Our government couldn't properly coordinate the relief efforts for the Hurricane Katrina disaster. Does anyone out there honestly think our government is organized enough to orchestrate a massive cover up for the development of an evil death ray?
Even more amazing is the fact that it would be a conspiracy that spans multiple administrations that are politically opposed. There was no, "Holy crap! Look at what the Republicans/Democrats were using your tax dollars to build. How can you ever justify voting for them again?" My dad always talks about the HAARP conspiracy, but rather jokingly because he doesn't really get what it does.
I never saw the article on Nature, since I don't have a subscription. HAARP pops up on Slashdot from time to time, as well as on space.com.
What about dogs? I know I'm not the only person here who's played with bubbles in the presence of a dog. I swear, they will literally kill themselves from exhaustion chasing bubbles if you're not careful. These things could be dangerous for your pets...
This is just braindead reasoning. Bombs kill people by their explosive force. When you are downwind of an exploded bomb, the smoke might not be plesant, but breathing a particle or two won't cause your body to be burned from the inside out, starting with your lungs. Getting hit in the arm by a bullet will be immensely painful, but it won't be anywhere near the agonizing pain caused by WP, and bullets won't continue to slowly burn their way up your arm.
WP is DEFINED as a chemical weapon, because it IS a chemical weapon. End of story. If you still can't grasp that simple fact, that's your problem.
You're wrong. WP is defined as an incendiary (further defined as a flame material, section II). He's not failing to grasp a simple fact. You're failing to do any research. Breathing a particle or two will not burn your lungs from the inside out. Inhaling a large amount can potentially do that, but it's a solid that doesn't exist after being released long enough for that to readily happen. It does not magically burn its way up your arm, either. It produces burns where it contacts but has no way of spreading beyond the initial bursting charge. It is not some magic superweapon, it's not a toxin (at least no more than lead, for example), it's not gangrene (which will "eat" it's way up your arm) and it has a limited combustion energy. When it's burnt up it's burnt up. Additionally, the smoke is irritating but mostly harmless.
The original point still stands. Dead is dead. Some ways of dying suck a lot more than others, some to the point that their use raises additional ethical questions, but the end result is that you stop caring about it.
Is it possible that someone has finally invented a Slashdot article with more flamebait potential than the classic "$distro Linux Latest Release Adds $feature?"
Re:From TFA (and other materials on the subject)
on
HAARP Amping It Up
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· Score: 1
Tesla did an experiment with harmonics in steel beams which ended up damaging the building he was in and knocking dishes off shelves for an area covering several blocks. It had nothing to do with electromagnetism. I'll grant that harmonics is somewhat complicated at the theoretical level, I'm amazed at the number of conspiracy theorists who have never seen an off-balance washing machine. I thought only the Warcraft geeks didn't do laundry...
First of all, great username. Is it safe to assume that's "Joe" was a convenient, typical American GI name to kill?
Second, you've popped up in probably the last half a dozen discussions which even remotely made reference to the US government spewing off your outrage at the use of white phosphorous (incidentally, the stuff is also formed when using strike anywhere matches). While I applaud your dedication to proving that Americans are evil and must be destroyed in a big holy Jihad, I think you're overly focused on white phosphorous.
If you think the US deliberately attacked civillians with willie peter, you're dead wrong. And while WP is nasty stuff to get hit by and perhaps we should we retire it, if you don't think it has its uses on the battlefield besides sadism, you're also wrong. And if you somehow think that being a hard-working Iraqi civillian standing in line to join the police and make his country safer or even just visiting the market and getting killed by a suicide or car bomber or a few intentionally targeted mortar rounds is in any way better than frying insurgents with incendiaries, you're messed up in the head.
How can you really be sure exactly what HAARP is being used for?
Find me one piece of reputable, published research supporting the ability of radio waves to generate earthquakes, hurricanes, or mind control. The Art Bell show and rense.com do not count as published sources, and certainly not reputable research. Besides, if it really were sensitive in nature, why would they let University of Alaska students work on it?
You've gotta love the unfounded conspiracy theories surrounding HAARP. Jamming the Chinese is the only plausible alternate explanation I've heard yet. If people are so convinced that something evil is going on up there, how about asking some of the grad students at University of Alaska? Everybody knows grad students will sing for a mere six pack or an offer to show their resume to your boss.
