After all, how many of the hi-tech items we have now came from the minds of sci-fi writers who inspired future engineers to make it happen?
And how many things that came out of science-fiction writers minds have failed to materialize, or turned out to be utterly impossible?
If a science fiction writer "predicts" a future technology, that doesn't mean that he's psychic, a genius, or a great inventor. It means he made enough guesses, and one turned out to more-or-less be true. Kinda like Nostradamus - make enough prediction which are vague enough, and sooner or later one of them is bound to come true. Given enough time (and enough guesses), even some very specific predictions are bound to come true. The problem is that people only count the hits, and forget the misses.
Now I'm not saying this device works, I haven't seen any evidence either way, but I can't just dismiss it out of hand simply because the claims are impressive. Once I see some independent testing then I'll be able to make a decision about this device.
Heh. So you're a fuel-polarization agnostic:p
Seriously, this is just like religious claims, or miracle-healing claims, or all the different perpetual motion machines which have been advertised in the past. Sure, there's a chance that 99.999% of the stuff out there is bunk, and that one is real. But there's a much better chance that 100% of it is bunk.
Yes, it's good to keep an open mind, but that doesn't mean you can't make a fairly accurate guess as to whether or not this thing is going to work. If I slap together two carrots and an avocado, and then tell you it'll increase your mileage 100% if you shove it in your gas tank, you don't need to carry out scientific tests in order to form an opinion about the effectiveness of my process. It's not a 50-50 guess - you can say with a high degree of certainty that it probably won't work.
At first when someone pointed out to me, that Canada, my home country had the least amount of attacks, he spun it to me in a sad manner. "Aww we have the least amount of hackers:(" To which I responded "No no young padawan. We have the least amount of hackers who were traced"
Agreed. When I was a teen (growing up in Canada), I used to dabble in the dark arts. I can guarantee that no "attacks" ever originated from my IP. Of course, if anyone had been paying attention, they may have noticed 2,500 computers in Korea and China doing some rather strange things, while being logged into an IRC channel called #Canadian_eh. Pretty much all of my friends took similar precautions. Dunno if that's true for all Canadians, but it definitely was for the ones I knew.
Until I went to army and found most machines there virtual antiques with no optical drives at all.
What, the Mexican army?
I've been in the military for 10 years now, and have never had any such difficulties.
Or having to do on-site format/install of fresh copies of WinXP... SATA....
Perhaps you're not aware of this, but you can streamline drivers into the XP install disks. My USB drive will install XP on pretty much any computer out there - it'll even install onto other USB disks, let alone SATA.
Or when I think about all those wonderful boxes that simply REFUSE to boot from a USB drive.
Holy crap! You really ARE in Mexico!
Or a friend of mine... movies and various TV series' episodes... Real Movie format. They were "good enough"... Until he got an HD TV.
Your friend's stupidity isn't my problem. I encode all my media in h.264 with AAC. Same format as Blueray, as far as I know. And they look gorgeous on my 55" LCD.
I don't know about him, but personally, I haven't burned a CD or DVD in about a year. They scratch too easily, they're a pain to sort through, and they don't hold all that much data anyway. My two 8 gig memory sticks carry everything I ever need to take portable, including a portable Ubuntu installation, and a bootable windows "CD" which I can use to reinstall windows if necessary. In fact, I don't even HAVE a disk drive on my computers any more - only one of them had it to start with, and during my last upgrade I pulled it out and never got around to reinstalling it.
Disks may not be dead yet, but they're well on their way. I think I'm well ahead of the curve - all my media is stored either on HD's or solid-state media, and I gotta tell ya, it's a dream come true. No more skipping movies. No more worrying about whether something will play on one system but not on another. No more shuffling disks and trying to read quickly scrawled labels. No more spending 2 hours on a computer, swapping in old disks to figure out what's on them. Even my car is no longer flooded with CD's - my deck has a USB port, so I can plug in a flash drive, MP3 player, or iPod, and get perfect quality audio without having to screw around with dozens of disks. Everything just works, and I'm loving it!
