The cheap PC's didn't start happening until MS DOS was popular.
While this is technically true, there's no cause/effect link between them. MS-DOS 1.0 predates the cloning of IBM PCs, and it pre-dates the ubiquitous nature of the IBM-PC design. It's a bit like saying automobiles didn't become popular until after the Cotton Gin, and therefore Eli Whitney is responsible for the popularity of cars.
And Apple is famous for their hardware lock-in (which is why they never got to be nearly as big as MS).
That's not the reason. It's because they were targetting the "I'm not a computer geek and don't want to be one" market at a time when the majority of home computer buyers were computer geeks and resented this. Microsoft didn't start trying to make their system work that way until after the marketplace started to fit that model better.
Gates was responsible for personal computing as we know it today. I'd say that's pretty important.
Yes, that is important. It just that it happens to be false. Everything useful MS did was something where someone else had done it first. Hell, even MS-DOS 1.0 itself was just someone else's product that they purchased and renamed (CP/M). But in business it is typically NOT the first cutting-edge group that ends up being financially successful - it's the ones that wait and let someone else test the waters first that do the best.
It's not a tax because it's not illegal to avoid it.
By that reasoning, the US Fedaral Income Tax isn't a tax either, since it's perfectly legal to emigrate to some small tourist island nation that doesn't use income tax and thereby avoid it : just like it's legal to go to some small independant PC vendor and avoid the MS "tax" that way too. I don't see the difference.
"Income tax isn't forced - nobody said you had to keep living in this country." "Microsoft's OS tax isn't forced - nobody said you had to buy a PC from a major vendor." See the similarity?
What does "three programs" mean in this context?? On the rare occasions that I boot up Windows, and then use ctrl-alt-del to look at at task list, I typically already see more than three processes up and running even before I actually *do* anything. Now, I realize that in Windows the processes are typically more heavyweight than in unix, and so there are fewer of them, but it still does have the notion of system-level things that are always there in the background.
The reason I'm asking is that it has to be something more high-level than the concept of what a "process" is, and therefore it has to be something that is crackable by editing something somewhere.
Much like the 10-connection limit in the old NT workstation, this has to be a totally arbitrary artificial limitation. The software to actually run more than 3 things is obviously already in place, and is being throttled with a setting somewhere.
Well, I will concede this point. But the economic impact of the destruction of the ladder must still be seriously considered. Given how much it will take to build this thing, even if it is destroyed in such a fashion that nobody gets hurt, it is still very devastating to have the world's biggest project, constituting a signifigant percentage of the GNP, get flung away.
The ladder will not be practical when it is first buildable. It will be practical when the means to build it is cheap enough that it can be replaced with ease.
I notice you've changed your tune from "you've never done enterprise stuff" to "the place I work for wouldn't accept your stuff". Thank you for backpeddling to the truth. I know the software was crappy. I chose to leave that place once I could. (a few years after I left they were in such bad shape that Nasdaq had to de-list them, making me very glad I never excercised my stock options).
I just get very angry at people who lie. And when you pretend to know something that you know damned well you don't, that's lying.
The same thing that happened in the early days of aviation when people died a lot in mishaps. The allure was strong enough that people kept doing it anyway.
To some extent, I think that's going to be one of the biggest benefits of opening up the space race to private concerns - if it's a government program and someone dies, it results in a slowdown of everything while a massive investigation takes place and no progress is made on future research and development. If it's a private program and someone dies, someone else will take up the mantle and continue on while the original group is still working on fixing the cause of the fatality. When it's a private matter, then there is less incentive to be careful, and I think risk-taking is sort of necessary to get anywhere in this field.
At today's technology a carbon nanotube ribbon is strong enough, but it is not LONG enough. For the idea to work, it would have to be a single unbroken 62,000 mile long strand. If you have to make it in currently available lengths and then attach the lengths together, it stops having the property of being superstrong yet low in mass.
The idea is sound. The technology, however, is NOT here yet. The irony is that to be able to make a superstrong unbroken long ribbon like that, you end up having to make it out in space.
The ideal solution is for the center of the elevator to be the manufacturing point of the ribbon, spewing out strands in both directions - in to earth and away from earth. That can work, but it will take a lot of time before that technology is here.
