None of modern power supplies can survive for 5 years. Normally it lasts a year, and then the fan starts rattling and finally locks up. You can replace the fan, but it costs $20 plus labor, or you can buy a new PSU ($50-80). In any case, if you have to replace the PSU three times over your warranty period, per computer, it will cost you about $150 per box - which already exceeds your profit. If you have other fans in the computer, add accordingly. My estimate is that you will lose your shirt on this job, primarily because you offered an insanely long warranty. One of consultant's best strategies is to close the contract ASAP and leave no tail; you, however, went all the way in opposite direction.
Because all Pilots in the Navy are officers and officers are kicked out if they are turned down for promotion.
Seems to be a very wasteful way to run the army... In my Legions of Terror all henchmen, especially pilots, are allowed to advance in the ranks at their own pace. After all, I paid millions for their training, including the Superweapons; why should I kick them out if, as you correctly note, they "have still many useful years as a pilot" ? Good pilots are hard get by these days, and administrative positions are not for everyone either.
If we had an automated system that began an emergency descent like what is being proposed, who is to say that this incident wouldn't be repeated by yet another captain trying to find the CB to disable the "annoying autopilot" preventing him from getting to cruise altitude?
Of course, nobody can save careless people from themselves. The proposed solution, however, is intended to save careful people from accidents that otherwise would have killed them. There are many reasons why a pilot may not be able to use his 15..30 seconds wisely. He may be not in his chair to begin with (as you describe), or he may be distracted with talking to the ground (or something else...) This automatic descent is just another ABS system, only for airplanes - something that you don't rely upon, but you are still grateful when it kicks in just when you need it.
Additionally, while you might have radar on to look for clouds and you might have TCAS on to "look" for traffic, civilian airplanes do not have radar system you just described.
The one that I studied did have such a RADAR, with the beam that could be pointed horizontally or vertically (down to the ground.) That is in addition to the RADAR-based altimeter, which is not involved in this. I even still remember how to operate the thing, if need be. It will pick up the mountains at least 100 miles ahead.
In any case, of course we can pile up all the failures we can come up with. But you must agree that radar's malfunction is not necessarily correlated with decompression. Sure, the tail may fall off and then you die. But that leads nowhere. You just do your best.
3.35. The forward-looking RADAR detects the mountains. (You always have the RADAR on, to look for traffic, or for turbulence, or just to measure your drift.)
3.36. The autopilot changes the course to avoid the obstacle.
The railways are usually automated so that the engineer has to press certain buttons quite frequently to prove that he is not asleep. Loss of attention is a serious problem on railways because the route is familiar and boring, and there isn't much happening (until the moment of impact.)
The sensor, faulty or not, does not need to take over until it spends some decent time trying to elicit a sane response from the pilots. The airplane can stay in the air for as long as it needs, definitely longer than the crew can. So if the pilots fail to acknowledge the low pressure alarm (by keying in "YeS, 1 AgR3E", for example) the autopilot can initiate a mayday broadcast, and begin the descent to a safe altitude. The broadcast will allow the traffic control to clear the way.
What happens if it is on a trans pacific flight and there is no good place to land?
You don't need to land; you only need to fly low enough so that the air outside is breathable.
What if there is more than one airport in range?
Well, pick one!
How does it know where to land?
Look for ILS signals. Also, I have a GPS thingy in my car, it knows where every restaurant in USA is. Is it too far-fetched that a 1000x more expensive autopilot may know where every airport in the world is?
What if you do include a datalink so remote control of the plane is possible? How do you secure it?
With a password "12345", of course!
Frankly the rapid and total loss of pressure is very rare.
But it has 100% mortality rate. One airplane crashed because of this very reason a few weeks ago, in Greece. Obviously the passengers on board would not have agreed with your last statement...
Yes, I thought of the golf player (the first crash, 5 years ago maybe) and the crash in Greece a few weeks ago. In both cases the decompression was visually confirmed by chase planes.
It was also complicated by the pilot and co-pilot not speaking the same language.
The facts are against your theory. Two recent crashes were caused by decompression, and in both cases pilots were as helpless as anyone else, despite the availability of oxygen on board. One would think that 15 seconds would be enough to grab a mask with one hand and to shove the stick from you with another... that would override the autopilot even if you don't switch it off with a button. But in both cases the pilots passed out before realizing what is happening to them, and autopilots kept the airplanes in the air until all the fuel was gone.