The array has so far produced localized auroras (go Google it yourself, I'm not your mother), which is one of the effects it was predicted to be able to achieve in addition to providing a theoretical way to improve radio reception, but I've heard some great crackpot theories. Most come from the tin-foil hat people who think it's a mind control device, but there's some lame stuff like destroying the ozone layer over only blue or only red states so Democrats/Republicans will all die of skin cancer or find oil sources for the big companies with government funding. The best, however, is the suggestion that it controls earthquakes. 'HAARP' + 'earthquake' is an entertaining google search. Iran, Sumatra, you name it. It was a secret government attack. Oh yeah, don't forget Hurricane Katrina. Obviously a creation of HAARP.
This isn't dirt or ice smoothing though. This is more like making a road. Bulldozing and mineclearing are two analogous processes I could think of. In front sounds more logical to me.
You can't buy a John Deere mower for $699. You can buy a John Deere labeled mowered at Home Depot for $1599, but I've not yet found verification that those aren't simply more MTD mowers or similar with JD green painted on them. Real John Deere mowers, the ones that genuinely last a freaking long time, don't bog down in wet grass (or rigolith), and come with actually comfortable seats and a cupholder for your beer cost $3000 or so.
If you want to go to the moon with an MTD mower that will last one season before the belt brakes, the nylon starter gear is stripped, and that stupid switch in the seat that shuts off the engine if you stand up wears out keeping it from running at all unless you short it, be my guest, but don't come bawling "Houston we have a problem" to me.
It was discovered in the last couple of years, but the forgery was supposed to have happened sometime in the first millenium. It made a bunch of hype because there have been some claims, generally regarded as unimportant by protestant Christians and flat-out rejected by Catholic theology, that Jesus had siblings. However, as with the discovery of the name Goliath, even if it's genuine there are other possibilities. It could've been another man named "Yeshua." It could've been a non-literal use of the term "brother" (Paul often used brother to address fellow Christians), etc. Similarly, this could be the Goliath that got owned by David, it could be some other dead guy named Goliath, or it could be part of a newstablet with confusing superlative adjectives like "Goliath skyscraper" or "Liliputian circuits."
I was wondering if Minerva might have troubles of its own. Japan has been putting quite a bit of effort into developing space exploration over the last couple of years, but don't have the benefit of screwing up as many times as the US and Russia have. You learn a lot from failing abysmally. They're on a good start though. A few commercial rockets blowing up here and there, then that probe that died after almost reaching Mars a couple years late due to a navigation problem. Give them time and a few billion more dollars, they'll make it eventually. With Hayabusa, they've still got 2 chances to make a powered landing, and if nothing else, they've gotten detailed pictures of the asteroid.
I imagine it's frustrating for them that, despite the effort they're putting into developing novel missions like Hayabusa that involve a great deal of finesse and scientific potential, the Chinese are getting more positive attention by building on existing Russian technology to create a high profile manned program.
I know you're trying hard to make it look this is work-related, but for goodness sake, don't make major purchasing decisions based on what you read on Slashdot!
Perhaps there should be a limit on the amount of time that can pass between when an idea goes into use and when the patent application is submitted. That doesn't address the silliness of this patent, but at least it would have eliminated it.
Re:Never underestimate the power of Nandrolone...
on
Cow Tipping is a Myth
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· Score: 3, Insightful
You city people are funny. Cows don't sleep on their feet. Heck, they hardly ever even sleep when laying down, just get dopey, and trust me, you are not going to move a cow that's laying down.
As for your "mere cow" theory, if you ever tried to move one you would find that they're a lot tougher than you think. First of all, they weigh 1000 pounds or more. I've seen Holstein bulls as big as 4000 pounds. That weight includes a lot of muscle. They're not as tough per weight as pigs, the most difficult animal I've ever had to wrestle into a loading chute, but a cow does not go anywhere it doesn't feel at least a minor incentive to go (hence cattle prods...). Your beefy jock friend may have been 250 pounds or so, but he's facing an animal 4 times his size or more with a lower center of gravity. I admit if a couple of tough guys snuck up on a dumb cow chewing it's cud, they could probably knock it over, but most cows don't even let people touch them.
