much, since wiki gives a broad definition for both. Hard sci-fi is a well known term and concept, just because YOU don't know it doesn't mean it isn't well known.
It is arguably easier and more profitable to write space operas or pure fantasy, the later it seems being where sci-fi authors go to make money.
huh? even if you have one the original poster said why it won't solve the problem: surgery on zero-g is much more difficult and more importantly no knowledge from experience of what to do/what can go wrong/etc. Not to mention that you have a surgeon who hasn't done surgery in a while, may not have ever done the surgery you need done and whose experience is limited to earth gravity.
Of course then you have the lack of a medical team, "nurses" with little experience, lack of the optimal equipment, and probably a lot more.
In other words your chances of surviving have just gone down substantially. Heck, even on Earth surgery can cause complications.
While they don't send up as many people they haven't lost one on the Soyuz since the 70s (and one of those failures resulted in the capsule landing fine although a pressure valve problem led to the people dying before landing). How many did we lose with the shuttles at regular intervals again?
Now the Soyuz program is filled with a way too many near-failures and non-lethal failures including sever injuries however no one died. In the shuttle, a near failure is the same as a failure it seems. The newest generation of the Soyuz doesn't seem to have many problems at all.
As for raw numbers overall, the soviets officially lost 4 people while the US lost 17 to 18. Add a few more for the ones the soviets may have hidden and the soviets still lost less people, although they didn't send as many up.
So yes, their simpler design is much safer it seems especially if designed and used with a decent budget.
The Russians aren't sending stuff outside orbit like the US mars probes, and they really have no future as a space program except as cargo movers to low orbit.
Which is the only area which may have potential in the near future, and the only one with commercial applications. It's also the one which everything else will rely on.
Sure we have the ability, granted to use it you need to sacrifice other functions. That is how the brain works; consider it akin to a computer with a full hard drive. Sure you it can in theory run any program however doing so will require removing an existing program. A better analogy would be a FPGA, sure it can do anything however the amount of circuitry you can program onto it at one time is limited.
The brain is quite flexible, within limits (response time of a computer can be much faster for example); however it works by hard wiring itself to perform certain actions. Changing the way it is wired is a) not easy (happens in children more easily but becomes harder with age) and b) will cause side-effects.
hopelessly flawed. First they missmanage and over use an inefficiant air/spaceframe design. During which they get two crews killed needlessly.
Blame the air force and a lack of budget for that one.
Meanwhile the Russians have a nice reusable space vehicle called Energia. In its Vulcan config it can lift up to 175 tons and has been sucessfully launched with a good safety record (so far).
You mean the one which was sent up TWICE, and only managed to get something into orbit once. Yeah, great and extensive track record there, yup. Not to mention that there are no remaining energia rockets, they've all rotted away. I mean the last companion Buran Shuttle died a few years ago when the roof of its storage building caved in.
It'd be cheaper, and safer, to simply modify the shuttle tanks/booster rockets to fulfill a similar role of which there has been some talk.
But nasa cant be bothered with existing tech that works
See above.
So can any other email host, as someone else said google (and other such large hosts) are probably much less likely to do so than say some fly-by-night webhost.
I said nations, not peoples but nations. The topic at hand was about the impact of said systems on the achievements of various nations, and I simply pointed out that they actually are beneficial in the short run. I'm simply able to look at things without mixing in stuff like morality or western values.
Human lives were in some ways the reason for those achievements, terror makes you work and cheap expendable workers build your infrastructure.
Oh, and yes I did hear of gulags. My grandparents got shipped off to Siberia after the US handed Poland over to Stalin. I would have one more uncle had they not been sent there, babies don't fare well in such situations.
Also, Mao killed a lot more than Stalin if you wish to get into death counts and all.
"You might want to think about why they had those wars in Europe, whereas we didn't have them here. Largely, it was because Europe and Asia were infested with utopian movements like Communism, Socialism and Nazism, which didn't make much of an impression on the more individualistic United States."
They didn't make an impression because the US didn't become a hell hole every few decades. And you did get socialism, that's how you kept the great depression from turning into a full out communist revolution.
