You get yours back on the return trip (this is not optional). Like you'd have known, if you'd done any research instead of running your gob off. If you're returning via a different route, don't use the swap stations unless you're willing to head back to them shortly afterward.
Also, I'm pretty sure they would test the batteries before swapping them into a car. It's not as if this is difficult, or as if they have any vested interest in giving you bad batteries. I know it's probably very unusual and painful to you, but try to stop and *think* for a moment before posting, OK?
What, the technology of the web from a decade before the web was invented?
I'm guessing you're a youngster, maybe don't even remember 1991. That was the year that both HTTP and HTML were first publicly described (though HTTP was version 0.9 and HTML was not yet standardized at all), and it didn't really take off until 93 or 94. The first few years certainly didn't have anything like the concept of HTTPS or dynamic content or "web applications" at all.
White supremacists are not a protected group, nor should they be. They are what they are by choice, and they choose to be harmful to others. That is not the case with gay people.
Similarly to the openly anti-Semitic person. Again, that is a choice, and one harmful to the people in question. Now, "religious" *is* a protected group, so the deli owner would have no right to refuse to serve somebody *just* because they're Muslim... but that's not what you said. They certainly have the right to refuse service to somebody who is intentionally choosing to insult or otherwise harm them. Also, "Nazi" is most definitely not a protected group, so again, if the person in question was (by their words/actions/behavior) harming or intending to harm the deli owner, they would be well within their rights to tell that pig to fuck off.
If the waiter in question wants to keep their job, yes, they should. Why the hell would a waiter who in unwilling to serve certain foods get a job serving food at a restaurant that serves those foods anyhow? Now, a nice restaurant manager might attempt to reach an accommodation with such waiters, but at the end of the day, if your job is "deliver food to customers" and you decide you don't want to do it, then you have no business in that job. Nobody is forcing them to eat it, though, nor is the restaurant owner allowed to say "we won't hire Muslim waiters". They might make sure the waiters agree to serve pork as a condition of their employment, which is a completely reasonable thing to require in a restaurant that serves pork, but if the potential waiter chooses not to it is *their* choice to fail to fulfill their job requirements, and nothing more.
Sigh... your numbers are wrong, your science is wrong, and your concept is questionable.
Let's start with the basics: GEO is 35,768 KM from the equator. You need twice that much, at most, ribbon (not cable. Cable is dramatically less feasible and stupid besides). No idea where you got 100,000 KM from...
Now, about that ribbon. It's a few feet (maybe around one meter) wide at the base, where tension is low. It's several times that at GEO, where tension is highest. It's got a thickness comparable to paper and a mass per unit length even lower. The part that falls, in the event of a catastrophe, will mostly burn up in the atmosphere, the rest will drift back to earth with a very low terminal velocity. It might kill a few unlucky people who happen to have a tangle of it fall on their heads; it's *not* going to "impact the surface" "with dramatic consequences".
But, to consider the meat of your proposal. First of all, you understand that the thing is under tension along its whole length, right? The primary limitation on our ability to build one is finding material of sufficient tensile strength. The middle (at GEO) will be under particularly bad tension; we *think* we can make materials strong enough to be feasible for that. You want to turn this thing into a *network* (implying interconnections)? Where do you plan to obtain the additional tensile strength for the extra mass hanging off the tensioned parts, pray tell? Oh, you can (and probably would) put multiple cables next to each other, allowing climbers to pass one another and providing redundancy, but each one would basically be its own space elevator that happens to be next to a few others. A single attack, if big enough, could still take them all out... but so it goes.
Also, where the hell does 62000 miles come from? Equator to GEO is about 22236 miles. A no-counterweight space elevator ribbon (one that uses the ribbon itself as the counterweight, by extending it past GEO) would be twice that. 44472 miles is a lot, of course, but it's a lot less than the numbers you're tossing around...
The ribbon (not cable) is balanced such that at the base point, gravity counteracts centrifugal force, and the tension is near-zero. If the tension is any higher than that, that means the whole ribbon is subject to more tension than it has to be. It also means your counterweight (which is probably just an equal length of ribbon *above* GEO to counteract the length below) is heavier than it has any reason to be, which would make launching the whole thing more difficult.
The base could easily be placed on a barge in the middle of the ocean. In fact, that's just about ideal; it can move around relatively easily, if the ribbon needs to dodge out of the way of something. It's also easier to control access for the sake of security, and may have a handful of political advantages too. Oh, and the base of the ribbon? Kept under tension by means of winches. The ribbon will actually rise and fall a bit, as climbers go up and down it (climbers near the bottom tug the whole thing downward, reducing tension at base to possibly negative unless you take up the slack). That's OK.
Yet another example of sci-fi authors completely failing to consider the "sci" part of sci-fi. If you bombed the base of a space elevator, the ribbon would fly *in to space*. The bottom is an anchor, holding the ribbon (not "cable" or "rope") to Earth. Ideally it's not under much tension - the high-tension part is the middle bit which sits at geosync, balanced between the pull of gravity and the centrifugal force of the upper segment/counterweight - but it's almost certainly under some (much like a ship's anchor chain, actually). How the fuck would cutting a ship's anchor cause it to sink? That's about the level of stupidity in what you just said.