Anybody who did ever tip a cow over is a jerk. If a cow ends up on the wrong side, it's stomach ends up on it's lungs and they suffocate. They often can't get their legs underneath themselves to get up.
Perhaps if Microsoft at least made a decent attempt to comply with the current standards. Admittedly no browser is 100% compliant, but most are about a full generation ahead of IE 6 and it seems IE 7 too, since all indications point to no worthwhile changes in that departement for explorer. It might not matter much to the average user, but the fact the the Mozilla Foundation actually tries to support the advancement of web standards wins me over. If you don't know what I'm talking about, an easy example is mozilla.org compared between Firefox and IE.
I don't want to sound like I'm starting some kind of international ego contest, because both NASA and the ESA are accomplishing quite a bit right now, both NASA and the ESA have had some great cooperation lately, and space is just too darn cool for "I can spit farther than you" type arguments, but I do want to point out that the US does currently have more active missions (and I think considerably more money invested in space research) than the EU. It's not like we're abandoning everything to buy a shiny new space SUV.
The point was not that saving civilization costs too much, but that this method costs to much. It's not like you can just park this tug right next to the asteroid and "tada," it magically changes orbit. Gravitational attraction is mutual, but each mass in the system has it's own momentum. The gravitational force between the two is going to deflect the orbit of the lighter object towards the heavier object more than it will the heavy object towards the lighter object. As that happens, to continue modifying the orbit after they intersect (aka "crash"), you need to re-establish your space-tug's position. The end result is you can't escape burning fuel to modify the asteroid's orbit by the space-tug concept. Landing, while tricky, is not really that hard. NASA landed on an asteroid with a space probe that was only intended to orbit it. Their low gravity is a major bonus. The difference is for one mission you launch 20 tons of mostly dead weight, plus the fuel to get 20 tons of mass to the asteroid, but for the other, you launch maybe 2 tons of power and control equipment, plus the fuel to get that much lower mass to the astroid. You also need fuel for the tugging/pushing, or course.
If I remember right, the Saturn V was rated to put 25 tons into lunar orbit, which is easier than rendezvousing with an asteroid zipping around the solar system at 25000 mph.
When you're talking about the continued existance of civilization, if plan A fails, you can afford plan B, as long as you're smart enough to realize it. Debt doesn't matter as much if you're dead. Debt matters even less if all your creditors are dead.
Ahh, I see the luddites wasted no time in responding. Just to make sure there's some serious discussion though...
While I'm impressed with SpaceX's progress so far and have my fingers crossed for a successful launch within the next month, keep in mind that they have yet to prove the Falcon 1, much less the Falcon 9 or the impressive 27 engine, side-stacked spin-off they've proposed. Remember also, that the $78 million price tag is a goal, probably slightly optimistic, and that's the launch cost only. It doesn't include the cost of the payload.
I think eventually a nuclear-powered Mars shuttle could be a great idea. If we were to reach the point of regular Martian travel, it could be fueled and mated to a payload (such as a lander) in earth orbit, deliver the payload to a Mars orbit and return another payload from Mars back to an earth orbit where it would be refueled and mated with a new payload for the next mission. At this point, however, we need to focus on getting to Mars and figuring out exactly what it will take to establish a permanent presence and if it's worth the cost before we invest billions of dollars developing, billions testing, and billions more building a craft with such a focused purpose. Trust me, it will take billions to design a new fission reactor and get it certified for launch, and there will be a huge fuss (probably costing billions more) over who's qualified to launch it, if anybody.
To be quite fair to the grandparent, I've heard plenty of self-proclaimed environmentalists complain about aesthetics. Usually, though, they find some easier to argue position like "we have to think of the birds." Talking energy with them typically goes something like this:
Environut: Global warming is going to kill us all. We have to stop the evil oil companies bent of world destruction.
Engineer: Well then, let's invest some money in clean, reliable nuclear power plant design
Environut: Are you kidding. Those things are radioactive and they meltdown all the time. Plus Tom Brokaw says terrorists can blow them up with molotav cocktails and kill us all.
Engineer: I don't think you understand the issue fully, but ok, how about natural gas.
Environut: I heard through from my neighbor's, best friend's, third cousin who is an expert in environmental peace engineering at Evergreen Community College that natural gas tankers can explode with the energy of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Engineer: The stored gas has equivalent chemical energy, yes, but it's release is dependent on the oxygen that can be supplied. The absolute worst case scenario is a really big fire. Still, if you're not comfortable with that, how about hydro power in locations where it's available?