As to the tug idea, you do realize that the ribbon will not be fixed in space above a point on the earth if you do that, right? Once you pull the payload up, the center of mass of the elevator drifts outward such that it is no longer in geosynchronous orbit. and the tug will not be directly above the station - it will be pulling laterally on it as it's orbital speed changes and it drifts out of line. This means having to re-position the elevator after each and every launch. Not that this is a bad idea, but your description of the station being fixed in place isn't really accurate if this method is used. The station will need to move itself back to geosynchronous orbit, back over the launch point, and will need to have signifigant propulsion ability of its own to do so. (or you will have to wait a long time between launches if it has to move itself using relatively small propulsion techniques currently used by satellites to keep themselves in place.) This station is becoming a signifigantly complex thing here with this design. Not that this is bad, but the notion of this being possible with today's technology is foolishly optomistic.
The problem with the space elevator is that we still need to be able to fling a lot of mass into orbit to be able to build the thing in the first place, and so there needs to be some intermediate step along the way that does that better than we do it today, before the elevator is buildable.
I heard an urban legend that American pilots were instructed to avoid MiG-29's in combat due to the technical superiority of that design.
Replace "combat" with "close combat". From a long distance the F-15 is superior to the Mig-29 due to better electronic measures - radar identification, missle guidance, etc. Up close the Mig-29 is better due to amazing manueverability. The F15 pilots were instructed not to get close enough to dogfight, and instead to use fast straight passes, and missles.
This is the standard tactic when your plane is either faster than the opponent, or better able to shoot from a distance than the opponent. It's the same tactic used by the US airmen against the Japaneese Zero in WW2. The Zero was amazingly manueverable, but structurally weaker such that it could barely reach 300 MPH before becoming in risk of breaking. So the US, with fighters that could top 400 MPH in level flight, and even reach 450 in a dive, would just fly straight in from a distance, take one pass shooting, and then zip right past, without turning to dogfight. While the Zeros could easily turn to keep the US fighters in their crosshairs during this, the distance between them would expand at about 150 MPH, leaving them only a precious few seconds of shooting before it was pointless. Then, after getting far enough away, the US fighters would turn back and do it again.
This is pretty much the same kind of thing, except using the longer-range attack instead of the faster speed to result in the same tactical decision - don't stick around the enemy - fight from a distance.
Planes take a long time to build and test before they fly. It is entirely possible for one group to copy the design before the final test flight, and then finish their model and fly it before the original is test flown. Especially if they have different methods and standards of testing. I'm not saying you're wrong - I'm just saying that the proof you provided is insufficient to rule out the 144 being the result of espianoge. Don't forget that the Concorde, as a joint British/French production, was not exactly rushed through from drawing board to production with lightning speed. There were a lot of delays and agreements to be reached on who did what parts.
The Soviet space program, from the very beginning, had a lot more emphasis on remote control and automation than the US program. While this did put them ahead in that technology, wasn't it done more for political rather than technical reasons? i.e. - they wanted to make it impossible for a cosmonaut at the controls to decide where the craft goes, and thus avoid the possibility of a high-profile embarassing defection. Or, is that just a rumor?
Some things are inherently going to be monopolies, like it or not, like the electrical company for your home town, or the "company" that plans where to put the roads. In these cases, paying for these items with tax money is less wasteful than having a monopoly private business in charge of it. In both cases the lack of competition can, and does, cause things to be wastefully expensive, but in one case there are shareholders insisting on profit on top of that and in the other there are only voters wanting it to break-even. Thus I don't agree with the implication that leaving more money out of government results in a larger economy. Take away all government funding of roads, for example, and the resulting private tollways that would crop up would cost you more than the tax money that was saved.
Agreed. The problem I had was that the original statement implied blame onto the wrong party. Don't blame the rocket scientists for failing to account for non-scientific, purely political alterations to their designs.
Also, one type of accidental failure is a malfunction partway up the ladder while carrying a load up. If a part of the ladder is getting weak, this could happen. The assumption that the only kinds of stress on the structure to be worth worrying about are the environmental ones at the base is a rather dangerous presumption.