It's already going to be a massive terrorist target, so I doubt you'll make things much worse by "militarizing" it.
Anyway, I was referring to the ease of using the elevator to lift materials into space in order to build and stock space stations to serve as weapons platforms. I didn't suggest that the elevator itself would be used for military purposes, except as transportation.
*shrug* fine, use lasers, what do I give shit. I don't find your argument particularly convincing since you haven't actually bothered to include any figures, but it's irrelevant anyway since, as I said earlier, building and erecting the ribbon is the hard part. Everything else is easy.
1) How would one get the opposite end of the "tether" into space after its been bolted to the Earth?
The best way to do it would be to build it in space in the first place. It's a bit of a catch-22 - we need a space elevator to make lifting things into orbit economical, but we'd need to lift a bunch of crap into orbit to make the elevator feasible.
Failing that, you could maybe use a rocket to haul it up, but it'd have to be one big bastard. I'm not sure that it's really an option - I've never ran any calculations on how much mass and volume we're talking about.
2) What kind of payloads are the likely going to be capable of carrying?
Anything. There will be a weight limit of course, but other than that I don't see why there'd be any restrictions.
3) Will the tether and the space-end of the tether need regular augmentations?
How much alignment it needs depends on how well you position it, but it's going to require SOME alignment no matter what. That's not really a problem though - just strap some rocket engines on it and you can move it around all you like. Getting the fuel up there would no longer be much of a problem.
Gasoline is useless. Won't work outside the atmosphere
By that logic, ROCKETS shouldn't work outside the atmosphere:)
Of course, both rockets and gasoline engines can work just fine outside the atmosphere - you just have to bring enough oxygen with you.
and if you're going to carry the fuel aboard the climber then you're missing the point of a space elevator and you might as well fly a rocket.
You'll require a lot less fuel though. But yes, you're right, which is why, as I said, I'd be leaning towards running the current through a cable, like a modern day subway system.
Running a current through the ribbon is a better idea. But you've just added a new requirement to the list: the ribbon must be incredibly light, incredibly strong, and a superconductor.
Nonsense. You can attach an electrical cable TO the ribbon. Whoever said that the ribbon itself needs to be conductive, let alone superconducting? Do we make subway rails superconductive?
How do you cool the climber?
Assuming that waste heat is enough of a problem, you can use the cable as a heat-sink. Or you can take a load of ice with you, and turn it into water on the way up - it's not like the extra weight would be a waste since water is an invaluable resource in space.
Funny, but no. There's much more important things the military could do with this technology than just dropping bombs. For one thing, we could finally develop an effective ABM system, rendering ICBMS's obsolete. For another, it'd add greatly to communications and surveillance capabilities, while costing a fraction of today's systems.
Of course, bombs would be a consideration too. For the first time in history it would become economically feasible to use kinetic penetrators launched from orbit. No explosives, no guidance systems, no airplanes required - just pick a country, zoom in on your target, push a button, and send a 500kg chunk of metal sailing towards your target at 20,000 km/h.
Exercise for the reader: work out how you're going to power the climber.
That's the least challenging part of the problem. Actually, it's something that I found great amusement in - there are currently several different projects working on designing the "climber", even though we still have no idea if we'll ever be able to create the ribbon. That's like spending all your time designing the Captains Chair for a faster-than-light spaceship - a wee bit of a mixup in your priorities, I would say...
Powering the climber's easy, you really only have two practical options:
1. Gasoline engine, either piston or jet turbine, depending on the size of the car. 2. Electric motor(s), powered either by batteries, a fuel cell, or a conductive track running the length of your elevator.
Personally I'd lean toward electric with a conductive track - that way you don't have to take your fuel with you, meaning you can carry more useful mass. To minimize weight you'd also want a LOX system to pressurize the cabin, and probably very light-weight furnishings in the passenger versions (hammocks, anyone?). Cargo models wouldn't require pressurization or furniture, so there's not much to worry about there.
