Why? Why the fuck should kids be familiar with real guns? I think you grew up in the wrong neighborhood.
I hope some day the only familiarity kids will have with guns will be in visits to a museum, where they will also see steam engines and whalebone corsets.
Wut? Unless that set period is so short it needs building additional facilities, the price for repeated launches will only go down, never up.
Imagine the time period is the same you need for building a 1 GW power plant using any traditional technology. That will be a few years. Meaning you could do a launch every couple of days and complete a thousand launches in the same period. You could do that from a single launchpad.
The reason why they don't do launches day after day right now is because there is no demand for so many launches, but they certainly could adapt the procedures for that.
In the geostationary orbits there are two periods each year, around March and September, when the satellites are eclipsed by the earth. That's why geostationary satellites need batteries, which are among the heaviest parts of a satellite. And, unfortunately for the power generation idea, these eclipses occur at night for a satellite located above the point it's beaming at.
As for the cost, launching 10,000 tons could be done for something like $50 billion or so. We are talking about a thousand launches, so it would pay to build your own rockets, which would bring the price down.
The exact costs of the launchers today is a closely guarded trade secret, but it's certainly less than the price you pay. Certainly, with a private company with development costs amortized over a thousand units, they could bring the launch costs to a less prohibitive level.
trying to force a 100 year old body to keep it's heart beating
Hint: by the time science discovers more about the mechanism of aging, it won't be a 100 year old body anymore.
All of her white blood cells were being produced by just two stem cells. Imagine if they could replicate stem cells indefinitely, her body would become 20 years old forever, not 100.
I took a philosophy course and an engineering degree. After working 30 years in engineering, I can tell for sure that philosophy is NOT the answer to engineering problems.
If too many people working on IT are under trained, you may blame the education system for failing to provide them with enough training in that field, not for failing to provide them education in totally unrelated fields.
Philosophy to come up with the right argument and psychology to make it stick
Unfortunately, philosophy is very far from coming with the right argument. I took a philosophy course in college, to "broaden" my outlook, and it had the exact opposite effect. Read any text by a philosopher, and in the end you'll get to the conclusion that perhaps there could be one or two good ideas there, if it had been written in a hundred words instead of a hundred pages. That's why sometimes a philosopher seems so smart to the uninitiated, they have read only the aphorisms and quotations, they have never had to pore through a full book written by a philosopher.
IT is a field for many different specialists. In the most common forms, what is needed is an expertise in human interfaces, we need graphics designers to create the screens and writers to create the documentation. In that sense, yes, it's all about expertise in the humanities. The vast majority of IT work in development is about personal and corporate software, of which data input and presentation is the bulk of the thing.
Logic and mathematics, although it's behind every software, is a very small part of the development job. However, it cannot be totally disregarded, because it's an essential part.
There's the dilemma we face. We cannot just exempt people working in IT from training in the essential parts most of them will never use, because we never know when those skills will be needed.
Those programmers who say "I've never used a differential equation" are people who slept through their calculus courses and cheated at the exams. If you are simulating pitching a ball or you are calculating the profits from an investment fund you are using differential equations, and you should know how to do the job. Unless you work for a big company, you cannot be assured that the only things you'll ever need to do is drawing screens and writing manuals.
I guess the memo had a misspelling. The wheel wells seem to be a good place for terrorists, not for tourists.
If someone can sneak up to the plane and climb in, it should be equally easy to put a bomb there. If a 16-year-old can find a way to squeeze into that space, it wouldn't be too difficult to fit in a couple hundred pounds of explosives.
If you need to sell some stock or commodity within a second of buying it, then something is wrong
Oh, yeah? Then, please, tell me in your infinite wisdom how long I should wait? Ten years? Twenty?
The fact is that ANY delay in a feedback system tends to destabilize it. In mechanical systems this is called "backlash" and there is extensive research on how to eliminate it and cope with the problems it causes. Anyone who proposes to artificially introduce backlash in a feedback system know nothing about what he is talking about.
In a market it would be trivially easy to manipulate prices if an artificial delay were involved, especially for the bigger traders. Put a buy order for a million shares and watch the prices rise, then sell at the higher price that would result a half second later. The same principle would work no matter how long the delay is.
