AC has a few things going for it - the ease with which voltage can be transformed
That's the kicker, right there. It's trivial to make a transformer that can step up to 22kV, or 220kV. It has historically been very difficult to step DC up to those voltages, and not much easier to step it back down efficiently. I think the parent's point is that at any distance, you go ahead and install cheap step-up and step-down transformers and transmit power at high voltage. Since the current required drops as the voltage increases, and the cross-sectional area of wire is a function of current, you get to use cheap thin wire. Modern advances in solid-state power conversion have helped improve the efficiency of dc-dc conversion, but modern transformers are still more efficient.
I think unilateral activity -- Iraq invading Kuwait -- or nearly unilateral activity -- the USA, along with a bunch of allies who seemed to be having their arms twisted, invading Iraq -- is not civilized behavior. But at some point, a state's violence against others and against its own citizens becomes unacceptable to observers.
This is war, as you say, and I'm not at all sure it's going to end well. Things like rights and ethics shouldn't be a majority-rule issue, so just because practically everyone from his own citizens, to his neighbors, to countries who have historically had a lot of conflict with him are all saying he has to go isn't in itself a sufficient reason for the UN to pretty much say we're committing ourselves to overthrowing him. But at the same time, you don't just stand around and watch a father beat his children to death, even if he holds that position of power.
I don't like interfering with other countries: I think it's a bad idea and leads to all sorts of unanticipated problems. But I think there are times when *not* interfering is worse. Whether this is one of those times -- and whether it'll actually do any good -- is a much harder question for me.
A lot of comments here seem to focus on what could have been done differently. Obviously, hindsight is 20/20. That being said, I have a question that I haven't seen asked or answered yet. Why are the spent fuel rods stored in the same buildings as the reactors?
In the event of losing power, not only do the active rods need to be dealt with, but the spent rods have to be monitored and maintained in the same facility. Wouldn't transporting the spent rods to a less densely populated area that was specifically designed to handle their storage make more sense? It seems that the problems right now getting the reactors under control is being hampered by the severe risks of those containment pools for the spent rods draining.
Precisely because spent rods need to be monitored and maintained, and at a nuclear power plant you already have the technology, expertise, and security in place because you have to for the reactor itself. If you have a remote facility for disposal you need to duplicate a lot of effort, and you have to figure out a secure and safe way to transport highly radioactive materials from the plant to the facility. A truck/train accident involving spent fuel rods would be a Big Deal because it'd be very likely to happen with zero buffer zone between the hot material and civilians.
This should be treated as a form of fraud -- there are specific egregious kinds of fraud (such as SLAPP, racketeering, SCO-like stuff) however sending papers with threats, filing lawsuits, asking for settlement while being perfectly aware of the fraudulent nature of those actions, is still first and foremost fraud.
I agree with your sentiment. But there are some problems: first off, in order to directly address this kind of crappy behavior by large corporations, what we'd have to do is pass laws that slightly benefit everyone, but have a significant impact on a small number of lawyers and corporations, and when you have a diffuse public good vs. a concentrated moneyed interest, we as a culture haven't figured out how to do the right thing, because the public cares less and has less money than the lobbyists hired by the people who stand to lose money. It's a failing of democracy.
Secondly, what do you want to bet they'd say "but it's not fraud because look at all these people who settled!" They're taking advantage of the system to set up a situation that's self-fulfilling. That makes stopping them harder.
It's easy to say "well, we should just stop them from doing this" but it's pretty hard, in a system designed to presume innocence, that can be strongly influenced by money and lobbying, to actually find good ways of stopping people doing vile stuff like this.
He has a book full of those -- at least one -- that has complete plans for making maybe 15 different frames. I've done a couple and they're a lot of fun. It's a good way to learn to weld. Right now a deranged friend of mine and I are working on a sidecar we can stick on a BMX bike or a recumbent, because that'd fit right into the atomic zombie philosophy. I love his ultra-low racing recumbent but haven't gotten a chance to make one yet. Which is to say: fantastic book, get it, build some.
If you're interested in this, there are companies that will walk you through a two-day course in making your own bamboo bicycle. Make Magazine had an article on it recently. Calfee's bamboo bikes ride wonderfully, even the crazy one using actual steerhorns as handlebars I've also gotten to ride a Boo Bicycles frame, and it was lovely. They're flexier than the bikes I'm used to, and there are sometimes issues with homebuilt ones having the bamboo split lengthwise, but the commercial ones are awesome.
