Whenever someone who understands personal rights talks about carefully refraining from using a potientially invasive technology in a damaging way, it's promising - but they often forget to design a system that will work well when the NEXT guy takes over the job. They tend to design systems for which the only safeguard against them being misused is that those in charge (the ones inventing the system) agree not to use them that way. Then when the system expands to be used by others, or when the original guardians of privacy leave the job and new people take over, the technology is there, the system is in place to make abuses happen, and the people who are then in charge of them are not the ones who thought long and hard about avoiding their misuse. So the system gets abused.
So when designing this sort of thing, it's important to think of the damage that can be done when someone less scrupulous than yourself is in charge of it, and try to design the system around that scenario. (This is also a good safeguard to keep yourself from falling into the temptation of misusing it later on.)
So to be fair, hikers MUST be told that they are being watched. (I think there's actually a law about that, but IANAL.) And they must be told where the watchpoints are (not by law, but in the interest of fairness). And the information gathered should not be private, far from it. It should be completely transparent. Surveillence data is an unbalancing of power only when it's data that only one group has. When it's data that everybody has, then it's not so unbalancing. Joe average should be able to find someone's sensor trail on a website just as easily as the ranger sitting in the search-and-rescue booth.
And if you think that would amount to too much information given out, and too much invasion of privacy to have that data in the public, then that's a clue that you're being too invasive.
Basically, if the data you want to collect is data that would be considered an invasion of privacy if it was published to the public, then it's also an invasion of privacy to collect it and keep it to yourself.
Wings work by differing the airspeed across the top and bottom surfaces, so the air moves faster across the top than across the bottom. That tends to stir up the air and leave vorteces behind. That adds a very signifigant resistance.
And you ignore that the air-resistance, while an impedement to accessleration is a helpful boon to decelleration, so that fact alone means that the 300-0 MPH part of the trip at the end takes less fuel than the 0-300 MPH part of the trip at the start.
As far as the difference in gravity goes, the pull at ground level and in orbit are not that signifigantly different when the orbit is only 100 miles high.
I have driven such a car. The constant adjustments were not as exaggerated as in the movies, where the driver is literally shifting the wheel back and forth and back and forth every two seconds.
Belief in the existence of a god is not a core requirement for something to be a religion. For an example that proves this point, see Buddhism - a belief system just as wacky as any other religion, but belief in god isn't part of it.
Religion versus science is not about belief in God versus doubt in God.
It's about belief in whatever you damn well feel like, versus careful skepticism. Belief in God is just one special case area of this more general difference.
Yes, you do add a little fuel, but as a percentage of the whole, it's not much. It takes a hell of a lot more fuel to go from zero to 17,000 MPH against gravity than it does to go from 300 MPH to zero against gravity. Compare that to the added cost of pushing a body designed for lift through the air on a launch, instead of pushing one designed for straight minimal bullet-like movement with no pull in a relative "up" direction. The lifting design will have more drag and thus increase the amount of fuel needed for liftoff. (or the wings will be something to be deployed later, meaning now you have to add the mass for a mechanical wing deployment system.)
One kind of "wing" that might work well, however, is the simple parachute wing. It is very light, and can be deployed later. The problem with this is reliability. If you launch the rocket into space, you know the rocket engines are working or the craft wouldn't even be in orbit. If you pack a parachute, you introduce an untested factor into the system that can't be tested until it's needed, (and if you test it, you have to repack it and thus ruin the integrety of that test, as far as testing the packing goes.)
And of course, parachutes were used to provide a portion of the decelleration on some mars landing missions. Yeah, the air is thin, but when travelling at interplanetary speeds, even thin air still provides a heck of a lot of friction.
The problem is really much more simple than that. Who teaches the young kids? People who graduated with Education majors. Now, how much history did those people have to take? A fair amount. How much about the psychology of teaching? A fair amount. How much about language skills and how to give speeches? A fair amount. How much about math and science? Not much. And that's the problem.
