Smoking bans are, as far as I've ever seen, meant to limit the health effects of secondhand smoke. This is not prohibition.
Drunk driving bans are meant to limit the number of auto accidents. You may or may not be right about where the limit is set, but it isn't prohibition either.
Gambling, on the other hand, has no "collateral damage" aspect to it. Or rather, it has no downside that causes people unrelated to the user to suffer.
Prohibition was justified as a way to prevent people from being self destructive. Online gambling laws are justified along similar lines. In both cases, and in the case of illegal drugs, the law is an attempt to regulate a person's private life "for their own best interests". Censorship and sex laws have sometimes had similar justifications put forward.
You can oppose all those forms of prohibition by putting forward the idea that a person's best interests are their own business, not the governments. By that logic, an adult is entitled to the freedom to live as they choose, whether you agree with their way of life or not. If that makes them screw up the lives of others (like an addict mugging someone, or a parent not feeding their kid), then punish the offender for the law they broke - robbery or child neglect.
Smoking bylaws and drunk driving laws are a seperate case. In those cases, the lives of bystandards are affected by the actions of one individual - either through accidents caused by impairment, or by health risks associated with secondhand smoke. Thus, they are fundamentally different from prohibition - they're examples of the idea that "my right to swing my fist ends where your face begins".
Equating these types of law with prohibition is illogical.
The spacecraft deploys a large membrane mirror which reflects light from the Sun or some other source. The radiation pressure on the mirror provides a minuscule amount of thrust by reflecting photons.
I'll have you know that I was very displeased at Blizzard. I wanted female virgins, damnit! Bloody contract technicalities......why the hell did I create all these lawyers anyway?
True, but you haven't addressed my point about the time frame involved in any evolution (human or otherwise).
Lets assume that estrogen mimicing molecules are affecting us. This, indirectly, will affect our response to estrogen (by, for example, weeding out genes that make our reproduction too vulnerable to this kind of pollution).
Now, as you rightly say, this isn't a detectable effect on our daily lives. It would take incredibly careful measurement to notice changes arising from such a pollutant, right?
How many centuries of this pollution would be required to produce a signifigant change? Nevermind centuries, we're probably looking at millenia. Remember that for ther to be signifigant change within even a half dozen generations, there has to be something on the order of a mass die off. AIDS is more likely to change us than pollution.
Now, are we going to continue putting artificial estrogen in the water for that long? I seriously doubt it. Granted, we've had a lousy track record in dealing with pollution, but over such a long time frame it's silly to assume that human technology and culture will remain the same. And if we were to start noticing a rise in birth defects or sterility, there would be an uproar, increasing the chance that something will be done about it - in other words, the more survival pressure there is, the more likely it is for our society to do something about, meaning the most likely candidates for human evolution are also the most likely candidates for human intervention.
Hence my statement that "evolution in humans is stalled". The GP was talking about humans adapting to Martian gravity with no regard for the timeframe involved in such adaptation, or the medical steps we'd invevitably take to resist such survival pressures. The same applies here - there is genetic change, but faster cultural and technological changes outpace it by several orders of magnitude. The survival pressure doesn't stay the same for long.
There is some indication that in fact they might be changing us - for example by flooding the ecosystem with estrogen-mimicking molecules.
And this relates to evolution, how exactly? We could intentionally flood the environment with artificial hormones and it wouldn't affect our evolution one bit. It would cause medical problems galore, and fuck up the ecology, but that is not evolution. Evolution is genetic level change. Your example doesn't meet the criteria.
We evolve when a genetic level trait gets weeded out or passed on to the next generation. Find me an example of that happening on a wide scale in today's humans, and I'll grant your point. Estrogen in the water doesn't even come close.
And as I said to the other poster, I did say "stalled" instead of "stopped". I don't think we aren't changing at all, I just don't think it's happening fast enough to matter on our time scale.