Environut: Disrupts salmon spawning.
Engineer: Wind power?
Environut: Kills birds
Engineer: Geothermal?
Environut: Haven't you seen Core? You'll stop the earth's core from spinning, cause earthquakes, and kill the yellowstone geysers.
Engineer: Umm, how about tidal generators for coastal cities?
Environut: Absolutely not. They destroy the reefs to build them and devastate the shoreline ecostructure by reducing wave action
Engineer: How about investing in Fusion research?
Environut: Doesn't that involve atoms? I don't like atoms and I think they should be banned by international treaty because terrorists can build dirty bombs out of them.
Engineer: I suppose you have something against solar power too?
Environut: Oh no. I love solar power. It will save us from global warming, cure world hunger, end racism, and get Barbara Streisand elected president.
Engineer: Well, it does have its benefits, but it's only practical in a limited part of the world and it's currently nowhere near as cost-effective as other forms of energy production
Environut: I knew it! You're just another puppet for big oil. Why do you hate the baby seals? What did they ever do to you? Murderer!
Ok, that's exagerated a little bit, but I bet if I pulled snippets from enough old posts on Slashdot, I could come up with that conversation without too much trouble.
I wouldn't really consider LRAD to be armament. It's like carrying a whistle, or maybe pepper spray, through a bad neighborhood.
It might not be a bad idea to have a few crewmen on ships that cruise in potentially dangerous routes trained to use, for example, a Mk-19 or an M-2 Browning. I somehow doubt they would maintain their enthusiasm for attacking cruise ships when 40mm grenades start flying their way at 300 rounds/minute or.50 caliber rounds start drilling holes completely through their boats. Actually, the best would probably be a Bushmaster 25 mm cannon. It's the same gun used on the Bradley IFV's and the LAV 25 "Strikers" the media is so infatuated with. Mounting it in an armored turret right on the sun deck should protect the crew while giving it a good field of fire and offering a sense of adventure for the sunbathers. It wouldn't matter if the pirates tried to attack in greater force. The Bushmaster has several times the effective range of an RPG and it can make swiss cheese of just about anything lighter than a tank.
You still have to be moving the same speed as the cable. If it's lunar-synchronous, it will be moving about 1000 mph ground speed. You can't let it reach the ground, or even into the region of air-breathing vehicles because of drag, which would probably cause gradual fatigue of the cable due to continuous flexing. If you can work out a reliable transfer method, you can probably do it reasonably efficiently with a sub-orbital rocket. Low earth orbit sucks because you expend a ton of energy getting up to 17,000 mph only to give up 16,000 of that, and you start losing altitude as you lose speed.
Probably the best option is to launch from an earth-anchored elevator somewhere just past the geo-synchronous altitude. That leaves you with about 3000 mph to lose (approximately 4,000 mph tangential velocity at that orbit), but you can probably accomplish it with a carefully planned slingshot manuever.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's just hope we don't find out this sweet stuff causes cancer 6 months after it hits the market. : (
He needs to get his act in gear and make bouncing bubbles. That sounded almost equally as cool.
What about dogs? I know I'm not the only person here who's played with bubbles in the presence of a dog. I swear, they will literally kill themselves from exhaustion chasing bubbles if you're not careful. These things could be dangerous for your pets...
True that. I love being a test engineer. I was told not to wear anything nicer than jeans. Sweet.
To all you IT suckers who's departments are implementing dress codes: Haha!
The original point still stands. Dead is dead. Some ways of dying suck a lot more than others, some to the point that their use raises additional ethical questions, but the end result is that you stop caring about it.
Is it possible that someone has finally invented a Slashdot article with more flamebait potential than the classic "$distro Linux Latest Release Adds $feature?"
Tesla did an experiment with harmonics in steel beams which ended up damaging the building he was in and knocking dishes off shelves for an area covering several blocks. It had nothing to do with electromagnetism. I'll grant that harmonics is somewhat complicated at the theoretical level, I'm amazed at the number of conspiracy theorists who have never seen an off-balance washing machine. I thought only the Warcraft geeks didn't do laundry...