The kids are taught at an early age by the people who don't know much about the topic themselves. It's not until they reach the age where their school system stars using specialized teachers for different subjects that they might come across someone with a love of math or science who was actually good at learning it him or her self. Before that point, in grade school when the format is "one teacher, all day, in the same classroom", that one teacher is rarely someone who liked math or science. Obviously there are exceptions, but on average kids have to hit middle school (or junior high, if that's what they call it where you live), before learning science from an actual science buff. By then the damage has been done, and the opportunity has passed.
The best response to the UFO alien believers is simply this:
"The phrase 'Unidentified Flying Object' is incompatable with the phrase 'alien spacecraft'. Make up your mind - Did you identify it as an alien spacecraft or didn't you?"
"I'm perfectly willing to admit that you saw something flying that you weren't able to identify. Big freakin' deal. Get back to me when you can identify it. Until then you are wrong to claim it's something special or odd."
The people who approach this question the "right way", by asking "does this exist" keep getting the answer "no". They are not ridiculed for this, as you imply. The ones being ridiculed are the ones not following this principle, who are the only ones coming up with "yes" answers.
The reason it's hard to keep them seperate is the other way around. Religion is speculation about the unknown. To expand its power, it has to move the boundry beteween known and unknown so that more stuff that was known becomes unknown. Science is the opposite, and is all about the push to try to move that boundry in the opposite direction.
That is why they clash. They seek to shove that boundry in opposite directions.
The majority of what we thought was "impossible" even 200 years ago has been shown to be possible.
That's a bold claim. By saying "majority", rather than just "some", you have to show that the number of things have moved from "impssible" to "possible" is greater than the number of things which have stayed "impossible". I doubt you have done this. Many things believed to be impossible today were also believed to be impossible in the past too. Here's a small list:
Coming back to life after dying.
Breathing water like a fish.
Running unassisted at 60 miles per hour.
Surviving without eating food.
Levitating with the power of the mind.
Walking to the moon. Anyway, I think you get my drift. The number of things believed to be impossible which have been proven to actually be possible is not necessarily that large in comparasin to the number of things believed to be impossible which have stayed that way. Remember that "the set of all things believed to be impossible" is a nearly infinite set.
I have the same problems in roleplaying games, which is why I never play a computer-based character in any game that features some form of computer network. I'm always annoyed at the notion that the computer experts use the same exact virtual-reality interface to make programs as the users use to run them. Experience shows that this is NOT the trend the future is heading in.
What if that *IS* one of their concerns? It's just a special case of the more general problem: "The movie contradicts it's OWN rules. I'm asked to suspend my disbelief by imagining a new rule about the world, and then I'm asked to suspend it *again* by vioilating that very same rule I was just asked to set up in my mind in the first place."
If he can bend the rules that strongly, then there is no need for the dramatic chase to catch her - he can go as fast as he feels like going and catch her in an instant, or maybe even just stop her with his mind. It's the classic problem in any 'superhero' movie - you give the hero extreme power and then forget that this would logically remove the danger and thus the drama from a lot of situations - so you conveniently "forget" about some of those powers when it would be convenient to do so.
The problem is that they were not even good-good-good, nor even good-okay-okay. Matrix 2 was an excellent story to fill a half hour. The problem is that the people making it believed they had a 2-hour story on their hands. So, to turn their half-hour story into a two-hour story, they made every single conversation take four times as long as it needed to, and it showed. The repetativeness was tangible (especially when talking to the oracle). Matrix 3 I never bothered seeing, because of the boredom of seeing Matrix 2.
But we're talking about a craft that already has to have rockets on it anyway, for the launch. So it's not a matter of "compare the cost of adding rockets to the cost of adding wings". It's "compare the cost of adding nothing to the cost of adding wings".
If you want to get pedantic, two can play that game. The Russian vehicles were assembled to the east of the Ural mountains. That means Asia was involved. So, no they were not "all european" missions.
Consider the terminal velocity (from air friction) of a falling ball. That's only about 300 miles per hour. Consider the speed of the space shuttle when it's in its relatively low orbit, that's about 17,000 miles per hour.