Imagine a bill were to be proposed which legalized marijuana, allowed for gay marriage, forbade "abstinence-only" sex-ed and created a federal mandate against teaching ID in science classrooms, created reasonable constraints on domestic surveillance, and placed tight limits on political lobbying... but also happened to legalize curb-stomping puppies. I'd probably put in a lot of effort to get the puppy provision removed, but if my efforts failed I'd vote for the bill anyway. The bill would do more good than harm, so why withhold my vote?
I'm not familiar with the contents of the rest of the bill in question, so I can't comment on Obama's decision, but I can certainly see that there are many situations in which a person would feel compelled to vote for a bill which contains portions to which he is opposed.
Well, if you define "The Black Experience" as "grew up in the ghetto, did a lot of drugs, spent half his life on welfare, and has 3 baby-mommas", then no, Obama didn't have "The Black Experience". On the other hand, characterizing blacks in such a ways is just a wee bit racist, eh?
I find it interesting that so many other "African Americans" are essentially saying: "He succeeded in life, therefore he doesn't represent us!". If that attitude is representative of the black community, then it's no wonder that the ghetto's are so disproportionately black. It's like their whole self-identity is based on failure.
RIAA lawyers do serve a purpose too, they take money away from RIAA... which is a good thing. If they would give them back to the people they would be modern day Robin Hoods.
Um.... no. RIAA lawyers fees come out of RIAA's operating costs, which come out of various record labels profits, which are calculated into their loss/profit margins, so the cost is eventually passed on to the consumer. That's not to say that the average consumer would see much of a price drop on CD's if the lawyers weren't taking their cut, but let's not pretend that their existence is in any way beneficial.
We will be able to do without lawyers once we can all agree to make and abide by the rules rationally, i.e never. We COULD do with fewer lawyers which could happen but probably won't.
Or, alternately, we could probably do without lawyers if we'd just simplify the damn legal code, and we could DEFINITELY do with fewer lawyers if we'd stop making stupid laws.
Take drug laws for example. The US annually arrests upwards of 800,000 people for marijuana violations alone. That means you're creating 1.6 million opportunities for lawyers (prosecutor and defense) on an annual basis. I don't know about you, but I'd much rather open up that industry to farmers, pot-bar/"coffee-house" owners, and other related private ventures, instead of creating jobs for lawyers, judges, police officers, and criminals.
There are countless such examples - marijuana was just the first one to come to mind because I was recently discussing the idea with some friends in law enforcement. Eventually it evolved into a discussion about law enforcement as a whole, and the general consensus seemed to be that we just have way too many pointless laws.
If you want to have a society in which law and order are taken seriously, it's much better to have a few very important laws which you enforce with a high degree of success rather than having a whole slew of laws, half of which you can't effectively enforce, and the other half of which you can only enforce sporadically because you're forced to waste resources on stuff that shouldn't be illegal in the first place. Not only does the current criminal code make law-enforcement less effective, but it makes the legal system unnecessarily complex, wastes taxpayer money on jobs that shouldn't even exist, and actually encourages crime.
So you're actually arguing that no government official should even be allowed to HAVE a personal e-mail account?
What about phones? Shall we take those away from them too? After all, they might use their personal cell-phone to conduct government business. Better have them all carry only government-approved phones, monitored 24/7 by the NSA.
Oh, and while we're at it, what about face-to-face conversations? We can't archive those! We'll have to wire every politician with a helmet-cam and microphone, and then archive the feed and make them available under the FOI act.
Or better yet, make them into a reality show! We could make millions! FOX executives, if you're reading this, have your people call my people, we'll do lunch.
Hey, I was just making a joke. I'm rather shocked to see that you got modded troll. I see nothing trollish whatsoever about your comment.
I don't think UHF is a geek movie, though - it's just cult-ish. I hadn't even seen it until a year ago, and I wasn't very impressed with it. Weird Al had his moments, but he was a bit of a dink.
With a name like "Foobar of Borg"? Please. At worst you assimilate people. More likely, though, you just run around at Star Trek conventions, pretending that you matter.
Oh no, you are using PPP values! You! You! Gah!...Why don't people learn!? You use GDP nominal, as in real money, to measure the economic power of different countries.
