I leave these up there to ensure that I never get hired by the sort of tight-assed company which would judge me according to essentially-innocuous pictures on social media.
These photos are legal and you aren't doing anything out of the ordinary there. Bars are full of people like that. Alcohol is a drug, and I personally don't ingest it, but in this world about 100% of population take it from time to time. I am not entitled to my own facts or to my own planet; hence, I accept the inevitable.
But as blackraven14250 said, you will be judged by random people with random ideas about what is right and what is wrong. For example, HR is usually staffed with women. If the HR worker has (or had) an alcoholic husband who used to beat her, she may project her hatred toward the man and the habit onto you. Perhaps without intentionally wanting to harm you - but you will be harmed nevertheless. You will never know what you missed; a resume sent and ignored carries zero bits of information back.
That's why I say that one shouldn't post anything on social media. It only leads to you being judged by someone else's rules, and you not only cannot face your accusers - you do not even know that you were tried and found guilty. The best course of action is to give them nothing. If they want something from you, let them ask - and then you will decide, on case by case basis, what they can be given, if anything.
but I'd never be able to find that out until getting the job and being there for a while
For that reason companies, starting at some size, all look the same. The cubicles are the same, the culture is the same... If you work in a garage alongside Jim, Bob and Dave, you can tell jokes of all kinds, from political to non-gender-neutral, and use any language you like amongst yourselves. But allowing that in a larger company is unthinkable. What if someone gets offended and sues for one billion trillion dollars? That happens. You can trust Bob because you know him and you are friends; but you cannot trust a random person even if s/he works for the same company as you do. This is triply so if big money is involved. Remember Herman Cain? His accuser got a bunch of money just to shut up and go away:
In October 2011, Politico reported that two female employees had complained about inappropriate behavior by Cain during his tenure at the National Restaurant Association. The women reportedly accepted financial settlements from the association which barred them from discussing their allegations further.
This is exactly what we are talking about here. Perhaps Cain made a joke, but that joke fell on gold digger's ears. Culture of openness and friendship collided with the culture of greed. You can't reconcile those; and the common denominator is your familiar featureless cubicles and the bland corporate-speak and corporate-think, all designed to not give anyone an excuse for a lawsuit.
And that is also the difference between a 3-person company and a 300-person department. A fourth man in a 3-person company would become a family member for all practical purposes. A 301'st man would be just another speck of dust on the vast landscape of a large company.
But returning to the problem at hand, applicants that are about to be hired are often given a tour of the facility, so that they can have a look at the culture of the company and decide for themselves if they are a good fit or not. Applicants are also expected to talk about that and ask about the company's culture. It is very important because an angry loner with violent tendencies may not fit well in a 10-man team where everyone is happy and is singing and talking. I, for example, wouldn't want to work at a company where formal clothes are required. I also wouldn't want to join company picnics, or gatherings at eateries. I can easily work with people who love these things - as long as I'm not expected to be there.
There's an overgeneralization that a lot of people make here though, expanding this unhirable status to include everything from hardcore drug addicts like you mention (reasonable) to just having a Red Solo Cup in a picture with 3 friends at your own house (unreasonable).
I personally wouldn't fault anyone for being at a party, or for drinking alcohol there. As long as the man is not a professional alcoholic (that happens!) the drug is legal, common, and the employee cannot be blackmailed over that. (This is a serious consideration when your employee has to have security clearance.)
That's why people really don't like the idea of prying into social media for information on employees
I'm telling everyone that social media is evil, for one reason or another, and that no one should have an FB account. Perhaps that is throwing the water out along with the baby, but if you want a single, simple advice then that's it. Anything else would require a lot of labor in considering what and who may need to know, and who can be trusted with this or that risky photo without immediately sharing it with the whole world. I personally have no social accounts because I cannot be bothered to do this work - even if I trusted Mark Zuckerberg, which I do not.
there's a whole slew of unknowns regarding the particular intersection of the HR worker's personal judgement and an individual's lifestyle that makes it a sensitive action to take.
There is that. My own bias is against drugs, for example. Other people may have objections against candidates who like target shooting, or who hunt animals, or who date opposite sex, or who date the same sex, and so on. Legal protections against discrimination do exist, but there is no G-man behind the shoulder of every HR worker who singlehandedly decides what resumes go into trash and what get forwarded to the hiring manager. If anyone in the long chain of hiring dislikes you for any reason whatsoever, your resume will never end up on the desk of the manager - and without documented, in writing, proof of the reason for doing so you cannot prove anything. HR has special phrases for that, such as "More qualified candidates were selected." In reality, if a team in a company is largely homophobic, hiring a gay is not such a great idea; the opposite would be also true. By the law the gay can't be denied employment; but by realities of life he would be not accepted as a team member, and he would be forced to quit soon after.
But there is yet another consideration. Twitbook contains photos of people doing things that are illegal or that appear to be illegal. It could be driving way over the speed limit, or street racing, or drinking too much alcohol, or giving what appears to be alcohol to a person that appears to be a minor, or engaging in what looks like sexual activity with an apparent minor, and so on. People do not think of these as of crimes. Perhaps in their mind these are small infractions that are harmless as long as nobody was hurt. But if an HR person sees these photos, not only the candidate won't be hired - the HR person by law may be forced to report the finding to the police. This is not what your drinking buddies would ever do; after all, they knew that the "apparent minor" in the photo is your wife who is not minor at all. But the HR person wouldn't know that; neither would the police - who will investigate, and that may end up with your arrest if something doesn't add up ("Hey, she said she is 21! I didn't know that her birthday was two weeks after the party!")
In the end, it would be better for most people if social media did not exist. Public sharing of texts, images and sounds of arguably legal activity is not helping anyone. But people tend to share exactly those images, trying to impress their peers. Lacking this information, HR would have to fall back to what they know about the applicant - what he says in the resume, what his past employers say (very little nowadays) and what the applicant himself tells at the int
Meanwhile, I'll keep monitoring our thousands of networking nodes in my rather prestigious position where they can't afford to replace me.
Absolutely. I have no knowledge of who you are, who your employer is, what you are doing on Sundays, and so on. And I don't need to know that. I'm glad that you and your employer have good working relations.
Only if I'm stuck in whatever retarded hiring process you manage.
There are many hiring processes. A three-man shop will have a vastly different policy than a multinational corporation with 100,000 employees in 50 countries. A new man in a 3-man shop can destroy the entire company if he is not careful and vigilant and honest. A new man at a multinational corporation can only steal some peanuts, to the tune of a few hundred thousand dollars, which is inconsequential, and the police will take care of the rest. This is quite obvious - in a larger company importance and influence of each additional worker is smaller; facilities are far apart; bank accounts are separate; even locks on doors at production facilities only allow some employees to some areas; and of course internal auditing service and internal security service are taking care of all edge cases. But even then we read once per year that this or that bank was nearly destroyed by an employee who gambled bank's money and lost.
Maybe I'll answer later with something more serious, but if you honestly think that someone who smokes a blunt on a friday needs a motherfucking withdrawal to not smoke on Monday you are not in a position to judge ANYONE in this world, let alone decide if they are worth hiring.
If I pay my own money to someone then I can have any requirements I want. This is how the world works, regardless of what you or others think about it. If I don't want drug users around then there won't be any (that I know of.) Note - that would be regardless of their skills.