Second, you've popped up in probably the last half a dozen discussions which even remotely made reference to the US government spewing off your outrage at the use of white phosphorous (incidentally, the stuff is also formed when using strike anywhere matches). While I applaud your dedication to proving that Americans are evil and must be destroyed in a big holy Jihad, I think you're overly focused on white phosphorous.
If you think the US deliberately attacked civillians with willie peter, you're dead wrong. And while WP is nasty stuff to get hit by and perhaps we should we retire it, if you don't think it has its uses on the battlefield besides sadism, you're also wrong. And if you somehow think that being a hard-working Iraqi civillian standing in line to join the police and make his country safer or even just visiting the market and getting killed by a suicide or car bomber or a few intentionally targeted mortar rounds is in any way better than frying insurgents with incendiaries, you're messed up in the head. Find me one piece of reputable, published research supporting the ability of radio waves to generate earthquakes, hurricanes, or mind control. The Art Bell show and rense.com do not count as published sources, and certainly not reputable research. Besides, if it really were sensitive in nature, why would they let University of Alaska students work on it?
You've gotta love the unfounded conspiracy theories surrounding HAARP. Jamming the Chinese is the only plausible alternate explanation I've heard yet. If people are so convinced that something evil is going on up there, how about asking some of the grad students at University of Alaska? Everybody knows grad students will sing for a mere six pack or an offer to show their resume to your boss.
The array has so far produced localized auroras (go Google it yourself, I'm not your mother), which is one of the effects it was predicted to be able to achieve in addition to providing a theoretical way to improve radio reception, but I've heard some great crackpot theories. Most come from the tin-foil hat people who think it's a mind control device, but there's some lame stuff like destroying the ozone layer over only blue or only red states so Democrats/Republicans will all die of skin cancer or find oil sources for the big companies with government funding. The best, however, is the suggestion that it controls earthquakes. 'HAARP' + 'earthquake' is an entertaining google search. Iran, Sumatra, you name it. It was a secret government attack. Oh yeah, don't forget Hurricane Katrina. Obviously a creation of HAARP.
This isn't dirt or ice smoothing though. This is more like making a road. Bulldozing and mineclearing are two analogous processes I could think of. In front sounds more logical to me.
You can't buy a John Deere mower for $699. You can buy a John Deere labeled mowered at Home Depot for $1599, but I've not yet found verification that those aren't simply more MTD mowers or similar with JD green painted on them. Real John Deere mowers, the ones that genuinely last a freaking long time, don't bog down in wet grass (or rigolith), and come with actually comfortable seats and a cupholder for your beer cost $3000 or so.
If you want to go to the moon with an MTD mower that will last one season before the belt brakes, the nylon starter gear is stripped, and that stupid switch in the seat that shuts off the engine if you stand up wears out keeping it from running at all unless you short it, be my guest, but don't come bawling "Houston we have a problem" to me.
It was discovered in the last couple of years, but the forgery was supposed to have happened sometime in the first millenium. It made a bunch of hype because there have been some claims, generally regarded as unimportant by protestant Christians and flat-out rejected by Catholic theology, that Jesus had siblings. However, as with the discovery of the name Goliath, even if it's genuine there are other possibilities. It could've been another man named "Yeshua." It could've been a non-literal use of the term "brother" (Paul often used brother to address fellow Christians), etc. Similarly, this could be the Goliath that got owned by David, it could be some other dead guy named Goliath, or it could be part of a newstablet with confusing superlative adjectives like "Goliath skyscraper" or "Liliputian circuits."
I was wondering if Minerva might have troubles of its own. Japan has been putting quite a bit of effort into developing space exploration over the last couple of years, but don't have the benefit of screwing up as many times as the US and Russia have. You learn a lot from failing abysmally. They're on a good start though. A few commercial rockets blowing up here and there, then that probe that died after almost reaching Mars a couple years late due to a navigation problem. Give them time and a few billion more dollars, they'll make it eventually. With Hayabusa, they've still got 2 chances to make a powered landing, and if nothing else, they've gotten detailed pictures of the asteroid.
I imagine it's frustrating for them that, despite the effort they're putting into developing novel missions like Hayabusa that involve a great deal of finesse and scientific potential, the Chinese are getting more positive attention by building on existing Russian technology to create a high profile manned program.
