I'm living 50 miles away from SF, and I was in the city (driving through) only about twice in last ten years (it's less convenient, though possible, to get to North Bay through other routes like 580.) Tourism-wise, I have no desire whatsoever to visit San Francisco; there are plenty of other places to see in California and elsewhere. For statistics, I did hear about the case, but it is only one of many effects of city policies. Other problems that you mention also flow from the same cause - from city fathers that are just as competent as the folks in Sacramento.
it's not at all inconceivable that Childs could cause damage to that network if he chose to do so.
You are correct, of course. Childs should be immediately lobotomized, or if the procedure appears to be unreliable then he should be just killed. He knows too much and can never be released. His possible future crime must be prevented at any cost. Same applies to all future sysadmins of SF - once they learn the network (a few weeks on the job, perhaps) they will have to be destroyed.
I doubt that Dell pays Microsoft 60 days ahead of time for software that they are going to copy onto a new harddrive
There is another reason to not pay ahead of time - the financial one. With Dell's volume, paying months in advance will result in a tidy sum of money that is on a permanent, no-interest loan to Microsoft. The current business practice is completely opposite - under the "net 30" rule Dell would pay Microsoft not later than 30 days *after* Dell created a copy.
An AC already replied to your comment, but it's worth repeating - "you have to start somewhere", this rule applies to everyone, including tyrants and their secret police. Even the kind of police that you mentioned wasn't born overnight with full powers and with torture tools at the ready. Everything is sold to the public as a good, necessary thing, and then it is modified by further laws and events until it becomes something else entirely, and you are left wondering how could it happen.
In this particular case the practice of searching laptops (among others) is cementing the power of authorities. Far from being a limited government with enumerated functions, it assigns rights and responsibilities to itself exactly as you'd expect a career-obsessed bureaucrat to do. The more duties the careerist has the more irreplaceable and important he becomes, even if he fails at many of these duties. Same with governments. Once they have fingers on every button such as, fictionally, finances, industry, healthcare - on top of traditionally mandated ones like wars - it makes itself an essential part of the society and acquires nearly unrestricted power over your freedom and life. There is even a word for a society where the rulers exercise absolute power over population; it's called a dictatorship. The dictator doesn't have to be a single person, USSR and China amply proved that.
Who then Falcon should believe - Apple marketing or his own lying eyes? Even Apple is cautious, they say "up to 7-8 hours", this means "definitely not longer than 7-8 hours". A battery that dies in 30 minutes will match this claim. There is not a word on Apple's Web site about guaranteed battery life.
Refining the above consists mainly of heating them enough to drive off the oxygen. [not sure about Al]
I'm not a chemist, but from whatever I remember oxygen bonds are very strong (and oxygen oxidizes many things.) Aluminum can't be extracted from an oxide just by melting it - we do that already on Earth, but molten oxide is just that. Electrolysis is required, and you need power of a nearby hydro power plant, not mere smattering of solar panels.
In general terms indeed, "the moon dust" has oxygen (40%), silicon (20%) and iron (12%). This means little because oxygen is bound. Your common river sand, SiO(2) also has oxygen and silicon. Now go and try to break oxygen free. Melt the sand if you wish, the world can always use another sheet of glass:-) Not surprisingly, pure Si is made with carbon. There is a new process, however, which may do the trick, and the link specifically mentions processing of lunar soil. At this moment, however, the FFC Cambridge Process is just a lab bench experiment.
Building solar furnaces consists of:
- inflating a balloon of the correct shape.
The shape needs to be parabolic, and the balloon needs to be oriented properly (with focus at the metal, not on a neighboring building.) The size of that dish will have to be enormous, and towers to hold it upright must be produced first. I'm afraid it also must track the Sun, which makes the whole project all but impossible even if there is a location on the Moon (on a pole?) where Sun can be always seen. That issue also applies to solar panels; I think as a backup they are great, but the primary power source should be [thermo]nuclear, with all that talk about free He(3) there.
Oxygen is for burning out carbon from pig iron - not an issue when you've got iron ore with no carbon in it that is vacuum-refined.
Iron ore Fe(2)O(3) has no carbon; carbon is actually an essential part of the smelting process; it is used to remove oxygen, and then excess carbon is removed itself:
Iron ores consists of oxygen and iron atoms bonded together into molecules. To convert it to metallic iron it must be smelted or sent through a direct reduction process to remove the oxygen. Oxygen-iron bonds are strong, and to remove the iron from the oxygen, a stronger elemental bond must be presented to attach to the oxygen. Carbon is used because the strength of a carbon-oxygen bond is greater than that of the iron-oxygen bond, at high temperatures. Thus, the iron ore must be powdered and mixed with coke, to be burnt in the smelting process.
