An unbreakable debt limit isn't smoothly applying the brakes, it's dropping a girder on the track ahead of you. You don't try to slow a train in one instantaneous movement.
Yes, they look very different. That's as a result of their construction methods, which was what I was comparing. Skylab was built in one go on the ground and was launched in a single flight. The ISS was flown up in bits.
In terms of function, what actually matters, they were very similar in purpose. The ISS cost about 40 times as much, but definitely did not offer 40 times as much living space or power.
Reliability and maturity of life support tech was a lot better on the ISS, but I think it's fair to argue that construction method and launch vehicle didn't contribute to that.
The ISS is in a useless orbit, chosen mainly so that access from Baikonur would be possible. Moving components from the ISS orbit to a more sensible one would not quite require as much fuel as launching new ones, but given the extra hardware involved in dismantling, ferrying about and rebuilding... it would be cheaper to launch new stuff.
One other thing that should be remembered is that the ISS was partly an experiment in how to construct stuff from multiple modules to be assembled in space. The lesson learned was basically: don't do it. Skylab had approximately the same capabilities as the ISS, maybe a bit less power available, and fewer docking ports, but it was built, launched and operated on a total cost of less than a fourtieth of the cost of the ISS. If you've got the right launch vehicle, a space station does not have to be hugely expensive.
All webserver and database software will go, then so will email, then windows software will start breaking. Every human on Earth will go mad, then the planet will descend into the sun, and finally the laws of physics themselves will become unstable and the universe will start generating paradoxes and fail utterly.
Home heating is more efficient and cheaper than air conditioning for cooling. If you are going to be burning fuel somewhere, better to burn it in a home for 100% energy use as heat. The alternative is burning it in a power plant somewhere for 60% efficiency at the turbine, transmitting it at about 60% efficiency through the grid, then running the power through an AC unit at about 20% efficiency in the cooling system...
People have made pedal powered helicopters, aircraft that run on AA batteries, wooden frame towerblocks... They all worked, but weren't exactly an endorsement of the techniques.
Norway has less than a tenth the population of the UK, approximately similar land area, and a far more significant snowmelt contribution to their precipitation. Hydro works for them in a way that it wouldn't for us.
The UK is committing to heavy use of renewable power in the form of wind turbines, but we are a small island with a huge power demand, we need to follow every avenue that we reasonably can do in power generation.
Don't be silly. This article is about an unimplemented proposal, that in the UK has got only as far as a few rights holding bodies writing a report describing the fantasy world they'd like to live in. Nothing has actually happened yet.
Distributing government functions to avoid corruption is not going to help. To begin with, there is the problem of coordinated small scale corruption being more or less identical to massive single instances of corruption. More importantly than that though, is the fact that corruption in the US has gone way beyond merely bribing politicians. The US model of purist capitalism has pooled wealth into a handful of ultra rich who are influential enough that they don't have to bother with ordinary corruption, and can go straight to buying voter opinion - through meddling with education, control of media, advertising power, or thinktanks being paid to promote some idea.
Trying to place all of the blame on the government and ignoring the influence of the super rich is silly. There is equal blame spread three ways among the political system, the ultra rich, and the voters.
Providing jobs does not grant a licence to do evil.
Low wages is not the issue here. if the Foxconn workers were just getting crap pay, I suspect nobody here would care, but what is happening is that they are getting crap pay in combination with being treated like robots. The workers are being forced to stand all day in silence, permitted enough time off to eat and sleep but not enough time off to look for alternative employment, and on top of all that then being told "if you kill yourself, we will fight to the very last to avoid admitting fault and having to give compensation to your family"
If a country's economy really can't support high wages, then fine, low wages will be acceptable. The same applies to things like cheap and awful company dormitories, but harassment and dehumanising policies should not be part of the deal. If competition for jobs is harsh enough that employers start being able to pointlessly abuse their emploees just because they have no choice, then yes, the law should be there to protect them.
Economic arguments cannot be used to defend something like a forced no-suicide agreement.
Aluminium as fuel has been proposed quite often for some truly insane concepts. One of my favourites was as an extremely dense energy source for long range supercavitating torpedoes - the idea was to use a quasiturbine engine that would ignite a seawater/aluminium foil mixture by compression of the combustion chamber. Essentially a hybrid of diesel engine and rocket, burning metal at white heat.
There was also a rather wonderful spaceplane design, proposed back in the 30s I think, that would have used aluminium wings for takeoff, then once going fast enough, grind up the wings into powder and feed them into the engine as a secondary fuel source.