The RKA only builds rockets and LEO spaceships, it does not really manufacture or manage satellites and probes. In USA, for example, JPL does most of the satellite work, along with the private sector, so this division of labor is not out of the ordinary.
In Russia, space science is done by the Academy of Sciences, as you can see at the IKI Web Site, for example. Communications satellites are done by other organizations, civilian as well as military.
With regard to your question, the list of current and future projects that are managed by IKI is on that Web page, with English translations in most cases. Here is an example of one of the projects.
As the comment above suggests, a lunar lander is a simple, flimsy kind of thing, and if you can send the Clipper into the Moon's orbit, it will be even easier to send a lander without a crew, and separately send the crew in Clipper. They can dock there and land, then get back up and return.
Proton is plenty reliable, but it won't be ever man-rated because of poisonous fuel (geptyl). Soyuz runs on kerosene + liquid oxygen.
it does not seem that there is a rocket in the Russian inventory that can orbit it
Well, that's it then, end of story. It's not like russians designed all their rockets themselves... because otherwise they might, you know... design another one, maybe?
There are at least two major differences, and some minor:
A blockbuster card does not have the clout of infallibility, as the DNA does. Jurors know what a card is, and they comprehend very well how such a card can be lost and found. They have no comparable understanding of minute matters, like hairs.
When you lose the card you know it. You have only one such card, and it is a macroscopic object. When you lose a hair you never know it.
A criminal is not likely to accidentally pick up a card; he either wants to frame someone, or he doesn't, in either case he won't be relying upon a chance occurence. However the criminal can contaminate the crime scene with other people's DNA without him even knowing it, even if he is not bright enough to frame someone intentionally.
In either case, it's much easier to convince someone on a mysterious DNA evidence than on evidence that is common and well understood - especially if the accused is honest (honest people don't prepare their alibi in advance.)
You sit in a bus. You scratch your head. One hair falls on the seat next to you. You leave the bus, get home and fall asleep.
One hour later a criminal on his way to kill someone sits in that seat. The hair sticks to his clothes. He leaves the bus, arrives at his crime scene, commits the crime and your hair falls onto the dead body. The criminal leaves.
Police arrives, collects the hair, finds out that it's your hair, and arrests you for murder. You have no alibi. There is no other evidence. Seventeen famous DNA experts testify in court that the hair is yours. You can't explain how it got there. There are no other defendants (not that police even looked for them, having you.) You are convicted.
Even if somehow you manage to explain the hair away, or wiggle out on thinness of evidence, you are ruined anyway. None of that could have happened if the police has no way to match the hair to you.
You run a chance to be misidentified (because of contamination, swapped samples, or any other reason.) With DNA being held as irrefutable proof, you can be executed for something you didn't do.
You are asking very good questions. I don't have all the answers. But here is what I understand myself.
Take, for example, the government purchases. The customer (the US Government) is, by law, required to award the contract to the lowest bidder. So if you want to bid you have to come up with the lowest possible price, and if you don't - then you get nothing. So the market pressure (that free market thing, you know, that something that determines the cost of goods) is often defining the price. In this sort of game you either half-starve your workers, winning marginally profitable bids, or starve them completely, by going out of business. That's how things are; smaller businesses, without lobbyists, run very lean here.
More often, though, the customer (the government) has the budget allocated already - such as "we are building the bridge from here to there, and here is $5M to do it." Then the cost is predetermined, and the bidders compete in cutting corners. One popular corner to cut is the cost of labor force...
But government orders are a world in itself. We don't need to focus on those. Let's have a look at something more common, like selling stuff to other businesses. For example, you hire 10 engineers to develop and maintain a Moogle Search appliance for Intranet searches etc. - you know what it might be like. The engineers are employed full time because you add new plugins for new data types all the time, and you update the box from time to time. With $80K per soul, all the overhead taken into account, you burn through (80K / 12)*2*10 = 130K per month, or $1.6M per year, and that is a very rough number (your overhead is higher than that.)
Now, let's assume each of your Moogle Boxes is sold for $3,000. You then have to sell (130K/3K) = 43 boxes per month, or two per business day, just to make it even. This rate does not include any advertising, any taxes on profit, any salary to you personally, as a business owner, any warranty costs, any sick pay, or anything else of that sort. It doesn't even include cost of parts that go into the product.