You ship a few critical parts for a starter mill and bootstrap from there.
I fully agree with that. This is why I am so skeptical that today's primitive rockets can do the job. But once you have, say, antigravity you can easily make big things on one planet, ship them to another until an industry is set up there, and repeat from there. Bootstrapping it from your backpacks will cost large number of lives, several waves will probably fail, and it will take forever.
Do it by remote control using operators ON THE MOON
This requires one operator per machine (as you say, Just because the on-site personnel are pricey so you want as much done automatically as possible.) Can't have so many people on the Moon before an infrastructure is built. Many proposals that were floating around focus on semi-automatic machinery that requires not an operator but an overseer. Then a 10-20 men colony can control a few hundred machines, and then those machines can gather enough resources. IMO, if we can't put together a few stupid excavation robots (but can build robots that drive on public roads for hundreds of miles!) then we have no business being on the Moon - we just aren't serious.
I guess it's possible, but it's a lot of empty space to fill with air. Per Ungrounded Lightning below, there is oxygen in moon minerals, but I don't see nitrogen there, and 78% of our atmosphere is nitrogen. Even if that is done and the mine is filled, you need airlocks at all places where something (people or ore) enters or leaves. You also must heat the air within the mine all the time (the Moon is cold.) And what is the backup plan if an airlock fails and hundreds of miners are exposed to vacuum, without ready access to a spacesuit? There are also cracks in the rock, natural openings that you can't see but the atmosphere will escape through them just as well as through a faulty airlock.
One possibility is to work in light spacesuits *and* fill the mine with some gas that may be not useful for breathing but at least will prevent instant death in case of an accident. That will allow, if necessary, to remove the spacesuit from an injured person and only leave him a small breathing mask like on airplanes. Also if an airlock fails and the filler gas is lost the light spacesuits will be sufficient for miners to get to a proper shelter.
Finally, posting to sci.space, Gregory Bennett discussed an actual space incident
That's too minor to even mention in this context. This is not the kind of injury workers get on a new planet. "You make a step, fall through, drop 50 feet, rip your spacesuit and break both legs" - this is more like it. Or heavy machinery accidents. We are talking here about building a whole industry on the Moon, not about some lab technicians moving beakers with tweezers; STS astronauts are more like lab technicians, considering what they actually do on the mission. Very few missions required dangerous activity like moving of heavy modules, and those who did not always went smoothly - I recall damaged solar panels, wedged rail carts, pins installed backwards, etc. In a real Moon colony the first thing people have to do will be driving bulldozers, blasting mountains, raising masts and towers, digging caves - those are all dangerous jobs even on Earth, and if something is wrong you don't get a 1/8" hole in a glove and a mosquito-bite like "wound", you get whipped by a torn steel cable 3" in diameter, and you ought to be happy if you retain most of your extremities after that.
In real world there is still an occasional need for a strong man wielding a heavy hammer, and with that come accidents. And if you want to do all that by remote control, do it from Earth. We already have robots that are sufficiently smart to not fall into a ravine; can't say the same about humans, especially when that human is a geologist highly interested in getting into some deep hole, hitting the wall a few times and not even worrying that something may fall onto his head.
"It is very unlikely that a human suddenly exposed to a vacuum would have more than 5 to 10 seconds to help himself. If immediate help is at hand, although one's appearance and condition will be grave, it is reasonable to assume that recompression to a tolerable pressure (200 mm Hg, 3.8 psia) within 60 to 90 seconds could result in survival, and possibly in rather rapid recovery."
It is rare even on Earth, with our concentration of people, that an accident victim can be helped within 60 to 90 seconds. Look at auto racing - there are teams ready to go on a moment's notice, and they do go even before the debris stops flying - and nevertheless they need about half a minute to just reach the site of an accident. Then you need to access the victim and do whatever needs to be done.
So imagine that you are a worker on the Moon. A small avalanche immobilizes you and tears your spacesuit in a few places. If you haven't radioed for help within seconds you are as good as dead. If you have a buddy always with you, chances are that the buddy is sharing your fate. If he was keeping his distance then he is welcome to start lifting stones - he has at most 90 seconds to free you, patch your suit up and recompress from a spare oxygen bottle. Secondary damage, like severe bleeding, can be controlled on Earth but is impossible to stop on the Moon. If the guy bleeds to death, or drowns in his vomit, or has a heart attack, blame vacuum - these are often survivable situations when a rescuer has access to the body of the victim.