First off, human males *do* have a mechanism to sweep out sperm from other males, consisting of the most visually obvious part of the male penis and protracted mechanical movement. We lost spikes, we evolved something else to do the same function. Secondly, there are many other mammals that have different methods for accomplishing the same thing: male squirrels have something like superglue that forms a plug after coitus, to prevent other males gaining access afterwards. (And female squirrels have claws and quite a bit of expertise in removing those same plugs, as you'd expect in any good arms race.) Likewise, many male lizards and insects avoid the problem by just staying connected until the female is ready to lay her eggs, which puts a whole lot of stress on the female during that period: they both get eaten pretty often.
But if you really want to get weird, go look at insects like bedbugs, where males practice traumatic insemination: they don't go looking for an orifice, they make one, and let the female's body figure out what to do with the results. Or bees, where the barbs aren't there to stimulate ovulation but to make sure the penis breaks off and acts as a plug that can't be removed.
And the next step weirder is hermaphrodites, where mating is a contest in which both wish to inseminate the other without getting inseminated, so mating strategies get seriously complicated. (The phrase 'penis fencing' has been used.)
For what it's worth, I've had a still-running (as in the monitor still had an image on it) motherboard with small parts sliding off because the solder had melted. Of course, solder melts way below 400C. However, I've also had the infamous Dell GX270 capacitor explosion, which blew actual flame out the back of my case -- clearly over 400C. As such I can imagine situations where the grandparent post's concern might be valid.
Something the review doesn't mention, that I particularly love about Inkscape, is the inkscape gcodetools plugin, which turns an inkscape drawing into g-code suitable for sending to a CNC milling machine directly from an inkscape menu. It still has some issues with complicated shapes, but as long as you review the toolpath, it's generally pretty good.
"The unfortunate fact is that Craigslist has become almost synonymous with really great deals." "The unfortunate fact is that Craigslist has become almost synonymous with bargains that don't get taxed." "The unfortunate fact is that Craigslist has become almost synonymous with purchases that don't get tracked by advertisers." Those are the first things that leap to MY mind.
Most of my coworkers are old-school embedded programmers. Many of my friends are Arduino-enthusiasts. The Arduino has a vastly easier learning curve: you plug it in, open a window, and hit 'download' and your code is on the machine and running. People who are used to embedded programming are fine with setting up a development environment with libraries, handling source files, telling the IDE what programmer hardware is being used, what target hardware is begin used, what oscillator frequency and which fuses to set, but that's simply overwhelming to someone who just wants to turn relays on and off to power an art project.
And once a lot of people were using it, they all started releasing their code. Sure there are other great code repositories, PIClist, AVRfreaks, but many of the people there are pretty DIY so they'll exchange snippets of code that they build into something finished. Arduino code is often complete: download this program to do this entire process. That mindset has attracted lots of people, who have contributed even more code, so it benefits from a networking effect, so now anyone who is releasing anything for the electronics experimenter market has to provide an Arduino sketch that handles the hardware being offered -- and that drives it even further.
There are cheaper platforms, there are faster ones, there are ones with much better hardware (and some that are all three, the MSP430 being a likely example) but nothing that combines the simplicity and codebase of the Arduino.
I agree a single-point pothole detector, using an iphone in someone's pocket, is useless. However, consider that if you were getting a stream of data from thousands, you could correlate their position/sensor readings, and then you might get *some* signal out of all the noise. I'm still dubious it's going to work well, but with enough sensors and enough time it is at least possible.
Acoustic Kitty reminds me of the extremely creepy head transplant experiments done in the Soviet Union in the 1960's, as detailed in Mary Roach's book "Stiff" and another book called "Elephants On Acid". The latter includes pictures of an obviously functional, conscious small dog head sticking off the shoulder/neck of a larger dog, who is also obviously conscious. Really unsettling, especially when one considers that if we *really* needed to keep someone alive for what they had in their brains, we could, even if they were mostly missing a body.
Public health care should be targeted at prevention and diagnostics. Catastrophic health care should be covered by insurance; if you don't pay for insurance, you're out of luck. That still doesn't change the fact that 90% of most people's health care expenses are incurred in the last 5 months of their lives, but cutting off funding for that would amount to a real version of the "death panels" the Republicans have falsely associated with the new Health Care act. Health insurance is so expensive because we simply refuse to let people die in peace.