Markets work so well because there is negative feedback in many different loops all over the economy. Some of these loops have shorter response times, other are slower to respond. If you invent an artificial delay that overlaps everything, this creates a well defined eignevalue that anyone with the proper technical knowledge could exploit.
Imposing a tax only means the profit threshold is raised. That creates the market distortion called "arbitrage", where the relative costs between different transactions are not symmetric.
A.01% tax per transaction would mean that for me, a small trader, there would be a net loss unless my own profit per trade is lower than.01%. For a bigger trader, the cost per trade is lower, therefore they would gain and advantage over us, the smaller guys.
The true solution? Let it be, do not change anything.
Apart from some guys who get a lot of profit selling books claiming HFT is bad, no one actually makes very much on HFT. The margins are very low, extremely low, so you need to invest a lot of capital to get any profit from it.
Getting a small profit from economy of scale is something that hurts no one, it happens in every sector of the economy. As a small investor, I have an indirect gain from the higher liquidity when the big investors go into HFT.
The economy is not a zero-sum game, there are situations where everyone profits and situations where everyone loses. With HFT everyone gains, with taxes everyone loses.
The US didn't need to use the bomb again, the mere knowledge that it existed was enough.
Anyhow, it was several years until the Soviets got their own bomb, and even longer until they had some way to deliver them. Until the mid-1950s at least the Soviets had no bomber planes or missiles capable of dropping atom bombs on the USA.
Voice interface is one of the hardest things to implement well in AI because there are so many sentences that sound similar, understanding depends so much on context.
Without understanding the context of the conversation, a voice interface will not be able to know if you are talking about sodas or sawdust, robots or row boats, new displays or nudist plays.
your own personal information that is being bundled up and sold off.
I repeat, there is no need to "monetize" everything.
Does that personal information have any monetary value to you? Can you sell it? Does someone using it take anything away from you? If not, then you are losing nothing while you get to use the services of a site without having to pay for it.
All that information does is to enable someone to send you advertisements that might interest you. If it doesn't interest you, too bad, but it's no worse than all the junk mail you have been receiving for so many years.
Anyhow, if you do not like the way it is, no one is forcing you to use any of those sites. It's not like the government taking taxes away from your pockets.
There will be plenty of people who prefer casual games on a phone screen, there will be plenty who prefer high-resolution fancy graphics displayed on their big TV with a control system more flexible than a touch screen
The problem with consoles right now is that any argument you can make for consoles vs. tablets you can also make for PC gaming vs. consoles, and any argument you can make for consoles vs. PCs you can also make for tablets vs. consoles.
Consoles are in an ever shrinking gap between tablets and PCs, I don't think their market has very much space to grow.
And how do you know if your equations are correct?
That's the whole point raised by TFA. You know your equations are correct if the results of the simulation agrees with the results of the observation.
This system offers an unprecedented way to check how much does model general relativity fit the actual universe.
It's all in TFA, but I suppose reading it breaks the slashdot rules. Since we have three stars that are much more massive than any other three body system observed before, we can make measurements of the effects of gravitation with more precision, because the effects of those three stars on each other are so much bigger than the perturbations from other masses.
Why is it fair to inherit money? Because it's like any other inheritance.
Is it fair that people inherit good looks from their parents? Or athletic potential? Try getting to play in the NBA if you had two very short parents.
Or what about the place where you were born? Is it fair that some people are born in Germany, Sweden, or the USA, while others are born in Somalia, Afghanistan, or North Korea?
The simple fact that you inherited money doesn't mean you didn't deserve it. You deserve it as much as anything else you got by pure chance.
If you think it would be fair to "equalize" the situation by taking away the money people inherit, then there are many other situations that should be equalized as well. One could start by abolishing nationalities, allowing everyone to live and work in whatever country they wanted. Then one should abolish all professional sport competitions, no one should be judged by their sports skills. Also, what about people with inherited musical skills? Get rid of music as a profession as well...
And it shouldn't be. This "guaranteed income" is one more bullshit keynesian theory that will never work. All that a guaranteed income in cash could bring is inflation.
There are resources, like real estate, for instance, that are intrinsically limited. Distributing cash to everyone would increase the demand for these limited resources, without contributing anything to production. For a good example of this, look at what happened when the Community Reinvestment Act forced banks to give financing to anyone who wanted to buy a house.