Although, cleaning up afterwards would be a challenge......and I don't even want to think about what would happen to the instruments if they tried zero-G Bukkake:-(
True, but that's offset somewhat by the need for more specialized equiptment. Plus, if you want to be really self-sufficient, you'd need to provide your own nutrient solution. Hydroponics may get around the need for soil, but I wouldn't assume it's much easier to do on Mars.
The only way evolution could stall is if every possible genetic makeup has an equal chance of reproducing. I doubt this is true, and I'm certain you don't have any evidence for it. The only difference is we have managed to change the evolutionary pressures. Now someone born with, say, a bad foot is not at such a disadvantage in passing on their genes as they once would have been. But I guarantee other factors are still important. How quickly we might be evolving is another matter, and I've no doubt that changes over time, and we're probably in a slow spot.
Hence my use of the word "stalled" rather than "stopped".
It's generally accepted that there is still genetic change occuring within the human genome, but it's eclipsed by technological and cultural changes. Moreover, for there to be signifigant evolution, there would have to be consistant survival pressures - pressure that remains the same over long periods of time. What other factors do you think prevail within a technological society, and more importantly, do you think those factors will still matter in a thousand years?
A thousand years ago, perhaps there was evolutionary pressure to develop better fat storage systems (due to famine). Nowdays that evolutionary pressure is gone in western society - in fact, with human mating habits being what they are, cultural pressure is probably selecting against fat storage genes. That isn't to say there is no pressure, it's just to showcase that evolutionary pressure doesn't matter to us on a human timescale. It's like the specifications are changing faster than evolution can keep up with.
Moving on from that, you dismissed his assertion that we would evolve to adapt to the lower Martian gravity without any counterargument. Why do you think we would not adapt? Clearly low gravity can have detrimental effects, so it seems at least possible that those who are better adapted to it have a better chance of passing on their genes. Unless you see some way we can change Mars so that it will have Earth gravity. I don't. Now as far as the rest of environment, we would probably adapt it as much as we could - temperature, atmospheric makeup, humidity, soil, etc. But whatever differences remained could possibly exert an evolutionary pressure.
I don't think we can change Martian gravity. I do however think that most of the problems associated with low gravity can be solved technologically.
For example, bone loss. We've established that humans lose a given amount of bone mass when left in a low-g environment for a long period of time. We'd realistically need to address this before establishing a permanant colony on Mars.
Now, what's the more likely solution? That we find a medical treatment to counteract any ill effects on our bones from Martian gravity? Or that we evolve?
These two options aren't mutually exclusive, but the better we can solve the problem with the former, the less likely the latter becomes. Ie, if we can find a medical treatment that completely solves the bone loss issue, then any future evolutionary pressure to adapt to Martian gravity in this area is lost. Conversely, if we cannot even begin to solve the problem technologically, then we might evolve around it (and it should be noted that said evolution would still take millenia, so the problem would have to remain serious and unsolvable for an incredibly long time before we started seeing the effects of it in our genome).
Sure. Once you get a nuclear reactor there to provide heat and light - but when the reactor fuel runs out - what then?
Well, by then, assuming things continue the way they have been here, the Earth's atmosphere should be sufficiently irradiated that I'm sure the Martians will be able to use that as fuel instead:-)
Mars has lower gravity, so our current shape isn't so apropriate, we'd revolve to a shape better suited, making Earth inhospitable to our new form (possibly taller and frailer, certainly lower muscle mass and bone density)
Bah, don't they teach evolution in schools these days? Please tell me that either you're joking, or that your teacher was a creationist.
Evolution doesn't work that way. First off, human evolution became stalled the moment we started making our environment adapt to us, instead of adapting to it. So saying "humans will evolve into X in Y years" is innacurate - it assumes that we'll start changing to suit the environment we're living in by then, instead of doing the opposite.
Second, "revolve" isn't a valid concept, in the same way "devolve" isn't - evolution isn't linear progression. This however is a very common misperception, so you can't be blamed for not knowing it.
Now, a human growing up in a low-g environment might certainly face developmental problems. Ie, you hit growth spurts in puberty and reach a height of 7 feet tall. But that isn't evolution, as there is no genetic componant.