Given that even on Earth the buddy system is used only rarely, on most dangerous missions (diving, fire, nuclear) - what is the likelihood that a Moon team will include people who do nothing but just tag along and watch your back? We routinely have police officers doing potentially deadly traffic stops alone; we have miners who work in their own section of the mine; we have steel mill workers who control rivers of fire alone; we have air traffic controllers who make decisions about life or death without anyone available to look over their shoulder and, once in a year, shout "belay that order." I don't say it's a good thing, but if we operate like that on Earth, where a buddy is relatively easy to get, what chances does the Moon have?
For starters, it's a LOT cheaper to mine, refine, and launch material for space-based industry on the Moon than on the Earth.
You are missing a smiley here:-) It is definitely cheaper to launch stuff from the Moon if you have a cat-a-pult already. But where do you see metal ores on the Moon? Some refining processes require amazing quantities of energy, water, oxygen and other very specific ingredients that I'd be amazed if they just sit on the surface. And how do you "spiral out" a construction of a steel mill that weighs a few million tons and measures power in gigawatts? It can't be built without all the supporting industries being already in place.
Mining on Earth is already dangerous and difficult even though we don't need to do it in spacesuits. On the Moon the vacuum will be a major killer because an accident that on Earth leaves you with a minor wound will puncture your spacesuit and you'll be dead as a mummy before anyone can pull you to safety. There are all kinds of costs and dangers associated with Moon mining and refining, and it is absurd to suggest that they can be done there cheaper than on Earth (unless we terraform Moon or Earth.)
All the talk about cybernetic mining machines is just talk until I see a herd of them here, on Earth, mining something useful (like Uranium ore) completely autonomously and with minimum maintenance. If you need a spare part it will cost $50 million per delivery. Let's see how that helps to make Moon mining cheaper.
In my personal opinion, humankind will not get anywhere until a new propulsion method is discovered. Chemical rockets barely can lift a handful of people onto LEO. Nuclear rockets using something like water as reaction mass may be usable, but water is precious in space. Physics research does not go any faster if a Moon colony is set up (unless you expect to find some ET cache of knowledge.) NASA funding would be better spent on basic science, and whatever remains can be used to send cheap but resilient robots to neighboring planets. This is similar to space travel - a ship sent 100 years later will overtake the ship sent earlier earlier because it will move faster due to advances in propulsion methods.
The employer only has to try really hard to get the one employee that they really want, but even that one interviewee makes it easy on them.
Unless that "one employee" is miles ahead of other applicants, he can lose his leading position if he asks unwelcome questions. In other words, unless you are irreplaceable, unique person you will reduce your chances by asking such questions. It will be also unwise to think that the answers you get are truthful. Interviewers are also humans, and if they don't like you personally (or if they see you as a potential threat to their own positions) they can easily tell you that the company is simply awful without ever actually saying those words. Then you decline the offer and they laugh all the way to the bank.
The situation doesn't need to be this unequal.
It doesn't need to be, but it is. There are too many workers and too few employers. Why that is so? Many reasons, but the main one is that it's hard to compete with Asia. The number of markets where such competition is beyond hope is growing with every passing day. In one word, US labor is too expensive for the world market. It's not too expensive only in a handful of areas, like top notch R&D, where there is no competition yet.
I don't need offers from many companies especially ones that are a poor match. I only need one offer from a company that I wouldn't mind working for.
You presume that you will understand everything about the company within those five minutes, based on non-verifiable answers of strangers, and that those strangers represent an average employee. IMO all of these assumptions are wrong.
You simply give the company an extra chance to reject your application. Better if the rejection comes from you and not from them. Other offers - if you get any - may be worse.
That means that they are perpetrated by people who are not what you would typically call criminals until they actually commit the act.
You are right, and we should be glad that Othello had no weapon on him when he confronted Desdemona. Otherwise he could kill her, in a "not premeditated or planned" way. "She was really lucky this way", said Nina Reiser.
You know, pull-down menus are pretty confusing to first-time users, too.
But they are not "in your face". People can work Word just fine without ever using the menu bar. Standard toolbars have everything for a common man. And those toolbars don't flicker on their own, so once you learn where the "Open File" button is, it's always there and the mouse movement is automatic. With ribbon you always need to look and comprehend why you see something else where another button was just a moment ago. That "feature" requires learning the whole palette of ribbons just to figure out where you are each time you need something.
Also, menus are structured far better. Everything insertable is generally under "Insert", everything about tables is in "Table" etc. In ribbons of MS Office some functions are duplicated, some are bound to the right-click event, and some are simply impossible to find. I remember looking for a footnote for 10 minutes; I did find it somewhere, but if I need to do that again I have no clue how that ribbon/button looks like.