As you can see, the cost of labor is immense. This is the greatest expense a US-based business carries, and it is recurring, and it is growing. Note that a business is usually spending on a worker about twice of his salary because of taxes and benefits and insurance etc. etc.
If you need to hire just one worker at $200K/yr rate this will set you back about half a million dollars by the end of the year. It is up to you to decide if you can get out of this worker anything that you can sell to compensate. In most cases it is not possible because of one simple reason: the employee is overpriced. Basically, a normal human can't produce anything worth of giving him ten new cars every year.
So what do we have here? We have the very reason why it's practically impossible to manufacture most products in USA. The labor costs kill you. For example, it will cost you $5K to make a most basic TV set. How can you sell that? No way. You are out of business.
You definitely can trace this reasoning back to its roots, financial and historical, and untangle the whole sorry mess. The premise stays the same - the labor of an american (or generally Western, since Europe is not behind at all) worker is too expensive compared to the value of goods he produces. That, in turn, is because he is paying mortgage on his $2M home, and that is because the land was appraised at $1M and the construction company charged him $1M to put some lumber together, and that is because... etc.
This explains why only specific types of businesses remain in USA - such as service, and military, and ultra-high-tech. China can manufacture a whole alarm clock, with radio and LED and everything, for the equivalent of 30 minutes your work time. Can you produce this clock, out of thin air, within 30 minutes? If not then you are overpaid; your true labor price, per hour, is equal to the cost of goods you can manufacture per hour.
I didn't say "better" - in fact, all East European countries, with Yugoslavia on top of the list, were seen as far advanced in terms of availability of fancy stuff. At that time USSR was quite dull and, as I said, one could have his daily bread and vodka but not much else.
You've lost me here...
Ok, maybe I should have said "when everyone is equally poor the poverty is not that obvious":-) With an engineer earning 150 u.e. and a worker earning 250 u.e. there is not enough difference between the two, especially considering the difference in the required physical labor.
But it's all history now, with Poland and Russia moving in the same general direction but at their own pace.
Col. Jessep: You want answers? Kaffee: I think I'm entitled. Col. Jessep: You want answers? Kaffee: I want the truth. Col. Jessep: You can't handle the truth.
I never had a chance to visit Poland, but I remember that Valensa was active around that time, maybe just beginning his career.
Poverty can exist only when someone is richer than someone else, and in USSR that was not the case - nobody could earn more than his neighbor, salaries were very much the same. If Poland somehow allowed some people to get rich, then it could not stay in the socialist mode any longer (which is exactly how it played out.)
Bread lines imply free selling of bread, but short supply of it. In USSR bread was always available, and it was not rationed, so there would be no point in forming a line for a product that is easy to get from any small store. Meat products, on the other hand, were in short supply around 1990, and you could stand in line for that.
how in USSR could be better?
USSR was more in control than Poland. The CPSU leaders knew well that bread and vodka must be always available, whatever the cost. I believe a good deal of grain was bought on the international market, but the bread was always available.
companies would vastly prefer searching the entire fricking globe for someone who matches their bullet list of desired qualifications, rather than just taking someone smart and training them on those skills.
I jump on the opportunity to train a smart guy whenever I see it. However it's much harder to find someone smart than to find a pre-trained monkey, so to say. Smart people are rare, and they are all too aware of their value. Often they estimate their value to be so high that it exceeds the revenue from the job that I have. Rare a job can justify paying anyone $200K/yr (or even $150K). They just don't produce enough goods to match their salary (or I just don't have jobs where they would produce.) Either way, I can't afford many of the smart people. They are welcome to keep looking or to drop their prices.
Well, Sir Business Genius, let's say the customer pays $100K to design the $FOO, and the prospective employee wants $200K/yr, and the job takes exactly one year. Where will the missing money come from?
Also, the scientists have more "incentive" to succeed, when a failure means poverty, bread-lines, and possible execution.
There was no poverty in USSR. There were no bread lines since... 1920's, I think, or the World War II. There were lines at all times, but only for luxury goods. Nobody was frivolously executed since Stalin died in 1950's; Stalin haven't even lived to see the Sputnik. Stalin's successors, Khruschev and Brezhnev, turned the country into society of law, not any different from other countries.