It may be a shock to geeks who use light drugs now and then. They may think that it's no big deal. Keep thinking that. Meanwhile business people avoid drug users at all costs - even if they, themselves, use the same drug on occasion.
One could think of some contrived case where the only man on Earth who can do some absolutely necessary job (say, save the world) has to be hired no matter what. That would be a fun subplot in a movie. However in real life when a company posts a job ad it receives hundreds of resumes, from all kinds of people - from young and old, from green to experienced, from exact matches to very loose matches to the job req. If a person is known for their "undesirable behavior" then the resume is trashed right away. Nobody in a business would want to be responsible for such a person because if that person steals something valuable to finance his troubles guess what, the manager who knowingly hired him may be fired or demoted soon. A business is not a kindergarten, it's not interested in helping people. A business is primarily interested in safely growing the profits. Drug users and the word "safely" do not intersect.
You again may want to point out that smoking some grass is very different from injecting heroin (or whatever it is that they inject these days) into one's veins. But you know, I'm not interested in details. I'm not a specialist on drugs, and I have no oversight over doses or choices of drugs that a prospective employee takes. Furthermore, in this labor market I don't have to care. There is plenty of "clean" applicants to pick and choose from; those that are known to be "unclean" won't be even considered. Take drugs and kill your career, it's that simple. You may disagree with that approach - but who cares what you think? You'd need to argue with tens of thousands of business owners, HR workers and hiring managers - and they have no good reason to even listen to you. Don't like that? Don't use drugs then. Or at least delete all your social accounts and be quiet about illegal things that you do. At least you will get a chance to be judged by your work.
Not that it matters, because you employ someone because of their skills, not what they do on their weekend.
It's far from the truth. Experienced managers hire good people first and skilled people second, if not third. The reason is simple: you can train a junior engineer to become senior engineer. It takes time but it can be done. On the other hand, you cannot take a bad man and train him into being a good man. And you never want to give keys to your offices and access to your code to a bad man.
With regard to weekends, if a person is bad on one day of the week he cannot be good on other days of the week. Exceptions are possible, but you can't count on them. If a person takes drugs on Sunday, do you think he will just heroically suffer through the withdrawal for the rest of the week? If a person needs illegal drugs but you aren't paying him millions, don't you think he will steal from you to pay for his habit? If a person is seen doing risky, illegal things, will you invest $100K into his training, knowing that he can be arrested at any time?
Even the pattern of employment matters, let alone the illegal sex pictured on Twitbook. If a candidate can't hold a job for more than a few months he is not viable, and his resume goes into trash. Even if he is a genius you simply can't have him for long enough to realize any business advantage.
If the guy has pictures of him smoking a blunt in the server room it's a different story.
What if he walks 20 feet, leaves the building, and smokes his blunt outside - and then returns to manage your precious network? Do you think the amount of THC in his blood would be any different? A known druggie is 100% unhireable - nobody wants that liability, for many reasons. If you are a drug user or otherwise "a bad man" in my opinion, I will not hire you. Since the reasons of rejection are never reported, you have no case in court. Businesses have no duty to hire anyone; the only thing they can't do is they can't reject candidates on protected grounds (gender, skin color, etc.) - and no smart person will ever do that. I don't care what your skin color is; but you must be a good person and a good employee. That's all that it takes, really.
Unfortunately, you get more junk than quality feedback that actually improves the paper.
This also applies to code review - and that's one of many reasons why programmers tend to skip on those. Most code reviews are useless ("You need to add comments") or too late ("You used a very slow sorting method in 277 places of your spaghetti code.") Bugs that are worth finding are not findable just by some stranger reading your printed code. If someone *can* regularly find such bugs in your code, your code is bad to begin with.
This paper is the output of an automaton, and thus not an original creative work.
The generator is a tool, just like a paintbrush or a pen or a chisel. The human who ran the tool, collected the output, looked at it, and published it would be the copyright owner.
In the same vein when a chicken crosses the road and leaves footprints in the dust, those footprints (in nature) are not copyrightable - not any more than a river or a cliff. However if an artist rolls the canvas on the ground, prepares it, catches a chicken, dips its legs in red paint and releases the chicken over the canvas, the chicken's footprints will be copyrightable. IMO, the only requirement for recognition of an original, copyrightable work is that you conceived and made it. If your only "assistants" were tools or nonhumans [animals, not Greys] then you own it all. If you had humans to assist you then it's up to the court to sort out who did what.
Mobile phones and tablets are sucking the profit out of them. They dont have a vertical supply chain of factories and stores like Apple.
Look at it from another angle. Google is servicing the constantly growing mass of mobile devices, and at the same time it does not need to take risk with design, assembly, sales and service of those devices! Profit comes not from selling a phone once in two years but from charging an advertiser $0.001 each time one of those mindless phone users looks at an ad that Google sent to them. I personally don't have Apple devices, but I have one Android tablet (had two, gave one - Nexus 7 - to my parents.) Android will keep growing, and it is already tied into Google so much that the Nexus 7 had to be cleaned up quite substantially before it became usable. A casual user would just enter all his personal data and whip the c/c out on first request.
Google may need to cut some fat here and there, as they are spending like a drunken sailor on projects that will never see the light of day. But in principle they buy and sell information; they have highly automated factories that make them money, and in theory Google could be operated by very few workers, thus making it very profitable. Its just not very smart to do in the long term; that's why every company finances some R&D.
No, I don't watch political shows. I am powerless to change the vote - even if I had a decent candidate to vote for. (This here pair of idiots is not it.)
so how many people here complain about taking English or some literature course instead of more CompSci?
I do, at least. I never understood the classical, all-emotions, literature, and I suspect it's how I think, and nothing can be done about it. Reading such writings is a waste of time for me. Why a 14 y/o boy should be reading about marital problems of much older people? Fsck it, I don't want to read about them even now.
There is literature that would be immensely appealing to young men. SciFi is of course one of best candidates, but one could think of many traditional fiction books that are written not for overly sensitive ladies. For some reason, though, books like those of Jules Verne were not part of the official reading list. But The Mysterious Island contains tons of technologies for boys to try out (as long as they are not trying synthesis of Nitroglycerine.) The book is light on emotions, and that is good because men are not supposed to be emotional creatures. The book is light on women as well (there are none) - and that is good because it removes distractions. It has plenty of challenges and plenty of solutions; every survivalist (or boy scout) should know at least a few. But, as I said, in my school days we were forced to read about some woman who was unhappily married to some man, and the entire story was supposed to happen 300 or 500 years ago. What can be more boring? To quote the classic,
But the reader [of the "Deerslayer" tale] dislikes the good people in it, is indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned together.
The question becomes, "why do you think that evidence in public hearings should be hidden and made secret?"
You cannot introduce a piece of evidence into public hearings without possible opposition from the other lawyer; and the judge may forbid such evidence if it is not necessary for the trial or if it is unreliable. In other words, all evidence that is provided at the trial is there for a reason, and it is sufficiently reliable to consider and debate further. If during a murder trial the defense lawyer brings up a random, unidentifiable scrap of paper with words "$(The_defendant) haven't done it" that paper will never see the light of day. If during a prostitution trial one side brings in the log book of the prostitute with names "John Doe, Jim Doe, etc." the other side will have ample chance to question which John Doe out of tens of thousands living in this country is mentioned here, and whether the name is real or imaginary. The whole list may be disallowed because it does not evidence pretty much anything except that those names are written there. For all we know, those are records of borrowed cash; or the list may be entirely made up, with blackmailing in mind.