Also, not everyone is image-oriented. There is a reason why most languages on Earth use limited character set, and why Chinese and Japanese and Korean scripts (CJK) [plus a couple more] are so hard to learn. Humans do better with fewer characters and longer words because our ability to distinguish shapes is not as good as our ability to form one complex object out of several simple ones.
is probably the #1 reason that people don't use styles
IMO people don't use styles because styles are a programming concept that they have no knowledge of and no educatonal base for. People use WYSIWYG because it's easier for them, even when it requires tons of manual, hopefully coordinated changes all over the document. It is infinitely easier for anyone but a programmer to select a word and then click on "Bold" and "Red" instead of first creating a Red_Bold style and then attaching it to the word. A style is such an OOP concept that even an early C coder could be confused, let alone a non-programmer. This is also one of several reasons why [La]Tex is used only by scientists - they understand its logic far better than a mess of invisible formatting in Word.
That's exactly what I do (I have a 2005 Prius.) However at some ratio between driving and towing [for instance] - 90% to 10% in your example elsewhere - the owner has to consider the overhead of renting. This overhead may be considerable even if you need a truck only a couple days per week: the rent will be $70/day + taxes and you need to arrange the rental, do the paperwork, get the truck, return the truck... it could be a lot of wasted time. You also need to include the total travelled distance because wasted fuel is proportional to that; if you drive little then a truck is more appealing.
Why doesn't someone on Slashdot come up with a creative way for the RIAA or MPAA to make lots of money given the current market trends?
Because the {RI,MP}AA, in the current market, should not exist in their current form. You explain it yourself.
Musicians may still need promoters and financial backers and recording studios - it's their personal decision - but a monopoly that does all these services for a simple flat fee of all your current and future earnings (plus all your copyrights are belong to us) is probably not a best option. But I think RIAA will be holding this ground until they are completely eliminated from the market, just like SCO. This is because the only other option for them is to dissolve their gigantic business and switch to a totally different revenue model.
Their current revenue model is nothing but slavery; artists are brought in, and once they sign on the dotted line they are RIAA's property. Then they use artists for profit; they retain profit and feed artists, just as it was done to real slaves.
This can't last. The new model would be services to artists, where artists retain rights on their creations, make decisions, etc. and RIAA members act just as lawyers, advisers, bankers - as service industry. When I use services of a plumber he doesn't become an owner of my bathroom; if I need a lawyer I don't expect him to claim rights on my house or my car. They only get paid for the work they do.
Unfortunately if RIAA suddenly loses its mind and decides to do honest work (as I just described) then they will have to seriously downsize. There would be no money to pay big bucks to hundreds of RIAA executives. Only people who perform actual services, who work with artists to artists' satisfaction, will be paid. So that's one reason why RIAA will stick to its guns for as long as they can. If things get worse only the top management of RIAA will be employed, and they will be paid by copyrights that RIAA wrestled out of artists over years.
I'm specifically curious as to why the "car minders" as you call them don't happen lots in other parts of the world.
Such small-time racketeering must be tolerated by the police in order to be worthwhile. So the society must first decay enough so that it's safe for a man to issue threats right in the public street and get away with it. Corruption of the police is usually required.
Sorry to reply to myself, but there is another interesting fact. Say I have AT&T cell phone.
If I call another AT&T cell phone user and leave a voice mail then the call is completely free. AT&T gains nothing here, and only loses money on longer announcements.
If I call an AT&T land line user then the he is very likely to have his own answering machine or a PBX. AT&T is not in control of that, and if I'm forced to wade through a complex voice mail system AT&T has nothing to do with it. It gains money from me, but it's just a stroke of luck.
If I call a cell phone that is not AT&T then AT&T earns money on me wasting time. This is the only case that matters. However chances of calling a cell phone and being sent to voice mail are far lower than calling someone's desk or home. People tend to have cell phones with them all the time.
So the space of possible scenarios where AT&T profits is now even narrower than I thought.
For the record, when I *listen* to my AT&T voice mail it says this (when it has messages:) "You have one message, July 30, 11:16am, [plays the message]" - there is nothing else. So I don't waste any air minutes regardless of how many instructions were played to the caller. Now, if I leave 10 voice mails for someone else, from my cell phone, every single day - that would only mean that I'm doing business calls from my cell phone, which is stupid. If you use land line then you pay nothing.