The last would be the most inconvenient, but it just might be plausible considering how fast our population has grown, and that of our herd animals.
And the least likely.
Carbon dioxide that's generated from metabolic proccesses come from carbon present in what we eat. Since all our food get's its carbon in turn from the air (plants via photosynthesis, animals via eating plants), the total carbon in the system remains in balance.
This is the same reason why biofuels aren't considered a greenhouse gas contributor - it takes as much carbon from the air to produce them as they release when burned.
photosynthetic organisms do pretty well in such an environment, I'll probably eat a lot of green leafy things.
OTOH, they also require loads of sunlight, water and soil. Sunlight is present there, but weaker than on Earth, any water on Mars is frozen, and soil requires it's own ecology.
So, you can certainly grow things there, but you'd need everything from electrical power to a large number of skilled colonists in order to do it on a large scale. Better start preparing now if you want to start living there in the next hundred years:-)
It goes way back before the 1980s - it's a French word dating back to 1795. The term terrorist, or words of equivalent meaning in other languages, have been applied to dozens of groups and thousands of individuals, mostly in the 20th century. The GP simply doesn't know what he's talking about if he says that the word was not in widespread use pre-9/11.
A dyson sphere is a bad example. Nobody is suggesting we'll have that level of tech in the next few decades.
However, we might be able to build a space elevator. The key word is "might" - I am in no way saying that we will be able to, only that it is a reasonable possiblity. It should be noted that there are basic scientific problems with making a dyson sphere, or at least with making one that we could live on. Conversely, all of the problems associated with a space elevator are engineering - ie, important stuff like nanotube fabrication that we haven't got the hardware for yet. We don't need gravity generation, or unobtainium type materials, or elemental conversion technology, all of which are typical of what a sci-fi type dyson sphere needs.
My point is more that it's worth investigating and developing the idea. Moreover, at present only NASA or an equivalent body can do this work, since there is pretty much zero interest in spaceflight from the private sector beyond the satellite business. And the person I initially replied to naively said we'd have "better" tech by the time we could build this - as if antigravity were just around the corner. Hence my challenge to name the tech in question that would make an elevator unnecesary.
Paying for items in games is silly, but if you enjoy the type of game that is more enjoyable with a better standing and you have more money than time, why spend the sparce resource to get where you want? Why care when others do so?
Oh, I can think of a few reasons.
Inflation comes to mind. This is a classic problem associated with bad game economies, and worsened considerably by gold farming (or equivalents). UO is a good example.
Fair play comes to mind as another example. The reason doping is against the rules is because it destroys the (admittedly unrealistic) notion that sports are supposed to be fair - that winning or losing are a measure of skill and dedication, not a measure of how many steroids you've shot up. By that same logic, game devlopers make powerleveling and goldfarming services against the rules (in the form of the EULA or TOS) based on the notion that the success in the game should be free from outside influences.
So the rules say that in game currency cannot be exchanged for RL currency, for the reasons above. That means that legally, it's very hard to hold the thief in TFA responsible in a court of law. Any halfwit lawyer would point out that what the player did was wholly within the confines of the game, and that only through "black market" services could the in game money be considered real money. Since that market isn't recognized by the game's admins, and participating will get you banned in a hurry for cheating, there is no way to legitimately translate game currency into RL currency.
This should be a problem for the admins to deal with. Unfortunately for the people who lost money, they seem to have adopted a "buyer beware" policy, which makes it unlikely the perp will be punished. However unfair that may be, the problem ultimately isn't a matter for the courts.
We've had the capacity to build fission engines since at least the 1960s. The old Orion designs would still work just fine if we developed them into a working craft today.
However, there isn't a chance in hell we could ever use them as launch vehicles. As in-system craft perhaps, but using fission reactions in the atmosphere would raise all sorts of politicial, safety and environmental hell. That kinda kills the idea of using them in lieu of a space elevator.
How very odd, considering that people do exactly that in virtually every field of human endeavor, be it sport...
Except that with professional athletes, we call that "cheating". How many doping scandals do we get in any given year?