Greed and power doesn't explain the Chinese political situation.
A better explanation is "we know how to run the country better than you do, so shut up and let us do our jobs". There is some justification for the position. Improvements in quality of life in China aren't just some side effect of a money grab from the west. The economy is set up with the primary objective of providing reasonable jobs now and providing better jobs in the future. That's the driving force behind infrastructure projects, currency manipulations, investor manipulations, banking regulations, population control...
The Chinese government like money because they are doing things with it, and not just for selfish reasons. That's not to say they're good, because a disrespect for the population does not make for a good politician, but they are extremely competent and good at running the country.
The morality of copyright infringement is not a simple subject. It's idiotic to just say that it's always wrong, and expect the argument to stop there.
What if none of the money ever goes back to the original artist? What if the money never can, because the artist is long dead? What if the license for the media is held by an organisation that has no purpose other than to make money and prevent media from ever entering the public domain?
Sure, you could just avoid all contact with whatever the media in question is, but in such a circumstance, where's the harm in piracy? Who is hurt by it?
There is a big overlap between science and engineering.
Just to take one example, the fluid flow equations for dealing with turbulence within the combustion chamber and nozzle of the F-1 engines on the Saturn V weren't known sufficiently well to predict their behaviour. At the time, a lot of people thought that constructing such large rocket engines was insanity, and that the Saturn V should use large clusters of smaller engines like the Russian N1 did, as smaller engines were far more stable.
The problem of stabilising flow in a large combustion chamber was solved experimentally, by testing engine configurations and deliberately introducing instability in them until there was enough data to solve the problem theoretically.
The end result of all of that was that the Saturn V had a relatively simple five-engined first stage and was very reliable. In contrast, the N1 had huge numbers of engines arranged in rings, which were a nightmare to deliver fuel to, and several flights were lost in incidents of uneven fuel flow.
If you're talking in terms of work done and ignoring funding given, then sorting out cultural, logistic and legal issues is the only job the publisher has. If they're not doing that job, then they're just treating the game developers as a money fountain rather than being part of a business.
The ggp was talking about putting a manned space station around jupiter or saturn without government assistance. We really don't have the tech to do that. We could make an attempt at it with current tech, and it might work if we were lucky, but it would be very slow, the chances wouldn't be good, and it would be loltastically expensive.
Shunting robots about the solar system is three or four orders of magnitude easier, plus one more order of magnitude if you are getting some form of government backing.
You talk about those who have earned their living, but they don't do that in isolation. They do so in a functioning society, in an economy that can support them. Government has a stake in all our industry because it paid for the system that lets it happen, and taking a share to let that continue is not unreasonable.
In the specific case of social security, it directly contributes to people's ability to make money by making sure that there isn't a vast number of people relying on undeclared labour or crime to survive.
Being willing to consider evidence which doesn't fit your world view is good.
Putting unusual effort and resource into investigating something that you have very good reason to suspect is complete nonsense, is not good.
In a perfect world, a skeptic would be free to test absolutely everything, from the existence of ghosts, to periodically making sure that newtonian mechanics and basic chemistry still remain valid, and that science hasn't all changed over night. Out here in the real world, we have to prioritise our time onto things that have a better chance of being valid.
We're not out of the age of scarcity yet, and not even coming close on the global scale, but just because the time hasn't come yet doesn't make this a bad idea.
The failings of one model of alternative shouldn't blind us into thinking that capitalism is perfect in every circumstance. One of the major flaws of capitalism is exactly what you've stated - products get made because somebody needs to make money, not because there is a need for the product. The most awful example of this kind of thing is brand named goods, a horrible form of deliberate inefficiency that only really exists because there's a need to keep money flowing, and to keep people employed, even if the job they are doing is pointless. Having available a variety of products is a good thing, even if it's only trivial stuff like colour of the packet that changes, but there can exist much simpler and cheaper ways to provide that sort of choice.
Slashdot Mirror
An unbreakable debt limit isn't smoothly applying the brakes, it's dropping a girder on the track ahead of you. You don't try to slow a train in one instantaneous movement.
Yes, they look very different. That's as a result of their construction methods, which was what I was comparing. Skylab was built in one go on the ground and was launched in a single flight. The ISS was flown up in bits.
In terms of function, what actually matters, they were very similar in purpose. The ISS cost about 40 times as much, but definitely did not offer 40 times as much living space or power.
Reliability and maturity of life support tech was a lot better on the ISS, but I think it's fair to argue that construction method and launch vehicle didn't contribute to that.