Sorry man, I'm no economist:) Would I be imposing if I asked for a quick explanation of the difference, and why one is a more accurate indication of economic activity rather than the other?
I'm mostly basing my assertion on the fact that right now China is swimming in money,
China GDP: $10.17 trillion US GDP: $13.13 trillion China Population: 1,321,851,888 US Population: 301,139,947
I guess if by "swimming in money" you mean "less than one quarter US GDP per capita", then yeah, they sure are!
productive industrial capacity
Man, I've seen the crash tests of their new "car". You know it's bad when the technicians are laughing in the background. They might have industrial capacity to spare but that means nothing when their products are crap, so they certainly don't have productive industrial capacity to spare.
national ambition
That bit I can't argue with. They should be annexing Taiwan any day now, and then turning their ambition on the rest of asia.
Slashdot Mirror
And how many things that came out of science-fiction writers minds have failed to materialize, or turned out to be utterly impossible?
If a science fiction writer "predicts" a future technology, that doesn't mean that he's psychic, a genius, or a great inventor. It means he made enough guesses, and one turned out to more-or-less be true. Kinda like Nostradamus - make enough prediction which are vague enough, and sooner or later one of them is bound to come true. Given enough time (and enough guesses), even some very specific predictions are bound to come true. The problem is that people only count the hits, and forget the misses.
Heh. So you're a fuel-polarization agnostic :p
Seriously, this is just like religious claims, or miracle-healing claims, or all the different perpetual motion machines which have been advertised in the past. Sure, there's a chance that 99.999% of the stuff out there is bunk, and that one is real. But there's a much better chance that 100% of it is bunk.
Yes, it's good to keep an open mind, but that doesn't mean you can't make a fairly accurate guess as to whether or not this thing is going to work. If I slap together two carrots and an avocado, and then tell you it'll increase your mileage 100% if you shove it in your gas tank, you don't need to carry out scientific tests in order to form an opinion about the effectiveness of my process. It's not a 50-50 guess - you can say with a high degree of certainty that it probably won't work.
Agreed. When I was a teen (growing up in Canada), I used to dabble in the dark arts. I can guarantee that no "attacks" ever originated from my IP. Of course, if anyone had been paying attention, they may have noticed 2,500 computers in Korea and China doing some rather strange things, while being logged into an IRC channel called #Canadian_eh. Pretty much all of my friends took similar precautions. Dunno if that's true for all Canadians, but it definitely was for the ones I knew.
Bill Gates?
What, the Mexican army?
I've been in the military for 10 years now, and have never had any such difficulties.
Perhaps you're not aware of this, but you can streamline drivers into the XP install disks. My USB drive will install XP on pretty much any computer out there - it'll even install onto other USB disks, let alone SATA.
Holy crap! You really ARE in Mexico!
Your friend's stupidity isn't my problem. I encode all my media in h.264 with AAC. Same format as Blueray, as far as I know. And they look gorgeous on my 55" LCD.
Oh, well, if it's in the papers then it MUST be true! :p
Who cares.
I don't know about him, but personally, I haven't burned a CD or DVD in about a year. They scratch too easily, they're a pain to sort through, and they don't hold all that much data anyway. My two 8 gig memory sticks carry everything I ever need to take portable, including a portable Ubuntu installation, and a bootable windows "CD" which I can use to reinstall windows if necessary. In fact, I don't even HAVE a disk drive on my computers any more - only one of them had it to start with, and during my last upgrade I pulled it out and never got around to reinstalling it.
Disks may not be dead yet, but they're well on their way. I think I'm well ahead of the curve - all my media is stored either on HD's or solid-state media, and I gotta tell ya, it's a dream come true. No more skipping movies. No more worrying about whether something will play on one system but not on another. No more shuffling disks and trying to read quickly scrawled labels. No more spending 2 hours on a computer, swapping in old disks to figure out what's on them. Even my car is no longer flooded with CD's - my deck has a USB port, so I can plug in a flash drive, MP3 player, or iPod, and get perfect quality audio without having to screw around with dozens of disks. Everything just works, and I'm loving it!