Given that people who are most likely dying, but possibly not -- terminal cancer patients, who spend unbelievable amounts of money on the slight chance they'll beat cancer -- have zero incentive to die in peace and an extremely high incentive to spend every penny they have on the slight chance they'll beat cancer, especially if the money actually belongs to their insurance company, and given that the health care industry, who makes money off providing health care, also has absolutely zero incentive to let people die in peace, *and* given that the general public shows strong support for keeping people alive through extraordinary medical efforts and even a whisper about managed health care and providing treatment based on statistical analysis will have the AARP so far up a politician's butt that blue hair will be sticking out his nose... what do we do to actually implement a plan wherein people die in peace? In an article on this subject by Atul Gawande, a surgical oncologist, he pointed out that the quality of life for people who went through Hospice was significantly better than that of people who went through extraordinary medical procedures, and I think articles like his, that convince people that life-prolonging medical treatments are painful, expensive, and don't actually do any real good, is probably the only way we as a culture have to fix this problem. But I don't think even that's going to do much. I know in my family my religiously-oriented aunt and uncle think it would actually be sinful to let my grandmother "just die" rather than doing everything they can to try to keep her alive, even though she's always said she wanted to die peacefully when it was her time, rather than hooked up to a machine, and the same certainly seemed to be the case when hundreds of thousands of people were shrieking wildly that Terry Schiavo should be kept alive against what appeared to be her own written wishes.
When faced with those three problems: individual, institutional, and cultural pressure to preserve life at any cost, I think we as a culture are simply facing inevitable bankruptcy, as our medical industry provides ever-newer, ever-more-expensive ways to give people another couple of days of life.
Well, a quick answer would be that this is an emergent characteristic of evolutionary processes: competition forces everyone to climb the local maximum, and once they're at the top they stay there because they have to. Anyone who tries to go somewhere else has to descend from the top, and that's competitively unsuccessful. So everyone fights for the very topmost spot, forever, or until the entire ecosystem changes enough that it's no longer the local maximum, and at that point everyone dashes for new local maxima.
In this case, since the entire ecosystem can't really change, we're just stuck, for exactly the reasons he says, until extremely large entities that can afford to be uncompetitive for a long time go looking for another local maximum, and they're not willing to, for, again, exactly the reasons he says. I'm not seeing any mystery here, just a grim outcome of competition and selection.
There's an extremely long history of people considering that actions that lead to a bad result are bad, while inaction that leads to the same bad result is much less bad. I'm not saying it's a logical mindset, but it is very definitely how humans think. A common example, when ethics and economics people talk about this, is: if you push someone in front of a train you're a murderer, but if you don't pull someone who is on the tracks off, or signal the train to stop, you're merely a selfish bastard.
It's a neat article, as usual with Neal, but the ending is odd. He says the current state of rocketry is at a local maximum, it's not going to get appreciably better, and there may be other ways of putting stuff in orbit that are better, and then he says he doesn't know why we aren't trying those other better things. This, after spending the previous twenty paragraphs writing about how the US has spent four trillion dollars to get to the top of this local maximum, and the old USSR spent about the same, and in the process we've established a huge military-industrial complex based on the money still flowing into that development path, with lots of political inertia greased by manufacturing and administrative money going into congressional districts... and he wonders why we're not considering spending another trillion dollars on a different, unproven system that would probably involve taking money from the people who are now getting it? He's already answered his own question, and that's surprising because he's a very bright person and does a good job of analyzing the subject.
I don't know what the limits are on ropeway length. I do know that in the 1920's, all of Denver was served by trams that used a common, centrally-powered cable running in a channel with pulleys. (The centrally-powered location is now the Spaghetti Factory.) Individual trams would grab the cable to drive, then let loose to stop and pick up passengers. It seemed to work pretty well.
Likewise, some of the aerial trams serving mines were miles long, and were (as the TFA notes) driven by having the mill below the mine: since the buckets came down full and went back empty, they were gravity-driven. They seemed to work pretty well also, and they covered ground that was completely impassable, especially in winter, since they didn't much care about three-meter-deep snow. (Which is part of why ski slopes use them for transporting people.)