Admittedly, there's still stuff like equipment, but even that is either minimized or standardized in many sports. And hell, many athletes get paid to use a certain companies equiptment and/or logo - do you think they pay for their shoes in the NBA?
Most of what makes an honest athlete good is time, talent and training, not money.
or work
Which has a bona fida monetary payoff. You don't work for pleasure, unless you're extremely lucky. Equating a game with a job isn't exactly helping your point.
What makes a game different is that it's supposed to be enjoyable. Most people play games to get away from life. The ones who assign a real life monetary value to their characters/items/moeny in a MMO are elevating their entertainment to the level of employment, and I agree with the GP that that isn't healthy, or the intention of the game.
Mind you that doesn't excuse cheating them. I think the person who pulled this ponzi scheme is a real SOB.
Um. All the first order research was done by the military. In particular the German military.
Into basic rocketry, yes. Into useful spaceflight, no. The V2 (the best they built) was a progenitor of later rockets used, but the actual R&D required to put a permanent satellite in orbit didn't come until later. You could argue that the Russians got there first, but that still means that the neccesary groundwork was laid by a government before the commercial sateliite business became possible.
My argument is that by the time a space elevator comes around, rockets and rocket launches will be on a production line and their costs will be amortised over far more launches than currently. Commercialising the launch business will bring cheap space flight, NASA never will.
If the private sector wants to get into space, I say let 'em. The key word here is "want" - so far the only thing I've seen them do is the satellite business. It isn't cost effective to get into space the way NASA does yet, and it won't get any cheaper without somebody "wasting" money on laying the groundwork. Which is exactly what NASA is doing in TFA - "wasting" money on something that won't be viable for years, if not decades, to come.
Now, admittedly NASA has a horrible track record for effeciency and bureaucracy. I will freely agree with you on that point. But that is true for all government and military agencies, regardless of era or nationality.
Moreover, I never claimed NASA was effecient. My sole point in our discussion has been that no rocket based solution comes close to a space elevator in terms of the ability to put heavy things into orbit, or fling spacecraft out of Earth's gravity well. The space elevator would open up the solar system in a way no modern launch solution could ever hope to (if it were possible to construct one, which it isn't yet).
Simply put, the cost per mass for even "cheap" commerical launches is terrible - this is offset by the fact that the commercial space business isn't interested in launching anything heavier than a communications satellite.
I have no doubt that commercial spaceflight will be much cheaper than government funded flight, however I also know from history that commerce follows government (or military) funded R&D, not the other way around.
Now, I'd just like to point something out here. These systems are not fuel-free for the launching craft. They get their energy from the laser system, but they get their reaction mass from either the craft itself (as in the case with ablative designs), or from the surrounding air (as is the case with lightcraft). So it's not entirely true that they don't have fuel mass considerations, especially if you want them to work in vacuum (where the ablative system will still work, but the air version will not).
It's like the other proposal for a skyramp. It's useful, it will work, but it's no space elevator. And it does have some of the same problems that an elevator will, namely the need to develop the ground stations for the lasers.
If we hadn't done the first order research and development required to put a man in space decades ago, we would not have the capability to put a satellites up there today. Do you think we'd have put the R&D in if there wasn't a space race on at the time (that centered around manned space flight no less)?
At some stage, somebody has to waste money to develop a technology past the drawing board stage, long before it becomes even remotely practical/profitable.
Slashdot Mirror
Smoking bans are, as far as I've ever seen, meant to limit the health effects of secondhand smoke. This is not prohibition.
Drunk driving bans are meant to limit the number of auto accidents. You may or may not be right about where the limit is set, but it isn't prohibition either.
Gambling, on the other hand, has no "collateral damage" aspect to it. Or rather, it has no downside that causes people unrelated to the user to suffer.
Prohibition was justified as a way to prevent people from being self destructive. Online gambling laws are justified along similar lines. In both cases, and in the case of illegal drugs, the law is an attempt to regulate a person's private life "for their own best interests". Censorship and sex laws have sometimes had similar justifications put forward.