This means that the whole "mountain out of the molehill" even exists when:
You are leaving voice mail using your cell phone
You are leaving *lots* of voice mail every day
I would more gladly support this cause if it were explained as a fight against wasting people's time - regardless of what phone line they are using or whether there is any impact on their phone costs. Waste of time is real. However voice mail adds very little cost, if any. I presume that aside from leaving voice mail the same person also talks to live people, and that eats far more air time than some voice mail. Besides, as other posters indicated, you can often skip the announcements by pressing '*' or '#'.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm living 50 miles away from SF, and I was in the city (driving through) only about twice in last ten years (it's less convenient, though possible, to get to North Bay through other routes like 580.) Tourism-wise, I have no desire whatsoever to visit San Francisco; there are plenty of other places to see in California and elsewhere. For statistics, I did hear about the case, but it is only one of many effects of city policies. Other problems that you mention also flow from the same cause - from city fathers that are just as competent as the folks in Sacramento.
it's not at all inconceivable that Childs could cause damage to that network if he chose to do so.
You are correct, of course. Childs should be immediately lobotomized, or if the procedure appears to be unreliable then he should be just killed. He knows too much and can never be released. His possible future crime must be prevented at any cost. Same applies to all future sysadmins of SF - once they learn the network (a few weeks on the job, perhaps) they will have to be destroyed.
It was broken for me for at least 3 hours this morning.
I doubt that Dell pays Microsoft 60 days ahead of time for software that they are going to copy onto a new harddrive
There is another reason to not pay ahead of time - the financial one. With Dell's volume, paying months in advance will result in a tidy sum of money that is on a permanent, no-interest loan to Microsoft. The current business practice is completely opposite - under the "net 30" rule Dell would pay Microsoft not later than 30 days *after* Dell created a copy.
An AC already replied to your comment, but it's worth repeating - "you have to start somewhere", this rule applies to everyone, including tyrants and their secret police. Even the kind of police that you mentioned wasn't born overnight with full powers and with torture tools at the ready. Everything is sold to the public as a good, necessary thing, and then it is modified by further laws and events until it becomes something else entirely, and you are left wondering how could it happen.
In this particular case the practice of searching laptops (among others) is cementing the power of authorities. Far from being a limited government with enumerated functions, it assigns rights and responsibilities to itself exactly as you'd expect a career-obsessed bureaucrat to do. The more duties the careerist has the more irreplaceable and important he becomes, even if he fails at many of these duties. Same with governments. Once they have fingers on every button such as, fictionally, finances, industry, healthcare - on top of traditionally mandated ones like wars - it makes itself an essential part of the society and acquires nearly unrestricted power over your freedom and life. There is even a word for a society where the rulers exercise absolute power over population; it's called a dictatorship. The dictator doesn't have to be a single person, USSR and China amply proved that.
but if you do work on the road, you're now going to be carrying around two laptops (plus accessories for both)
Buy the work laptop of the same model as one you have already. Then you only need to carry your personal HDD while on the road.
Who then Falcon should believe - Apple marketing or his own lying eyes? Even Apple is cautious, they say "up to 7-8 hours", this means "definitely not longer than 7-8 hours". A battery that dies in 30 minutes will match this claim. There is not a word on Apple's Web site about guaranteed battery life.
Refining the above consists mainly of heating them enough to drive off the oxygen. [not sure about Al]
I'm not a chemist, but from whatever I remember oxygen bonds are very strong (and oxygen oxidizes many things.) Aluminum can't be extracted from an oxide just by melting it - we do that already on Earth, but molten oxide is just that. Electrolysis is required, and you need power of a nearby hydro power plant, not mere smattering of solar panels.
In general terms indeed, "the moon dust" has oxygen (40%), silicon (20%) and iron (12%). This means little because oxygen is bound. Your common river sand, SiO(2) also has oxygen and silicon. Now go and try to break oxygen free. Melt the sand if you wish, the world can always use another sheet of glass :-) Not surprisingly, pure Si is made with carbon. There is a new process, however, which may do the trick, and the link specifically mentions processing of lunar soil. At this moment, however, the FFC Cambridge Process is just a lab bench experiment.
Building solar furnaces consists of: - inflating a balloon of the correct shape.
The shape needs to be parabolic, and the balloon needs to be oriented properly (with focus at the metal, not on a neighboring building.) The size of that dish will have to be enormous, and towers to hold it upright must be produced first. I'm afraid it also must track the Sun, which makes the whole project all but impossible even if there is a location on the Moon (on a pole?) where Sun can be always seen. That issue also applies to solar panels; I think as a backup they are great, but the primary power source should be [thermo]nuclear, with all that talk about free He(3) there.
Oxygen is for burning out carbon from pig iron - not an issue when you've got iron ore with no carbon in it that is vacuum-refined.