I've wanted that for years. I'd love a system where you have points, just like your driver's license, and you can vote against someone else, and when you do, both you and they lose a point. If a person loses all his/her points, the car won't drive for a week. It would be somewhat suseptible to gang pranking, but you'd need like 20 people all of whom are willing to lose a point, to mount a distributed attack on a person. I can't see how metamoderation would work, though. It'd be nice if you could vote people up, as well, although that opens a lot of avenues for abuse.
Narrow-band interference coatings aren't *that* narrow-band. That's important because I own portable battery-powered lasers with emission center frequencies of 660nm, 635 nm, 593 nm, dual 510 and 578 nm, 532nm, 473 nm, and 405 nm. Only the dual-output copper bromide laser is difficult to obtain. Once you coat a windshield with interference coatings at all those frequencies, with an OD of say 3, you're going to have something that's nearly opaque.
Along with that, there are plenty of times when we need to see red and green: signal guns if you've lost your radio, glidepath lights... and sure we could change those to other colors, with great difficulty retraining people all over the world who are used to those colors and what they mean, but there are reasonably cheap laser diodes in almost every color of the spectrum these days.
I'm not arguing we should ban laser pointers or laser diodes by any means. I'm just suggesting that coatings on windshields aren't going to solve this problem. (And I'm not sure how you're going to manage to put an interference coating on the acrylic windshield in the Cessna I usually fly. I don't know what Boeing uses for their windshields: maybe they do use glass.)
I'm looking forwards to seeing what he builds once he's gotten done rebuilding the machine.
Sure, it's a lot of work to put into a brand-new machine, but anyone who has bought a Chinese mill or lathe machine knows that a right-out-of-the-box rebuild sure helps the accuracy. Even with simple tools like wood chisels, the first thing you do is resharpen them because the from-the-factory job is nearly worthless, so it's hardly surprising that an amateur-designed, amateur-built, and kit-built-by-amateur 3D printer would need some work.
I seem to recall when modems with lights were still in use, that a video tape of the flashing lights on the modem could be slowed down enough to read the stream of bits. Granted 3mb/s is a great deal faster than 56kb/s, but video technology is faster now, too.
I would presume there is encryption on both ends, but I see a small IR led "bug" left on top of a computer, cube wall, file cabinet, etc. serving as a middle man pickup of the stream while it is decoded on the other end.
Slashdot Mirror
AC has a few things going for it - the ease with which voltage can be transformed
That's the kicker, right there. It's trivial to make a transformer that can step up to 22kV, or 220kV. It has historically been very difficult to step DC up to those voltages, and not much easier to step it back down efficiently. I think the parent's point is that at any distance, you go ahead and install cheap step-up and step-down transformers and transmit power at high voltage. Since the current required drops as the voltage increases, and the cross-sectional area of wire is a function of current, you get to use cheap thin wire. Modern advances in solid-state power conversion have helped improve the efficiency of dc-dc conversion, but modern transformers are still more efficient.
By 'everything short of an invasion' we are unquestionably violating Libya's sovereignty. However, there's a pretty big 'we' who are doing this: The League Of Arab States is requesting this, and Arab states are saying they'll *help* enforce a no-fly zone -- not just allow overflights or refueling.
I think unilateral activity -- Iraq invading Kuwait -- or nearly unilateral activity -- the USA, along with a bunch of allies who seemed to be having their arms twisted, invading Iraq -- is not civilized behavior. But at some point, a state's violence against others and against its own citizens becomes unacceptable to observers.
This is war, as you say, and I'm not at all sure it's going to end well. Things like rights and ethics shouldn't be a majority-rule issue, so just because practically everyone from his own citizens, to his neighbors, to countries who have historically had a lot of conflict with him are all saying he has to go isn't in itself a sufficient reason for the UN to pretty much say we're committing ourselves to overthrowing him. But at the same time, you don't just stand around and watch a father beat his children to death, even if he holds that position of power.
I don't like interfering with other countries: I think it's a bad idea and leads to all sorts of unanticipated problems. But I think there are times when *not* interfering is worse. Whether this is one of those times -- and whether it'll actually do any good -- is a much harder question for me.
A lot of comments here seem to focus on what could have been done differently. Obviously, hindsight is 20/20. That being said, I have a question that I haven't seen asked or answered yet. Why are the spent fuel rods stored in the same buildings as the reactors?