So even without designing an areodynamic smooth body to fly nicely, even a simple sphere could use the atmosphere's friction to bleed off everything but the last one 1/5333 of its speed.
After that, the difference between using rockets or using wings doesn't matter as much. The first 99.98 % of the effort to slow down the craft is happening from the re-entry friction in both cases.
How about making all the fuel tanks disposable, just like the big hydrogen tank on the current shuttle is? Yeah, that means building a new tank, but building a new feul tank for each launch should (in theory) be a heck of a lot cheaper than making a new vehicle for each launch.
Yeah, it's a big problem that the vehicle contains deadweight that isn't needed after liftoff. (Likftoff requires big bulky equipment, but orbital maneuvering and the de-orbit burn only need a small fraction of that kind of power.). I used to think that the solution lays in designing the launch facility so that it provides most of the liftoff power itself - that it flings the craft ballisticly into the air. The hard part of this is that you need to accellerate up to a large velocity and thus you need to do it over a long distance so as not to pull too many "Gees" getting up to speed. That is going to mean the launch facility has to be gigantic, but if it truly makes the craft reusable, then maybe the expense of it is worth it.
But, now I not longer believe that is a real solution for a number of reasons: 1 - To fling an object to orbit, you have to make it go fast enough to compensate for air friction, so it's even still going at orbital velocity even after it pushes through the atmosphere. Wheres with a rocket, it does't reach its top speed until it's already climbed quite a ways up into the thinner air. So with a projectile method, the point in the flight where the vehicle is going the fastest is right at the moment of release, right at the thickest part of the atmosphere. This means the launch facility is going to have to use some type of frictionless gun (a magnetic one, perhaps). Otherwise the friction invovlved with an object going that fast in contact with the launching gun will be impossible to engineer a solution for. It's just going to be too damaging, and ruin the idea of the launch facility being cheaply reusable.
2 - The second problem, of course, is that during the first portion of the flight through the atmosphere, the vehicle will be going even faster that it does when it's in re-entry, so it will experience air-friction even worse than that of re-entry. And that means even more heat protection is needed, and it has to survive TWO burns without servicing in-between, one going up and one coming back down later. When the thing leaves the launch gun, it would look like a flaming fireball.
Had you been merely claiming that Websters is the only full paper dictionary there, your claim would have been true. But you also made the implication that this wasn't good enough to trust it, and that's where I tuned out and said, "this guy's got some kind of stupid predjudice about Websters."
While I understand the problem, and I see that some technology to make it hard to get the material for free is needed before big studios will embrace digital distribution, DRM technology is not a good way to do it. The problem with DRM is that it ends up requiring that EVERY layer of the software, from the gui where you click a play button, all the way down to the firmware burned into the chips, be secret, or it will get broken through. And *that* means that it will be illegal to spread technical knowlege about *anything* that could be related to playing that movie. It would be like the CSS fisaco, but worse. In order to be allowed to view that movie, not only will you have to have an approved playback software tool, but you'll have to have an approved OS to put it on, as well as an approved firmware suite in all of the hardware involved. And every level of that is going to be locked up behind DMCA walls. It will put a legal barrier up preventing ever using open source systems to look at any sort of media.
Songs, Movies, Television - all of it is going to be distributed on computer in the future, and if it uses the current crop of DRM technology, then it will be a world where nothing open-source is allowed to participate, because open-source tools are not legally compatable with the way DRM works, and DRM invades ALL levels of the technology, from hardware up to end-user-tool - so the option to just give in and use a closed app for the media, but still use open-source for everything else, won't really be an option either.
The media cartels love it because it means nobody else can learn the technology but them, which keeps new competition from cropping up. and Microsoft loves it because it will become another thing they can lie about claiming open source is incapable of (as opposed to the truth that it's being legally dissallowed from) doing. - and the evidence will make it look like they're right to the average non-techie person.
Slashdot Mirror
Yawn.