Really, getting your disaster scenarios from a sci-fi shooter videogame? This meme really needs to die. It's used over and over again in sci-fi stories that want to have some big catastrophe happen, but it's complete bullshit that has been debunked repeatedly. The ribbon (not cable) has *extremely* low mass per unit length. It will basically *drift* to the ground, some of it probably burning up in re-entry. Sure, if enough of it tangles up and lands on something there could be localized damage, but the odds of that are pretty low... especially since the obvious place to put it is in the middle of the ocean, a region noted for a lack of things to damage. Unless a good pile of it literally fell on you, the worst you'd probably have to deal with (aside from running a new ribbon, and the loss of whatever was on the old one) is a bunch of CNT drifting on the wind and possibly getting inhaled by people who would rather not.
A counterweight always seemed kind of silly compared to just extending the ribbon as far in the other direction. That way you can also "build" the elevator by unspooling cable in both directions from GEO. You also get the ability to use the upper portion as a launch platform for interplanetary travel (at the end of the ribbon, you'd be experiencing a strong acceleration *away* from earth, just let go at the right time for the direction you want to travel).
Laser-delivered power is one good option. There are a few others, and you might want to supplement it with power collection on the "roof" of the climber (either to collect solar energy directly, or to collect beamed power from a midpoint station) as ground-based lasers would become inefficient above a certain point.
Ocean, actually. We have rather a lot of it, especially around the equator.
Sigh. This whole "the cable could fall and kill us all!" bullshit has been debunked again and again, but still people keep pulling it out of their asses like they have any idea what the fuck they're talking about. Do at least a little research before spouting your mouth off, OK? For starters, ribbon, not cable. Think silk scarf, not suspension bridge.
Oh, and as for the idea that where you built it would matter for people living "in the cable fall direction"... you really don't get the scale of this thing, do you? The Earth's circumference is less than 25000 miles. The distance to geostationary orbit - which is the shortest such a ribbon could be, realistically it would be about twice that - is more than 22000 miles. If it *did* fall, and somehow survived re-entry and came down in one continuous piece, it would probably wrap around the equator. But that wouldn't happen, because any material which could survive such a fall would be completely impractical for use as ribbon material in the first place!
It was also, sadly, complete bullshit ("sadly" because it's one of the worst research failures in the series, which is otherwise fairly good hard sci-fi). The material he envisioned making the cable out of was not only wildly impractical, it was apparently chosen explicitly because of several characteristics it exhibited that are exactly opposite of what would be desirable. You need a material with an extremely low mass per unit length. You do not need a highly durable material, certainly not on the scale of diamond hardness. You also want a ribbon, not a true cable. That gives the climber more surface area to grip for a given amount of mass per unit length.
The result would be more akin to a silk scarf a few feet wide (at the base, several times that at geosync) and many thousands of miles long slowly falling to earth. Some, possibly much, would be burned up in the atmosphere. Some more would flutter to the ground, buffeted by the winds but no more harmful than if some airplane unspooled a bunch of tissue paper in the high atmosphere and then let it go. Some places it might tangle and fall to the ground in a knot, but even then it would have a fairly low terminal velocity and relatively low mass. You might destroy a building or two in the worst case; you would not wreck the entire circumference of the planet
The very concept of building the ribbon out of anything that could contain the energy needed to produce a "kilometres-wide path of destruction" without harmlessly burning up in the atmosphere is as idiotic as it is unrealistic.
That is a (one of several, but in my opinion one of the more regrettable) unfortunate failure to do his homework, frankly. The cable he envisioned was hard, durable, dense stuff. That's not what you want, though. The only real criterion is tensile strength, and density is actually the exact opposite of a desirable property. Dense materials (I believe his cable used diamonds, which are notable for hardness more than for tensile strength) simply increase the tension the cable is under, making it harder yet to find a material strong enough.
A *real* cable would actually be a ribbon, thin and of extremely low mass per unit length. The total mass of the ribbon would still be considerable, of course, but it would be spread out over a huge (mostly long, actually) area. In the event of a break, the effect would not be a whip wrapping around the equator so much as it would be a thousands-of-miles-long silk scarf undergoing re-entry. Depending on the material's characteristics, it's possible that a considerable amount of it would survive re-entry and even crash to earth in a tangle large enough to have significant impact, but for that to happen it would need to be very concentrated in one area. Far more likely, most of it would be buffeted by the wind and land relatively gently (think about what might happen if an airplane could trail a thousand-mile-long sheet of paper behind it, then let it go midair). Probably not something you want to be standing under, but neither is a kid dropping rocks off a bridge. It's not going to cause global devastation and turn the equator into "a prominent physical feature".