In the event of losing power, not only do the active rods need to be dealt with, but the spent rods have to be monitored and maintained in the same facility. Wouldn't transporting the spent rods to a less densely populated area that was specifically designed to handle their storage make more sense? It seems that the problems right now getting the reactors under control is being hampered by the severe risks of those containment pools for the spent rods draining.
Precisely because spent rods need to be monitored and maintained, and at a nuclear power plant you already have the technology, expertise, and security in place because you have to for the reactor itself. If you have a remote facility for disposal you need to duplicate a lot of effort, and you have to figure out a secure and safe way to transport highly radioactive materials from the plant to the facility. A truck/train accident involving spent fuel rods would be a Big Deal because it'd be very likely to happen with zero buffer zone between the hot material and civilians.
This should be treated as a form of fraud -- there are specific egregious kinds of fraud (such as SLAPP, racketeering, SCO-like stuff) however sending papers with threats, filing lawsuits, asking for settlement while being perfectly aware of the fraudulent nature of those actions, is still first and foremost fraud.
I agree with your sentiment. But there are some problems: first off, in order to directly address this kind of crappy behavior by large corporations, what we'd have to do is pass laws that slightly benefit everyone, but have a significant impact on a small number of lawyers and corporations, and when you have a diffuse public good vs. a concentrated moneyed interest, we as a culture haven't figured out how to do the right thing, because the public cares less and has less money than the lobbyists hired by the people who stand to lose money. It's a failing of democracy.
Secondly, what do you want to bet they'd say "but it's not fraud because look at all these people who settled!" They're taking advantage of the system to set up a situation that's self-fulfilling. That makes stopping them harder.
It's easy to say "well, we should just stop them from doing this" but it's pretty hard, in a system designed to presume innocence, that can be strongly influenced by money and lobbying, to actually find good ways of stopping people doing vile stuff like this.
That's called felching, and unless you're Gene Simmons you're not likely to be cleaning out the ones that are your actual competition.
He has a book full of those -- at least one -- that has complete plans for making maybe 15 different frames. I've done a couple and they're a lot of fun. It's a good way to learn to weld. Right now a deranged friend of mine and I are working on a sidecar we can stick on a BMX bike or a recumbent, because that'd fit right into the atomic zombie philosophy. I love his ultra-low racing recumbent but haven't gotten a chance to make one yet. Which is to say: fantastic book, get it, build some.
If you're interested in this, there are companies that will walk you through a two-day course in making your own bamboo bicycle. Make Magazine had an article on it recently. Calfee's bamboo bikes ride wonderfully, even the crazy one using actual steerhorns as handlebars I've also gotten to ride a Boo Bicycles frame, and it was lovely. They're flexier than the bikes I'm used to, and there are sometimes issues with homebuilt ones having the bamboo split lengthwise, but the commercial ones are awesome.
First off, human males *do* have a mechanism to sweep out sperm from other males, consisting of the most visually obvious part of the male penis and protracted mechanical movement. We lost spikes, we evolved something else to do the same function. Secondly, there are many other mammals that have different methods for accomplishing the same thing: male squirrels have something like superglue that forms a plug after coitus, to prevent other males gaining access afterwards. (And female squirrels have claws and quite a bit of expertise in removing those same plugs, as you'd expect in any good arms race.) Likewise, many male lizards and insects avoid the problem by just staying connected until the female is ready to lay her eggs, which puts a whole lot of stress on the female during that period: they both get eaten pretty often.
But if you really want to get weird, go look at insects like bedbugs, where males practice traumatic insemination: they don't go looking for an orifice, they make one, and let the female's body figure out what to do with the results. Or bees, where the barbs aren't there to stimulate ovulation but to make sure the penis breaks off and acts as a plug that can't be removed.
And the next step weirder is hermaphrodites, where mating is a contest in which both wish to inseminate the other without getting inseminated, so mating strategies get seriously complicated. (The phrase 'penis fencing' has been used.)
Anyone who is curious about this should read the brilliant book Promiscuity: the evolutionary history of sperm competition by Tim Birkhead. It will make you relieved to be human.
Thanks for the suggestion: I just did the same. I've never had a 'reply all' disaster and I'd like to keep it that way.