It's already going to be a massive terrorist target, so I doubt you'll make things much worse by "militarizing" it.
Anyway, I was referring to the ease of using the elevator to lift materials into space in order to build and stock space stations to serve as weapons platforms. I didn't suggest that the elevator itself would be used for military purposes, except as transportation.
*shrug* fine, use lasers, what do I give shit. I don't find your argument particularly convincing since you haven't actually bothered to include any figures, but it's irrelevant anyway since, as I said earlier, building and erecting the ribbon is the hard part. Everything else is easy.
The best way to do it would be to build it in space in the first place. It's a bit of a catch-22 - we need a space elevator to make lifting things into orbit economical, but we'd need to lift a bunch of crap into orbit to make the elevator feasible.
Failing that, you could maybe use a rocket to haul it up, but it'd have to be one big bastard. I'm not sure that it's really an option - I've never ran any calculations on how much mass and volume we're talking about.
Anything. There will be a weight limit of course, but other than that I don't see why there'd be any restrictions.
How much alignment it needs depends on how well you position it, but it's going to require SOME alignment no matter what. That's not really a problem though - just strap some rocket engines on it and you can move it around all you like. Getting the fuel up there would no longer be much of a problem.
By that logic, ROCKETS shouldn't work outside the atmosphere :)
Of course, both rockets and gasoline engines can work just fine outside the atmosphere - you just have to bring enough oxygen with you.
You'll require a lot less fuel though. But yes, you're right, which is why, as I said, I'd be leaning towards running the current through a cable, like a modern day subway system.
Nonsense. You can attach an electrical cable TO the ribbon. Whoever said that the ribbon itself needs to be conductive, let alone superconducting? Do we make subway rails superconductive?
Assuming that waste heat is enough of a problem, you can use the cable as a heat-sink. Or you can take a load of ice with you, and turn it into water on the way up - it's not like the extra weight would be a waste since water is an invaluable resource in space.
Funny, but no. There's much more important things the military could do with this technology than just dropping bombs. For one thing, we could finally develop an effective ABM system, rendering ICBMS's obsolete. For another, it'd add greatly to communications and surveillance capabilities, while costing a fraction of today's systems.
Of course, bombs would be a consideration too. For the first time in history it would become economically feasible to use kinetic penetrators launched from orbit. No explosives, no guidance systems, no airplanes required - just pick a country, zoom in on your target, push a button, and send a 500kg chunk of metal sailing towards your target at 20,000 km/h.
That's the least challenging part of the problem. Actually, it's something that I found great amusement in - there are currently several different projects working on designing the "climber", even though we still have no idea if we'll ever be able to create the ribbon. That's like spending all your time designing the Captains Chair for a faster-than-light spaceship - a wee bit of a mixup in your priorities, I would say ...
Powering the climber's easy, you really only have two practical options:
1. Gasoline engine, either piston or jet turbine, depending on the size of the car.
2. Electric motor(s), powered either by batteries, a fuel cell, or a conductive track running the length of your elevator.
Personally I'd lean toward electric with a conductive track - that way you don't have to take your fuel with you, meaning you can carry more useful mass. To minimize weight you'd also want a LOX system to pressurize the cabin, and probably very light-weight furnishings in the passenger versions (hammocks, anyone?). Cargo models wouldn't require pressurization or furniture, so there's not much to worry about there.
It's a question of degrees.
Imagine a bill were to be proposed which legalized marijuana, allowed for gay marriage, forbade "abstinence-only" sex-ed and created a federal mandate against teaching ID in science classrooms, created reasonable constraints on domestic surveillance, and placed tight limits on political lobbying ... but also happened to legalize curb-stomping puppies. I'd probably put in a lot of effort to get the puppy provision removed, but if my efforts failed I'd vote for the bill anyway. The bill would do more good than harm, so why withhold my vote?
I'm not familiar with the contents of the rest of the bill in question, so I can't comment on Obama's decision, but I can certainly see that there are many situations in which a person would feel compelled to vote for a bill which contains portions to which he is opposed.