You can oppose all those forms of prohibition by putting forward the idea that a person's best interests are their own business, not the governments. By that logic, an adult is entitled to the freedom to live as they choose, whether you agree with their way of life or not. If that makes them screw up the lives of others (like an addict mugging someone, or a parent not feeding their kid), then punish the offender for the law they broke - robbery or child neglect.
Smoking bylaws and drunk driving laws are a seperate case. In those cases, the lives of bystandards are affected by the actions of one individual - either through accidents caused by impairment, or by health risks associated with secondhand smoke. Thus, they are fundamentally different from prohibition - they're examples of the idea that "my right to swing my fist ends where your face begins".
Equating these types of law with prohibition is illogical.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_sail
There, see? He was right about solar sails.
You were thinking of a magnetic sail:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_sail
Which is something completely different. Magnetic sails do use solar wind; solar sails use sunlight. Big big difference between the two.
I'll have you know that I was very displeased at Blizzard. I wanted female virgins, damnit! Bloody contract technicalities... ...why the hell did I create all these lawyers anyway?
-The Devil
True, but you haven't addressed my point about the time frame involved in any evolution (human or otherwise).
Lets assume that estrogen mimicing molecules are affecting us. This, indirectly, will affect our response to estrogen (by, for example, weeding out genes that make our reproduction too vulnerable to this kind of pollution).
Now, as you rightly say, this isn't a detectable effect on our daily lives. It would take incredibly careful measurement to notice changes arising from such a pollutant, right?
How many centuries of this pollution would be required to produce a signifigant change? Nevermind centuries, we're probably looking at millenia. Remember that for ther to be signifigant change within even a half dozen generations, there has to be something on the order of a mass die off. AIDS is more likely to change us than pollution.
Now, are we going to continue putting artificial estrogen in the water for that long? I seriously doubt it. Granted, we've had a lousy track record in dealing with pollution, but over such a long time frame it's silly to assume that human technology and culture will remain the same. And if we were to start noticing a rise in birth defects or sterility, there would be an uproar, increasing the chance that something will be done about it - in other words, the more survival pressure there is, the more likely it is for our society to do something about, meaning the most likely candidates for human evolution are also the most likely candidates for human intervention.
Hence my statement that "evolution in humans is stalled". The GP was talking about humans adapting to Martian gravity with no regard for the timeframe involved in such adaptation, or the medical steps we'd invevitably take to resist such survival pressures. The same applies here - there is genetic change, but faster cultural and technological changes outpace it by several orders of magnitude. The survival pressure doesn't stay the same for long.
We evolve when a genetic level trait gets weeded out or passed on to the next generation. Find me an example of that happening on a wide scale in today's humans, and I'll grant your point. Estrogen in the water doesn't even come close.
And as I said to the other poster, I did say "stalled" instead of "stopped". I don't think we aren't changing at all, I just don't think it's happening fast enough to matter on our time scale.
Zero. G. Porn.
:-)
...and I don't even want to think about what would happen to the instruments if they tried zero-G Bukkake :-(
There's your 21st centure business model
Although, cleaning up afterwards would be a challenge...
True, but that's offset somewhat by the need for more specialized equiptment. Plus, if you want to be really self-sufficient, you'd need to provide your own nutrient solution. Hydroponics may get around the need for soil, but I wouldn't assume it's much easier to do on Mars.
It's generally accepted that there is still genetic change occuring within the human genome, but it's eclipsed by technological and cultural changes. Moreover, for there to be signifigant evolution, there would have to be consistant survival pressures - pressure that remains the same over long periods of time. What other factors do you think prevail within a technological society, and more importantly, do you think those factors will still matter in a thousand years?
A thousand years ago, perhaps there was evolutionary pressure to develop better fat storage systems (due to famine). Nowdays that evolutionary pressure is gone in western society - in fact, with human mating habits being what they are, cultural pressure is probably selecting against fat storage genes. That isn't to say there is no pressure, it's just to showcase that evolutionary pressure doesn't matter to us on a human timescale. It's like the specifications are changing faster than evolution can keep up with.