For what it's worth, I've had a still-running (as in the monitor still had an image on it) motherboard with small parts sliding off because the solder had melted. Of course, solder melts way below 400C. However, I've also had the infamous Dell GX270 capacitor explosion, which blew actual flame out the back of my case -- clearly over 400C. As such I can imagine situations where the grandparent post's concern might be valid.
Something the review doesn't mention, that I particularly love about Inkscape, is the inkscape gcodetools plugin, which turns an inkscape drawing into g-code suitable for sending to a CNC milling machine directly from an inkscape menu. It still has some issues with complicated shapes, but as long as you review the toolpath, it's generally pretty good.
"The unfortunate fact is that Craigslist has become almost synonymous with really great deals."
"The unfortunate fact is that Craigslist has become almost synonymous with bargains that don't get taxed."
"The unfortunate fact is that Craigslist has become almost synonymous with purchases that don't get tracked by advertisers."
Those are the first things that leap to MY mind.
And once a lot of people were using it, they all started releasing their code. Sure there are other great code repositories, PIClist, AVRfreaks, but many of the people there are pretty DIY so they'll exchange snippets of code that they build into something finished. Arduino code is often complete: download this program to do this entire process. That mindset has attracted lots of people, who have contributed even more code, so it benefits from a networking effect, so now anyone who is releasing anything for the electronics experimenter market has to provide an Arduino sketch that handles the hardware being offered -- and that drives it even further.
There are cheaper platforms, there are faster ones, there are ones with much better hardware (and some that are all three, the MSP430 being a likely example) but nothing that combines the simplicity and codebase of the Arduino.
I agree a single-point pothole detector, using an iphone in someone's pocket, is useless. However, consider that if you were getting a stream of data from thousands, you could correlate their position/sensor readings, and then you might get *some* signal out of all the noise. I'm still dubious it's going to work well, but with enough sensors and enough time it is at least possible.
Acoustic Kitty reminds me of the extremely creepy head transplant experiments done in the Soviet Union in the 1960's, as detailed in Mary Roach's book "Stiff" and another book called "Elephants On Acid". The latter includes pictures of an obviously functional, conscious small dog head sticking off the shoulder/neck of a larger dog, who is also obviously conscious. Really unsettling, especially when one considers that if we *really* needed to keep someone alive for what they had in their brains, we could, even if they were mostly missing a body.
Public health care should be targeted at prevention and diagnostics. Catastrophic health care should be covered by insurance; if you don't pay for insurance, you're out of luck. That still doesn't change the fact that 90% of most people's health care expenses are incurred in the last 5 months of their lives, but cutting off funding for that would amount to a real version of the "death panels" the Republicans have falsely associated with the new Health Care act. Health insurance is so expensive because we simply refuse to let people die in peace.
Given that people who are most likely dying, but possibly not -- terminal cancer patients, who spend unbelievable amounts of money on the slight chance they'll beat cancer -- have zero incentive to die in peace and an extremely high incentive to spend every penny they have on the slight chance they'll beat cancer, especially if the money actually belongs to their insurance company, and given that the health care industry, who makes money off providing health care, also has absolutely zero incentive to let people die in peace, *and* given that the general public shows strong support for keeping people alive through extraordinary medical efforts and even a whisper about managed health care and providing treatment based on statistical analysis will have the AARP so far up a politician's butt that blue hair will be sticking out his nose... what do we do to actually implement a plan wherein people die in peace? In an article on this subject by Atul Gawande, a surgical oncologist, he pointed out that the quality of life for people who went through Hospice was significantly better than that of people who went through extraordinary medical procedures, and I think articles like his, that convince people that life-prolonging medical treatments are painful, expensive, and don't actually do any real good, is probably the only way we as a culture have to fix this problem. But I don't think even that's going to do much. I know in my family my religiously-oriented aunt and uncle think it would actually be sinful to let my grandmother "just die" rather than doing everything they can to try to keep her alive, even though she's always said she wanted to die peacefully when it was her time, rather than hooked up to a machine, and the same certainly seemed to be the case when hundreds of thousands of people were shrieking wildly that Terry Schiavo should be kept alive against what appeared to be her own written wishes.
When faced with those three problems: individual, institutional, and cultural pressure to preserve life at any cost, I think we as a culture are simply facing inevitable bankruptcy, as our medical industry provides ever-newer, ever-more-expensive ways to give people another couple of days of life.