Well, if you define "The Black Experience" as "grew up in the ghetto, did a lot of drugs, spent half his life on welfare, and has 3 baby-mommas", then no, Obama didn't have "The Black Experience". On the other hand, characterizing blacks in such a ways is just a wee bit racist, eh?
I find it interesting that so many other "African Americans" are essentially saying: "He succeeded in life, therefore he doesn't represent us!". If that attitude is representative of the black community, then it's no wonder that the ghetto's are so disproportionately black. It's like their whole self-identity is based on failure.
Um .... no. RIAA lawyers fees come out of RIAA's operating costs, which come out of various record labels profits, which are calculated into their loss/profit margins, so the cost is eventually passed on to the consumer. That's not to say that the average consumer would see much of a price drop on CD's if the lawyers weren't taking their cut, but let's not pretend that their existence is in any way beneficial.
Or, alternately, we could probably do without lawyers if we'd just simplify the damn legal code, and we could DEFINITELY do with fewer lawyers if we'd stop making stupid laws.
Take drug laws for example. The US annually arrests upwards of 800,000 people for marijuana violations alone. That means you're creating 1.6 million opportunities for lawyers (prosecutor and defense) on an annual basis. I don't know about you, but I'd much rather open up that industry to farmers, pot-bar/"coffee-house" owners, and other related private ventures, instead of creating jobs for lawyers, judges, police officers, and criminals.
There are countless such examples - marijuana was just the first one to come to mind because I was recently discussing the idea with some friends in law enforcement. Eventually it evolved into a discussion about law enforcement as a whole, and the general consensus seemed to be that we just have way too many pointless laws.
If you want to have a society in which law and order are taken seriously, it's much better to have a few very important laws which you enforce with a high degree of success rather than having a whole slew of laws, half of which you can't effectively enforce, and the other half of which you can only enforce sporadically because you're forced to waste resources on stuff that shouldn't be illegal in the first place. Not only does the current criminal code make law-enforcement less effective, but it makes the legal system unnecessarily complex, wastes taxpayer money on jobs that shouldn't even exist, and actually encourages crime.
My colour-sampler puts him at #A67A61
So you're actually arguing that no government official should even be allowed to HAVE a personal e-mail account?
What about phones? Shall we take those away from them too? After all, they might use their personal cell-phone to conduct government business. Better have them all carry only government-approved phones, monitored 24/7 by the NSA.
Oh, and while we're at it, what about face-to-face conversations? We can't archive those! We'll have to wire every politician with a helmet-cam and microphone, and then archive the feed and make them available under the FOI act.
Or better yet, make them into a reality show! We could make millions! FOX executives, if you're reading this, have your people call my people, we'll do lunch.
Hey, I was just making a joke. I'm rather shocked to see that you got modded troll. I see nothing trollish whatsoever about your comment.
I don't think UHF is a geek movie, though - it's just cult-ish. I hadn't even seen it until a year ago, and I wasn't very impressed with it. Weird Al had his moments, but he was a bit of a dink.
With a name like "Foobar of Borg"? Please. At worst you assimilate people. More likely, though, you just run around at Star Trek conventions, pretending that you matter.
Sorry man, I'm no economist :) Would I be imposing if I asked for a quick explanation of the difference, and why one is a more accurate indication of economic activity rather than the other?
...
wtf?
I'm talking about GDP and you're talking about borrowing money?
That's like me saying "Bill Gates makes $500 million a year", and you saying "yeah, but he owes money on his VISA, so HAH!".
China GDP: $10.17 trillion
US GDP: $13.13 trillion
China Population: 1,321,851,888
US Population: 301,139,947
I guess if by "swimming in money" you mean "less than one quarter US GDP per capita", then yeah, they sure are!
Man, I've seen the crash tests of their new "car". You know it's bad when the technicians are laughing in the background. They might have industrial capacity to spare but that means nothing when their products are crap, so they certainly don't have productive industrial capacity to spare.
That bit I can't argue with. They should be annexing Taiwan any day now, and then turning their ambition on the rest of asia.
What the heck do we call the Indian astronauts, then? Gandhinaut? Bollynaut?