Everyone says they want the world to use Linux, but when someone produces a distro that is easy enough for Win users to use as a stepping stone to *cough* 'greater things', everyone mocks it for being too dumbed down.
Perhaps what they want is a simple `UI Complexity' slider somewhere, like they used to have for their installer so you could set the slider to the right amount of disk space and the distro would select enough packages to fill that space for you.
The UI slider could be set to near zero when installed, you could slide it all the way down to `George Jetson' mode for those, er, special clients and lock it there, or redline it if you like to decide what values get poked into what registers with what timing to set up your video card.
Just don't let on that the `UI' stands for `User Intelligence' and you'll be fine. <G/D/R>
Gael Duval made the mistake of comparing the "bankruptcy protection" that Mandrake is under with a US Chapter 11. They are completely different. The idea in the US is that at this point the vultures gather and peck the unfortunate company to death (although when this happens to Microsoft I expect a number of uncultured louts to be gathered around EULA bonfires wearing party hats and making toasts with MSDN CDs); in France, the idea is that the company is repaired and gets a chance to catch its breath. The French government has approved Mandrake's plan for doing so.
It's worth reiterating that Mandrake are making a profit, but they've got some financial baggage from the halcyon dot-com days when a bright-eyed bushy-tailed and basically dumb management team spent too much money chasing non-core-business dreams.
I personally don't like some of the things Gael has done, but Mandrake as a whole is enthusiastic and productive. They're helping efforts like KDE enormously as well, and unlike certain other noisy for-profits who run everything as root, Mandrake GPL everything they do and actually publish the sources. They about as close to Debian as an RPM-based for-profit corp can be, and with a much more obvious concern for usability.
Materialism is also a fundamental religious belief.
Why do you believe that what you see is all you get? What evidence have you that this is so?
And really, you don't even believe in that, 'coz you believe in - for example - electricity, quarks and dark matter, yet you can't touch or see any of them.
I got off easy; many years ago a witchy friend of mine got me exposed, several times and in completely different ways, to some physical effects which were literally impossible to explain by any means besides rank stupidities like `mass hallucination' (coordinated how...?), and this opened my mind to the possibility that I might not know everything, might not be seeing everything, there might be more.
Evolution doesn't deal with creation of the universe nor with the creation of life. Evolution deals with a very specific problem: the origin of species. Where the "first species" came from is pure conjecture. Some people support abiogenesis which is unproven though still a science. Some people support creationism which is unprovable and therefore not a science. You are fooling yourself and misleading others by conflating the two.
You couldn't be more wronger. (-:
There is no theory which postulates differing processes for the origin and development of life. Before biological evolution there must have been chemical evolution, else biological evolution doesn't make any sense.
However, it really doesn't matter. The plant in question is a crossbreed, no new-and-improved information involved. Whoopie-doo. How original.
Mutation destroys, it does not build up or organise or improve. Mutation in action is like hitting a Lego display with a.303 shot. Is the resulting Lego improved, no matter how carefully you compare and select pieces (in itself, a non-random act)?
The same objectively observed and measured principles which account for abiogenesis being ridiculously impossible also account for mutation-and-selection being a consatnt downhill slide, not a glorious march to universal self-improvement.
We still lack an example of evolution in action. We also lack any substantial results from studies into possible routes for abiogenesis, and any substantial commitment to studying Creation. If the billions which followed Miller and Urey's cul-de-sac experiments into oblivion had been spent on testing Creatiojn as an hypothesis instead, there would no longer be doubt in any civilised country - which is, of course, why it didn't happen. Creation does indeed imply a Creator.
You need to kill the inherited velocity of Earth's orbit.
You can be going at walking pace or 0.5c, and if the dotted line which represents your path intersects the (more or less) cylinder which represents the Sun's path, all of your worries will soon be over.
So, if you skipped past Venus, killed a little velocity and wound up looping (either out or in will work), and did a low, slow pass over Mercury (spend an hour going past, turn by roughly 12km/s, a manouver which could even add velocity if you liked) which then put you in the path of the Sun, it wouldn't matter that you still have over 20km/s under your belt. Air (hydrogen, anyway) resistance would soon cure that...