If the police publishes the list months ahead of the trial the list will be unopposed. It will get life on its own, and hundreds of people who have no relation to the case will be wrongly associated and accused of what they haven't done. If the police wants to publish the list "to teach them" then the police also becomes the judge and the executioner, without trial and without giving the accused the chance to face his accuser and to have proper defense mounted.
They are not, unless "doctors save people" means "we are all immortal now."
Advertising stays in business only because it is profitable - not because it controls everyone's mind. A manufacturer with a 5% market share may gain 3% more customers but the cost of ads could be 90% of that increase in revenue - and it is still worth doing. But the manufacturer in the end only has 8% of the market, not 100%. Complete control is impossible; few men will buy a dress just because they saw a TV ad, and few women will buy rock climbing gear just because they got a flyer in the mail.
If we're creating more criminals, let's fix that problem, not just make it easier to track them down.
It is not politically correct to "fix that problem". Only a small percentage of criminals get caught - only when they do a serious crime (like murder) and when they get unlucky. A typical vandal will not even be stopped; locals will be afraid to step in (see George Zimmerman) and police cannot be bothered. Besides, LEO response time would be 10 minutes at best - and how long does it take to tag a storefront or to throw a stone at a window or to key a car?
Reliable removal of criminals from the society requires exactly that - removal. To prisons, to Australia, to the Moon - but the criminal must be caught and sent away for a long time. The "long time" part is because the society doesn't want the game of "catch and release."
This doesn't mean that all criminals must be given 25 years in chains. It only means that the society A decided that a certain citizen is no longer worthy of being a citizen of that society - and he is then cast away. Currently there is no other society B for the criminal to join, and so he is put back with the innocents of A. Australia, where an alternative society was formed, is one possible example.
However statistics tells us that even harsh punishments do not deter crime. England used to boil criminals, but that haven't rid the country of thieves. As crime and low IQ often go hand in hand, criminals do not believe that *they* will be caught. Some people are genetically or educationally predisposed to certain types of crime. Some enjoy going around and beating random people up. Other enjoy stealing from stores. Other enjoy lying; some find fun in arson. Perhaps some of these can be classified as mental diseases, but the fact remains. So far nobody offered a reliable way to sort alphas from deltas, short of doing it at the point of manufacturing. Today crime prevention does not exist; this means that at least one innocent must become a sacrificial bait for detection of a criminal; often that is needed more than once, and one criminal can destroy many lives over his "career."
I can understand that you can be in a public place but still be unhappy if someone videotapes you. An otherwise empty nude beach, with no one in sight for miles, is one such example. There is no public good that would result from taping you on such a beach:-)
However there is a clear public good that results from videotaping all incidents on roads. You don't have to record everything that ever happens in 360 degrees around your car. It's enough to have a ring buffer for 20-30 minutes. If an accident happens the recording stops and the data is preserved. But modern car video recorders (like the one I own) have a ring buffer that holds 8 hours of HD recording on a 32 GB SD card.
Nobody explicitly "stopped the science" aside from stem cells (that one they did, yes.) The science died out along the manufacturing and engineering, as a side effect of the general decay of the country. In other words, world-leadership and science are both outputs of a healthy society - which is not in evidence since what, 1980's?
The USA was not particularly remarkable all the way up to the World War II. During the war changes occurred internally (accelerated development of the industry) and externally (destruction of competitors in Europe.) This resulted in a significant kick in the rear which was a sufficient propulsion to sail close to the end of the 20th century. But then laziness set in; why to make products if you can just borrow the money and buy them? Why to have factories and pollute your precious land if you can outsource to China and pollute there? Why to study calculus if there is no manufacturing anymore? Why to even bother working if properly collected entitlements (there are many!) may come close to an honest salary? Why to hire people if the legally mandated minimum wage exceeds the worth of those people? The end result is here - a society that doesn't want to work, and is largely unable to work even if it had to. You can't be a world leader with such an approach.
An anti-science president will mean the US won't be a world leader in this century.
The USA is not exactly the world leader today, and the magic 8-ball does not predict an improvement in the future. The USA is doing good basically only in one area - in agriculture. And in printing money; but that's only while other guys pretend to like USD. Some electronic products, especially memory ICs, are not even available in the USA - not because Toshiba is anti-US but simply because the US market of components isn't worth maintaining. No company here will buy a million reels of the latest DDR3 or SLC Flash. As result many datasheets exist only in Asian languages; developers in the USA are forced to address their prayers to local companies like Micron.
So you're going to need some kind of active system to get the thing positioned.
This would require the sphere to be rigid - and not only rigid but sufficiently strong to impart the force from the motor to the adjacent elements. This will result in oscillations, and it will not be a trivial task to energize those motors, or to stop them. Failure of one motor, with other engines running, can lead to destruction of the links between sections of the sphere (or to destruction of the solid sphere, if it is contiguous.) Given the size of the sphere (several AU in diameter) the very concept of "simultaneous" will have relativistic effects involved. It will be an extremely fragile construct; all your operations must be flawless, and any single mistake, ever, will destroy the sphere.
And I would recommend putting some spin on it [...] at a considerable rate
The centipetal force of the center band (at the latitude 0) will be provided by the gravitational attraction of the Sun. However the same attraction will be applied to the stationary poles (at the latitude of 90 degrees.) The poles have zero velocity; therefore, they will be falling toward the Sun. The only thing that prevents such a collapse is the rigidity of the rest of the sphere. This will result in various forces that, at first blush, would be astronomical. The sphere, if it is ideally flexible, will be squeezed into a disk, and then into a ring (because different bands of the disk would want to spin at different angular speeds, that's what forms bands in planetary rings.) If that's not what you want then you need to compensate the squishing forces.
A rotating sphere will also present interesting challenges if you want to beam energy from the sphere to inner planets or ships. This would be doubly interesting if the beam must be accurately aimed, lest it becomes a death ray.
The spinning sphere will be a gyroscope. Impacts from comets, asteroids and spaceships will be translated into precession which is capable of eventually making the trajectory of the axis hard to calculate. I cannot say much about the tensile forces that will be present within the sphere.
this would be an advantage for intergalactic space travel as starships would leave the system with a considerable speed boost and wouldn't have to slow down nearly as much to land on the sphere so you do have that going for you
This is true only if you only fly within the equatorial plane of the sphere. Approach in any other plane would present a nontrivial problem. An accident near the sphere has a chance to completely destroy the fragile structure, just as a single needle can explode a rubber balloon. Even if you are very careful, you can't do anything about an asteroid that can travel fast and be large. Perhaps the sphere can survive until you send repairmen; but if not you will have big problems.
Fusion reactors (which you seem to think is the foreseeable endgame, as you mention it twice) may be great and all
I only want to remain within boundaries of what is imaginable today. If we go beyond then we suddenly get zero point energy, and then everyone can have all the energy of all the Universes in his pocket (which also will make Dyson spheres useless.) Magic is not a good answer in this discussion. We either deal with facts and science, or we deal in fantasies.
the sun (which is of course a fusion reactor itself, with more fuel then you could possibly acquire otherwise.)