The ISS is in a useless orbit, chosen mainly so that access from Baikonur would be possible. Moving components from the ISS orbit to a more sensible one would not quite require as much fuel as launching new ones, but given the extra hardware involved in dismantling, ferrying about and rebuilding... it would be cheaper to launch new stuff.
One other thing that should be remembered is that the ISS was partly an experiment in how to construct stuff from multiple modules to be assembled in space. The lesson learned was basically: don't do it. Skylab had approximately the same capabilities as the ISS, maybe a bit less power available, and fewer docking ports, but it was built, launched and operated on a total cost of less than a fourtieth of the cost of the ISS. If you've got the right launch vehicle, a space station does not have to be hugely expensive.
Everything. Literally everything.
All webserver and database software will go, then so will email, then windows software will start breaking. Every human on Earth will go mad, then the planet will descend into the sun, and finally the laws of physics themselves will become unstable and the universe will start generating paradoxes and fail utterly.
Home heating is more efficient and cheaper than air conditioning for cooling. If you are going to be burning fuel somewhere, better to burn it in a home for 100% energy use as heat. The alternative is burning it in a power plant somewhere for 60% efficiency at the turbine, transmitting it at about 60% efficiency through the grid, then running the power through an AC unit at about 20% efficiency in the cooling system...
People have made pedal powered helicopters, aircraft that run on AA batteries, wooden frame towerblocks... They all worked, but weren't exactly an endorsement of the techniques.
You say that as though a desire to avoid mass hunger was some kind of evil conspiracy.
Making sure that the people who elected you don't risk starvation is pretty high up the list of priorities for a decent and competent politician.
Norway has less than a tenth the population of the UK, approximately similar land area, and a far more significant snowmelt contribution to their precipitation. Hydro works for them in a way that it wouldn't for us.
The UK is committing to heavy use of renewable power in the form of wind turbines, but we are a small island with a huge power demand, we need to follow every avenue that we reasonably can do in power generation.
Don't be silly. This article is about an unimplemented proposal, that in the UK has got only as far as a few rights holding bodies writing a report describing the fantasy world they'd like to live in. Nothing has actually happened yet.
In the meantime, attempts at shutting down websites have actually been implemented in the US - http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/06/13/218206/First-Challenge-To-US-Domain-Seizures-Filed
In destroying freedoms, the US leads and the UK just follows on behind.
Distributing government functions to avoid corruption is not going to help. To begin with, there is the problem of coordinated small scale corruption being more or less identical to massive single instances of corruption. More importantly than that though, is the fact that corruption in the US has gone way beyond merely bribing politicians. The US model of purist capitalism has pooled wealth into a handful of ultra rich who are influential enough that they don't have to bother with ordinary corruption, and can go straight to buying voter opinion - through meddling with education, control of media, advertising power, or thinktanks being paid to promote some idea. Trying to place all of the blame on the government and ignoring the influence of the super rich is silly. There is equal blame spread three ways among the political system, the ultra rich, and the voters.
Providing jobs does not grant a licence to do evil.
Low wages is not the issue here. if the Foxconn workers were just getting crap pay, I suspect nobody here would care, but what is happening is that they are getting crap pay in combination with being treated like robots. The workers are being forced to stand all day in silence, permitted enough time off to eat and sleep but not enough time off to look for alternative employment, and on top of all that then being told "if you kill yourself, we will fight to the very last to avoid admitting fault and having to give compensation to your family"
If a country's economy really can't support high wages, then fine, low wages will be acceptable. The same applies to things like cheap and awful company dormitories, but harassment and dehumanising policies should not be part of the deal. If competition for jobs is harsh enough that employers start being able to pointlessly abuse their emploees just because they have no choice, then yes, the law should be there to protect them. Economic arguments cannot be used to defend something like a forced no-suicide agreement.
It's vacuum apart from all the stars, planets, moons, asteroids, comets, dust, gas, solar wind, light...
Aluminium as fuel has been proposed quite often for some truly insane concepts. One of my favourites was as an extremely dense energy source for long range supercavitating torpedoes - the idea was to use a quasiturbine engine that would ignite a seawater/aluminium foil mixture by compression of the combustion chamber. Essentially a hybrid of diesel engine and rocket, burning metal at white heat.
There was also a rather wonderful spaceplane design, proposed back in the 30s I think, that would have used aluminium wings for takeoff, then once going fast enough, grind up the wings into powder and feed them into the engine as a secondary fuel source.
Greed and power doesn't explain the Chinese political situation.