Iron ore Fe(2)O(3) has no carbon; carbon is actually an essential part of the smelting process; it is used to remove oxygen, and then excess carbon is removed itself:
You ship a few critical parts for a starter mill and bootstrap from there.
I fully agree with that. This is why I am so skeptical that today's primitive rockets can do the job. But once you have, say, antigravity you can easily make big things on one planet, ship them to another until an industry is set up there, and repeat from there. Bootstrapping it from your backpacks will cost large number of lives, several waves will probably fail, and it will take forever.
Do it by remote control using operators ON THE MOON
This requires one operator per machine (as you say, Just because the on-site personnel are pricey so you want as much done automatically as possible.) Can't have so many people on the Moon before an infrastructure is built. Many proposals that were floating around focus on semi-automatic machinery that requires not an operator but an overseer. Then a 10-20 men colony can control a few hundred machines, and then those machines can gather enough resources. IMO, if we can't put together a few stupid excavation robots (but can build robots that drive on public roads for hundreds of miles!) then we have no business being on the Moon - we just aren't serious.
Couldn't we just pressurize the mines?
I guess it's possible, but it's a lot of empty space to fill with air. Per Ungrounded Lightning below, there is oxygen in moon minerals, but I don't see nitrogen there, and 78% of our atmosphere is nitrogen. Even if that is done and the mine is filled, you need airlocks at all places where something (people or ore) enters or leaves. You also must heat the air within the mine all the time (the Moon is cold.) And what is the backup plan if an airlock fails and hundreds of miners are exposed to vacuum, without ready access to a spacesuit? There are also cracks in the rock, natural openings that you can't see but the atmosphere will escape through them just as well as through a faulty airlock.
One possibility is to work in light spacesuits *and* fill the mine with some gas that may be not useful for breathing but at least will prevent instant death in case of an accident. That will allow, if necessary, to remove the spacesuit from an injured person and only leave him a small breathing mask like on airplanes. Also if an airlock fails and the filler gas is lost the light spacesuits will be sufficient for miners to get to a proper shelter.
Finally, posting to sci.space, Gregory Bennett discussed an actual space incident
That's too minor to even mention in this context. This is not the kind of injury workers get on a new planet. "You make a step, fall through, drop 50 feet, rip your spacesuit and break both legs" - this is more like it. Or heavy machinery accidents. We are talking here about building a whole industry on the Moon, not about some lab technicians moving beakers with tweezers; STS astronauts are more like lab technicians, considering what they actually do on the mission. Very few missions required dangerous activity like moving of heavy modules, and those who did not always went smoothly - I recall damaged solar panels, wedged rail carts, pins installed backwards, etc. In a real Moon colony the first thing people have to do will be driving bulldozers, blasting mountains, raising masts and towers, digging caves - those are all dangerous jobs even on Earth, and if something is wrong you don't get a 1/8" hole in a glove and a mosquito-bite like "wound", you get whipped by a torn steel cable 3" in diameter, and you ought to be happy if you retain most of your extremities after that.
In real world there is still an occasional need for a strong man wielding a heavy hammer, and with that come accidents. And if you want to do all that by remote control, do it from Earth. We already have robots that are sufficiently smart to not fall into a ravine; can't say the same about humans, especially when that human is a geologist highly interested in getting into some deep hole, hitting the wall a few times and not even worrying that something may fall onto his head.
"Spacesuit puncture is not nearly as dangerous as you think ", sayeth you. The link, however, does not sustain this statement:
"It is very unlikely that a human suddenly exposed to a vacuum would have more than 5 to 10 seconds to help himself. If immediate help is at hand, although one's appearance and condition will be grave, it is reasonable to assume that recompression to a tolerable pressure (200 mm Hg, 3.8 psia) within 60 to 90 seconds could result in survival, and possibly in rather rapid recovery."
It is rare even on Earth, with our concentration of people, that an accident victim can be helped within 60 to 90 seconds. Look at auto racing - there are teams ready to go on a moment's notice, and they do go even before the debris stops flying - and nevertheless they need about half a minute to just reach the site of an accident. Then you need to access the victim and do whatever needs to be done.
So imagine that you are a worker on the Moon. A small avalanche immobilizes you and tears your spacesuit in a few places. If you haven't radioed for help within seconds you are as good as dead. If you have a buddy always with you, chances are that the buddy is sharing your fate. If he was keeping his distance then he is welcome to start lifting stones - he has at most 90 seconds to free you, patch your suit up and recompress from a spare oxygen bottle. Secondary damage, like severe bleeding, can be controlled on Earth but is impossible to stop on the Moon. If the guy bleeds to death, or drowns in his vomit, or has a heart attack, blame vacuum - these are often survivable situations when a rescuer has access to the body of the victim.