The simple way would be to launch in the right direction from Earth, but that would also involve burning the most fuel.
I guess the rope and tower could both be supported by a ship in the ocean that moved around in a figure 8 forever
Why would you bother? The day someone makes something 100,000km long and absolutely rigid is the day magic is recognised at the same level as mechanical engineering. You elevator will be quite happy as a cat-o-one-tail. The ship would have to do hundreds of km/h anyway. (-:
Agree. There is a theory that our atmosphgeric pressure once was about double, with about double the proportion of oxygen in it, and that's what a hyperbaric chamber simulates. Some of the stuff you can heal with on is pretty amazing. (-:
Until someone makes nano cables in industrial quantity, spindizzies aren't more than a few orders of magnitude more unlikely
Ah, so tens of thousands of years away instead of tens of years away? It makes a slight difference to my enthusiasm for them...
Nanotubes are already up to centimeter sizes and climbing, you'd only need meter-scale fibres for this (they're to be embedded in a composite sandwich for a alignment and cross-connection purposes).
You can't tack in a solar wind because there is nothing to provide sideslip resistance like water does for a sailboat.
`Nothing' is probably too general a statement for something as large and flimsy as a solar sail, but I agree in principle.
In that case, I'd be looking for interesting diffraction/refraction/polarisation effects, and also seeing about a secondary sail powered by light reflected from the first.
then the Victorian government will steal the idea and it'll get built off of Melbourne.
Nah, Kim Beazley'll pinch it for South Oz so he can win a State election there instead of having them built just across the bay from the base that's going to use most of them, the Croweaters won't know how to build the damn thing, and it will still want to sink unpredictably after a $70 million dollar refit, while a safer, quieter, cheaper and more reliable model sits on drydock in Fremantle.
Imagine this - an electric airplane that is powered by a Powersat beaming microwaves to it.
Models have been tested and found to work which are nothing more than a shaped piece of aluminium. The device focusses the microwave beam landing on it into a very small space, heats the air there to amazing temperatures and basically operates as a continuous-flow ramjet. No moving parts.
And if someone hijacks the airplane, turn off the beam from outside. Hijackers then have three choices: surrender, crash nearby or deploy parachutes.
Any of a dozen posts above yours point out that it would have about the same impact as sheets of loose newspaper. Mars has little atmosphere, and Kim seems to have seriously overengineered his elevator.
A rocket with at least 1t of payload costs at least $14M to fling to LEO, so $14,000/kg. Shuttle costs roughly $500M to fling and carries (OTToMH) roughly 20t, so in the ballpark of $30,000/kg. HLS said `a shuttle _or_ a rocket' so this is our baseline; we calculate that they're promising to beat $700/kg. IRL, I think they're aiming for $200/kg.
Now that we have some context, cheaply built and frequently launched dumb H2/O2 rockets can lob 2t payloads for rougly $1300/kg, so there is a big improvement available with existing technology which we could have on the hop in about two years, but that hasn't been taken.
HLS' elevator requires 1-5 years of development (realistically 2 years) and six years to construct. If it drops freight rates to LEO from $10,000/kg to $200/kg, it's a bargain. It would still be a bargain if it only dropped rates from $1300 to $200.
Moreso since it can be used to launch its own replacement, making the second elevator much cheaper, and the third-and-on much cheaper again.
You will notice that the ribbon(s) is/are 100,000km long, but geosynchronous orbit is only 35,000km up. Consider the (feather)weight of the ribbon itself. The counterweight need only be roughly half as massy as the biggest load you plan to send up.
Dropping along the ribbon from geosync and detaching just before the counterweight would give you roughly 7km/s of additional boost (on top of the 4km/s at geosync), which about equals escape velocity for Earth, and would have no problem getting to the Moon. You could do it in an unpowered vehicle if you didn't have to arrive gently. (-:
From 30 degrees south, that would be a point about 3000 km north and about 35 km up
No, 35 thousand km up. And the elevator would be curved.
Perhaps someone should point out to them that Cairns also has an international airport, and Cape York has already been proposed as a spaceport. On top of that, Australia plans to develop Christmas Island as a spaceport, too.
the ribbon would leave the ground at at angle of 31 degrees from the vertical
Infeasible.