We can offer people the basic needs, not a basic income. We can give them food, medical care, housing, etc, but not a significant income in cash. If, instead of providing people with financing to buy any house they wanted, the CRA had provided people in need with standard basic houses, the junk mortgage bubble would have never happened.
There are several different niches on earth where life exists in very hostile conditions. But that's not relevant to the question of life on Mars. The point is, did extremophile life arise spontaneously in such places, or did it migrate from somewhere else and gradually adapted to extreme conditions?
As far as we know, life may have a very low probability of appearing. We still don't know the exact combination of factors that led to the formation of the first living organisms, no one has ever been able to duplicate it in a laboratory.
The earth has several unique characteristics, one of them being its presence right in the middle of the habitable zone. However, the right temperature is not enough. The existence of a magnetic field is important, and plate tectonics may also be a fundamental factor, in its recycling of carbonaceous rocks that keeps the carbon dioxide in balance.
The presence of the moon could be fundamental to both the magnetic field and plate tectonics, due to the churning of the earth through tidal action. Also, ocean tides may have been a contributor to the creation of life, perhaps the concentration of soluble minerals in tidal pools were a factor. So, it could be that life will only evolve on a planet with a large moon.
Slashdot Mirror
to familiarize kids with real guns
Why? Why the fuck should kids be familiar with real guns? I think you grew up in the wrong neighborhood.
I hope some day the only familiarity kids will have with guns will be in visits to a museum, where they will also see steam engines and whalebone corsets.
Wut? Unless that set period is so short it needs building additional facilities, the price for repeated launches will only go down, never up.
Imagine the time period is the same you need for building a 1 GW power plant using any traditional technology. That will be a few years. Meaning you could do a launch every couple of days and complete a thousand launches in the same period. You could do that from a single launchpad.
The reason why they don't do launches day after day right now is because there is no demand for so many launches, but they certainly could adapt the procedures for that.
The cost of sending 10 metric tons to LEO and about 5 metric tons to GEO is claimed by SpaceX to be slightly under $60 million USD
For a single launch. Ask them about their discount for a thousand.
In the geostationary orbits there are two periods each year, around March and September, when the satellites are eclipsed by the earth. That's why geostationary satellites need batteries, which are among the heaviest parts of a satellite. And, unfortunately for the power generation idea, these eclipses occur at night for a satellite located above the point it's beaming at.
As for the cost, launching 10,000 tons could be done for something like $50 billion or so. We are talking about a thousand launches, so it would pay to build your own rockets, which would bring the price down.
The exact costs of the launchers today is a closely guarded trade secret, but it's certainly less than the price you pay. Certainly, with a private company with development costs amortized over a thousand units, they could bring the launch costs to a less prohibitive level.
trying to force a 100 year old body to keep it's heart beating
Hint: by the time science discovers more about the mechanism of aging, it won't be a 100 year old body anymore.
All of her white blood cells were being produced by just two stem cells. Imagine if they could replicate stem cells indefinitely, her body would become 20 years old forever, not 100.
I took a philosophy course and an engineering degree. After working 30 years in engineering, I can tell for sure that philosophy is NOT the answer to engineering problems.
If too many people working on IT are under trained, you may blame the education system for failing to provide them with enough training in that field, not for failing to provide them education in totally unrelated fields.
Philosophy to come up with the right argument and psychology to make it stick
Unfortunately, philosophy is very far from coming with the right argument. I took a philosophy course in college, to "broaden" my outlook, and it had the exact opposite effect. Read any text by a philosopher, and in the end you'll get to the conclusion that perhaps there could be one or two good ideas there, if it had been written in a hundred words instead of a hundred pages. That's why sometimes a philosopher seems so smart to the uninitiated, they have read only the aphorisms and quotations, they have never had to pore through a full book written by a philosopher.
IT is a field for many different specialists. In the most common forms, what is needed is an expertise in human interfaces, we need graphics designers to create the screens and writers to create the documentation. In that sense, yes, it's all about expertise in the humanities. The vast majority of IT work in development is about personal and corporate software, of which data input and presentation is the bulk of the thing.
Logic and mathematics, although it's behind every software, is a very small part of the development job. However, it cannot be totally disregarded, because it's an essential part.