I do like the idea of trying to make it out of something that will burn into gasses on re-entry, but I'm having a hard time imagining it being strong enough to be a space ladder, and yet skinny enough to not have any remaining mass in the core of it survive the burn. (i.e. how large do meteors typically have to start out in order for enough to survive re-entry to hit the ground?) If worst comes to worst I suppose it could be rigged with a mechnamism to deliberately separate it into smaller bits when it starts hitting re-entry (i.e. fasteners designed to melt easily).
You are assuming accidental failures. I am not. Deliberate sabotage can be carried out by a spaceship or by a bomb in the cargo going up the elevator, and a deliberate saboteur would go for the most damage by severing higher up the chain.
As far as burning on re-entry - to be strong enough this thing will be very massive. It will burn, but will it burn all the way through? What kind of materials do we have that are strong enough to handle the tensions this thing will be under, and yet still skinny enough to 100% burn into gasses on re-entry?
Then your ignorance was accidental. Ever heard of a "turnkey" system? Where the hardware box, OS, and an application on the OS are all sold as a single unit? They do get used in enterprise-level installations, like the customers we had. Ever heard of tiny companies called "The Home Depot", "Sunbeam/Oster", "Crystler", "Bay Area Networks"?
Michael Foal is a US Citizen born in Britain. It's only just recently that the US government started accepting the idea of dual-citizenships. Before that, to become a US Citizen you had to renounce any previous citizenships. The UK had a rule that a UK Citizen could do that and not have it legally count in the UK if you don't want it to. Thus the person ends up being a citizen of just the US if you ask the US, or a citizen of both the US and UK if you ask the UK. Which was internationally recognized I don't know.
Out of curiosity, just what do you think the materials we have today are that have the proper amount of tensile strength while at the same time being light enough to feasably get into geosyncrhonous orbit with today's launch technologies?
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The cheap PC's didn't start happening until MS DOS was popular.
While this is technically true, there's no cause/effect link between them. MS-DOS 1.0 predates the cloning of IBM PCs, and it pre-dates the ubiquitous nature of the IBM-PC design. It's a bit like saying automobiles didn't become popular until after the Cotton Gin, and therefore Eli Whitney is responsible for the popularity of cars.
And Apple is famous for their hardware lock-in (which is why they never got to be nearly as big as MS).
That's not the reason. It's because they were targetting the "I'm not a computer geek and don't want to be one" market at a time when the majority of home computer buyers were computer geeks and resented this. Microsoft didn't start trying to make their system work that way until after the marketplace started to fit that model better.
Gates was responsible for personal computing as we know it today. I'd say that's pretty important.
Yes, that is important. It just that it happens to be false. Everything useful MS did was something where someone else had done it first. Hell, even MS-DOS 1.0 itself was just someone else's product that they purchased and renamed (CP/M). But in business it is typically NOT the first cutting-edge group that ends up being financially successful - it's the ones that wait and let someone else test the waters first that do the best.
It's not a tax because it's not illegal to avoid it.
By that reasoning, the US Fedaral Income Tax isn't a tax either, since it's perfectly legal to emigrate to some small tourist island nation that doesn't use income tax and thereby avoid it : just like it's legal to go to some small independant PC vendor and avoid the MS "tax" that way too. I don't see the difference.
"Income tax isn't forced - nobody said you had to keep living in this country."
"Microsoft's OS tax isn't forced - nobody said you had to buy a PC from a major vendor."
See the similarity?
What does "three programs" mean in this context?? On the rare occasions that I boot up Windows, and then use ctrl-alt-del to look at at task list, I typically already see more than three processes up and running even before I actually *do* anything. Now, I realize that in Windows the processes are typically more heavyweight than in unix, and so there are fewer of them, but it still does have the notion of system-level things that are always there in the background.
The reason I'm asking is that it has to be something more high-level than the concept of what a "process" is, and therefore it has to be something that is crackable by editing something somewhere.
Much like the 10-connection limit in the old NT workstation, this has to be a totally arbitrary artificial limitation. The software to actually run more than 3 things is obviously already in place, and is being throttled with a setting somewhere.
You said things about liberals that even a moron would know are false. The only thruthful thing for me to do was call you a liar.
It is a common tactic for the liar to get all haughty when called on it.
Well, I will concede this point. But the economic impact of the destruction of the ladder must still be seriously considered. Given how much it will take to build this thing, even if it is destroyed in such a fashion that nobody gets hurt, it is still very devastating to have the world's biggest project, constituting a signifigant percentage of the GNP, get flung away.