Why can't I get some Helium from the Sun? If you are powerful enough to build an object that is comparable in size to the Solar system then you certainly can teleport or something a few million tons of stellar mass for your pocket expenses.
The whole point of building a Dyson sphere is because local sources of energy are no longer sufficient.
And as I said, local sources of energy may be not necessary. You would want remote sources of energy. But if you intend to use the Dyson sphere to charge your portable batteries then you can do it near any star - not just at your homeworld. A young blue star would be far more profitable in this regard, and you can waste its planets without a thought. Do that in your own Solar system and watch other planets change their orbits. Including your homeworld. Fun, isn't it?
Or if you want to leave your original planet in place, you can easily build it *inside* it's orbit. That' be much more efficient use of material anyway.
Yes, limited by the strength and thermal resistance of the material. You also lose the "hiding" factor, if you care about that. A classical Dyson sphere is outside, so that nothing escapes except the black body radiation.
Just leave a window to illuminate your planet as before
I'll have to leave it to better cosmic engineers than myself to synchronize orbits of those two objects...
or use an extremely tiny fraction of the prodigious energy collected in order to artificially illuminate it.
Well, I guess people can get used to eternal night and artificial light. Progress demands sacrifices, as they say.
if you're already imagining a civilization capable of such hyperstructures, it's not hard to also include nanometer thin film that can do the energy capture
I can imagine construction of a Dyson sphere using only traditional technologies. However the current science does not easily allow existence of nanometer thick stable hyperstructures that are sufficiently strong. Your sphere will be under tension from the sunlight, and it has to be spun or otherwise stabilized in space - and that has to be done very accurately, or else any deviations from the ideal sphere (as long as the Sun is an ideal sphere itself, mass-wise) will tear it apart. A segment of the sphere that is closer to the Sun will move faster, eventually folding onto other segments and unraveling the whole thing. Blow a soap bubble and look how wobbly it is. Your bubble of a nanometer thin film will be just as wobbly, influenced by coronal mass ejections, by passing planets, and punctured by many comets and asteroids that just happen to fly by. The sphere either needs to be sturdy enough to survive impacts (like the Ringworld - with footnotes) or it has to be able to heal itself. However the latter is doubtful because a sphere under tension tends to rip like a balloon; it is unstable by definition. Solutions to that involve thicker threads that carry the load - but those threads can become severed too, ad infinitum. Ideally you want a force field to hold the sphere together, especially considering that the sphere needs to be pushed by correction engines if you want it to not drift into the Sun. If the sphere is spinning then we are looking at even more forces that try to flatten it into a disk.
Some people mention that the sphere does not need to be solid. In such a
Well, the point of my argument is that you either learn how to make matter out of the collected energy, or that energy will cook you:-) Most of the energy will eventually transition into heat, except the energy that you intentionally blast into space.
The easiest solution to this problem is in building the sphere at 1AU and moving there. But there isn't enough material in this Solar system to build it and fill with enough oxygen and water. Another possibility is to use that energy to heat outer planets of the Solar system... but unfortunately they would be already gone by the time you have the sphere built.
Either way, the real question is not about the energy but about the matter. If you know how to synthesize one, good for you. Then the sphere can build itself. You need its energy only if you have enough surface to use that energy on. Otherwise it would be like living in a furnace.
That's a lot of energy escaping into space that could be put to use.
OK. Launch a mirror, 1000 x 1000 miles, onto the LEO and focus it onto your house. What will happen?
You get oodles of free energy and you can now keep all your computers running 24/7
There will be a burned hole where your house was, all the way to the Earth's mantle.
We, here on Earth, already are having thermal problems even though we only release chemical energy from fossil fuels. If more energy is magically delivered to Earth (by increasing Sun's output, for example) the planet will overheat. Imagine if every house on Earth has 1 MW power station in the basement, and 1 MW of loads?
Past performance is not an indicator of future performance. Humans always used horses... until they invented a car. Humans were using only land transport.. until they invented an airplane. Humans were always planet-bound, until they flew into space.
A Dyson sphere is not a scientific fact, it's only a possibility, and not trivial one at that. The approach has many problems.
First, the Dyson Sphere, even if it is ideally constructed, will only supply energy to your sites near the star. However it is logical to expect that an advanced civilization will need spaceships for all kinds of purposes, from research to migration. This cannot be done without movable sources of energy (thermonuclear at the least.) Once you have them, the effort of building the Dyson sphere appears to be too high.
Then the Dyson sphere needs to be constructed. There isn't much material in an average planetary system to do that, unless you can transmute your common silicon and carbon into scrith and make a thin foil out of it. You also need to deliver that material to where it is needed, and join it. A Ringworld is a much easier possibility at this point.
Once you build the sphere you need to equip it with collectors of solar energy. Where would they come from? If we build a sphere at 1AU from the Sun, do you think we can line it with solar panels? We'd have not one atom left in this Solar system after we built the sphere. Besides, the sheer volume of the effort would be impossible.
The sphere would need to be thermally balanced. (This is how they intend to find it.) If you collect all the energy and keep it inside it will heat up to the temperature of the star - and that is perhaps not what you want. So you need to cool it. Earth is rotating, radiating heat every night and collecting it every day. Planets like Mercury show what happens when a planet is thermally overloaded. The Dyson sphere would have to have radiators of energy somewhere on the external side, and there would have to be conduits. This is a lot of work.
Then the question would arise of atmosphere. Is your Dyson sphere is at 1AU then you need to live on that sphere - and that means that you must have means of holding the atmosphere in place. If you leave Earth (for example) in place and instead build the sphere on a farther orbit then the surface of your sphere grows and you need even more material. Also the problem of transportation of collected energy arises.
Considering these and other technological and conceptual difficulties, it may be easier to just use local sources of energy, like thermonuclear reactors or better. Astronomers, of course, want something to look at, and you can't look for reactors that far away. I don't think they will find Dyson spheres, though. A civilization that is advanced enough to build such a sphere probably does not need it.
I haven't tried to add artificial menu items. I installed Quicken from its original CD. There are very few items in the start menu (this is a new computer.)
Your observations further prove my point that the search is unreliable. It searches for unknown metadata, and it cannot figure out the most common issues like typos, transposed keys, parallel shifted keys like rgua one, and lots of other stuff that Google understands. As it seems, the search code was written at MS by a lowly intern. This can be improved, of course, but the very fact that such errors made it into the released Win7 is telling a lot about the MS culture. I don't know if excellence was ever valued at MS, but it certainly isn't today.
It's not Microsoft's fault that somebody decided to start their app with a greek letter.
True. However it is MS's fault for not doing a better search. This would take care of typos and of partial matches. For example, right here on my Win7 desktop I have "VNC viewer." But if I type "viewer" in the start menu I don't get that one! It doesn't find it even if I type "NC viewer." Now, how is it helpful if you must REMEMBER the EXACT name of the application? Hell, I have a pretty good memory, IMO, but even I forget now and then how some obscure piece of software is called. I can't remember everything; I wouldn't need a computer then:-)
I just tried on "Quicken Premier 2011" and Quicken does not even show up in the menu when I enter "quick" - I have to keep typing. Also if I type "premier" it doesn't find it. Search for "qw.exe" is also returning nothing. This quickly devolves into the classical shamanic dance with a tambourine, where certain magic words summon the spirits and other magic words do not. I thought we were done with that by 1990...