Most of that trilogy was good, but that part was either pure research fail or was intentionally done wrong for the sake of artistic license to create a catastrophic event in-story.
I've seen proposals that talk about using a ribbon that is only just barely larger than is needed to support itself for the initial strand. Send it up in a conventional rocket (at the time this was discussed, they talked about using a Saturn V or possibly even the Space Shuttle; these days a Falcon 9 Heavy would probably be enough or even more-than) to geosync and have it unspool in both directions from there. Grab the lowered end as it reaches earth. Then, send up a small climber, carrying another, possibly even smaller strand of ribbon. Join it to the first one. Now you have a stronger ribbon. Repeat (potentially with increasingly large builder-climbers) until you have a strong enough ribbon for whatever you want to do (send up people, or ISS modules, or other satellites, or parts for a Project Orion-style nuclear pulse rocket to be constructed in space... you get the idea).
I don't know how feasible all the steps there are, but it's worth considering as an alternative to sending up the entire thing all at once.
Or construction workers (somebody had to build those spaceships and space stations, after all). Or traders/merchants/shippers/etc. since interstellar, much less interplanetary, commerce was very much a thing that people were doing. Or technicians, to keep that infrastructure running. Or colonists, off to settle other worlds. Or emigrants, moving to one of those colonies after the initial settlement. Or tourists, heading to Risa (or any of the other pleasant parts of the galaxy reachable by warp drive). Or any of surely many more classes of people...
Sure, the show focused on scientists and military (although it might be more accurate to describe the Enterprise's mission as exploration rather than true science, even though they certainly had scientists aboard). But there were lots of other people out there. Even the original series had some of that. The later shows expanded on it a great deal. The Enterprise D had families aboard; it was more like a mobile city than the exploration ships of old.
Also, you don't know that people were stuck. That was never claimed, that I can recall. Many people may never have felt the need to leave - planets are big places, after all, and an impulse-speed shuttle can get you from one side to the other in a matter of minutes (it would be seconds, but you ought to get out of the atmosphere before lighting off a fusion drive) even if you can't just use a transporter - but I'll bet plenty of people would have had families or friends on Mars or something, and gone to visit them (a voyage of minutes from earth if you can even reach warp 1, hours at worst if limited to impulse).
If WBC member came into my (hypothetical) store wearing a "God hates fags" shirt, then you better believe I'd refuse them service. Not because of their affiliations, but because of their hateful and discriminatory message to everybody around them. If they came in, bought a common random item off the shelf and paid for it quietly and politely, I'd take their money same as anybody else... I wouldn't even know who they were. If I recognized them by the name on the credit card I'd feel kind of dirty about it, but whatever.
That doesn't mean I'd support their organization, mind you. If the WBC got hacked by Anonymous and they tried to hire me to help secure their computers, I would probably refuse.
The difference, by the way, is that the WBC hurts people. They actively seek to cause harm to others. Being gay hurts nobody. Not me personally, not my friends or family, not the people around them, and not even themselves (at least, not in any way that they can help; the "being gay is a choice" crowd always makes me wonder what is wrong with their brain, because given the discrimination they face, who the hell would *choose* that life?). Being a member of the WBC and picketing military funerals with hateful signs and slogans? Totally a choice. Same, incidentally, for Neo-Nazis and for Catholics... the difference being that most Catholics (unlike the other two groups) aren't out to ruin other people's lives. I wouldn't let them preach in the store, though...
Good for you (and I say that sincerely, not sarcastically). There's a lot to be said for staying and fighting. On the other hand, picking up and leaving is a form of protest as well; as you note, the concept of thousands of jobs moving out of the state is a concern that motivates people to reconsider things. Still... I'd be willing to attend a rally in Arizona, if it was big enough and I could take the time for travel. I would not, given what I've read and heard in the (almost entirely non-mainstream) news and from people who've been or lived there, want to stay for very long. It's not the weather, either.
As for my co-workers, they were from Phoenix or nearby, and don't really seem to miss the desert on a day-to-day basis (we've got a good chunk of desert ourselves, a few hours drive east). One of them went to our San Francisco office instead of coming up to WA; I don't know him very well. The others, though, say they basically wanted to work "anywhere but Arizona." Maybe it isn't actually that bad, but that was their perception. They are, to the best of my knowledge, straight white cis-gender males with college degrees and good job prospects too, so they probably weren't facing any particularly strong prejudice personally, either.
Hell, you can get that much just by reading the bible. The only reason I'd worship such an undeserving cretin is if it had the power to compel me to do so. I see no evidence that it does (or that it even exists). Don't bother with the "creator" bit either; the Abrahamic God is the deadbeat dad to beat all deadbeat dads (literally, if you believe the relevant religious texts). I don't respect them, why the fuck should I respect Him?
Religion co-opted marriage and turned it into a religious thing millennia ago, but before that it was about as secular as things got. True, it was a kind of awful arrangement in a lot of the world, with the wife either effectively or literally being property of the husband (a man typically purchased his wife-to-be from her father), but most of the world also openly practiced slavery back then... Anyhow, it was a business arrangement, generally enforced by whatever secular law there was in that time and place, that essentially said A) I have a right to this woman B) I have a right to her children C) Those (male) children have a right to inherit from me.