Perhaps the problem is that people in positions where they can hire people, are simply not willing to hire someone fresh out of college with heads full of knowledge, but with little experience?
That's not me. Out of three of my recent hires two are fresh from university. But I wouldn't dare to claim the "heads full of knowledge" thing:-) It's a sad state of affairs at times. But I do what I can.
Perhaps there would be more engineers and more good engineers if they were hiring americans fresh from school instead of importing them all the time, or only hiring people who already have jobs doing what you want?
That's what you get when you cross capitalism with bureaucracy (the resulting product is called "big business".) In this mess the functionaries are required to hire only those who are known to work best, and at the same time the functionaries are not willing to take risks. Students, being nothing but risks, are out.
My business is small, and we don't have any money to hire today, but when we do I only look for skills. That's capitalism alone, where I am willing to take risks to get the results. So the only small thing I require from new hires is ability to code Qt (desktop, Win32) and POSIX (embedded, Linux or QNX or "while (1) {} with interrupts") in their sleep:-) Math background on signal processing is also required. How the applicant gets there - I don't care, but if he doesn't understand what a negative frequency is, or how to produce a complex signal, or how the clock jitter translates into time domain, he can't write the code, or even read what we have already.
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I am sure the dinosaurs really appreciated the climate change caused by that asteroid.
None of modern power supplies can survive for 5 years. Normally it lasts a year, and then the fan starts rattling and finally locks up. You can replace the fan, but it costs $20 plus labor, or you can buy a new PSU ($50-80). In any case, if you have to replace the PSU three times over your warranty period, per computer, it will cost you about $150 per box - which already exceeds your profit. If you have other fans in the computer, add accordingly. My estimate is that you will lose your shirt on this job, primarily because you offered an insanely long warranty. One of consultant's best strategies is to close the contract ASAP and leave no tail; you, however, went all the way in opposite direction.
Seems to be a very wasteful way to run the army... In my Legions of Terror all henchmen, especially pilots, are allowed to advance in the ranks at their own pace. After all, I paid millions for their training, including the Superweapons; why should I kick them out if, as you correctly note, they "have still many useful years as a pilot" ? Good pilots are hard get by these days, and administrative positions are not for everyone either.
Of course, nobody can save careless people from themselves. The proposed solution, however, is intended to save careful people from accidents that otherwise would have killed them. There are many reasons why a pilot may not be able to use his 15..30 seconds wisely. He may be not in his chair to begin with (as you describe), or he may be distracted with talking to the ground (or something else...) This automatic descent is just another ABS system, only for airplanes - something that you don't rely upon, but you are still grateful when it kicks in just when you need it.
The one that I studied did have such a RADAR, with the beam that could be pointed horizontally or vertically (down to the ground.) That is in addition to the RADAR-based altimeter, which is not involved in this. I even still remember how to operate the thing, if need be. It will pick up the mountains at least 100 miles ahead.
In any case, of course we can pile up all the failures we can come up with. But you must agree that radar's malfunction is not necessarily correlated with decompression. Sure, the tail may fall off and then you die. But that leads nowhere. You just do your best.
It's more important to ask why they ended their careers with Navy.
3.36. The autopilot changes the course to avoid the obstacle.
The sensor, faulty or not, does not need to take over until it spends some decent time trying to elicit a sane response from the pilots. The airplane can stay in the air for as long as it needs, definitely longer than the crew can. So if the pilots fail to acknowledge the low pressure alarm (by keying in "YeS, 1 AgR3E", for example) the autopilot can initiate a mayday broadcast, and begin the descent to a safe altitude. The broadcast will allow the traffic control to clear the way.
What happens if it is on a trans pacific flight and there is no good place to land?
You don't need to land; you only need to fly low enough so that the air outside is breathable.
What if there is more than one airport in range?
Well, pick one!
How does it know where to land?
Look for ILS signals. Also, I have a GPS thingy in my car, it knows where every restaurant in USA is. Is it too far-fetched that a 1000x more expensive autopilot may know where every airport in the world is?
What if you do include a datalink so remote control of the plane is possible? How do you secure it?
With a password "12345", of course!
Frankly the rapid and total loss of pressure is very rare.