Given that even on Earth the buddy system is used only rarely, on most dangerous missions (diving, fire, nuclear) - what is the likelihood that a Moon team will include people who do nothing but just tag along and watch your back? We routinely have police officers doing potentially deadly traffic stops alone; we have miners who work in their own section of the mine; we have steel mill workers who control rivers of fire alone; we have air traffic controllers who make decisions about life or death without anyone available to look over their shoulder and, once in a year, shout "belay that order." I don't say it's a good thing, but if we operate like that on Earth, where a buddy is relatively easy to get, what chances does the Moon have?
For starters, it's a LOT cheaper to mine, refine, and launch material for space-based industry on the Moon than on the Earth.
You are missing a smiley here :-) It is definitely cheaper to launch stuff from the Moon if you have a cat-a-pult already. But where do you see metal ores on the Moon? Some refining processes require amazing quantities of energy, water, oxygen and other very specific ingredients that I'd be amazed if they just sit on the surface. And how do you "spiral out" a construction of a steel mill that weighs a few million tons and measures power in gigawatts? It can't be built without all the supporting industries being already in place.
Mining on Earth is already dangerous and difficult even though we don't need to do it in spacesuits. On the Moon the vacuum will be a major killer because an accident that on Earth leaves you with a minor wound will puncture your spacesuit and you'll be dead as a mummy before anyone can pull you to safety. There are all kinds of costs and dangers associated with Moon mining and refining, and it is absurd to suggest that they can be done there cheaper than on Earth (unless we terraform Moon or Earth.)
All the talk about cybernetic mining machines is just talk until I see a herd of them here, on Earth, mining something useful (like Uranium ore) completely autonomously and with minimum maintenance. If you need a spare part it will cost $50 million per delivery. Let's see how that helps to make Moon mining cheaper.
In my personal opinion, humankind will not get anywhere until a new propulsion method is discovered. Chemical rockets barely can lift a handful of people onto LEO. Nuclear rockets using something like water as reaction mass may be usable, but water is precious in space. Physics research does not go any faster if a Moon colony is set up (unless you expect to find some ET cache of knowledge.) NASA funding would be better spent on basic science, and whatever remains can be used to send cheap but resilient robots to neighboring planets. This is similar to space travel - a ship sent 100 years later will overtake the ship sent earlier earlier because it will move faster due to advances in propulsion methods.
The employer only has to try really hard to get the one employee that they really want, but even that one interviewee makes it easy on them.
Unless that "one employee" is miles ahead of other applicants, he can lose his leading position if he asks unwelcome questions. In other words, unless you are irreplaceable, unique person you will reduce your chances by asking such questions. It will be also unwise to think that the answers you get are truthful. Interviewers are also humans, and if they don't like you personally (or if they see you as a potential threat to their own positions) they can easily tell you that the company is simply awful without ever actually saying those words. Then you decline the offer and they laugh all the way to the bank.
The situation doesn't need to be this unequal.
It doesn't need to be, but it is. There are too many workers and too few employers. Why that is so? Many reasons, but the main one is that it's hard to compete with Asia. The number of markets where such competition is beyond hope is growing with every passing day. In one word, US labor is too expensive for the world market. It's not too expensive only in a handful of areas, like top notch R&D, where there is no competition yet.
I don't need offers from many companies especially ones that are a poor match. I only need one offer from a company that I wouldn't mind working for.
That means that they are perpetrated by people who are not what you would typically call criminals until they actually commit the act.
You are right, and we should be glad that Othello had no weapon on him when he confronted Desdemona. Otherwise he could kill her, in a "not premeditated or planned" way. "She was really lucky this way", said Nina Reiser.
You know, pull-down menus are pretty confusing to first-time users, too.
But they are not "in your face". People can work Word just fine without ever using the menu bar. Standard toolbars have everything for a common man. And those toolbars don't flicker on their own, so once you learn where the "Open File" button is, it's always there and the mouse movement is automatic. With ribbon you always need to look and comprehend why you see something else where another button was just a moment ago. That "feature" requires learning the whole palette of ribbons just to figure out where you are each time you need something.
Also, menus are structured far better. Everything insertable is generally under "Insert", everything about tables is in "Table" etc. In ribbons of MS Office some functions are duplicated, some are bound to the right-click event, and some are simply impossible to find. I remember looking for a footnote for 10 minutes; I did find it somewhere, but if I need to do that again I have no clue how that ribbon/button looks like.