I know you're trying hard to make it look this is work-related, but for goodness sake, don't make major purchasing decisions based on what you read on Slashdot!
Perhaps there should be a limit on the amount of time that can pass between when an idea goes into use and when the patent application is submitted. That doesn't address the silliness of this patent, but at least it would have eliminated it.
You city people are funny. Cows don't sleep on their feet. Heck, they hardly ever even sleep when laying down, just get dopey, and trust me, you are not going to move a cow that's laying down.
As for your "mere cow" theory, if you ever tried to move one you would find that they're a lot tougher than you think. First of all, they weigh 1000 pounds or more. I've seen Holstein bulls as big as 4000 pounds. That weight includes a lot of muscle. They're not as tough per weight as pigs, the most difficult animal I've ever had to wrestle into a loading chute, but a cow does not go anywhere it doesn't feel at least a minor incentive to go (hence cattle prods...). Your beefy jock friend may have been 250 pounds or so, but he's facing an animal 4 times his size or more with a lower center of gravity. I admit if a couple of tough guys snuck up on a dumb cow chewing it's cud, they could probably knock it over, but most cows don't even let people touch them.
Anybody who did ever tip a cow over is a jerk. If a cow ends up on the wrong side, it's stomach ends up on it's lungs and they suffocate. They often can't get their legs underneath themselves to get up.
Perhaps if Microsoft at least made a decent attempt to comply with the current standards. Admittedly no browser is 100% compliant, but most are about a full generation ahead of IE 6 and it seems IE 7 too, since all indications point to no worthwhile changes in that departement for explorer. It might not matter much to the average user, but the fact the the Mozilla Foundation actually tries to support the advancement of web standards wins me over. If you don't know what I'm talking about, an easy example is mozilla.org compared between Firefox and IE.
I don't want to sound like I'm starting some kind of international ego contest, because both NASA and the ESA are accomplishing quite a bit right now, both NASA and the ESA have had some great cooperation lately, and space is just too darn cool for "I can spit farther than you" type arguments, but I do want to point out that the US does currently have more active missions (and I think considerably more money invested in space research) than the EU. It's not like we're abandoning everything to buy a shiny new space SUV.
The point was not that saving civilization costs too much, but that this method costs to much. It's not like you can just park this tug right next to the asteroid and "tada," it magically changes orbit. Gravitational attraction is mutual, but each mass in the system has it's own momentum. The gravitational force between the two is going to deflect the orbit of the lighter object towards the heavier object more than it will the heavy object towards the lighter object. As that happens, to continue modifying the orbit after they intersect (aka "crash"), you need to re-establish your space-tug's position. The end result is you can't escape burning fuel to modify the asteroid's orbit by the space-tug concept. Landing, while tricky, is not really that hard. NASA landed on an asteroid with a space probe that was only intended to orbit it. Their low gravity is a major bonus. The difference is for one mission you launch 20 tons of mostly dead weight, plus the fuel to get 20 tons of mass to the asteroid, but for the other, you launch maybe 2 tons of power and control equipment, plus the fuel to get that much lower mass to the astroid. You also need fuel for the tugging/pushing, or course.
If I remember right, the Saturn V was rated to put 25 tons into lunar orbit, which is easier than rendezvousing with an asteroid zipping around the solar system at 25000 mph.
When you're talking about the continued existance of civilization, if plan A fails, you can afford plan B, as long as you're smart enough to realize it. Debt doesn't matter as much if you're dead. Debt matters even less if all your creditors are dead.
Ahh, I see the luddites wasted no time in responding. Just to make sure there's some serious discussion though...
While I'm impressed with SpaceX's progress so far and have my fingers crossed for a successful launch within the next month, keep in mind that they have yet to prove the Falcon 1, much less the Falcon 9 or the impressive 27 engine, side-stacked spin-off they've proposed. Remember also, that the $78 million price tag is a goal, probably slightly optimistic, and that's the launch cost only. It doesn't include the cost of the payload.
I think eventually a nuclear-powered Mars shuttle could be a great idea. If we were to reach the point of regular Martian travel, it could be fueled and mated to a payload (such as a lander) in earth orbit, deliver the payload to a Mars orbit and return another payload from Mars back to an earth orbit where it would be refueled and mated with a new payload for the next mission. At this point, however, we need to focus on getting to Mars and figuring out exactly what it will take to establish a permanent presence and if it's worth the cost before we invest billions of dollars developing, billions testing, and billions more building a craft with such a focused purpose. Trust me, it will take billions to design a new fission reactor and get it certified for launch, and there will be a huge fuss (probably costing billions more) over who's qualified to launch it, if anybody.