But it has 100% mortality rate. One airplane crashed because of this very reason a few weeks ago, in Greece. Obviously the passengers on board would not have agreed with your last statement...
It was also complicated by the pilot and co-pilot not speaking the same language.
That wasn't very smart, to say the least.
The facts are against your theory. Two recent crashes were caused by decompression, and in both cases pilots were as helpless as anyone else, despite the availability of oxygen on board. One would think that 15 seconds would be enough to grab a mask with one hand and to shove the stick from you with another... that would override the autopilot even if you don't switch it off with a button. But in both cases the pilots passed out before realizing what is happening to them, and autopilots kept the airplanes in the air until all the fuel was gone.
http://www.zerogcorp.com/Book/Bookaseat.aspx
In Russia, space science is done by the Academy of Sciences, as you can see at the IKI Web Site, for example. Communications satellites are done by other organizations, civilian as well as military.
With regard to your question, the list of current and future projects that are managed by IKI is on that Web page, with English translations in most cases. Here is an example of one of the projects.
As the comment above suggests, a lunar lander is a simple, flimsy kind of thing, and if you can send the Clipper into the Moon's orbit, it will be even easier to send a lander without a crew, and separately send the crew in Clipper. They can dock there and land, then get back up and return.
Proton is plenty reliable, but it won't be ever man-rated because of poisonous fuel (geptyl). Soyuz runs on kerosene + liquid oxygen.
it does not seem that there is a rocket in the Russian inventory that can orbit it
Well, that's it then, end of story. It's not like russians designed all their rockets themselves... because otherwise they might, you know ... design another one, maybe?
In either case, it's much easier to convince someone on a mysterious DNA evidence than on evidence that is common and well understood - especially if the accused is honest (honest people don't prepare their alibi in advance.)
One hour later a criminal on his way to kill someone sits in that seat. The hair sticks to his clothes. He leaves the bus, arrives at his crime scene, commits the crime and your hair falls onto the dead body. The criminal leaves.
Police arrives, collects the hair, finds out that it's your hair, and arrests you for murder. You have no alibi. There is no other evidence. Seventeen famous DNA experts testify in court that the hair is yours. You can't explain how it got there. There are no other defendants (not that police even looked for them, having you.) You are convicted.
Even if somehow you manage to explain the hair away, or wiggle out on thinness of evidence, you are ruined anyway. None of that could have happened if the police has no way to match the hair to you.
You run a chance to be misidentified (because of contamination, swapped samples, or any other reason.) With DNA being held as irrefutable proof, you can be executed for something you didn't do.
Take, for example, the government purchases. The customer (the US Government) is, by law, required to award the contract to the lowest bidder. So if you want to bid you have to come up with the lowest possible price, and if you don't - then you get nothing. So the market pressure (that free market thing, you know, that something that determines the cost of goods) is often defining the price. In this sort of game you either half-starve your workers, winning marginally profitable bids, or starve them completely, by going out of business. That's how things are; smaller businesses, without lobbyists, run very lean here.
More often, though, the customer (the government) has the budget allocated already - such as "we are building the bridge from here to there, and here is $5M to do it." Then the cost is predetermined, and the bidders compete in cutting corners. One popular corner to cut is the cost of labor force...
But government orders are a world in itself. We don't need to focus on those. Let's have a look at something more common, like selling stuff to other businesses. For example, you hire 10 engineers to develop and maintain a Moogle Search appliance for Intranet searches etc. - you know what it might be like. The engineers are employed full time because you add new plugins for new data types all the time, and you update the box from time to time. With $80K per soul, all the overhead taken into account, you burn through (80K / 12)*2*10 = 130K per month, or $1.6M per year, and that is a very rough number (your overhead is higher than that.)
Now, let's assume each of your Moogle Boxes is sold for $3,000. You then have to sell (130K/3K) = 43 boxes per month, or two per business day, just to make it even. This rate does not include any advertising, any taxes on profit, any salary to you personally, as a business owner, any warranty costs, any sick pay, or anything else of that sort. It doesn't even include cost of parts that go into the product.
As you can see, the cost of labor is immense. This is the greatest expense a US-based business carries, and it is recurring, and it is growing. Note that a business is usually spending on a worker about twice of his salary because of taxes and benefits and insurance etc. etc.
