I love the LIGO observatories, myself. Each new kind of observatory we get working is wondrous - look at all that came from the CMBR observatory satellites. I'm hoping we get a dark matter detector soon, and an CNBR observatory in my lifetime (though I couldn't even guess how you'd make such a thing).
without using any propellant, it violates basic physics and cannot work
Ahh, but "violates basic physics and cannot work" would be the best experimental result, if only it were high-confidence. Much like this observation turned all of physics on its ear the last time people were thinking there was only minor work left in the field.
From what I hear, the LIGO guys see data every time a heavy truck drives by on the nearest highway. One detector by itself can't be too confidant of any result, but there are two observatories and when their results correlate, that's a strong signal. Once we have several around the world, we'll be able to add direction to the observations. (Currently we only know direction if the source happens to line up with the two observatories).
For the EM drive - if someone has a solid guess at how it works, we should be able to build one that produces a lot more thrust based on that guess, and thus test the hypothesis cleanly. Very exciting if it ever makes it that far.
People have also been saying "this time it's different" since the dawn of the industrial revolution.
ll that's required is for some need to arise that requires more/better-paid people to support these new efficiencies
Not specifically "these new efficiencies", just "some new need to arise". Humans want more it's our nature. Every step along the way of technological advancement has produced a wave of some new sort of job, doing or making something that previously only the rich could afford, but now there's demand for at vastly larger scale.
Almost no one today in the US has a job as a farmer or manufacturing worker (while we grow more food, and manufacture more stuff than ever) , yet there are plenty of service jobs and the like.
I wish I could predict what the next wave of jobs would be (my investment portfolio wouldn't look so sad if I could), but I do expect personal services to flourish.
Society has always gained net benefit from efficiency. Making a given product, or delivering a given service, with less labor, less raw materials, and/or less energy has always helped us more than it has hurt us, as a society. We call that "technology", and it's a good thing.
People are complaining that the rate of this change is a bad, but I've read books making this same claim written 40 years ago, and 8- years ago, and I'm sure people were writing it 120 years ago too.
Apparently you don't understand the difference between criticism and trash-talking, nor the different between trash-talking one politician and the country that you live in. That's rather sad, really.
How many employees can they fire in the process? I assume they're not keeping the same amount of employees as before as some tasks are be relegated to robots.
I don't think they fired anyone - the business is still growing, and turnover is high anyhow (it's a shitty job, by all accounts).
If you don't know about these robots, BTW, they're quite clever. It's a shame among all these overpriced social media startup acquisitions that Kiva wasn't worth a lot more. Rather that getting hung up on the problem no one has solved yet (picking the part from the bin on the shelf reliably and cheaply), they built a robot to move the whole shelf to a central locations where the humans do the rest. They solved a problem that was practical to solve, and it made a real difference to efficiency.
Eventually someone will solve the "picking problem" end-to-end, and then I'm sure those jobs will be gone.
"Murcans" is offensive? Goddamn people are touchy these days.
I'm not offended by trash-talking -- that's all good fun, like your mother said last night -- but I am offended when people trash-talk their own country.
Meh, I wrote a functional kernel-mode XML parser used in production for a job a few years back. Didn't use a single library string function, which was the point here. As the GPP said: anyone that needs to process text will build a proper parser.
memcpy is different: it's full of surprisingly complex optimizations. But memcpy_s is fucking stupid.
The US or Fed do not pay interest on Federal Reserve notes. The U.S. does pay interest on Treasury bills, notes and bonds.
The Fed does, however, pay above-market-rate interest on bank money deposited with the Fed. It's relatively new program, and really quite odd. The Fed pays banks better interest than you or I can get from buying T-bills.
While it's done wonders to keep the money supply from growing while QE was printing a couple trillion new dollars, it hardly seems fair.
"The US"? Each individual living here? Including all the US cryptographers pointing out how silly this was, and selling T-shirts?
Stereotyping whole countries by their sillier government acts is fine if were doing patriotic trash-talking, like calling people "Murcans" or "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" or "I know he wasn't Canadian, or he would have apologized afterwards". That's just being silly, but if you're going to do that, it's rude not to identify your side.
Yup, the paper about escaping photons is rubbish. But then, I'm assuming this drive is as well, unless someone can manage to get thrust out of it above the hard-to-isolate background noise.
The gravity wave detector guys have the same isolation problem, but they can use correlation between detectors to prove results. Extreme claims require, well, more than "this might be something other than noise".
If you're American yourself, please stop taking your self-hatred out on those around you. Find a therapist instead.
If not, carry on. Yay patriotism! But do have the courtesy to call out what team you do root for: it's unfair to mock one team without allowing the same in return.
Shaved Chimpanzee with a Brain Slug and a Bad Toupee
Sir, I strongly object to this characterization. That's no toupee, it's the natural beauty of the brain slug. Don't insult it just because it looks different than you.
The current system seems to discourage people of actual ability to seek office, at almost any level. . ..