Slashdot Mirror
I leave these up there to ensure that I never get hired by the sort of tight-assed company which would judge me according to essentially-innocuous pictures on social media.
These photos are legal and you aren't doing anything out of the ordinary there. Bars are full of people like that. Alcohol is a drug, and I personally don't ingest it, but in this world about 100% of population take it from time to time. I am not entitled to my own facts or to my own planet; hence, I accept the inevitable.
But as blackraven14250 said, you will be judged by random people with random ideas about what is right and what is wrong. For example, HR is usually staffed with women. If the HR worker has (or had) an alcoholic husband who used to beat her, she may project her hatred toward the man and the habit onto you. Perhaps without intentionally wanting to harm you - but you will be harmed nevertheless. You will never know what you missed; a resume sent and ignored carries zero bits of information back.
That's why I say that one shouldn't post anything on social media. It only leads to you being judged by someone else's rules, and you not only cannot face your accusers - you do not even know that you were tried and found guilty. The best course of action is to give them nothing. If they want something from you, let them ask - and then you will decide, on case by case basis, what they can be given, if anything.
but I'd never be able to find that out until getting the job and being there for a while
For that reason companies, starting at some size, all look the same. The cubicles are the same, the culture is the same... If you work in a garage alongside Jim, Bob and Dave, you can tell jokes of all kinds, from political to non-gender-neutral, and use any language you like amongst yourselves. But allowing that in a larger company is unthinkable. What if someone gets offended and sues for one billion trillion dollars? That happens. You can trust Bob because you know him and you are friends; but you cannot trust a random person even if s/he works for the same company as you do. This is triply so if big money is involved. Remember Herman Cain? His accuser got a bunch of money just to shut up and go away:
In October 2011, Politico reported that two female employees had complained about inappropriate behavior by Cain during his tenure at the National Restaurant Association. The women reportedly accepted financial settlements from the association which barred them from discussing their allegations further.
This is exactly what we are talking about here. Perhaps Cain made a joke, but that joke fell on gold digger's ears. Culture of openness and friendship collided with the culture of greed. You can't reconcile those; and the common denominator is your familiar featureless cubicles and the bland corporate-speak and corporate-think, all designed to not give anyone an excuse for a lawsuit.
And that is also the difference between a 3-person company and a 300-person department. A fourth man in a 3-person company would become a family member for all practical purposes. A 301'st man would be just another speck of dust on the vast landscape of a large company.
But returning to the problem at hand, applicants that are about to be hired are often given a tour of the facility, so that they can have a look at the culture of the company and decide for themselves if they are a good fit or not. Applicants are also expected to talk about that and ask about the company's culture. It is very important because an angry loner with violent tendencies may not fit well in a 10-man team where everyone is happy and is singing and talking. I, for example, wouldn't want to work at a company where formal clothes are required. I also wouldn't want to join company picnics, or gatherings at eateries. I can easily work with people who love these things - as long as I'm not expected to be there.
There's an overgeneralization that a lot of people make here though, expanding this unhirable status to include everything from hardcore drug addicts like you mention (reasonable) to just having a Red Solo Cup in a picture with 3 friends at your own house (unreasonable).
I personally wouldn't fault anyone for being at a party, or for drinking alcohol there. As long as the man is not a professional alcoholic (that happens!) the drug is legal, common, and the employee cannot be blackmailed over that. (This is a serious consideration when your employee has to have security clearance.)
That's why people really don't like the idea of prying into social media for information on employees
I'm telling everyone that social media is evil, for one reason or another, and that no one should have an FB account. Perhaps that is throwing the water out along with the baby, but if you want a single, simple advice then that's it. Anything else would require a lot of labor in considering what and who may need to know, and who can be trusted with this or that risky photo without immediately sharing it with the whole world. I personally have no social accounts because I cannot be bothered to do this work - even if I trusted Mark Zuckerberg, which I do not.
there's a whole slew of unknowns regarding the particular intersection of the HR worker's personal judgement and an individual's lifestyle that makes it a sensitive action to take.
There is that. My own bias is against drugs, for example. Other people may have objections against candidates who like target shooting, or who hunt animals, or who date opposite sex, or who date the same sex, and so on. Legal protections against discrimination do exist, but there is no G-man behind the shoulder of every HR worker who singlehandedly decides what resumes go into trash and what get forwarded to the hiring manager. If anyone in the long chain of hiring dislikes you for any reason whatsoever, your resume will never end up on the desk of the manager - and without documented, in writing, proof of the reason for doing so you cannot prove anything. HR has special phrases for that, such as "More qualified candidates were selected." In reality, if a team in a company is largely homophobic, hiring a gay is not such a great idea; the opposite would be also true. By the law the gay can't be denied employment; but by realities of life he would be not accepted as a team member, and he would be forced to quit soon after.
But there is yet another consideration. Twitbook contains photos of people doing things that are illegal or that appear to be illegal. It could be driving way over the speed limit, or street racing, or drinking too much alcohol, or giving what appears to be alcohol to a person that appears to be a minor, or engaging in what looks like sexual activity with an apparent minor, and so on. People do not think of these as of crimes. Perhaps in their mind these are small infractions that are harmless as long as nobody was hurt. But if an HR person sees these photos, not only the candidate won't be hired - the HR person by law may be forced to report the finding to the police. This is not what your drinking buddies would ever do; after all, they knew that the "apparent minor" in the photo is your wife who is not minor at all. But the HR person wouldn't know that; neither would the police - who will investigate, and that may end up with your arrest if something doesn't add up ("Hey, she said she is 21! I didn't know that her birthday was two weeks after the party!")
In the end, it would be better for most people if social media did not exist. Public sharing of texts, images and sounds of arguably legal activity is not helping anyone. But people tend to share exactly those images, trying to impress their peers. Lacking this information, HR would have to fall back to what they know about the applicant - what he says in the resume, what his past employers say (very little nowadays) and what the applicant himself tells at the int
Meanwhile, I'll keep monitoring our thousands of networking nodes in my rather prestigious position where they can't afford to replace me.
Absolutely. I have no knowledge of who you are, who your employer is, what you are doing on Sundays, and so on. And I don't need to know that. I'm glad that you and your employer have good working relations.
Only if I'm stuck in whatever retarded hiring process you manage.
There are many hiring processes. A three-man shop will have a vastly different policy than a multinational corporation with 100,000 employees in 50 countries. A new man in a 3-man shop can destroy the entire company if he is not careful and vigilant and honest. A new man at a multinational corporation can only steal some peanuts, to the tune of a few hundred thousand dollars, which is inconsequential, and the police will take care of the rest. This is quite obvious - in a larger company importance and influence of each additional worker is smaller; facilities are far apart; bank accounts are separate; even locks on doors at production facilities only allow some employees to some areas; and of course internal auditing service and internal security service are taking care of all edge cases. But even then we read once per year that this or that bank was nearly destroyed by an employee who gambled bank's money and lost.
Maybe I'll answer later with something more serious, but if you honestly think that someone who smokes a blunt on a friday needs a motherfucking withdrawal to not smoke on Monday you are not in a position to judge ANYONE in this world, let alone decide if they are worth hiring.
If I pay my own money to someone then I can have any requirements I want. This is how the world works, regardless of what you or others think about it. If I don't want drug users around then there won't be any (that I know of.) Note - that would be regardless of their skills.