Also, not everyone is image-oriented. There is a reason why most languages on Earth use limited character set, and why Chinese and Japanese and Korean scripts (CJK) [plus a couple more] are so hard to learn. Humans do better with fewer characters and longer words because our ability to distinguish shapes is not as good as our ability to form one complex object out of several simple ones.
is probably the #1 reason that people don't use styles
IMO people don't use styles because styles are a programming concept that they have no knowledge of and no educatonal base for. People use WYSIWYG because it's easier for them, even when it requires tons of manual, hopefully coordinated changes all over the document. It is infinitely easier for anyone but a programmer to select a word and then click on "Bold" and "Red" instead of first creating a Red_Bold style and then attaching it to the word. A style is such an OOP concept that even an early C coder could be confused, let alone a non-programmer. This is also one of several reasons why [La]Tex is used only by scientists - they understand its logic far better than a mess of invisible formatting in Word.
That's exactly what I do (I have a 2005 Prius.) However at some ratio between driving and towing [for instance] - 90% to 10% in your example elsewhere - the owner has to consider the overhead of renting. This overhead may be considerable even if you need a truck only a couple days per week: the rent will be $70/day + taxes and you need to arrange the rental, do the paperwork, get the truck, return the truck... it could be a lot of wasted time. You also need to include the total travelled distance because wasted fuel is proportional to that; if you drive little then a truck is more appealing.
Why continue to drive around a V8 100% of the time when you only need it's hauling capacity 5 or 10% of the time?
Because it's cheaper to pay for gas for your truck than to pay for a second car.
Yes, if you want to preserve the battery you'll have to lay off the heater and put on a coat.
Why then, if we are losing convenience of a warm car, not to make the next logical step and simply ride a horse?
When you wake up one morning and find gas is $10 / gallon...
I wonder what would be the cost of 1 kWh of electric energy then...
Why doesn't someone on Slashdot come up with a creative way for the RIAA or MPAA to make lots of money given the current market trends?
Because the {RI,MP}AA, in the current market, should not exist in their current form. You explain it yourself.
Musicians may still need promoters and financial backers and recording studios - it's their personal decision - but a monopoly that does all these services for a simple flat fee of all your current and future earnings (plus all your copyrights are belong to us) is probably not a best option. But I think RIAA will be holding this ground until they are completely eliminated from the market, just like SCO. This is because the only other option for them is to dissolve their gigantic business and switch to a totally different revenue model.
Their current revenue model is nothing but slavery; artists are brought in, and once they sign on the dotted line they are RIAA's property. Then they use artists for profit; they retain profit and feed artists, just as it was done to real slaves.
This can't last. The new model would be services to artists, where artists retain rights on their creations, make decisions, etc. and RIAA members act just as lawyers, advisers, bankers - as service industry. When I use services of a plumber he doesn't become an owner of my bathroom; if I need a lawyer I don't expect him to claim rights on my house or my car. They only get paid for the work they do.
Unfortunately if RIAA suddenly loses its mind and decides to do honest work (as I just described) then they will have to seriously downsize. There would be no money to pay big bucks to hundreds of RIAA executives. Only people who perform actual services, who work with artists to artists' satisfaction, will be paid. So that's one reason why RIAA will stick to its guns for as long as they can. If things get worse only the top management of RIAA will be employed, and they will be paid by copyrights that RIAA wrestled out of artists over years.
I'm specifically curious as to why the "car minders" as you call them don't happen lots in other parts of the world.
Such small-time racketeering must be tolerated by the police in order to be worthwhile. So the society must first decay enough so that it's safe for a man to issue threats right in the public street and get away with it. Corruption of the police is usually required.
Sorry to reply to myself, but there is another interesting fact. Say I have AT&T cell phone.
So the space of possible scenarios where AT&T profits is now even narrower than I thought.
For the record, when I *listen* to my AT&T voice mail it says this (when it has messages:) "You have one message, July 30, 11:16am, [plays the message]" - there is nothing else. So I don't waste any air minutes regardless of how many instructions were played to the caller. Now, if I leave 10 voice mails for someone else, from my cell phone, every single day - that would only mean that I'm doing business calls from my cell phone, which is stupid. If you use land line then you pay nothing.
This means that the whole "mountain out of the molehill" even exists when:
I would more gladly support this cause if it were explained as a fight against wasting people's time - regardless of what phone line they are using or whether there is any impact on their phone costs. Waste of time is real. However voice mail adds very little cost, if any. I presume that aside from leaving voice mail the same person also talks to live people, and that eats far more air time than some voice mail. Besides, as other posters indicated, you can often skip the announcements by pressing '*' or '#'.