Obviously, I'm simplifying and combining a number of somewhat different systems, but it was no more a religious ceremony than setting sail in a ship was (i.e. you might ask the gods for blessings on the woman's fertility and childrens' health, just as you might ask for calm seas and favorable winds, or for strength and protection before going into battle). In places with a codified set of laws, marriages were reported to the government (actually, much as they are today). The question of who presided over them varies widely, and was indeed sometimes a priest or shaman (and sometimes was nobody but the relevant families or even just fathers), but it wasn't generally considered a religious institution until just a few thousand years ago (early human civilizations, and their belief systems and governments, go back much further than that).
In any case, marriage in the US has always been a matter of secular law, at least at the federal level. You can get a religious ceremony performed if you want, but that is neither sufficient nor necessary to be considered married (my grandmother "married" her third "husband" in a religious but non-legal ceremony to assuage her guilt at "living in sin" without overly complicating her inheritance; the ceremony was lovely but had no secular recognition). The right to grant marriage licenses is owned by the states, and some states might hypothetically refuse to grant them if not approved by a member of some recognized religion or similar bullshit, but it is the state governments and not the religious institutions that decide who is married, and it is the state-granted marriage licenses that the federal government recognizes. That was the major aspect of the DOMA that was struck down last year: the idea that the federal government could refuse to recognize a state-issued marriage license just because the couple were of the same sex.
Thus, aside from the terminology (which really is *not* inherently religious, despite what various clergy might have you believe) the secular benefits and protections are already tied to a secular institution.
You kind of missed the point of my post, didn't you?
I never stated, or even implied, that 2 launches was the goal. Nor did I claim or imply that it's all they would be able to achieve. I merely pointed out that even a single re-use would cut costs dramatically (probably by a factor of 1/3 to just shy of 1/2, the rocket being the majority cost of each flight). SpaceX are, obviously, going for far more than a twice-usable rocket. With that said, some parts probably will need to be downchecked and replaced after each flight. Probably not half the components, though, and it's quite likely that most of them will be reusable without anything worse than some inspection and maybe a little cleaning.
I have no idea what the average life expectancy of the parts will come out to be (or how many of them will be later able to be returned to service for lower cost than rebuilding them, which is probably significant), but hey, baby steps. When they use the same rocket for its second orbital launch, it will be a great day for space travel. When they do it for the 20th launch, it will still be amazing but at that point the marginal value of one more launch has gone way down compared to the marginal value of that second launch.
It will be interesting to see, over the next couple decades, how reusable rocketry failure rates shake out. Do they increase steadily over time and number of launches, the way one might expect? Or does a rocket that manages one complete liftoff and recovery without failure have a better chance of making it to twenty than one right off the factory floor has of making it to two? Is there a point where fatigue will make it more economical to replace the rocket anyhow, rather than continually recertifying it, or will it be cheaper to just keep going, making small repairs as needed and upgrades as appropriate, and only manufacture complete new rockets to meet increased capacity demands?
Any way you look at it, this is going to be an exciting era for space travel.
TL;DR: It's anti-people, and businesses are made up of people
It's not very "pro-business" when it makes it hard to hire people to work there! The west-coast culture, which by-and-large embraces different sexual orientations and gender identities, is very prevalent in computer culture as well (largely because many of the best computer tech universities, and best computer industry jobs, are in California or Washington). Most of those people - even those who are cis and straight - aren't going to want to work in a state that has given official sanction to homophobia and transphobia. Ignoring the jokes about Apple fans (I don't like their products, but I have no problem with their hiring practices), this would likely be a problem for any major tech company. They simply can't afford to build a major location in a state where they're going to have to write off a significant number of potential employees simply due to the political environment.
Sheesh, as if "papers, please" wasn't enough! Arizona really does seem to want to shoot itself in the foot... We hired one guy from Arizona. He was overjoyed to move to Seattle and had no trouble convincing a couple other guys to do so too. Dude landed a huge referral bonus before his first six months at the company were up. People want *out* of that state!
I think that's part of their genius in using in-mall showrooms. Not only does it let them use a nice small space to show off their cars, they can put them where everybody will see the car and can come ask questions about it. Very few people will go to a dealership just to look at new models unless they already plan to buy one (partially, of course, because car dealers are often quite annoying people). Almost everybody goes to the mall, though, and if they can see first-hand how awesome a car Tesla makes, it could influence their decisions on when they next want to buy a car.
Slashdot Mirror
You get yours back on the return trip (this is not optional). Like you'd have known, if you'd done any research instead of running your gob off. If you're returning via a different route, don't use the swap stations unless you're willing to head back to them shortly afterward.
Also, I'm pretty sure they would test the batteries before swapping them into a car. It's not as if this is difficult, or as if they have any vested interest in giving you bad batteries. I know it's probably very unusual and painful to you, but try to stop and *think* for a moment before posting, OK?