The ladder will not be practical when it is first buildable. It will be practical when the means to build it is cheap enough that it can be replaced with ease.
I notice you've changed your tune from "you've never done enterprise stuff" to "the place I work for wouldn't accept your stuff". Thank you for backpeddling to the truth. I know the software was crappy. I chose to leave that place once I could. (a few years after I left they were in such bad shape that Nasdaq had to de-list them, making me very glad I never excercised my stock options).
I just get very angry at people who lie. And when you pretend to know something that you know damned well you don't, that's lying.
MS has made computing cheap and ubiquitous
False. That was the IBM-PC cloners. Even at MS's inflated profit margin, the cost of buying the OS is irrelevant compared to the cost of the hardware.
The same thing that happened in the early days of aviation when people died a lot in mishaps. The allure was strong enough that people kept doing it anyway.
To some extent, I think that's going to be one of the biggest benefits of opening up the space race to private concerns - if it's a government program and someone dies, it results in a slowdown of everything while a massive investigation takes place and no progress is made on future research and development. If it's a private program and someone dies, someone else will take up the mantle and continue on while the original group is still working on fixing the cause of the fatality. When it's a private matter, then there is less incentive to be careful, and I think risk-taking is sort of necessary to get anywhere in this field.
At today's technology a carbon nanotube ribbon is strong enough, but it is not LONG enough. For the idea to work, it would have to be a single unbroken 62,000 mile long strand. If you have to make it in currently available lengths and then attach the lengths together, it stops having the property of being superstrong yet low in mass.
The idea is sound. The technology, however, is NOT here yet. The irony is that to be able to make a superstrong unbroken long ribbon like that, you end up having to make it out in space.
The ideal solution is for the center of the elevator to be the manufacturing point of the ribbon, spewing out strands in both directions - in to earth and away from earth. That can work, but it will take a lot of time before that technology is here.
As to the tug idea, you do realize that the ribbon will not be fixed in space above a point on the earth if you do that, right? Once you pull the payload up, the center of mass of the elevator drifts outward such that it is no longer in geosynchronous orbit. and the tug will not be directly above the station - it will be pulling laterally on it as it's orbital speed changes and it drifts out of line. This means having to re-position the elevator after each and every launch. Not that this is a bad idea, but your description of the station being fixed in place isn't really accurate if this method is used. The station will need to move itself back to geosynchronous orbit, back over the launch point, and will need to have signifigant propulsion ability of its own to do so. (or you will have to wait a long time between launches if it has to move itself using relatively small propulsion techniques currently used by satellites to keep themselves in place.) This station is becoming a signifigantly complex thing here with this design. Not that this is bad, but the notion of this being possible with today's technology is foolishly optomistic.
The problem with the space elevator is that we still need to be able to fling a lot of mass into orbit to be able to build the thing in the first place, and so there needs to be some intermediate step along the way that does that better than we do it today, before the elevator is buildable.
I heard an urban legend that American pilots were instructed to avoid MiG-29's in combat due to the technical superiority of that design.
Replace "combat" with "close combat". From a long distance the F-15 is superior to the Mig-29 due to better electronic measures - radar identification, missle guidance, etc. Up close the Mig-29 is better due to amazing manueverability. The F15 pilots were instructed not to get close enough to dogfight, and instead to use fast straight passes, and missles.
This is the standard tactic when your plane is either faster than the opponent, or better able to shoot from a distance than the opponent. It's the same tactic used by the US airmen against the Japaneese Zero in WW2. The Zero was amazingly manueverable, but structurally weaker such that it could barely reach 300 MPH before becoming in risk of breaking. So the US, with fighters that could top 400 MPH in level flight, and even reach 450 in a dive, would just fly straight in from a distance, take one pass shooting, and then zip right past, without turning to dogfight. While the Zeros could easily turn to keep the US fighters in their crosshairs during this, the distance between them would expand at about 150 MPH, leaving them only a precious few seconds of shooting before it was pointless. Then, after getting far enough away, the US fighters would turn back and do it again.
This is pretty much the same kind of thing, except using the longer-range attack instead of the faster speed to result in the same tactical decision - don't stick around the enemy - fight from a distance.