If you need to hire just one worker at $200K/yr rate this will set you back about half a million dollars by the end of the year. It is up to you to decide if you can get out of this worker anything that you can sell to compensate. In most cases it is not possible because of one simple reason: the employee is overpriced. Basically, a normal human can't produce anything worth of giving him ten new cars every year.
So what do we have here? We have the very reason why it's practically impossible to manufacture most products in USA. The labor costs kill you. For example, it will cost you $5K to make a most basic TV set. How can you sell that? No way. You are out of business.
You definitely can trace this reasoning back to its roots, financial and historical, and untangle the whole sorry mess. The premise stays the same - the labor of an american (or generally Western, since Europe is not behind at all) worker is too expensive compared to the value of goods he produces. That, in turn, is because he is paying mortgage on his $2M home, and that is because the land was appraised at $1M and the construction company charged him $1M to put some lumber together, and that is because... etc.
This explains why only specific types of businesses remain in USA - such as service, and military, and ultra-high-tech. China can manufacture a whole alarm clock, with radio and LED and everything, for the equivalent of 30 minutes your work time. Can you produce this clock, out of thin air, within 30 minutes? If not then you are overpaid; your true labor price, per hour, is equal to the cost of goods you can manufacture per hour.
We
You've lost me here...
Ok, maybe I should have said "when everyone is equally poor the poverty is not that obvious" :-) With an engineer earning 150 u.e. and a worker earning 250 u.e. there is not enough difference between the two, especially considering the difference in the required physical labor.
But it's all history now, with Poland and Russia moving in the same general direction but at their own pace.
As seen here.
Poverty can exist only when someone is richer than someone else, and in USSR that was not the case - nobody could earn more than his neighbor, salaries were very much the same. If Poland somehow allowed some people to get rich, then it could not stay in the socialist mode any longer (which is exactly how it played out.)
Bread lines imply free selling of bread, but short supply of it. In USSR bread was always available, and it was not rationed, so there would be no point in forming a line for a product that is easy to get from any small store. Meat products, on the other hand, were in short supply around 1990, and you could stand in line for that.
how in USSR could be better?
USSR was more in control than Poland. The CPSU leaders knew well that bread and vodka must be always available, whatever the cost. I believe a good deal of grain was bought on the international market, but the bread was always available.
I jump on the opportunity to train a smart guy whenever I see it. However it's much harder to find someone smart than to find a pre-trained monkey, so to say. Smart people are rare, and they are all too aware of their value. Often they estimate their value to be so high that it exceeds the revenue from the job that I have. Rare a job can justify paying anyone $200K/yr (or even $150K). They just don't produce enough goods to match their salary (or I just don't have jobs where they would produce.) Either way, I can't afford many of the smart people. They are welcome to keep looking or to drop their prices.
Well, Sir Business Genius, let's say the customer pays $100K to design the $FOO, and the prospective employee wants $200K/yr, and the job takes exactly one year. Where will the missing money come from?
There was no poverty in USSR. There were no bread lines since... 1920's, I think, or the World War II. There were lines at all times, but only for luxury goods. Nobody was frivolously executed since Stalin died in 1950's; Stalin haven't even lived to see the Sputnik. Stalin's successors, Khruschev and Brezhnev, turned the country into society of law, not any different from other countries.
That's not me. Out of three of my recent hires two are fresh from university. But I wouldn't dare to claim the "heads full of knowledge" thing :-) It's a sad state of affairs at times. But I do what I can.
Perhaps there would be more engineers and more good engineers if they were hiring americans fresh from school instead of importing them all the time, or only hiring people who already have jobs doing what you want?
That's what you get when you cross capitalism with bureaucracy (the resulting product is called "big business".) In this mess the functionaries are required to hire only those who are known to work best, and at the same time the functionaries are not willing to take risks. Students, being nothing but risks, are out.
My business is small, and we don't have any money to hire today, but when we do I only look for skills. That's capitalism alone, where I am willing to take risks to get the results. So the only small thing I require from new hires is ability to code Qt (desktop, Win32) and POSIX (embedded, Linux or QNX or "while (1) {} with interrupts") in their sleep :-) Math background on signal processing is also required. How the applicant gets there - I don't care, but if he doesn't understand what a negative frequency is, or how to produce a complex signal, or how the clock jitter translates into time domain, he can't write the code, or even read what we have already.