There's the dilemma we face. We cannot just exempt people working in IT from training in the essential parts most of them will never use, because we never know when those skills will be needed.
Those programmers who say "I've never used a differential equation" are people who slept through their calculus courses and cheated at the exams. If you are simulating pitching a ball or you are calculating the profits from an investment fund you are using differential equations, and you should know how to do the job. Unless you work for a big company, you cannot be assured that the only things you'll ever need to do is drawing screens and writing manuals.
I guess the memo had a misspelling. The wheel wells seem to be a good place for terrorists, not for tourists.
If someone can sneak up to the plane and climb in, it should be equally easy to put a bomb there. If a 16-year-old can find a way to squeeze into that space, it wouldn't be too difficult to fit in a couple hundred pounds of explosives.
If you need to sell some stock or commodity within a second of buying it, then something is wrong
Oh, yeah? Then, please, tell me in your infinite wisdom how long I should wait? Ten years? Twenty?
The fact is that ANY delay in a feedback system tends to destabilize it. In mechanical systems this is called "backlash" and there is extensive research on how to eliminate it and cope with the problems it causes. Anyone who proposes to artificially introduce backlash in a feedback system know nothing about what he is talking about.
In a market it would be trivially easy to manipulate prices if an artificial delay were involved, especially for the bigger traders. Put a buy order for a million shares and watch the prices rise, then sell at the higher price that would result a half second later. The same principle would work no matter how long the delay is.
Markets work so well because there is negative feedback in many different loops all over the economy. Some of these loops have shorter response times, other are slower to respond. If you invent an artificial delay that overlaps everything, this creates a well defined eignevalue that anyone with the proper technical knowledge could exploit.
Imposing a tax only means the profit threshold is raised. That creates the market distortion called "arbitrage", where the relative costs between different transactions are not symmetric.
A .01% tax per transaction would mean that for me, a small trader, there would be a net loss unless my own profit per trade is lower than .01%. For a bigger trader, the cost per trade is lower, therefore they would gain and advantage over us, the smaller guys.
The true solution? Let it be, do not change anything.
Apart from some guys who get a lot of profit selling books claiming HFT is bad, no one actually makes very much on HFT. The margins are very low, extremely low, so you need to invest a lot of capital to get any profit from it.
Getting a small profit from economy of scale is something that hurts no one, it happens in every sector of the economy. As a small investor, I have an indirect gain from the higher liquidity when the big investors go into HFT.
The economy is not a zero-sum game, there are situations where everyone profits and situations where everyone loses. With HFT everyone gains, with taxes everyone loses.
The US didn't need to use the bomb again, the mere knowledge that it existed was enough.
Anyhow, it was several years until the Soviets got their own bomb, and even longer until they had some way to deliver them. Until the mid-1950s at least the Soviets had no bomber planes or missiles capable of dropping atom bombs on the USA.
That's how we define what is called "history". If it happened before writing existed, it's not part of history.
Although, to be fair, Catholic missionaries destroyed a lot of written records from pre-Columbian America. They literally deleted Inca history.
And don't someone come up with the BS about everyone will sit around in blissful nirvana writing poetry or music or coding or go kayaking all day.
No, of course not. They will sit around and watch TV.
How many people have the ability and the inclination to write poetry or music or code anyhow?
Voice interface is one of the hardest things to implement well in AI because there are so many sentences that sound similar, understanding depends so much on context.
Without understanding the context of the conversation, a voice interface will not be able to know if you are talking about sodas or sawdust, robots or row boats, new displays or nudist plays.
In C you just cannot use inheritance in any useful way
work on space exploration, fusion power, renewable food production,
You know what's even worse than working on developing weapon systems? Working on 90 years old weapon systems.
Aircraft carriers were state of the art during WWII, today they are as obsolete as the USS Arizona was in 1941.
What's the point is spending hundreds of billions of dollars in building sitting ducks that can be taken out by a single hypersonic missile?
your own personal information that is being bundled up and sold off.
I repeat, there is no need to "monetize" everything.
Does that personal information have any monetary value to you? Can you sell it? Does someone using it take anything away from you? If not, then you are losing nothing while you get to use the services of a site without having to pay for it.
All that information does is to enable someone to send you advertisements that might interest you. If it doesn't interest you, too bad, but it's no worse than all the junk mail you have been receiving for so many years.