It may be a shock to geeks who use light drugs now and then. They may think that it's no big deal. Keep thinking that. Meanwhile business people avoid drug users at all costs - even if they, themselves, use the same drug on occasion.
One could think of some contrived case where the only man on Earth who can do some absolutely necessary job (say, save the world) has to be hired no matter what. That would be a fun subplot in a movie. However in real life when a company posts a job ad it receives hundreds of resumes, from all kinds of people - from young and old, from green to experienced, from exact matches to very loose matches to the job req. If a person is known for their "undesirable behavior" then the resume is trashed right away. Nobody in a business would want to be responsible for such a person because if that person steals something valuable to finance his troubles guess what, the manager who knowingly hired him may be fired or demoted soon. A business is not a kindergarten, it's not interested in helping people. A business is primarily interested in safely growing the profits. Drug users and the word "safely" do not intersect.
You again may want to point out that smoking some grass is very different from injecting heroin (or whatever it is that they inject these days) into one's veins. But you know, I'm not interested in details. I'm not a specialist on drugs, and I have no oversight over doses or choices of drugs that a prospective employee takes. Furthermore, in this labor market I don't have to care. There is plenty of "clean" applicants to pick and choose from; those that are known to be "unclean" won't be even considered. Take drugs and kill your career, it's that simple. You may disagree with that approach - but who cares what you think? You'd need to argue with tens of thousands of business owners, HR workers and hiring managers - and they have no good reason to even listen to you. Don't like that? Don't use drugs then. Or at least delete all your social accounts and be quiet about illegal things that you do. At least you will get a chance to be judged by your work.
Not that it matters, because you employ someone because of their skills, not what they do on their weekend.
It's far from the truth. Experienced managers hire good people first and skilled people second, if not third. The reason is simple: you can train a junior engineer to become senior engineer. It takes time but it can be done. On the other hand, you cannot take a bad man and train him into being a good man. And you never want to give keys to your offices and access to your code to a bad man.
With regard to weekends, if a person is bad on one day of the week he cannot be good on other days of the week. Exceptions are possible, but you can't count on them. If a person takes drugs on Sunday, do you think he will just heroically suffer through the withdrawal for the rest of the week? If a person needs illegal drugs but you aren't paying him millions, don't you think he will steal from you to pay for his habit? If a person is seen doing risky, illegal things, will you invest $100K into his training, knowing that he can be arrested at any time?
Even the pattern of employment matters, let alone the illegal sex pictured on Twitbook. If a candidate can't hold a job for more than a few months he is not viable, and his resume goes into trash. Even if he is a genius you simply can't have him for long enough to realize any business advantage.
If the guy has pictures of him smoking a blunt in the server room it's a different story.
What if he walks 20 feet, leaves the building, and smokes his blunt outside - and then returns to manage your precious network? Do you think the amount of THC in his blood would be any different? A known druggie is 100% unhireable - nobody wants that liability, for many reasons. If you are a drug user or otherwise "a bad man" in my opinion, I will not hire you. Since the reasons of rejection are never reported, you have no case in court. Businesses have no duty to hire anyone; the only thing they can't do is they can't reject candidates on protected grounds (gender, skin color, etc.) - and no smart person will ever do that. I don't care what your skin color is; but you must be a good person and a good employee. That's all that it takes, really.
Unfortunately, you get more junk than quality feedback that actually improves the paper.
This also applies to code review - and that's one of many reasons why programmers tend to skip on those. Most code reviews are useless ("You need to add comments") or too late ("You used a very slow sorting method in 277 places of your spaghetti code.") Bugs that are worth finding are not findable just by some stranger reading your printed code. If someone *can* regularly find such bugs in your code, your code is bad to begin with.
This paper is the output of an automaton, and thus not an original creative work.
The generator is a tool, just like a paintbrush or a pen or a chisel. The human who ran the tool, collected the output, looked at it, and published it would be the copyright owner.
In the same vein when a chicken crosses the road and leaves footprints in the dust, those footprints (in nature) are not copyrightable - not any more than a river or a cliff. However if an artist rolls the canvas on the ground, prepares it, catches a chicken, dips its legs in red paint and releases the chicken over the canvas, the chicken's footprints will be copyrightable. IMO, the only requirement for recognition of an original, copyrightable work is that you conceived and made it. If your only "assistants" were tools or nonhumans [animals, not Greys] then you own it all. If you had humans to assist you then it's up to the court to sort out who did what.
Mobile phones and tablets are sucking the profit out of them. They dont have a vertical supply chain of factories and stores like Apple.
Look at it from another angle. Google is servicing the constantly growing mass of mobile devices, and at the same time it does not need to take risk with design, assembly, sales and service of those devices! Profit comes not from selling a phone once in two years but from charging an advertiser $0.001 each time one of those mindless phone users looks at an ad that Google sent to them. I personally don't have Apple devices, but I have one Android tablet (had two, gave one - Nexus 7 - to my parents.) Android will keep growing, and it is already tied into Google so much that the Nexus 7 had to be cleaned up quite substantially before it became usable. A casual user would just enter all his personal data and whip the c/c out on first request.
Google may need to cut some fat here and there, as they are spending like a drunken sailor on projects that will never see the light of day. But in principle they buy and sell information; they have highly automated factories that make them money, and in theory Google could be operated by very few workers, thus making it very profitable. Its just not very smart to do in the long term; that's why every company finances some R&D.
No, I don't watch political shows. I am powerless to change the vote - even if I had a decent candidate to vote for. (This here pair of idiots is not it.)
so how many people here complain about taking English or some literature course instead of more CompSci?
I do, at least. I never understood the classical, all-emotions, literature, and I suspect it's how I think, and nothing can be done about it. Reading such writings is a waste of time for me. Why a 14 y/o boy should be reading about marital problems of much older people? Fsck it, I don't want to read about them even now.
There is literature that would be immensely appealing to young men. SciFi is of course one of best candidates, but one could think of many traditional fiction books that are written not for overly sensitive ladies. For some reason, though, books like those of Jules Verne were not part of the official reading list. But The Mysterious Island contains tons of technologies for boys to try out (as long as they are not trying synthesis of Nitroglycerine.) The book is light on emotions, and that is good because men are not supposed to be emotional creatures. The book is light on women as well (there are none) - and that is good because it removes distractions. It has plenty of challenges and plenty of solutions; every survivalist (or boy scout) should know at least a few. But, as I said, in my school days we were forced to read about some woman who was unhappily married to some man, and the entire story was supposed to happen 300 or 500 years ago. What can be more boring? To quote the classic,
But the reader [of the "Deerslayer" tale] dislikes the good people in it, is indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned together.
what good is being able to speak if you know nothing to speak of?
You can become the President.
The question becomes, "why do you think that evidence in public hearings should be hidden and made secret?"
You cannot introduce a piece of evidence into public hearings without possible opposition from the other lawyer; and the judge may forbid such evidence if it is not necessary for the trial or if it is unreliable. In other words, all evidence that is provided at the trial is there for a reason, and it is sufficiently reliable to consider and debate further. If during a murder trial the defense lawyer brings up a random, unidentifiable scrap of paper with words "$(The_defendant) haven't done it" that paper will never see the light of day. If during a prostitution trial one side brings in the log book of the prostitute with names "John Doe, Jim Doe, etc." the other side will have ample chance to question which John Doe out of tens of thousands living in this country is mentioned here, and whether the name is real or imaginary. The whole list may be disallowed because it does not evidence pretty much anything except that those names are written there. For all we know, those are records of borrowed cash; or the list may be entirely made up, with blackmailing in mind.