Whenever someone who understands personal rights talks about carefully refraining from using a potientially invasive technology in a damaging way, it's promising - but they often forget to design a system that will work well when the NEXT guy takes over the job. They tend to design systems for which the only safeguard against them being misused is that those in charge (the ones inventing the system) agree not to use them that way. Then when the system expands to be used by others, or when the original guardians of privacy leave the job and new people take over, the technology is there, the system is in place to make abuses happen, and the people who are then in charge of them are not the ones who thought long and hard about avoiding their misuse. So the system gets abused.
So when designing this sort of thing, it's important to think of the damage that can be done when someone less scrupulous than yourself is in charge of it, and try to design the system around that scenario. (This is also a good safeguard to keep yourself from falling into the temptation of misusing it later on.)
So to be fair, hikers MUST be told that they are being watched. (I think there's actually a law about that, but IANAL.) And they must be told where the watchpoints are (not by law, but in the interest of fairness). And the information gathered should not be private, far from it. It should be completely transparent. Surveillence data is an unbalancing of power only when it's data that only one group has. When it's data that everybody has, then it's not so unbalancing. Joe average should be able to find someone's sensor trail on a website just as easily as the ranger sitting in the search-and-rescue booth.
And if you think that would amount to too much information given out, and too much invasion of privacy to have that data in the public, then that's a clue that you're being too invasive.
Basically, if the data you want to collect is data that would be considered an invasion of privacy if it was published to the public, then it's also an invasion of privacy to collect it and keep it to yourself.
Wings work by differing the airspeed across the top and bottom surfaces, so the air moves faster across the top than across the bottom. That tends to stir up the air and leave vorteces behind. That adds a very signifigant resistance.
And you ignore that the air-resistance, while an impedement to accessleration is a helpful boon to decelleration, so that fact alone means that the 300-0 MPH part of the trip at the end takes less fuel than the 0-300 MPH part of the trip at the start.
As far as the difference in gravity goes, the pull at ground level and in orbit are not that signifigantly different when the orbit is only 100 miles high.
I have driven such a car. The constant adjustments were not as exaggerated as in the movies, where the driver is literally shifting the wheel back and forth and back and forth every two seconds.
Belief in the existence of a god is not a core requirement for something to be a religion. For an example that proves this point, see Buddhism - a belief system just as wacky as any other religion, but belief in god isn't part of it.
Religion versus science is not about belief in God versus doubt in God.
It's about belief in whatever you damn well feel like, versus careful skepticism. Belief in God is just one special case area of this more general difference.
I know what a pole shift is, enough to know that it has nothing to do with the insane crap you were asserting.
Yes, you do add a little fuel, but as a percentage of the whole, it's not much. It takes a hell of a lot more fuel to go from zero to 17,000 MPH against gravity than it does to go from 300 MPH to zero against gravity. Compare that to the added cost of pushing a body designed for lift through the air on a launch, instead of pushing one designed for straight minimal bullet-like movement with no pull in a relative "up" direction. The lifting design will have more drag and thus increase the amount of fuel needed for liftoff. (or the wings will be something to be deployed later, meaning now you have to add the mass for a mechanical wing deployment system.)
One kind of "wing" that might work well, however, is the simple parachute wing. It is very light, and can be deployed later. The problem with this is reliability. If you launch the rocket into space, you know the rocket engines are working or the craft wouldn't even be in orbit. If you pack a parachute, you introduce an untested factor into the system that can't be tested until it's needed, (and if you test it, you have to repack it and thus ruin the integrety of that test, as far as testing the packing goes.)
And of course, parachutes were used to provide a portion of the decelleration on some mars landing missions. Yeah, the air is thin, but when travelling at interplanetary speeds, even thin air still provides a heck of a lot of friction.
The problem is really much more simple than that. Who teaches the young kids? People who graduated with Education majors. Now, how much history did those people have to take? A fair amount. How much about the psychology of teaching? A fair amount. How much about language skills and how to give speeches? A fair amount. How much about math and science? Not much. And that's the problem.