Does Fremont, CA have one of those too, or are you a confused Washingtonian?
(The concept of the Fremont, WA troll wandering onto a battlefield swinging it's old VW bug around is pretty entertaining, though.)
What, the technology of the web from a decade before the web was invented?
I'm guessing you're a youngster, maybe don't even remember 1991. That was the year that both HTTP and HTML were first publicly described (though HTTP was version 0.9 and HTML was not yet standardized at all), and it didn't really take off until 93 or 94. The first few years certainly didn't have anything like the concept of HTTPS or dynamic content or "web applications" at all.
Get off my lawn! (I'm not quite 30...)
White supremacists are not a protected group, nor should they be. They are what they are by choice, and they choose to be harmful to others. That is not the case with gay people.
Similarly to the openly anti-Semitic person. Again, that is a choice, and one harmful to the people in question. Now, "religious" *is* a protected group, so the deli owner would have no right to refuse to serve somebody *just* because they're Muslim... but that's not what you said. They certainly have the right to refuse service to somebody who is intentionally choosing to insult or otherwise harm them. Also, "Nazi" is most definitely not a protected group, so again, if the person in question was (by their words/actions/behavior) harming or intending to harm the deli owner, they would be well within their rights to tell that pig to fuck off.
If the waiter in question wants to keep their job, yes, they should. Why the hell would a waiter who in unwilling to serve certain foods get a job serving food at a restaurant that serves those foods anyhow? Now, a nice restaurant manager might attempt to reach an accommodation with such waiters, but at the end of the day, if your job is "deliver food to customers" and you decide you don't want to do it, then you have no business in that job. Nobody is forcing them to eat it, though, nor is the restaurant owner allowed to say "we won't hire Muslim waiters". They might make sure the waiters agree to serve pork as a condition of their employment, which is a completely reasonable thing to require in a restaurant that serves pork, but if the potential waiter chooses not to it is *their* choice to fail to fulfill their job requirements, and nothing more.
Sigh... your numbers are wrong, your science is wrong, and your concept is questionable.
Let's start with the basics: GEO is 35,768 KM from the equator. You need twice that much, at most, ribbon (not cable. Cable is dramatically less feasible and stupid besides). No idea where you got 100,000 KM from...
Now, about that ribbon. It's a few feet (maybe around one meter) wide at the base, where tension is low. It's several times that at GEO, where tension is highest. It's got a thickness comparable to paper and a mass per unit length even lower. The part that falls, in the event of a catastrophe, will mostly burn up in the atmosphere, the rest will drift back to earth with a very low terminal velocity. It might kill a few unlucky people who happen to have a tangle of it fall on their heads; it's *not* going to "impact the surface" "with dramatic consequences".
But, to consider the meat of your proposal. First of all, you understand that the thing is under tension along its whole length, right? The primary limitation on our ability to build one is finding material of sufficient tensile strength. The middle (at GEO) will be under particularly bad tension; we *think* we can make materials strong enough to be feasible for that. You want to turn this thing into a *network* (implying interconnections)? Where do you plan to obtain the additional tensile strength for the extra mass hanging off the tensioned parts, pray tell? Oh, you can (and probably would) put multiple cables next to each other, allowing climbers to pass one another and providing redundancy, but each one would basically be its own space elevator that happens to be next to a few others. A single attack, if big enough, could still take them all out... but so it goes.
Also, where the hell does 62000 miles come from? Equator to GEO is about 22236 miles. A no-counterweight space elevator ribbon (one that uses the ribbon itself as the counterweight, by extending it past GEO) would be twice that. 44472 miles is a lot, of course, but it's a lot less than the numbers you're tossing around...
*SIGH*
Nope! Wrong again.
The ribbon (not cable) is balanced such that at the base point, gravity counteracts centrifugal force, and the tension is near-zero. If the tension is any higher than that, that means the whole ribbon is subject to more tension than it has to be. It also means your counterweight (which is probably just an equal length of ribbon *above* GEO to counteract the length below) is heavier than it has any reason to be, which would make launching the whole thing more difficult.
The base could easily be placed on a barge in the middle of the ocean. In fact, that's just about ideal; it can move around relatively easily, if the ribbon needs to dodge out of the way of something. It's also easier to control access for the sake of security, and may have a handful of political advantages too. Oh, and the base of the ribbon? Kept under tension by means of winches. The ribbon will actually rise and fall a bit, as climbers go up and down it (climbers near the bottom tug the whole thing downward, reducing tension at base to possibly negative unless you take up the slack). That's OK.
Yet another example of sci-fi authors completely failing to consider the "sci" part of sci-fi. If you bombed the base of a space elevator, the ribbon would fly *in to space*. The bottom is an anchor, holding the ribbon (not "cable" or "rope") to Earth. Ideally it's not under much tension - the high-tension part is the middle bit which sits at geosync, balanced between the pull of gravity and the centrifugal force of the upper segment/counterweight - but it's almost certainly under some (much like a ship's anchor chain, actually). How the fuck would cutting a ship's anchor cause it to sink? That's about the level of stupidity in what you just said.