That's the natural consequence of the fact that those in office are the lackeys of those in power. Trump's so odd because he's neither, and he repeats stuff that the common man actually believes (oh, the horror).
t's the same reasoning the super-rich uses when talking about "ordinary people" (ie. wage slaves), "ordinary people" are lazy slobs trying to get as much money as possible from them.
I spent many years being quite poor (by US standards, as opposed to actual poverty by world standards), and getting to know my neighbors. Lazy slobs weren't uncommon, but that wasn't the majority.
Want to know why the vast majority of poor-but-able people stayed poor? 2 reasons: * People convinced that a regular job was some sort of scam by The Man that they were too smart for * People (always women) working hard but unable to get ahead because of some lazy slob attached to them, often a husband or brother.
Many people there, like me, didn't stay poor forever. Immigrant families and single people with jobs, however humble those jobs were, gradually working their way up. For that crowd, government-paid vocational training or community college would have been just the thing. Why don't we do that?
The thrust of a solar sail drops exponentially as it moves away from stellar bodies though, whereas the thrust of an EM drive could remain constant as long as it had a supply of energy.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
Assuming we're talking about a "solar sail" that works by reflected sunlight, both the thrust of the solar sail and the power from your solar panels drops off identically, as the square of the distance from the Sun.
if the directional emission of photons creates thrust why can't we create an em drive from a flashlight?
Every flashlight is an EM drive. The thrust is quite small, of course, as is the efficiency. Light has momentum, and every physics student has probably calculated the thrust of a solar sail, both black and reflective, for some test or assignment.
Calories mostly come from vegetables, even today (80% of the calories consumed in the US came originally from corn). Protein mostly comes from meat (or milk, if we go back a ways). It takes reasonable sophistication in farming to reach the point where you can be vegan without serious protein deficiencies, which is why we were originally hunter-gatherers, not just gatherers.
Everything has secondary processors, has forever. What's interesting is that this secondary processor has a TCP stack for remote management - an actual feature lots of people use. I don't know if AMDs are the same, but it wouldn't surprise me.
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I love the LIGO observatories, myself. Each new kind of observatory we get working is wondrous - look at all that came from the CMBR observatory satellites. I'm hoping we get a dark matter detector soon, and an CNBR observatory in my lifetime (though I couldn't even guess how you'd make such a thing).
without using any propellant, it violates basic physics and cannot work
Ahh, but "violates basic physics and cannot work" would be the best experimental result, if only it were high-confidence. Much like this observation turned all of physics on its ear the last time people were thinking there was only minor work left in the field.
That be "geometrically". It's only "exponentially" when the variable is the exponent.
From what I hear, the LIGO guys see data every time a heavy truck drives by on the nearest highway. One detector by itself can't be too confidant of any result, but there are two observatories and when their results correlate, that's a strong signal. Once we have several around the world, we'll be able to add direction to the observations. (Currently we only know direction if the source happens to line up with the two observatories).
For the EM drive - if someone has a solid guess at how it works, we should be able to build one that produces a lot more thrust based on that guess, and thus test the hypothesis cleanly. Very exciting if it ever makes it that far.
People have also been saying "this time it's different" since the dawn of the industrial revolution.
ll that's required is for some need to arise that requires more/better-paid people to support these new efficiencies
Not specifically "these new efficiencies", just "some new need to arise". Humans want more it's our nature. Every step along the way of technological advancement has produced a wave of some new sort of job, doing or making something that previously only the rich could afford, but now there's demand for at vastly larger scale.
Almost no one today in the US has a job as a farmer or manufacturing worker (while we grow more food, and manufacture more stuff than ever) , yet there are plenty of service jobs and the like.
I wish I could predict what the next wave of jobs would be (my investment portfolio wouldn't look so sad if I could), but I do expect personal services to flourish.
Automation: permanently destroying all the jobs, leaving only the factory owners able to eat, for 400 consecutive years now.
Society has always gained net benefit from efficiency. Making a given product, or delivering a given service, with less labor, less raw materials, and /or less energy has always helped us more than it has hurt us, as a society. We call that "technology", and it's a good thing.
People are complaining that the rate of this change is a bad, but I've read books making this same claim written 40 years ago, and 8- years ago, and I'm sure people were writing it 120 years ago too.
Apparently you don't understand the difference between criticism and trash-talking, nor the different between trash-talking one politician and the country that you live in. That's rather sad, really.
How many employees can they fire in the process? I assume they're not keeping the same amount of employees as before as some tasks are be relegated to robots.
I don't think they fired anyone - the business is still growing, and turnover is high anyhow (it's a shitty job, by all accounts).
If you don't know about these robots, BTW, they're quite clever. It's a shame among all these overpriced social media startup acquisitions that Kiva wasn't worth a lot more. Rather that getting hung up on the problem no one has solved yet (picking the part from the bin on the shelf reliably and cheaply), they built a robot to move the whole shelf to a central locations where the humans do the rest. They solved a problem that was practical to solve, and it made a real difference to efficiency.