Communism flourished in Russia, which was in a horrid state for quite some time. It also did well in China which was likewise in a not-so-nice state at the time, partially thanks to the US. Nazism flourished in Germany, which was in economic collapse (they would have welcomed your Great Depression with open arms and kisses). Socialism had various influences, although none were really bad per say.
Also, Nazism and Communism did wonders for some of the nations they showed up in. Germany, China and Russia became world powers in record time although long term it doesn't hold as well.
huh? If a sat dies then there are 4 working spares already in orbit which can replace it. As I said above, you'd need to have multiple sats (5, potentially less if spares can only take over certain orbits each) die in the time it takes to get replacements up for there to be any real downtime.
Redundancy is already in place, right now its all a question of "how few sats can we launch while keeping the chance of failure very low." If we launch too early then we have an extra satellite in orbit which provides unnecessary redundancy and doesn't do anything while at the same time already being subjected to aging. In other words, over time such behavior would lead to more frequent need to replace the satellites. Launching sats isn't exactly cheap.
Yeah, why replace them when they're still working fine. That would be a waste of money, extra sats which age and provide little benefit. I mean, unless 5 fail in the time it takes to get a new one up there is no problem. Given that only 2 fail per year I don't see that happening anytime soon.
I mean, come on look at this idiotic statement:
'Bonnor said launches of new satellites are "only just keeping up" with current losses of around two satellites per year.'
What they hell is the US supposed to do, send up more satellites than they lose and waste money keeping up sats when only 24 are needed (+ a few redundant ones)?
Depends, with some effort you can probably create a nice skin-colored fake patch to put over your finger. You really only need it to stay on and look real from a distance. You can probably even use a rather crude mold if you're decent at concealing it when using it.
Yes. In every sense that matters, yes.
Reality does not agree with you.
I'm rather sure that it is a public agency, asfaik it's been a long time since the subway system was owned by a private company.
Yes the magic heat which has absolutely nothing to do with the power consumption. Its not like the power consumed is converted to heat or anything like that...
I'm sure they'll be worrying about it as soon as they find where that darn magic is coming from.
I was thinking that as well however given how quickly some viruses/worms have spread you'd simply need to put in a timer of some sort. For example 10 hours after a computer is infected (ie: once it has spread about as much as it can) it kills itself off. However, this delay may be enough to create some counter against the threat. In addition, anything beyond simply spreading adds unnecessary payload to the virus/worm and makes it spread more slowly. I'd be interesting to see some models of such viruses/worms.
I find it so amusing that at some point all the pro-war people lost sight of what we went to war about and just started mindlessly reciting propaganda.
Let me put it in words you understand since you may not grasp what the other poster implied:
Iraq did not help terrorist who fought against the US, at best it helped a few terrorist fighting against Israel in Israel. We never went to war with Iraq to fight against Al-Queda or any terrorists who targeted the US. Even the stated reasons avoided such terms, originally referring to WMDs and now referring to "freeing the Iraqi people."
Anon so I doubt you'll even read this but morons have to be countered an all.
"It's also worth noting that while North Korea may or may not possess the ability to land a nuclear strike on the west coast of the continental US, China most certainly does, and we all know that China and N. Korea are essentially allies."
Allies? Hardy, more like China's annoying little neighbor who can't be gotten rid off. NK is tolerated since it doesn't jeopardize anything important (ie: trade with the west) and provides a buffer between SK. Also, China has more to fear from those NK nukes than anyone else except SK.
"(using tech Clinton sold them no doubt)"
Wow, how much tin foil do YOU cover your head with? OR are you simply as dense as DU? They're using Soviet technology, heck they copied decent amounts of it exactly.
"If they can put a person in orbit, they can land a warhead anywhere on earth they choose."
Not really, aiming and so on become more problematic and less accurate. In addition, such a weapon is easy to detect and potentially intercept. Right now China has 20 icbms it can lob at the West Coast, and either does or soon will have nuclear missiles on submarines (may have one, I'm not sure) which can hit more or less anywhere. It also would be committing economic suicide if it ever used them.
"The bottom of a blimp can look like swiss cheese and still hold it's helium pretty darn well" So I'll shoot just a bit to the left and fill its side with holes.