To be quite fair to the grandparent, I've heard plenty of self-proclaimed environmentalists complain about aesthetics. Usually, though, they find some easier to argue position like "we have to think of the birds." Talking energy with them typically goes something like this:
Environut: Global warming is going to kill us all. We have to stop the evil oil companies bent of world destruction.
Engineer: Well then, let's invest some money in clean, reliable nuclear power plant design
Environut: Are you kidding. Those things are radioactive and they meltdown all the time. Plus Tom Brokaw says terrorists can blow them up with molotav cocktails and kill us all.
Engineer: I don't think you understand the issue fully, but ok, how about natural gas.
Environut: I heard through from my neighbor's, best friend's, third cousin who is an expert in environmental peace engineering at Evergreen Community College that natural gas tankers can explode with the energy of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Engineer: The stored gas has equivalent chemical energy, yes, but it's release is dependent on the oxygen that can be supplied. The absolute worst case scenario is a really big fire. Still, if you're not comfortable with that, how about hydro power in locations where it's available?
Environut: Disrupts salmon spawning.
Engineer: Wind power?
Environut: Kills birds
Engineer: Geothermal?
Environut: Haven't you seen Core? You'll stop the earth's core from spinning, cause earthquakes, and kill the yellowstone geysers. Engineer: Umm, how about tidal generators for coastal cities?
Environut: Absolutely not. They destroy the reefs to build them and devastate the shoreline ecostructure by reducing wave action
Engineer: How about investing in Fusion research?
Environut: Doesn't that involve atoms? I don't like atoms and I think they should be banned by international treaty because terrorists can build dirty bombs out of them.
Engineer: I suppose you have something against solar power too?
Environut: Oh no. I love solar power. It will save us from global warming, cure world hunger, end racism, and get Barbara Streisand elected president.
Engineer: Well, it does have its benefits, but it's only practical in a limited part of the world and it's currently nowhere near as cost-effective as other forms of energy production
Environut: I knew it! You're just another puppet for big oil. Why do you hate the baby seals? What did they ever do to you? Murderer!
Ok, that's exagerated a little bit, but I bet if I pulled snippets from enough old posts on Slashdot, I could come up with that conversation without too much trouble.
I wouldn't really consider LRAD to be armament. It's like carrying a whistle, or maybe pepper spray, through a bad neighborhood.
.50 caliber rounds start drilling holes completely through their boats. Actually, the best would probably be a Bushmaster 25 mm cannon. It's the same gun used on the Bradley IFV's and the LAV 25 "Strikers" the media is so infatuated with. Mounting it in an armored turret right on the sun deck should protect the crew while giving it a good field of fire and offering a sense of adventure for the sunbathers. It wouldn't matter if the pirates tried to attack in greater force. The Bushmaster has several times the effective range of an RPG and it can make swiss cheese of just about anything lighter than a tank.
It might not be a bad idea to have a few crewmen on ships that cruise in potentially dangerous routes trained to use, for example, a Mk-19 or an M-2 Browning. I somehow doubt they would maintain their enthusiasm for attacking cruise ships when 40mm grenades start flying their way at 300 rounds/minute or
I was completely unaware of the free "express editions" of their developer software (or MSSQL). What limitations do these editions have?
You still have to be moving the same speed as the cable. If it's lunar-synchronous, it will be moving about 1000 mph ground speed. You can't let it reach the ground, or even into the region of air-breathing vehicles because of drag, which would probably cause gradual fatigue of the cable due to continuous flexing. If you can work out a reliable transfer method, you can probably do it reasonably efficiently with a sub-orbital rocket. Low earth orbit sucks because you expend a ton of energy getting up to 17,000 mph only to give up 16,000 of that, and you start losing altitude as you lose speed.
Probably the best option is to launch from an earth-anchored elevator somewhere just past the geo-synchronous altitude. That leaves you with about 3000 mph to lose (approximately 4,000 mph tangential velocity at that orbit), but you can probably accomplish it with a carefully planned slingshot manuever.