The kids are taught at an early age by the people who don't know much about the topic themselves. It's not until they reach the age where their school system stars using specialized teachers for different subjects that they might come across someone with a love of math or science who was actually good at learning it him or her self. Before that point, in grade school when the format is "one teacher, all day, in the same classroom", that one teacher is rarely someone who liked math or science. Obviously there are exceptions, but on average kids have to hit middle school (or junior high, if that's what they call it where you live), before learning science from an actual science buff. By then the damage has been done, and the opportunity has passed.
There needs to be a moderation option called "-1, utter lunatic".
The best response to the UFO alien believers is simply this:
"The phrase 'Unidentified Flying Object' is incompatable with the phrase 'alien spacecraft'. Make up your mind - Did you identify it as an alien spacecraft or didn't you?"
"I'm perfectly willing to admit that you saw something flying that you weren't able to identify. Big freakin' deal. Get back to me when you can identify it. Until then you are wrong to claim it's something special or odd."
The people who approach this question the "right way", by asking "does this exist" keep getting the answer "no". They are not ridiculed for this, as you imply. The ones being ridiculed are the ones not following this principle, who are the only ones coming up with "yes" answers.
The reason it's hard to keep them seperate is the other way around. Religion is speculation about the unknown. To expand its power, it has to move the boundry beteween known and unknown so that more stuff that was known becomes unknown. Science is the opposite, and is all about the push to try to move that boundry in the opposite direction.
That is why they clash. They seek to shove that boundry in opposite directions.
The majority of what we thought was "impossible" even 200 years ago has been shown to be possible.
That's a bold claim. By saying "majority", rather than just "some", you have to show that the number of things have moved from "impssible" to "possible" is greater than the number of things which have stayed "impossible". I doubt you have done this. Many things believed to be impossible today were also believed to be impossible in the past too. Here's a small list:
Coming back to life after dying.
Breathing water like a fish.
Running unassisted at 60 miles per hour.
Surviving without eating food.
Levitating with the power of the mind.
Walking to the moon.
Anyway, I think you get my drift. The number of things believed to be impossible which have been proven to actually be possible is not necessarily that large in comparasin to the number of things believed to be impossible which have stayed that way. Remember that "the set of all things believed to be impossible" is a nearly infinite set.
And of course, that steering wheels require constant attention and adjustment, moving back and forth every second, when driving straight.
I have the same problems in roleplaying games, which is why I never play a computer-based character in any game that features some form of computer network. I'm always annoyed at the notion that the computer experts use the same exact virtual-reality interface to make programs as the users use to run them. Experience shows that this is NOT the trend the future is heading in.
What if that *IS* one of their concerns? It's just a special case of the more general problem: "The movie contradicts it's OWN rules. I'm asked to suspend my disbelief by imagining a new rule about the world, and then I'm asked to suspend it *again* by vioilating that very same rule I was just asked to set up in my mind in the first place."
If he can bend the rules that strongly, then there is no need for the dramatic chase to catch her - he can go as fast as he feels like going and catch her in an instant, or maybe even just stop her with his mind. It's the classic problem in any 'superhero' movie - you give the hero extreme power and then forget that this would logically remove the danger and thus the drama from a lot of situations - so you conveniently "forget" about some of those powers when it would be convenient to do so.
The problem is that they were not even good-good-good, nor even good-okay-okay. Matrix 2 was an excellent story to fill a half hour. The problem is that the people making it believed they had a 2-hour story on their hands. So, to turn their half-hour story into a two-hour story, they made every single conversation take four times as long as it needed to, and it showed. The repetativeness was tangible (especially when talking to the oracle). Matrix 3 I never bothered seeing, because of the boredom of seeing Matrix 2.
But we're talking about a craft that already has to have rockets on it anyway, for the launch. So it's not a matter of "compare the cost of adding rockets to the cost of adding wings". It's "compare the cost of adding nothing to the cost of adding wings".
If you want to get pedantic, two can play that game. The Russian vehicles were assembled to the east of the Ural mountains. That means Asia was involved. So, no they were not "all european" missions.