If the police publishes the list months ahead of the trial the list will be unopposed. It will get life on its own, and hundreds of people who have no relation to the case will be wrongly associated and accused of what they haven't done. If the police wants to publish the list "to teach them" then the police also becomes the judge and the executioner, without trial and without giving the accused the chance to face his accuser and to have proper defense mounted.
Those statements are contradictory.
They are not, unless "doctors save people" means "we are all immortal now."
Advertising stays in business only because it is profitable - not because it controls everyone's mind. A manufacturer with a 5% market share may gain 3% more customers but the cost of ads could be 90% of that increase in revenue - and it is still worth doing. But the manufacturer in the end only has 8% of the market, not 100%. Complete control is impossible; few men will buy a dress just because they saw a TV ad, and few women will buy rock climbing gear just because they got a flyer in the mail.
If we're creating more criminals, let's fix that problem, not just make it easier to track them down.
It is not politically correct to "fix that problem". Only a small percentage of criminals get caught - only when they do a serious crime (like murder) and when they get unlucky. A typical vandal will not even be stopped; locals will be afraid to step in (see George Zimmerman) and police cannot be bothered. Besides, LEO response time would be 10 minutes at best - and how long does it take to tag a storefront or to throw a stone at a window or to key a car?
Reliable removal of criminals from the society requires exactly that - removal. To prisons, to Australia, to the Moon - but the criminal must be caught and sent away for a long time. The "long time" part is because the society doesn't want the game of "catch and release."
This doesn't mean that all criminals must be given 25 years in chains. It only means that the society A decided that a certain citizen is no longer worthy of being a citizen of that society - and he is then cast away. Currently there is no other society B for the criminal to join, and so he is put back with the innocents of A. Australia, where an alternative society was formed, is one possible example.
However statistics tells us that even harsh punishments do not deter crime. England used to boil criminals, but that haven't rid the country of thieves. As crime and low IQ often go hand in hand, criminals do not believe that *they* will be caught. Some people are genetically or educationally predisposed to certain types of crime. Some enjoy going around and beating random people up. Other enjoy stealing from stores. Other enjoy lying; some find fun in arson. Perhaps some of these can be classified as mental diseases, but the fact remains. So far nobody offered a reliable way to sort alphas from deltas, short of doing it at the point of manufacturing. Today crime prevention does not exist; this means that at least one innocent must become a sacrificial bait for detection of a criminal; often that is needed more than once, and one criminal can destroy many lives over his "career."
I can understand that you can be in a public place but still be unhappy if someone videotapes you. An otherwise empty nude beach, with no one in sight for miles, is one such example. There is no public good that would result from taping you on such a beach :-)
However there is a clear public good that results from videotaping all incidents on roads. You don't have to record everything that ever happens in 360 degrees around your car. It's enough to have a ring buffer for 20-30 minutes. If an accident happens the recording stops and the data is preserved. But modern car video recorders (like the one I own) have a ring buffer that holds 8 hours of HD recording on a 32 GB SD card.
Nobody explicitly "stopped the science" aside from stem cells (that one they did, yes.) The science died out along the manufacturing and engineering, as a side effect of the general decay of the country. In other words, world-leadership and science are both outputs of a healthy society - which is not in evidence since what, 1980's?
The USA was not particularly remarkable all the way up to the World War II. During the war changes occurred internally (accelerated development of the industry) and externally (destruction of competitors in Europe.) This resulted in a significant kick in the rear which was a sufficient propulsion to sail close to the end of the 20th century. But then laziness set in; why to make products if you can just borrow the money and buy them? Why to have factories and pollute your precious land if you can outsource to China and pollute there? Why to study calculus if there is no manufacturing anymore? Why to even bother working if properly collected entitlements (there are many!) may come close to an honest salary? Why to hire people if the legally mandated minimum wage exceeds the worth of those people? The end result is here - a society that doesn't want to work, and is largely unable to work even if it had to. You can't be a world leader with such an approach.
An anti-science president will mean the US won't be a world leader in this century.
The USA is not exactly the world leader today, and the magic 8-ball does not predict an improvement in the future. The USA is doing good basically only in one area - in agriculture. And in printing money; but that's only while other guys pretend to like USD. Some electronic products, especially memory ICs, are not even available in the USA - not because Toshiba is anti-US but simply because the US market of components isn't worth maintaining. No company here will buy a million reels of the latest DDR3 or SLC Flash. As result many datasheets exist only in Asian languages; developers in the USA are forced to address their prayers to local companies like Micron.
So you're going to need some kind of active system to get the thing positioned.
This would require the sphere to be rigid - and not only rigid but sufficiently strong to impart the force from the motor to the adjacent elements. This will result in oscillations, and it will not be a trivial task to energize those motors, or to stop them. Failure of one motor, with other engines running, can lead to destruction of the links between sections of the sphere (or to destruction of the solid sphere, if it is contiguous.) Given the size of the sphere (several AU in diameter) the very concept of "simultaneous" will have relativistic effects involved. It will be an extremely fragile construct; all your operations must be flawless, and any single mistake, ever, will destroy the sphere.
And I would recommend putting some spin on it [...] at a considerable rate
The centipetal force of the center band (at the latitude 0) will be provided by the gravitational attraction of the Sun. However the same attraction will be applied to the stationary poles (at the latitude of 90 degrees.) The poles have zero velocity; therefore, they will be falling toward the Sun. The only thing that prevents such a collapse is the rigidity of the rest of the sphere. This will result in various forces that, at first blush, would be astronomical. The sphere, if it is ideally flexible, will be squeezed into a disk, and then into a ring (because different bands of the disk would want to spin at different angular speeds, that's what forms bands in planetary rings.) If that's not what you want then you need to compensate the squishing forces.
A rotating sphere will also present interesting challenges if you want to beam energy from the sphere to inner planets or ships. This would be doubly interesting if the beam must be accurately aimed, lest it becomes a death ray.
The spinning sphere will be a gyroscope. Impacts from comets, asteroids and spaceships will be translated into precession which is capable of eventually making the trajectory of the axis hard to calculate. I cannot say much about the tensile forces that will be present within the sphere.
this would be an advantage for intergalactic space travel as starships would leave the system with a considerable speed boost and wouldn't have to slow down nearly as much to land on the sphere so you do have that going for you
This is true only if you only fly within the equatorial plane of the sphere. Approach in any other plane would present a nontrivial problem. An accident near the sphere has a chance to completely destroy the fragile structure, just as a single needle can explode a rubber balloon. Even if you are very careful, you can't do anything about an asteroid that can travel fast and be large. Perhaps the sphere can survive until you send repairmen; but if not you will have big problems.
Fusion reactors (which you seem to think is the foreseeable endgame, as you mention it twice) may be great and all
I only want to remain within boundaries of what is imaginable today. If we go beyond then we suddenly get zero point energy, and then everyone can have all the energy of all the Universes in his pocket (which also will make Dyson spheres useless.) Magic is not a good answer in this discussion. We either deal with facts and science, or we deal in fantasies.
the sun (which is of course a fusion reactor itself, with more fuel then you could possibly acquire otherwise.)