Anyhow, if you do not like the way it is, no one is forcing you to use any of those sites. It's not like the government taking taxes away from your pockets.
How did this half-wit get published by the NY times?
Hint: they also publish the bullshit that Paul Krugman writes.
It's easy to say that internet companies only employs X people, while forgetting that they do not charge users for whatever they provide.
I, for one, think the greatest economic advantage is when we are able to get things for free. There's no need to "monetize" everything.
Your failure to predict it will still get you arrested in Italy.
But if you predict it you will be arrested in North Carolina.
There will be plenty of people who prefer casual games on a phone screen, there will be plenty who prefer high-resolution fancy graphics displayed on their big TV with a control system more flexible than a touch screen
The problem with consoles right now is that any argument you can make for consoles vs. tablets you can also make for PC gaming vs. consoles, and any argument you can make for consoles vs. PCs you can also make for tablets vs. consoles.
Consoles are in an ever shrinking gap between tablets and PCs, I don't think their market has very much space to grow.
And how do you know if your equations are correct?
That's the whole point raised by TFA. You know your equations are correct if the results of the simulation agrees with the results of the observation.
This system offers an unprecedented way to check how much does model general relativity fit the actual universe.
It's all in TFA, but I suppose reading it breaks the slashdot rules. Since we have three stars that are much more massive than any other three body system observed before, we can make measurements of the effects of gravitation with more precision, because the effects of those three stars on each other are so much bigger than the perturbations from other masses.
provided people are free to leave.
But don't forget this is a two ended trip. There must also exist a provision that no country should be allowed to refuse immigrants.
If a person from India or Malawi wanted to go live in the USA or Western Europe they should be allowed to do so, without any hindrance.
Otherwise, it would be just a matter of luck that you inherited your parents' nationality.
Why is it fair to inherit money? Because it's like any other inheritance.
Is it fair that people inherit good looks from their parents? Or athletic potential? Try getting to play in the NBA if you had two very short parents.
Or what about the place where you were born? Is it fair that some people are born in Germany, Sweden, or the USA, while others are born in Somalia, Afghanistan, or North Korea?
The simple fact that you inherited money doesn't mean you didn't deserve it. You deserve it as much as anything else you got by pure chance.
If you think it would be fair to "equalize" the situation by taking away the money people inherit, then there are many other situations that should be equalized as well. One could start by abolishing nationalities, allowing everyone to live and work in whatever country they wanted. Then one should abolish all professional sport competitions, no one should be judged by their sports skills. Also, what about people with inherited musical skills? Get rid of music as a profession as well...
That is NOT guaranteed income
And it shouldn't be. This "guaranteed income" is one more bullshit keynesian theory that will never work. All that a guaranteed income in cash could bring is inflation.
There are resources, like real estate, for instance, that are intrinsically limited. Distributing cash to everyone would increase the demand for these limited resources, without contributing anything to production. For a good example of this, look at what happened when the Community Reinvestment Act forced banks to give financing to anyone who wanted to buy a house.
We can offer people the basic needs, not a basic income. We can give them food, medical care, housing, etc, but not a significant income in cash. If, instead of providing people with financing to buy any house they wanted, the CRA had provided people in need with standard basic houses, the junk mortgage bubble would have never happened.
There are several different niches on earth where life exists in very hostile conditions. But that's not relevant to the question of life on Mars. The point is, did extremophile life arise spontaneously in such places, or did it migrate from somewhere else and gradually adapted to extreme conditions?
As far as we know, life may have a very low probability of appearing. We still don't know the exact combination of factors that led to the formation of the first living organisms, no one has ever been able to duplicate it in a laboratory.
The earth has several unique characteristics, one of them being its presence right in the middle of the habitable zone. However, the right temperature is not enough. The existence of a magnetic field is important, and plate tectonics may also be a fundamental factor, in its recycling of carbonaceous rocks that keeps the carbon dioxide in balance.
The presence of the moon could be fundamental to both the magnetic field and plate tectonics, due to the churning of the earth through tidal action. Also, ocean tides may have been a contributor to the creation of life, perhaps the concentration of soluble minerals in tidal pools were a factor. So, it could be that life will only evolve on a planet with a large moon.