It would leave pretty much straight up, and curve in a part-spiral (possibly right across the equator before it hits geosync, I don't know enough maths to say in detail).
I'd better take some more sunset photos before they all have a black line in them. (-: Yes, I know it would be invisible at 20km:-)
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Perhaps what they want is a simple `UI Complexity' slider somewhere, like they used to have for their installer so you could set the slider to the right amount of disk space and the distro would select enough packages to fill that space for you.
The UI slider could be set to near zero when installed, you could slide it all the way down to `George Jetson' mode for those, er, special clients and lock it there, or redline it if you like to decide what values get poked into what registers with what timing to set up your video card.
Just don't let on that the `UI' stands for `User Intelligence' and you'll be fine. <G/D/R>
Friend of a friend did that to download the updates, and the machine was history 11 minutes later. He went back to using Linux. (-:
And Open For Business (unusual for Tim Butler to make this kind of blue, but...)
Gael Duval made the mistake of comparing the "bankruptcy protection" that Mandrake is under with a US Chapter 11. They are completely different. The idea in the US is that at this point the vultures gather and peck the unfortunate company to death (although when this happens to Microsoft I expect a number of uncultured louts to be gathered around EULA bonfires wearing party hats and making toasts with MSDN CDs); in France, the idea is that the company is repaired and gets a chance to catch its breath. The French government has approved Mandrake's plan for doing so.
It's worth reiterating that Mandrake are making a profit, but they've got some financial baggage from the halcyon dot-com days when a bright-eyed bushy-tailed and basically dumb management team spent too much money chasing non-core-business dreams.
I personally don't like some of the things Gael has done, but Mandrake as a whole is enthusiastic and productive. They're helping efforts like KDE enormously as well, and unlike certain other noisy for-profits who run everything as root, Mandrake GPL everything they do and actually publish the sources. They about as close to Debian as an RPM-based for-profit corp can be, and with a much more obvious concern for usability.
Materialism is also a fundamental religious belief.
Why do you believe that what you see is all you get? What evidence have you that this is so?
And really, you don't even believe in that, 'coz you believe in - for example - electricity, quarks and dark matter, yet you can't touch or see any of them.
I got off easy; many years ago a witchy friend of mine got me exposed, several times and in completely different ways, to some physical effects which were literally impossible to explain by any means besides rank stupidities like `mass hallucination' (coordinated how...?), and this opened my mind to the possibility that I might not know everything, might not be seeing everything, there might be more.
And there is.
You couldn't be more wronger. (-:
There is no theory which postulates differing processes for the origin and development of life. Before biological evolution there must have been chemical evolution, else biological evolution doesn't make any sense.
However, it really doesn't matter. The plant in question is a crossbreed, no new-and-improved information involved. Whoopie-doo. How original.
Mutation destroys, it does not build up or organise or improve. Mutation in action is like hitting a Lego display with a .303 shot. Is the resulting Lego improved, no matter how carefully you compare and select pieces (in itself, a non-random act)?
The same objectively observed and measured principles which account for abiogenesis being ridiculously impossible also account for mutation-and-selection being a consatnt downhill slide, not a glorious march to universal self-improvement.
We still lack an example of evolution in action. We also lack any substantial results from studies into possible routes for abiogenesis, and any substantial commitment to studying Creation. If the billions which followed Miller and Urey's cul-de-sac experiments into oblivion had been spent on testing Creatiojn as an hypothesis instead, there would no longer be doubt in any civilised country - which is, of course, why it didn't happen. Creation does indeed imply a Creator.
You can be going at walking pace or 0.5c, and if the dotted line which represents your path intersects the (more or less) cylinder which represents the Sun's path, all of your worries will soon be over.
So, if you skipped past Venus, killed a little velocity and wound up looping (either out or in will work), and did a low, slow pass over Mercury (spend an hour going past, turn by roughly 12km/s, a manouver which could even add velocity if you liked) which then put you in the path of the Sun, it wouldn't matter that you still have over 20km/s under your belt. Air (hydrogen, anyway) resistance would soon cure that...
