I'm sorry, but what on earth are you talking about?
A gentleman's agreement between the respective military-industrial-complexes, really.
Why would any industrial interest *limit* the usage of new, advanced -- read EXPENSIVE -- weapons system? This is akin to Intel lobbying for a law limiting processors to 1 GHz.
Someone on/. always screws up the Geneva Convention angle whenever a military laser story hits the frontpage, though I admit this is a new way to do it...the first Geneva Protocol on limiting weaponry was passed in 1899. I doubt that "military-industrial complexes" even existed then.
The underlying tenet of this whole article is: "If X has not been proven and approved by the scientific community then you are a laughable ignoramus for believing it might be true."
Close, but you're still wrong. When we're discussing something like UFOs, ESP, or the like, we're discussing phenomena with (what SHOULD be) readily observable empirical effects. If mindreading is possible, why has no respectable psychological journal published a study indicating so? If UFOs are visiting the earth, why is there no better evidence than all-too-fallible human testimony?
The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, of course. Short of some a priori demonstration that ESP cannot occur, which we don't have, we must remain open to the possibility that it exists -- but until at least some evidence is mustered for it, and repeatable phenomena are reliably observed and cannot be explained with current theory, we're obliged to remain skeptics.
This is the essence of the scientific outlook. If the author didn't lay that out explicitly for the people who believe weird things of the title, it's because it was published in Scientific American, whose readership probably already knows these things. If you still don't get it, go pick up one of Carl Sagan's works on scientific philosophy. You'll thank yourself.
At least one of these technical objections is pretty much dead wrong. Kinetic energy at the bottom of Earth's gravity well is not equal to the potential energy achieved when a rocket reaches orbit; much energy has been lost to drag by the atmosphere on the way up. (Space elevator sled moves in the hundreds of kilometers/hour, rocket at thousands, drag grows as square of velocity, etc...)
Much bigger problem with the argument that energy required is equal: the rocket carries its fuel all the way up, whereas the sled's fuel lives at the bottom of the cable in a nuclear reactor or other electrical power plant, then is transmitted up via laser beam (according to the article) or maybe through the cable. Given how much of the Shuttle's mass is fuel at takeoff (I don't feel like getting great stats, but to give you an idea, the SRBs burn 5 tons of fuel per second), this gives us huge energy savings on lifting payloads with the elevator.
The other technical concerns are engineering problems, and I'm going to throw in with the optimists on those. (What's more wild-eyed...putting a big, strong rack in orbit, or negating gravity?) And as far as the political concerns go, I guess that's why there aren't any multinational manufacturing concerns in those poor equitorial countries, right?
...under the Geneva convention its against the rules to build a weapon that can only maim or mutilate somebody...
Not necessarily. The Geneva Conventions actually require that soldiers use full metal jacket rounds in their personal weapons because they tend to punch small, neat holes in people. This increases the probability of the victim only being wounded as compared to someone struck by a hollow-point round, which type tends to make much larger, messier holes.
In fact, the Geneva Conventions on weapons are intended to eliminate the use of certain variants of weapons that are extremely likely to be fatal in favor of variants that are more likely to wound. The distaste for lasers which only blind comes from the permanance of the injury; a person can recover more or less fully from getting shot by an FMJ round, but there's no way to give a person their sight back. The International Red Cross has a lot of documentation on this:
I've said it CONTROL-ALT-DELETE as long as I've known what that key combo did, but when I actually hit the buttons, it's ALT-CONTROL-DELETE. Why? Because I use the ALT and CONTROL buttons on the right side of the keyboard, so I can do it all with one hand...and in that case, I *am* going from left to right. Maybe that's why Gore writes it as he does.
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I'm sorry, but what on earth are you talking about?
/. always screws up the Geneva Convention angle whenever a military laser story hits the frontpage, though I admit this is a new way to do it...the first Geneva Protocol on limiting weaponry was passed in 1899. I doubt that "military-industrial complexes" even existed then.
A gentleman's agreement between the respective military-industrial-complexes, really.
Why would any industrial interest *limit* the usage of new, advanced -- read EXPENSIVE -- weapons system? This is akin to Intel lobbying for a law limiting processors to 1 GHz.
Someone on
The underlying tenet of this whole article is: "If X has not been proven and approved by the scientific community then you are a laughable ignoramus for believing it might be true."
Close, but you're still wrong. When we're discussing something like UFOs, ESP, or the like, we're discussing phenomena with (what SHOULD be) readily observable empirical effects. If mindreading is possible, why has no respectable psychological journal published a study indicating so? If UFOs are visiting the earth, why is there no better evidence than all-too-fallible human testimony?
The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, of course. Short of some a priori demonstration that ESP cannot occur, which we don't have, we must remain open to the possibility that it exists -- but until at least some evidence is mustered for it, and repeatable phenomena are reliably observed and cannot be explained with current theory, we're obliged to remain skeptics.
This is the essence of the scientific outlook. If the author didn't lay that out explicitly for the people who believe weird things of the title, it's because it was published in Scientific American, whose readership probably already knows these things. If you still don't get it, go pick up one of Carl Sagan's works on scientific philosophy. You'll thank yourself.
At least one of these technical objections is pretty much dead wrong. Kinetic energy at the bottom of Earth's gravity well is not equal to the potential energy achieved when a rocket reaches orbit; much energy has been lost to drag by the atmosphere on the way up. (Space elevator sled moves in the hundreds of kilometers/hour, rocket at thousands, drag grows as square of velocity, etc...)
Much bigger problem with the argument that energy required is equal: the rocket carries its fuel all the way up, whereas the sled's fuel lives at the bottom of the cable in a nuclear reactor or other electrical power plant, then is transmitted up via laser beam (according to the article) or maybe through the cable. Given how much of the Shuttle's mass is fuel at takeoff (I don't feel like getting great stats, but to give you an idea, the SRBs burn 5 tons of fuel per second), this gives us huge energy savings on lifting payloads with the elevator.
The other technical concerns are engineering problems, and I'm going to throw in with the optimists on those. (What's more wild-eyed...putting a big, strong rack in orbit, or negating gravity?) And as far as the political concerns go, I guess that's why there aren't any multinational manufacturing concerns in those poor equitorial countries, right?
...under the Geneva convention its against the rules to build a weapon that can only maim or mutilate somebody...
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Not necessarily. The Geneva Conventions actually require that soldiers use full metal jacket rounds in their personal weapons because they tend to punch small, neat holes in people. This increases the probability of the victim only being wounded as compared to someone struck by a hollow-point round, which type tends to make much larger, messier holes.
http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/385ec082b509e76c41256
In fact, the Geneva Conventions on weapons are intended to eliminate the use of certain variants of weapons that are extremely likely to be fatal in favor of variants that are more likely to wound. The distaste for lasers which only blind comes from the permanance of the injury; a person can recover more or less fully from getting shot by an FMJ round, but there's no way to give a person their sight back. The International Red Cross has a lot of documentation on this:
http://www.icrc.org/Web/eng/siteeng0.nsf/html/57K
I've said it CONTROL-ALT-DELETE as long as I've known what that key combo did, but when I actually hit the buttons, it's ALT-CONTROL-DELETE. Why? Because I use the ALT and CONTROL buttons on the right side of the keyboard, so I can do it all with one hand...and in that case, I *am* going from left to right. Maybe that's why Gore writes it as he does.