Eventually someone will solve the "picking problem" end-to-end, and then I'm sure those jobs will be gone.
"Murcans" is offensive? Goddamn people are touchy these days.
I'm not offended by trash-talking -- that's all good fun, like your mother said last night -- but I am offended when people trash-talk their own country.
Meh, I wrote a functional kernel-mode XML parser used in production for a job a few years back. Didn't use a single library string function, which was the point here. As the GPP said: anyone that needs to process text will build a proper parser.
memcpy is different: it's full of surprisingly complex optimizations. But memcpy_s is fucking stupid.
Sure, but you're saying "the US" and he's using the slur "Murcans", which is what I was objecting to: the trash talking. He uses it a lot.
The US or Fed do not pay interest on Federal Reserve notes. The U.S. does pay interest on Treasury bills, notes and bonds.
The Fed does, however, pay above-market-rate interest on bank money deposited with the Fed. It's relatively new program, and really quite odd. The Fed pays banks better interest than you or I can get from buying T-bills.
While it's done wonders to keep the money supply from growing while QE was printing a couple trillion new dollars, it hardly seems fair.
"The US"? Each individual living here? Including all the US cryptographers pointing out how silly this was, and selling T-shirts?
Stereotyping whole countries by their sillier government acts is fine if were doing patriotic trash-talking, like calling people "Murcans" or "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" or "I know he wasn't Canadian, or he would have apologized afterwards". That's just being silly, but if you're going to do that, it's rude not to identify your side.
Yup, the paper about escaping photons is rubbish. But then, I'm assuming this drive is as well, unless someone can manage to get thrust out of it above the hard-to-isolate background noise.
The gravity wave detector guys have the same isolation problem, but they can use correlation between detectors to prove results. Extreme claims require, well, more than "this might be something other than noise".
No, no, if you drag the Sun along with you that's called a Shkadov thruster (which should actually work, if you could build it).
I see that you use this slur a lot.
If you're American yourself, please stop taking your self-hatred out on those around you. Find a therapist instead.
If not, carry on. Yay patriotism! But do have the courtesy to call out what team you do root for: it's unfair to mock one team without allowing the same in return.
Shaved Chimpanzee with a Brain Slug and a Bad Toupee
Sir, I strongly object to this characterization. That's no toupee, it's the natural beauty of the brain slug. Don't insult it just because it looks different than you.
The current system seems to discourage people of actual ability to seek office, at almost any level. . . .
That's the natural consequence of the fact that those in office are the lackeys of those in power. Trump's so odd because he's neither, and he repeats stuff that the common man actually believes (oh, the horror).
t's the same reasoning the super-rich uses when talking about "ordinary people" (ie. wage slaves), "ordinary people" are lazy slobs trying to get as much money as possible from them.
I spent many years being quite poor (by US standards, as opposed to actual poverty by world standards), and getting to know my neighbors. Lazy slobs weren't uncommon, but that wasn't the majority.
Want to know why the vast majority of poor-but-able people stayed poor? 2 reasons:
* People convinced that a regular job was some sort of scam by The Man that they were too smart for
* People (always women) working hard but unable to get ahead because of some lazy slob attached to them, often a husband or brother.
Many people there, like me, didn't stay poor forever. Immigrant families and single people with jobs, however humble those jobs were, gradually working their way up. For that crowd, government-paid vocational training or community college would have been just the thing. Why don't we do that?
Last year a net million jobs were created, yet the number of people seeking employment (unemployed or underemployed) did not change.
Huh. It's almost as if there's a problem with too much immigration. Now where did I last hear that?
So you blindly assert, in the face of all logic and reason, out of quite obvious envy for those more successful than you.
The thrust of a solar sail drops exponentially as it moves away from stellar bodies though, whereas the thrust of an EM drive could remain constant as long as it had a supply of energy.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
Assuming we're talking about a "solar sail" that works by reflected sunlight, both the thrust of the solar sail and the power from your solar panels drops off identically, as the square of the distance from the Sun.
if the directional emission of photons creates thrust why can't we create an em drive from a flashlight?
Every flashlight is an EM drive. The thrust is quite small, of course, as is the efficiency. Light has momentum, and every physics student has probably calculated the thrust of a solar sail, both black and reflective, for some test or assignment.
Nitpick: corn is a
Vegetable
Angiosperm
Monocot
Commelinid
Poale
Poacea
Panicoidea
Andropogonea
Zea
Z. mays
All are equally valid, if we're nitpicking.
Calories mostly come from vegetables, even today (80% of the calories consumed in the US came originally from corn). Protein mostly comes from meat (or milk, if we go back a ways). It takes reasonable sophistication in farming to reach the point where you can be vegan without serious protein deficiencies, which is why we were originally hunter-gatherers, not just gatherers.
Everything has secondary processors, has forever. What's interesting is that this secondary processor has a TCP stack for remote management - an actual feature lots of people use. I don't know if AMDs are the same, but it wouldn't surprise me.