Really, getting your disaster scenarios from a sci-fi shooter videogame? This meme really needs to die. It's used over and over again in sci-fi stories that want to have some big catastrophe happen, but it's complete bullshit that has been debunked repeatedly. The ribbon (not cable) has *extremely* low mass per unit length. It will basically *drift* to the ground, some of it probably burning up in re-entry. Sure, if enough of it tangles up and lands on something there could be localized damage, but the odds of that are pretty low... especially since the obvious place to put it is in the middle of the ocean, a region noted for a lack of things to damage. Unless a good pile of it literally fell on you, the worst you'd probably have to deal with (aside from running a new ribbon, and the loss of whatever was on the old one) is a bunch of CNT drifting on the wind and possibly getting inhaled by people who would rather not.
A counterweight always seemed kind of silly compared to just extending the ribbon as far in the other direction. That way you can also "build" the elevator by unspooling cable in both directions from GEO. You also get the ability to use the upper portion as a launch platform for interplanetary travel (at the end of the ribbon, you'd be experiencing a strong acceleration *away* from earth, just let go at the right time for the direction you want to travel).
Laser-delivered power is one good option. There are a few others, and you might want to supplement it with power collection on the "roof" of the climber (either to collect solar energy directly, or to collect beamed power from a midpoint station) as ground-based lasers would become inefficient above a certain point.
Ocean, actually. We have rather a lot of it, especially around the equator.
Sigh. This whole "the cable could fall and kill us all!" bullshit has been debunked again and again, but still people keep pulling it out of their asses like they have any idea what the fuck they're talking about. Do at least a little research before spouting your mouth off, OK? For starters, ribbon, not cable. Think silk scarf, not suspension bridge.
Oh, and as for the idea that where you built it would matter for people living "in the cable fall direction"... you really don't get the scale of this thing, do you? The Earth's circumference is less than 25000 miles. The distance to geostationary orbit - which is the shortest such a ribbon could be, realistically it would be about twice that - is more than 22000 miles. If it *did* fall, and somehow survived re-entry and came down in one continuous piece, it would probably wrap around the equator. But that wouldn't happen, because any material which could survive such a fall would be completely impractical for use as ribbon material in the first place!
It was also, sadly, complete bullshit ("sadly" because it's one of the worst research failures in the series, which is otherwise fairly good hard sci-fi). The material he envisioned making the cable out of was not only wildly impractical, it was apparently chosen explicitly because of several characteristics it exhibited that are exactly opposite of what would be desirable. You need a material with an extremely low mass per unit length. You do not need a highly durable material, certainly not on the scale of diamond hardness. You also want a ribbon, not a true cable. That gives the climber more surface area to grip for a given amount of mass per unit length.
The result would be more akin to a silk scarf a few feet wide (at the base, several times that at geosync) and many thousands of miles long slowly falling to earth. Some, possibly much, would be burned up in the atmosphere. Some more would flutter to the ground, buffeted by the winds but no more harmful than if some airplane unspooled a bunch of tissue paper in the high atmosphere and then let it go. Some places it might tangle and fall to the ground in a knot, but even then it would have a fairly low terminal velocity and relatively low mass. You might destroy a building or two in the worst case; you would not wreck the entire circumference of the planet
The very concept of building the ribbon out of anything that could contain the energy needed to produce a "kilometres-wide path of destruction" without harmlessly burning up in the atmosphere is as idiotic as it is unrealistic.
That is a (one of several, but in my opinion one of the more regrettable) unfortunate failure to do his homework, frankly. The cable he envisioned was hard, durable, dense stuff. That's not what you want, though. The only real criterion is tensile strength, and density is actually the exact opposite of a desirable property. Dense materials (I believe his cable used diamonds, which are notable for hardness more than for tensile strength) simply increase the tension the cable is under, making it harder yet to find a material strong enough.
A *real* cable would actually be a ribbon, thin and of extremely low mass per unit length. The total mass of the ribbon would still be considerable, of course, but it would be spread out over a huge (mostly long, actually) area. In the event of a break, the effect would not be a whip wrapping around the equator so much as it would be a thousands-of-miles-long silk scarf undergoing re-entry. Depending on the material's characteristics, it's possible that a considerable amount of it would survive re-entry and even crash to earth in a tangle large enough to have significant impact, but for that to happen it would need to be very concentrated in one area. Far more likely, most of it would be buffeted by the wind and land relatively gently (think about what might happen if an airplane could trail a thousand-mile-long sheet of paper behind it, then let it go midair). Probably not something you want to be standing under, but neither is a kid dropping rocks off a bridge. It's not going to cause global devastation and turn the equator into "a prominent physical feature".
Most of that trilogy was good, but that part was either pure research fail or was intentionally done wrong for the sake of artistic license to create a catastrophic event in-story.