Consider the terminal velocity (from air friction) of a falling ball. That's only about 300 miles per hour. Consider the speed of the space shuttle when it's in its relatively low orbit, that's about 17,000 miles per hour.
So even without designing an areodynamic smooth body to fly nicely, even a simple sphere could use the atmosphere's friction to bleed off everything but the last one 1/5333 of its speed.
After that, the difference between using rockets or using wings doesn't matter as much. The first 99.98 % of the effort to slow down the craft is happening from the re-entry friction in both cases.
How about making all the fuel tanks disposable, just like the big hydrogen tank on the current shuttle is? Yeah, that means building a new tank, but building a new feul tank for each launch should (in theory) be a heck of a lot cheaper than making a new vehicle for each launch.
Yeah, it's a big problem that the vehicle contains deadweight that isn't needed after liftoff. (Likftoff requires big bulky equipment, but orbital maneuvering and the de-orbit burn only need a small fraction of that kind of power.). I used to think that the solution lays in designing the launch facility so that it provides most of the liftoff power itself - that it flings the craft ballisticly into the air. The hard part of this is that you need to accellerate up to a large velocity and thus you need to do it over a long distance so as not to pull too many "Gees" getting up to speed. That is going to mean the launch facility has to be gigantic, but if it truly makes the craft reusable, then maybe the expense of it is worth it.
But, now I not longer believe that is a real solution for a number of reasons: 1 - To fling an object to orbit, you have to make it go fast enough to compensate for air friction, so it's even still going at orbital velocity even after it pushes through the atmosphere. Wheres with a rocket, it does't reach its top speed until it's already climbed quite a ways up into the thinner air. So with a projectile method, the point in the flight where the vehicle is going the fastest is right at the moment of release, right at the thickest part of the atmosphere. This means the launch facility is going to have to use some type of frictionless gun (a magnetic one, perhaps). Otherwise the friction invovlved with an object going that fast in contact with the launching gun will be impossible to engineer a solution for. It's just going to be too damaging, and ruin the idea of the launch facility being cheaply reusable.
2 - The second problem, of course, is that during the first portion of the flight through the atmosphere, the vehicle will be going even faster that it does when it's in re-entry, so it will experience air-friction even worse than that of re-entry. And that means even more heat protection is needed, and it has to survive TWO burns without servicing in-between, one going up and one coming back down later. When the thing leaves the launch gun, it would look like a flaming fireball.
Had you been merely claiming that Websters is the only full paper dictionary there, your claim would have been true. But you also made the implication that this wasn't good enough to trust it, and that's where I tuned out and said, "this guy's got some kind of stupid predjudice about Websters."
While I understand the problem, and I see that some technology to make it hard to get the material for free is needed before big studios will embrace digital distribution, DRM technology is not a good way to do it. The problem with DRM is that it ends up requiring that EVERY layer of the software, from the gui where you click a play button, all the way down to the firmware burned into the chips, be secret, or it will get broken through. And *that* means that it will be illegal to spread technical knowlege about *anything* that could be related to playing that movie. It would be like the CSS fisaco, but worse. In order to be allowed to view that movie, not only will you have to have an approved playback software tool, but you'll have to have an approved OS to put it on, as well as an approved firmware suite in all of the hardware involved. And every level of that is going to be locked up behind DMCA walls. It will put a legal barrier up preventing ever using open source systems to look at any sort of media.
Songs, Movies, Television - all of it is going to be distributed on computer in the future, and if it uses the current crop of DRM technology, then it will be a world where nothing open-source is allowed to participate, because open-source tools are not legally compatable with the way DRM works, and DRM invades ALL levels of the technology, from hardware up to end-user-tool - so the option to just give in and use a closed app for the media, but still use open-source for everything else, won't really be an option either.
The media cartels love it because it means nobody else can learn the technology but them, which keeps new competition from cropping up. and Microsoft loves it because it will become another thing they can lie about claiming open source is incapable of (as opposed to the truth that it's being legally dissallowed from) doing. - and the evidence will make it look like they're right to the average non-techie person.