The simple way would be to launch in the right direction from Earth, but that would also involve burning the most fuel.
...and Mercury, retrograde and very close in. If it's aimed straight at the Sun, the velocity won't matter.
...and run it around the cluttered orbits backwards for a year.
Why would you bother? The day someone makes something 100,000km long and absolutely rigid is the day magic is recognised at the same level as mechanical engineering. You elevator will be quite happy as a cat-o-one-tail. The ship would have to do hundreds of km/h anyway. (-:
Agree. There is a theory that our atmosphgeric pressure once was about double, with about double the proportion of oxygen in it, and that's what a hyperbaric chamber simulates. Some of the stuff you can heal with on is pretty amazing. (-:
Why is it a requirement?
If it's entirely unnecessary to the purpose, costs more, and risks circumcising your planet then it's unquestionably over-engineered. (-:
$17G. I've already had a stab at asking Bill, Larry and Scott, and not seen a reply. It would be most appropriate if Sun funded it. (-:
Ah, so tens of thousands of years away instead of tens of years away? It makes a slight difference to my enthusiasm for them...
Nanotubes are already up to centimeter sizes and climbing, you'd only need meter-scale fibres for this (they're to be embedded in a composite sandwich for a alignment and cross-connection purposes).
`Nothing' is probably too general a statement for something as large and flimsy as a solar sail, but I agree in principle.
In that case, I'd be looking for interesting diffraction/refraction/polarisation effects, and also seeing about a secondary sail powered by light reflected from the first.
One set to dig a hole for when you arrived, and one set to fly Toronto away from all that great skiing.
Nah, Kim Beazley'll pinch it for South Oz so he can win a State election there instead of having them built just across the bay from the base that's going to use most of them, the Croweaters won't know how to build the damn thing, and it will still want to sink unpredictably after a $70 million dollar refit, while a safer, quieter, cheaper and more reliable model sits on drydock in Fremantle.
Oh, sorry, I'm having a flashback. (-:
Models have been tested and found to work which are nothing more than a shaped piece of aluminium. The device focusses the microwave beam landing on it into a very small space, heats the air there to amazing temperatures and basically operates as a continuous-flow ramjet. No moving parts.
And if someone hijacks the airplane, turn off the beam from outside. Hijackers then have three choices: surrender, crash nearby or deploy parachutes.
What asteroid? HLS aren't proposing to use an asteroid. Their anchor would be in the tens-of-tonnes range. Read The Fine Page before commenting.
Any of a dozen posts above yours point out that it would have about the same impact as sheets of loose newspaper. Mars has little atmosphere, and Kim seems to have seriously overengineered his elevator.
Now that we have some context, cheaply built and frequently launched dumb H2/O2 rockets can lob 2t payloads for rougly $1300/kg, so there is a big improvement available with existing technology which we could have on the hop in about two years, but that hasn't been taken.
HLS' elevator requires 1-5 years of development (realistically 2 years) and six years to construct. If it drops freight rates to LEO from $10,000/kg to $200/kg, it's a bargain. It would still be a bargain if it only dropped rates from $1300 to $200.
Moreso since it can be used to launch its own replacement, making the second elevator much cheaper, and the third-and-on much cheaper again.
Dropping along the ribbon from geosync and detaching just before the counterweight would give you roughly 7km/s of additional boost (on top of the 4km/s at geosync), which about equals escape velocity for Earth, and would have no problem getting to the Moon. You could do it in an unpowered vehicle if you didn't have to arrive gently. (-:
And...
No, 35 thousand km up. And the elevator would be curved.
Perhaps someone should point out to them that Cairns also has an international airport, and Cape York has already been proposed as a spaceport. On top of that, Australia plans to develop Christmas Island as a spaceport, too.
Infeasible.
It would leave pretty much straight up, and curve in a part-spiral (possibly right across the equator before it hits geosync, I don't know enough maths to say in detail).
I'd better take some more sunset photos before they all have a black line in them. (-: Yes, I know it would be invisible at 20km :-)
Most geosync satellites describe something vaguely reminiscent of a figure-8 over the surface. Geostationary stays (more or less) in one place.