Planes take a long time to build and test before they fly. It is entirely possible for one group to copy the design before the final test flight, and then finish their model and fly it before the original is test flown. Especially if they have different methods and standards of testing. I'm not saying you're wrong - I'm just saying that the proof you provided is insufficient to rule out the 144 being the result of espianoge. Don't forget that the Concorde, as a joint British/French production, was not exactly rushed through from drawing board to production with lightning speed. There were a lot of delays and agreements to be reached on who did what parts.
The Soviet space program, from the very beginning, had a lot more emphasis on remote control and automation than the US program. While this did put them ahead in that technology, wasn't it done more for political rather than technical reasons? i.e. - they wanted to make it impossible for a cosmonaut at the controls to decide where the craft goes, and thus avoid the possibility of a high-profile embarassing defection. Or, is that just a rumor?
I will not be convinced by someone who masks lies with haughtiness. I'm not that gullible.
I'll believe in this super-strong ribbon when I see things being built with it.
Some things are inherently going to be monopolies, like it or not, like the electrical company for your home town, or the "company" that plans where to put the roads. In these cases, paying for these items with tax money is less wasteful than having a monopoly private business in charge of it. In both cases the lack of competition can, and does, cause things to be wastefully expensive, but in one case there are shareholders insisting on profit on top of that and in the other there are only voters wanting it to break-even. Thus I don't agree with the implication that leaving more money out of government results in a larger economy. Take away all government funding of roads, for example, and the resulting private tollways that would crop up would cost you more than the tax money that was saved.
Agreed. The problem I had was that the original statement implied blame onto the wrong party. Don't blame the rocket scientists for failing to account for non-scientific, purely political alterations to their designs.
Also, one type of accidental failure is a malfunction partway up the ladder while carrying a load up. If a part of the ladder is getting weak, this could happen. The assumption that the only kinds of stress on the structure to be worth worrying about are the environmental ones at the base is a rather dangerous presumption.
I do like the idea of trying to make it out of something that will burn into gasses on re-entry, but I'm having a hard time imagining it being strong enough to be a space ladder, and yet skinny enough to not have any remaining mass in the core of it survive the burn. (i.e. how large do meteors typically have to start out in order for enough to survive re-entry to hit the ground?) If worst comes to worst I suppose it could be rigged with a mechnamism to deliberately separate it into smaller bits when it starts hitting re-entry (i.e. fasteners designed to melt easily).
You are assuming accidental failures. I am not. Deliberate sabotage can be carried out by a spaceship or by a bomb in the cargo going up the elevator, and a deliberate saboteur would go for the most damage by severing higher up the chain.
As far as burning on re-entry - to be strong enough this thing will be very massive. It will burn, but will it burn all the way through? What kind of materials do we have that are strong enough to handle the tensions this thing will be under, and yet still skinny enough to 100% burn into gasses on re-entry?
Then your ignorance was accidental. Ever heard of a "turnkey" system? Where the hardware box, OS, and an application on the OS are all sold as a single unit? They do get used in enterprise-level installations, like the customers we had. Ever heard of tiny companies called "The Home Depot", "Sunbeam/Oster", "Crystler", "Bay Area Networks"?
parent might have meant systems with UNIX as an OS, but running other crappy code on it?
Yes. It was a turnkey system (That's where you buy the hardware box, OS, and the application on it as a single unit.)
Website != Internet subdomain.
Michael Foal is a US Citizen born in Britain. It's only just recently that the US government started accepting the idea of dual-citizenships. Before that, to become a US Citizen you had to renounce any previous citizenships. The UK had a rule that a UK Citizen could do that and not have it legally count in the UK if you don't want it to. Thus the person ends up being a citizen of just the US if you ask the US, or a citizen of both the US and UK if you ask the UK. Which was internationally recognized I don't know.
Out of curiosity, just what do you think the materials we have today are that have the proper amount of tensile strength while at the same time being light enough to feasably get into geosyncrhonous orbit with today's launch technologies?
Situation1:
income = 100
spending = 50
amount remaining = 50
Now, the situation changes:
Situation 1a, increase spending by 10:
income = 100
spending = 60
amount remaining = 40
OR:
Situation 1b: decresase income by 10:
income = 90
spending = 50
amount remaining = 40
What is the relevant difference between 1a and 1b?