I've seen proposals that talk about using a ribbon that is only just barely larger than is needed to support itself for the initial strand. Send it up in a conventional rocket (at the time this was discussed, they talked about using a Saturn V or possibly even the Space Shuttle; these days a Falcon 9 Heavy would probably be enough or even more-than) to geosync and have it unspool in both directions from there. Grab the lowered end as it reaches earth. Then, send up a small climber, carrying another, possibly even smaller strand of ribbon. Join it to the first one. Now you have a stronger ribbon. Repeat (potentially with increasingly large builder-climbers) until you have a strong enough ribbon for whatever you want to do (send up people, or ISS modules, or other satellites, or parts for a Project Orion-style nuclear pulse rocket to be constructed in space... you get the idea).
I don't know how feasible all the steps there are, but it's worth considering as an alternative to sending up the entire thing all at once.
Or construction workers (somebody had to build those spaceships and space stations, after all). Or traders/merchants/shippers/etc. since interstellar, much less interplanetary, commerce was very much a thing that people were doing. Or technicians, to keep that infrastructure running. Or colonists, off to settle other worlds. Or emigrants, moving to one of those colonies after the initial settlement. Or tourists, heading to Risa (or any of the other pleasant parts of the galaxy reachable by warp drive). Or any of surely many more classes of people...
Sure, the show focused on scientists and military (although it might be more accurate to describe the Enterprise's mission as exploration rather than true science, even though they certainly had scientists aboard). But there were lots of other people out there. Even the original series had some of that. The later shows expanded on it a great deal. The Enterprise D had families aboard; it was more like a mobile city than the exploration ships of old.
Also, you don't know that people were stuck. That was never claimed, that I can recall. Many people may never have felt the need to leave - planets are big places, after all, and an impulse-speed shuttle can get you from one side to the other in a matter of minutes (it would be seconds, but you ought to get out of the atmosphere before lighting off a fusion drive) even if you can't just use a transporter - but I'll bet plenty of people would have had families or friends on Mars or something, and gone to visit them (a voyage of minutes from earth if you can even reach warp 1, hours at worst if limited to impulse).
If WBC member came into my (hypothetical) store wearing a "God hates fags" shirt, then you better believe I'd refuse them service. Not because of their affiliations, but because of their hateful and discriminatory message to everybody around them. If they came in, bought a common random item off the shelf and paid for it quietly and politely, I'd take their money same as anybody else... I wouldn't even know who they were. If I recognized them by the name on the credit card I'd feel kind of dirty about it, but whatever.
That doesn't mean I'd support their organization, mind you. If the WBC got hacked by Anonymous and they tried to hire me to help secure their computers, I would probably refuse.
The difference, by the way, is that the WBC hurts people. They actively seek to cause harm to others. Being gay hurts nobody. Not me personally, not my friends or family, not the people around them, and not even themselves (at least, not in any way that they can help; the "being gay is a choice" crowd always makes me wonder what is wrong with their brain, because given the discrimination they face, who the hell would *choose* that life?). Being a member of the WBC and picketing military funerals with hateful signs and slogans? Totally a choice. Same, incidentally, for Neo-Nazis and for Catholics... the difference being that most Catholics (unlike the other two groups) aren't out to ruin other people's lives. I wouldn't let them preach in the store, though...
Well, and gender identity and a few other things. It's not *only* going to affect gays, if it passes.
It will definitely affect them, though, despite not actually saying anything to that effect whatsoever.
Good for you (and I say that sincerely, not sarcastically). There's a lot to be said for staying and fighting. On the other hand, picking up and leaving is a form of protest as well; as you note, the concept of thousands of jobs moving out of the state is a concern that motivates people to reconsider things. Still... I'd be willing to attend a rally in Arizona, if it was big enough and I could take the time for travel. I would not, given what I've read and heard in the (almost entirely non-mainstream) news and from people who've been or lived there, want to stay for very long. It's not the weather, either.
As for my co-workers, they were from Phoenix or nearby, and don't really seem to miss the desert on a day-to-day basis (we've got a good chunk of desert ourselves, a few hours drive east). One of them went to our San Francisco office instead of coming up to WA; I don't know him very well. The others, though, say they basically wanted to work "anywhere but Arizona." Maybe it isn't actually that bad, but that was their perception. They are, to the best of my knowledge, straight white cis-gender males with college degrees and good job prospects too, so they probably weren't facing any particularly strong prejudice personally, either.
Hell, you can get that much just by reading the bible. The only reason I'd worship such an undeserving cretin is if it had the power to compel me to do so. I see no evidence that it does (or that it even exists). Don't bother with the "creator" bit either; the Abrahamic God is the deadbeat dad to beat all deadbeat dads (literally, if you believe the relevant religious texts). I don't respect them, why the fuck should I respect Him?