I don't think we can change Martian gravity. I do however think that most of the problems associated with low gravity can be solved technologically.
For example, bone loss. We've established that humans lose a given amount of bone mass when left in a low-g environment for a long period of time. We'd realistically need to address this before establishing a permanant colony on Mars.
Now, what's the more likely solution? That we find a medical treatment to counteract any ill effects on our bones from Martian gravity? Or that we evolve?
These two options aren't mutually exclusive, but the better we can solve the problem with the former, the less likely the latter becomes. Ie, if we can find a medical treatment that completely solves the bone loss issue, then any future evolutionary pressure to adapt to Martian gravity in this area is lost. Conversely, if we cannot even begin to solve the problem technologically, then we might evolve around it (and it should be noted that said evolution would still take millenia, so the problem would have to remain serious and unsolvable for an incredibly long time before we started seeing the effects of it in our genome).
Evolution doesn't work that way. First off, human evolution became stalled the moment we started making our environment adapt to us, instead of adapting to it. So saying "humans will evolve into X in Y years" is innacurate - it assumes that we'll start changing to suit the environment we're living in by then, instead of doing the opposite.
Second, "revolve" isn't a valid concept, in the same way "devolve" isn't - evolution isn't linear progression. This however is a very common misperception, so you can't be blamed for not knowing it.
Now, a human growing up in a low-g environment might certainly face developmental problems. Ie, you hit growth spurts in puberty and reach a height of 7 feet tall. But that isn't evolution, as there is no genetic componant.
Carbon dioxide that's generated from metabolic proccesses come from carbon present in what we eat. Since all our food get's its carbon in turn from the air (plants via photosynthesis, animals via eating plants), the total carbon in the system remains in balance.
This is the same reason why biofuels aren't considered a greenhouse gas contributor - it takes as much carbon from the air to produce them as they release when burned.
So, you can certainly grow things there, but you'd need everything from electrical power to a large number of skilled colonists in order to do it on a large scale. Better start preparing now if you want to start living there in the next hundred years
Soylent Red?
Wow, 2 hours since you posted and not one marriage proposal. That's gotta be a record...
It goes way back before the 1980s - it's a French word dating back to 1795. The term terrorist, or words of equivalent meaning in other languages, have been applied to dozens of groups and thousands of individuals, mostly in the 20th century. The GP simply doesn't know what he's talking about if he says that the word was not in widespread use pre-9/11.
You don't like big boosters? :-)
A dyson sphere is a bad example. Nobody is suggesting we'll have that level of tech in the next few decades.
However, we might be able to build a space elevator. The key word is "might" - I am in no way saying that we will be able to, only that it is a reasonable possiblity. It should be noted that there are basic scientific problems with making a dyson sphere, or at least with making one that we could live on. Conversely, all of the problems associated with a space elevator are engineering - ie, important stuff like nanotube fabrication that we haven't got the hardware for yet. We don't need gravity generation, or unobtainium type materials, or elemental conversion technology, all of which are typical of what a sci-fi type dyson sphere needs.
My point is more that it's worth investigating and developing the idea. Moreover, at present only NASA or an equivalent body can do this work, since there is pretty much zero interest in spaceflight from the private sector beyond the satellite business. And the person I initially replied to naively said we'd have "better" tech by the time we could build this - as if antigravity were just around the corner. Hence my challenge to name the tech in question that would make an elevator unnecesary.
Inflation comes to mind. This is a classic problem associated with bad game economies, and worsened considerably by gold farming (or equivalents). UO is a good example.
Fair play comes to mind as another example. The reason doping is against the rules is because it destroys the (admittedly unrealistic) notion that sports are supposed to be fair - that winning or losing are a measure of skill and dedication, not a measure of how many steroids you've shot up. By that same logic, game devlopers make powerleveling and goldfarming services against the rules (in the form of the EULA or TOS) based on the notion that the success in the game should be free from outside influences.