A better explanation is "we know how to run the country better than you do, so shut up and let us do our jobs". There is some justification for the position. Improvements in quality of life in China aren't just some side effect of a money grab from the west. The economy is set up with the primary objective of providing reasonable jobs now and providing better jobs in the future. That's the driving force behind infrastructure projects, currency manipulations, investor manipulations, banking regulations, population control...
The Chinese government like money because they are doing things with it, and not just for selfish reasons. That's not to say they're good, because a disrespect for the population does not make for a good politician, but they are extremely competent and good at running the country.
The morality of copyright infringement is not a simple subject. It's idiotic to just say that it's always wrong, and expect the argument to stop there.
What if none of the money ever goes back to the original artist? What if the money never can, because the artist is long dead? What if the license for the media is held by an organisation that has no purpose other than to make money and prevent media from ever entering the public domain?
Sure, you could just avoid all contact with whatever the media in question is, but in such a circumstance, where's the harm in piracy? Who is hurt by it?
It's not simple. Don't pretend it is.
There is a big overlap between science and engineering.
Just to take one example, the fluid flow equations for dealing with turbulence within the combustion chamber and nozzle of the F-1 engines on the Saturn V weren't known sufficiently well to predict their behaviour. At the time, a lot of people thought that constructing such large rocket engines was insanity, and that the Saturn V should use large clusters of smaller engines like the Russian N1 did, as smaller engines were far more stable.
The problem of stabilising flow in a large combustion chamber was solved experimentally, by testing engine configurations and deliberately introducing instability in them until there was enough data to solve the problem theoretically.
The end result of all of that was that the Saturn V had a relatively simple five-engined first stage and was very reliable. In contrast, the N1 had huge numbers of engines arranged in rings, which were a nightmare to deliver fuel to, and several flights were lost in incidents of uneven fuel flow.
If you're talking in terms of work done and ignoring funding given, then sorting out cultural, logistic and legal issues is the only job the publisher has. If they're not doing that job, then they're just treating the game developers as a money fountain rather than being part of a business.
The ggp was talking about putting a manned space station around jupiter or saturn without government assistance. We really don't have the tech to do that. We could make an attempt at it with current tech, and it might work if we were lucky, but it would be very slow, the chances wouldn't be good, and it would be loltastically expensive.
Shunting robots about the solar system is three or four orders of magnitude easier, plus one more order of magnitude if you are getting some form of government backing.
Without physics, mathematics is only a game of picking some axioms to see what they do, or worse, just a language.
Cold fusion can be done, easily and reliably: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion
What we don't have is any way to do it that isn't ludicrously expensive, burning through catalyst almost as fast as fuel.
You talk about those who have earned their living, but they don't do that in isolation. They do so in a functioning society, in an economy that can support them. Government has a stake in all our industry because it paid for the system that lets it happen, and taking a share to let that continue is not unreasonable.
In the specific case of social security, it directly contributes to people's ability to make money by making sure that there isn't a vast number of people relying on undeclared labour or crime to survive.
Which period are you referring to? Serious question.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/dec/07/world-education-rankings-maths-science-reading
This is a nice, recent attempt to answer that question.
Being beaten by South Korea is nothing to be ashamed of, but being beaten across all three categories by Poland has got to be embarassing.
As for attempts worldwide to change school systems, the talk in the UK at least is in trying to imitate the Swedes and the Norwegians.
Being willing to consider evidence which doesn't fit your world view is good.
Putting unusual effort and resource into investigating something that you have very good reason to suspect is complete nonsense, is not good.
In a perfect world, a skeptic would be free to test absolutely everything, from the existence of ghosts, to periodically making sure that newtonian mechanics and basic chemistry still remain valid, and that science hasn't all changed over night. Out here in the real world, we have to prioritise our time onto things that have a better chance of being valid.
We're not out of the age of scarcity yet, and not even coming close on the global scale, but just because the time hasn't come yet doesn't make this a bad idea.
The failings of one model of alternative shouldn't blind us into thinking that capitalism is perfect in every circumstance. One of the major flaws of capitalism is exactly what you've stated - products get made because somebody needs to make money, not because there is a need for the product. The most awful example of this kind of thing is brand named goods, a horrible form of deliberate inefficiency that only really exists because there's a need to keep money flowing, and to keep people employed, even if the job they are doing is pointless. Having available a variety of products is a good thing, even if it's only trivial stuff like colour of the packet that changes, but there can exist much simpler and cheaper ways to provide that sort of choice.