In this case, since the entire ecosystem can't really change, we're just stuck, for exactly the reasons he says, until extremely large entities that can afford to be uncompetitive for a long time go looking for another local maximum, and they're not willing to, for, again, exactly the reasons he says. I'm not seeing any mystery here, just a grim outcome of competition and selection.
There's an extremely long history of people considering that actions that lead to a bad result are bad, while inaction that leads to the same bad result is much less bad. I'm not saying it's a logical mindset, but it is very definitely how humans think. A common example, when ethics and economics people talk about this, is: if you push someone in front of a train you're a murderer, but if you don't pull someone who is on the tracks off, or signal the train to stop, you're merely a selfish bastard.
It's a neat article, as usual with Neal, but the ending is odd. He says the current state of rocketry is at a local maximum, it's not going to get appreciably better, and there may be other ways of putting stuff in orbit that are better, and then he says he doesn't know why we aren't trying those other better things. This, after spending the previous twenty paragraphs writing about how the US has spent four trillion dollars to get to the top of this local maximum, and the old USSR spent about the same, and in the process we've established a huge military-industrial complex based on the money still flowing into that development path, with lots of political inertia greased by manufacturing and administrative money going into congressional districts... and he wonders why we're not considering spending another trillion dollars on a different, unproven system that would probably involve taking money from the people who are now getting it? He's already answered his own question, and that's surprising because he's a very bright person and does a good job of analyzing the subject.
I've found that it's a much better idea to use duct tape on ducts, than to use gaffer tape on gaffers.
I don't know what the limits are on ropeway length. I do know that in the 1920's, all of Denver was served by trams that used a common, centrally-powered cable running in a channel with pulleys. (The centrally-powered location is now the Spaghetti Factory.) Individual trams would grab the cable to drive, then let loose to stop and pick up passengers. It seemed to work pretty well. Likewise, some of the aerial trams serving mines were miles long, and were (as the TFA notes) driven by having the mill below the mine: since the buckets came down full and went back empty, they were gravity-driven. They seemed to work pretty well also, and they covered ground that was completely impassable, especially in winter, since they didn't much care about three-meter-deep snow. (Which is part of why ski slopes use them for transporting people.)
... mod other divers down?
I've wanted that for years. I'd love a system where you have points, just like your driver's license, and you can vote against someone else, and when you do, both you and they lose a point. If a person loses all his/her points, the car won't drive for a week. It would be somewhat suseptible to gang pranking, but you'd need like 20 people all of whom are willing to lose a point, to mount a distributed attack on a person. I can't see how metamoderation would work, though. It'd be nice if you could vote people up, as well, although that opens a lot of avenues for abuse.
Along with that, there are plenty of times when we need to see red and green: signal guns if you've lost your radio, glidepath lights... and sure we could change those to other colors, with great difficulty retraining people all over the world who are used to those colors and what they mean, but there are reasonably cheap laser diodes in almost every color of the spectrum these days.
I'm not arguing we should ban laser pointers or laser diodes by any means. I'm just suggesting that coatings on windshields aren't going to solve this problem. (And I'm not sure how you're going to manage to put an interference coating on the acrylic windshield in the Cessna I usually fly. I don't know what Boeing uses for their windshields: maybe they do use glass.)
I'm looking forwards to seeing what he builds once he's gotten done rebuilding the machine.
Sure, it's a lot of work to put into a brand-new machine, but anyone who has bought a Chinese mill or lathe machine knows that a right-out-of-the-box rebuild sure helps the accuracy. Even with simple tools like wood chisels, the first thing you do is resharpen them because the from-the-factory job is nearly worthless, so it's hardly surprising that an amateur-designed, amateur-built, and kit-built-by-amateur 3D printer would need some work.
I seem to recall when modems with lights were still in use, that a video tape of the flashing lights on the modem could be slowed down enough to read the stream of bits. Granted 3mb/s is a great deal faster than 56kb/s, but video technology is faster now, too. I would presume there is encryption on both ends, but I see a small IR led "bug" left on top of a computer, cube wall, file cabinet, etc. serving as a middle man pickup of the stream while it is decoded on the other end.
Doesn't have to be modems. You can recreate network traffic from reflected flashes from a network switch, although this report claims that it is, probably, restricted to 56kbps modems, not 10/100mbps ethernet cards.