Religion co-opted marriage and turned it into a religious thing millennia ago, but before that it was about as secular as things got. True, it was a kind of awful arrangement in a lot of the world, with the wife either effectively or literally being property of the husband (a man typically purchased his wife-to-be from her father), but most of the world also openly practiced slavery back then... Anyhow, it was a business arrangement, generally enforced by whatever secular law there was in that time and place, that essentially said
A) I have a right to this woman
B) I have a right to her children
C) Those (male) children have a right to inherit from me.
Obviously, I'm simplifying and combining a number of somewhat different systems, but it was no more a religious ceremony than setting sail in a ship was (i.e. you might ask the gods for blessings on the woman's fertility and childrens' health, just as you might ask for calm seas and favorable winds, or for strength and protection before going into battle). In places with a codified set of laws, marriages were reported to the government (actually, much as they are today). The question of who presided over them varies widely, and was indeed sometimes a priest or shaman (and sometimes was nobody but the relevant families or even just fathers), but it wasn't generally considered a religious institution until just a few thousand years ago (early human civilizations, and their belief systems and governments, go back much further than that).
In any case, marriage in the US has always been a matter of secular law, at least at the federal level. You can get a religious ceremony performed if you want, but that is neither sufficient nor necessary to be considered married (my grandmother "married" her third "husband" in a religious but non-legal ceremony to assuage her guilt at "living in sin" without overly complicating her inheritance; the ceremony was lovely but had no secular recognition). The right to grant marriage licenses is owned by the states, and some states might hypothetically refuse to grant them if not approved by a member of some recognized religion or similar bullshit, but it is the state governments and not the religious institutions that decide who is married, and it is the state-granted marriage licenses that the federal government recognizes. That was the major aspect of the DOMA that was struck down last year: the idea that the federal government could refuse to recognize a state-issued marriage license just because the couple were of the same sex.
Thus, aside from the terminology (which really is *not* inherently religious, despite what various clergy might have you believe) the secular benefits and protections are already tied to a secular institution.
You kind of missed the point of my post, didn't you?
I never stated, or even implied, that 2 launches was the goal. Nor did I claim or imply that it's all they would be able to achieve. I merely pointed out that even a single re-use would cut costs dramatically (probably by a factor of 1/3 to just shy of 1/2, the rocket being the majority cost of each flight). SpaceX are, obviously, going for far more than a twice-usable rocket. With that said, some parts probably will need to be downchecked and replaced after each flight. Probably not half the components, though, and it's quite likely that most of them will be reusable without anything worse than some inspection and maybe a little cleaning.
I have no idea what the average life expectancy of the parts will come out to be (or how many of them will be later able to be returned to service for lower cost than rebuilding them, which is probably significant), but hey, baby steps. When they use the same rocket for its second orbital launch, it will be a great day for space travel. When they do it for the 20th launch, it will still be amazing but at that point the marginal value of one more launch has gone way down compared to the marginal value of that second launch.
It will be interesting to see, over the next couple decades, how reusable rocketry failure rates shake out. Do they increase steadily over time and number of launches, the way one might expect? Or does a rocket that manages one complete liftoff and recovery without failure have a better chance of making it to twenty than one right off the factory floor has of making it to two? Is there a point where fatigue will make it more economical to replace the rocket anyhow, rather than continually recertifying it, or will it be cheaper to just keep going, making small repairs as needed and upgrades as appropriate, and only manufacture complete new rockets to meet increased capacity demands?
Any way you look at it, this is going to be an exciting era for space travel.
TL;DR: It's anti-people, and businesses are made up of people
It's not very "pro-business" when it makes it hard to hire people to work there! The west-coast culture, which by-and-large embraces different sexual orientations and gender identities, is very prevalent in computer culture as well (largely because many of the best computer tech universities, and best computer industry jobs, are in California or Washington). Most of those people - even those who are cis and straight - aren't going to want to work in a state that has given official sanction to homophobia and transphobia. Ignoring the jokes about Apple fans (I don't like their products, but I have no problem with their hiring practices), this would likely be a problem for any major tech company. They simply can't afford to build a major location in a state where they're going to have to write off a significant number of potential employees simply due to the political environment.
Sheesh, as if "papers, please" wasn't enough! Arizona really does seem to want to shoot itself in the foot...
We hired one guy from Arizona. He was overjoyed to move to Seattle and had no trouble convincing a couple other guys to do so too. Dude landed a huge referral bonus before his first six months at the company were up. People want *out* of that state!
I think that's part of their genius in using in-mall showrooms. Not only does it let them use a nice small space to show off their cars, they can put them where everybody will see the car and can come ask questions about it. Very few people will go to a dealership just to look at new models unless they already plan to buy one (partially, of course, because car dealers are often quite annoying people). Almost everybody goes to the mall, though, and if they can see first-hand how awesome a car Tesla makes, it could influence their decisions on when they next want to buy a car.
I wanted to read TFA (no, I'm not new here) to see if they said anything about that... but apparently CR can't take a slashdotting? Lame.
Consumer Reports controls the Nobel prize committee, or at least did in 2008? Whoa, when did that happen?