So the rules say that in game currency cannot be exchanged for RL currency, for the reasons above. That means that legally, it's very hard to hold the thief in TFA responsible in a court of law. Any halfwit lawyer would point out that what the player did was wholly within the confines of the game, and that only through "black market" services could the in game money be considered real money. Since that market isn't recognized by the game's admins, and participating will get you banned in a hurry for cheating, there is no way to legitimately translate game currency into RL currency.
This should be a problem for the admins to deal with. Unfortunately for the people who lost money, they seem to have adopted a "buyer beware" policy, which makes it unlikely the perp will be punished. However unfair that may be, the problem ultimately isn't a matter for the courts.
We've had the capacity to build fission engines since at least the 1960s. The old Orion designs would still work just fine if we developed them into a working craft today.
However, there isn't a chance in hell we could ever use them as launch vehicles. As in-system craft perhaps, but using fission reactions in the atmosphere would raise all sorts of politicial, safety and environmental hell. That kinda kills the idea of using them in lieu of a space elevator.
Admittedly, there's still stuff like equipment, but even that is either minimized or standardized in many sports. And hell, many athletes get paid to use a certain companies equiptment and/or logo - do you think they pay for their shoes in the NBA?
Most of what makes an honest athlete good is time, talent and training, not money.
Which has a bona fida monetary payoff. You don't work for pleasure, unless you're extremely lucky. Equating a game with a job isn't exactly helping your point.
What makes a game different is that it's supposed to be enjoyable. Most people play games to get away from life. The ones who assign a real life monetary value to their characters/items/moeny in a MMO are elevating their entertainment to the level of employment, and I agree with the GP that that isn't healthy, or the intention of the game.
Mind you that doesn't excuse cheating them. I think the person who pulled this ponzi scheme is a real SOB.
Given that it's Clippy, wouldn't it be more like:
I see you're having some sort of seizure. Would you like me to call 911?
After all, the stupid little bugger could never figure out what the hell the user was trying to do. How's he gonna tell one spasm from another?
If the private sector wants to get into space, I say let 'em. The key word here is "want" - so far the only thing I've seen them do is the satellite business. It isn't cost effective to get into space the way NASA does yet, and it won't get any cheaper without somebody "wasting" money on laying the groundwork. Which is exactly what NASA is doing in TFA - "wasting" money on something that won't be viable for years, if not decades, to come.
Now, admittedly NASA has a horrible track record for effeciency and bureaucracy. I will freely agree with you on that point. But that is true for all government and military agencies, regardless of era or nationality.
Moreover, I never claimed NASA was effecient. My sole point in our discussion has been that no rocket based solution comes close to a space elevator in terms of the ability to put heavy things into orbit, or fling spacecraft out of Earth's gravity well. The space elevator would open up the solar system in a way no modern launch solution could ever hope to (if it were possible to construct one, which it isn't yet).
Simply put, the cost per mass for even "cheap" commerical launches is terrible - this is offset by the fact that the commercial space business isn't interested in launching anything heavier than a communications satellite.
I have no doubt that commercial spaceflight will be much cheaper than government funded flight, however I also know from history that commerce follows government (or military) funded R&D, not the other way around.
What you may be thinking of is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_propulsion
Now, I'd just like to point something out here. These systems are not fuel-free for the launching craft. They get their energy from the laser system, but they get their reaction mass from either the craft itself (as in the case with ablative designs), or from the surrounding air (as is the case with lightcraft). So it's not entirely true that they don't have fuel mass considerations, especially if you want them to work in vacuum (where the ablative system will still work, but the air version will not).
It's like the other proposal for a skyramp. It's useful, it will work, but it's no space elevator. And it does have some of the same problems that an elevator will, namely the need to develop the ground stations for the lasers.
If we hadn't done the first order research and development required to put a man in space decades ago, we would not have the capability to put a satellites up there today. Do you think we'd have put the R&D in if there wasn't a space race on at the time (that centered around manned space flight no less)?
At some stage, somebody has to waste money to develop a technology past the drawing board stage, long before it becomes even remotely practical/profitable.