Why can't I get some Helium from the Sun? If you are powerful enough to build an object that is comparable in size to the Solar system then you certainly can teleport or something a few million tons of stellar mass for your pocket expenses.
The whole point of building a Dyson sphere is because local sources of energy are no longer sufficient.
And as I said, local sources of energy may be not necessary. You would want remote sources of energy. But if you intend to use the Dyson sphere to charge your portable batteries then you can do it near any star - not just at your homeworld. A young blue star would be far more profitable in this regard, and you can waste its planets without a thought. Do that in your own Solar system and watch other planets change their orbits. Including your homeworld. Fun, isn't it?
Or if you want to leave your original planet in place, you can easily build it *inside* it's orbit. That' be much more efficient use of material anyway.
Yes, limited by the strength and thermal resistance of the material. You also lose the "hiding" factor, if you care about that. A classical Dyson sphere is outside, so that nothing escapes except the black body radiation.
Just leave a window to illuminate your planet as before
I'll have to leave it to better cosmic engineers than myself to synchronize orbits of those two objects...
or use an extremely tiny fraction of the prodigious energy collected in order to artificially illuminate it.
Well, I guess people can get used to eternal night and artificial light. Progress demands sacrifices, as they say.
if you're already imagining a civilization capable of such hyperstructures, it's not hard to also include nanometer thin film that can do the energy capture
I can imagine construction of a Dyson sphere using only traditional technologies. However the current science does not easily allow existence of nanometer thick stable hyperstructures that are sufficiently strong. Your sphere will be under tension from the sunlight, and it has to be spun or otherwise stabilized in space - and that has to be done very accurately, or else any deviations from the ideal sphere (as long as the Sun is an ideal sphere itself, mass-wise) will tear it apart. A segment of the sphere that is closer to the Sun will move faster, eventually folding onto other segments and unraveling the whole thing. Blow a soap bubble and look how wobbly it is. Your bubble of a nanometer thin film will be just as wobbly, influenced by coronal mass ejections, by passing planets, and punctured by many comets and asteroids that just happen to fly by. The sphere either needs to be sturdy enough to survive impacts (like the Ringworld - with footnotes) or it has to be able to heal itself. However the latter is doubtful because a sphere under tension tends to rip like a balloon; it is unstable by definition. Solutions to that involve thicker threads that carry the load - but those threads can become severed too, ad infinitum. Ideally you want a force field to hold the sphere together, especially considering that the sphere needs to be pushed by correction engines if you want it to not drift into the Sun. If the sphere is spinning then we are looking at even more forces that try to flatten it into a disk.
Some people mention that the sphere does not need to be solid. In such a
Well, the point of my argument is that you either learn how to make matter out of the collected energy, or that energy will cook you :-) Most of the energy will eventually transition into heat, except the energy that you intentionally blast into space.
The easiest solution to this problem is in building the sphere at 1AU and moving there. But there isn't enough material in this Solar system to build it and fill with enough oxygen and water. Another possibility is to use that energy to heat outer planets of the Solar system... but unfortunately they would be already gone by the time you have the sphere built.
Either way, the real question is not about the energy but about the matter. If you know how to synthesize one, good for you. Then the sphere can build itself. You need its energy only if you have enough surface to use that energy on. Otherwise it would be like living in a furnace.
That's a lot of energy escaping into space that could be put to use.
OK. Launch a mirror, 1000 x 1000 miles, onto the LEO and focus it onto your house. What will happen?
We, here on Earth, already are having thermal problems even though we only release chemical energy from fossil fuels. If more energy is magically delivered to Earth (by increasing Sun's output, for example) the planet will overheat. Imagine if every house on Earth has 1 MW power station in the basement, and 1 MW of loads?
we have *always* relied on sunlight
Past performance is not an indicator of future performance. Humans always used horses... until they invented a car. Humans were using only land transport.. until they invented an airplane. Humans were always planet-bound, until they flew into space.
A Dyson sphere is not a scientific fact, it's only a possibility, and not trivial one at that. The approach has many problems.
First, the Dyson Sphere, even if it is ideally constructed, will only supply energy to your sites near the star. However it is logical to expect that an advanced civilization will need spaceships for all kinds of purposes, from research to migration. This cannot be done without movable sources of energy (thermonuclear at the least.) Once you have them, the effort of building the Dyson sphere appears to be too high.
Then the Dyson sphere needs to be constructed. There isn't much material in an average planetary system to do that, unless you can transmute your common silicon and carbon into scrith and make a thin foil out of it. You also need to deliver that material to where it is needed, and join it. A Ringworld is a much easier possibility at this point.
Once you build the sphere you need to equip it with collectors of solar energy. Where would they come from? If we build a sphere at 1AU from the Sun, do you think we can line it with solar panels? We'd have not one atom left in this Solar system after we built the sphere. Besides, the sheer volume of the effort would be impossible.
The sphere would need to be thermally balanced. (This is how they intend to find it.) If you collect all the energy and keep it inside it will heat up to the temperature of the star - and that is perhaps not what you want. So you need to cool it. Earth is rotating, radiating heat every night and collecting it every day. Planets like Mercury show what happens when a planet is thermally overloaded. The Dyson sphere would have to have radiators of energy somewhere on the external side, and there would have to be conduits. This is a lot of work.
Then the question would arise of atmosphere. Is your Dyson sphere is at 1AU then you need to live on that sphere - and that means that you must have means of holding the atmosphere in place. If you leave Earth (for example) in place and instead build the sphere on a farther orbit then the surface of your sphere grows and you need even more material. Also the problem of transportation of collected energy arises.
Considering these and other technological and conceptual difficulties, it may be easier to just use local sources of energy, like thermonuclear reactors or better. Astronomers, of course, want something to look at, and you can't look for reactors that far away. I don't think they will find Dyson spheres, though. A civilization that is advanced enough to build such a sphere probably does not need it.
I haven't tried to add artificial menu items. I installed Quicken from its original CD. There are very few items in the start menu (this is a new computer.)
Your observations further prove my point that the search is unreliable. It searches for unknown metadata, and it cannot figure out the most common issues like typos, transposed keys, parallel shifted keys like rgua one, and lots of other stuff that Google understands. As it seems, the search code was written at MS by a lowly intern. This can be improved, of course, but the very fact that such errors made it into the released Win7 is telling a lot about the MS culture. I don't know if excellence was ever valued at MS, but it certainly isn't today.
It's not Microsoft's fault that somebody decided to start their app with a greek letter.
True. However it is MS's fault for not doing a better search. This would take care of typos and of partial matches. For example, right here on my Win7 desktop I have "VNC viewer." But if I type "viewer" in the start menu I don't get that one! It doesn't find it even if I type "NC viewer." Now, how is it helpful if you must REMEMBER the EXACT name of the application? Hell, I have a pretty good memory, IMO, but even I forget now and then how some obscure piece of software is called. I can't remember everything; I wouldn't need a computer then :-)
I just tried on "Quicken Premier 2011" and Quicken does not even show up in the menu when I enter "quick" - I have to keep typing. Also if I type "premier" it doesn't find it. Search for "qw.exe" is also returning nothing. This quickly devolves into the classical shamanic dance with a tambourine, where certain magic words summon the spirits and other magic words do not. I thought we were done with that by 1990...