Awright, if achieving a fraction of c large enough to make the trip non-generational for the astronauts isn't practical then maybe the poem is spot-on after all. Break the light barrier, or forget about it.
You're quite right that you don't need to exceed C. I decided to take the lazy way out to analyze this problem. Please note, that site has a crappy interface. There are probably better relativistic trip calculators out there.
What's interesting is that you can subject both the earth and the ship to a fairly long wait time (we're both in it together) or you can give the ship a reasonably short wait time if you can get to 0.99c. The aforementioned lack of sync with Earth is still a problem of course. Single digit years on the ship, multi-decades go by on Earth. I don't know if that calculator takes into account the fact that you have to accelerate to some fraction of C and then decelerate to orbit. Having the deceleration fail would be a world of suck too, not to mention the kinetic energy of a dust particle at relativistic velocities.
Anyway, it was a bit of doggeral I banged out on a whim. If you can come up with some good rhyme and meter that's also good physics, have at it.
Here's silver candy,
It doesn't make you fat.
It'll get you girls and all of that.
It only sells for a modest fee.
A quintillion dollars
Or exceeding C.
Millions of consumers have already started tackling, now a 300 million pound defensive lineman jumps on the pile. The official keeps blowing the whistle and nobody cares. It'll be interesting to see who has the ball when the pull everybody off. Go 49ers!
For those who don't understand the free market concept, let me clue you in. It solves problems because it's an ideal. How do you obtain an ideal economic order, you say? Just send me $588,987 and I'll tell you. You must agreee not to share the plans with others. Those are my terms. I can set them, because it's a free market.
Until housing is regarded as a consumer item that is desirable to make cheaply, this will not happen. Our ENTIRE FINANCIAL SYSTEM is predicated on the notion that a house is an investment which must appreciate. There is no intrinsic need for this of course, it's just the way things are. The idea is so ingrained in people's thought processes that it just doesn't occur to them that it's wrong. I'm tired of re-hashing this on Slashdot. Even most people here don't get it.
This, like all other ideas that are supposed to make housing affordable, will run into the same brick wall: Nobody actually wants affordable housing because our system is designed to force all but the wealthiest consumers to have leveraged real estate as their largest investment. When leveraged investments decline in value, those who hold them experience amplified losses.
According to the Daily Paul, it's not affiliated with Ron Paul.
That said, I would be surprised if Paul supported SOPA/PIPA. Unfortunately I too find the bad outweighs the good with Ron Paul. I think a lot of his ideas are like spice. We need a dash of Ron Paul in the system; but I can't stomach a plate full of pepper.
28% of all geniuses make perfect guesses at statistics on Slashdot. FWIW, Mozart was a prodigy and died at 35. We need to define "prodigy" and compare it to contemporary mortality figures to get a real answer though.
Today I learned that "splutnik" is screen, and "frob" is plot. I think the function would be better if it returned an int to indicated that you attempted to frob outside the bounds of the splutnik.
I'd say designers should do it only if you have tools designers can use that don't result in a doubling of the hardware requirements. Also, the designers must admit that not everybody wants eye candy and some people just want text. They should offer a way to turn off the eye candy. I'm pointing my fingers at you, almost the entire WWW.
The other elephant: collision. If we get any significant fraction of c, how are we going to know when a rock the size of a marble is in our path? At that velocity, it's bye-bye charlie when it hits you.
OK, maybe "it's an investment" is the biggest argument for ownership; but IMHO it's a bad argument. Food and clothing are just as essential as housing; but we don't regard them as investments. Your rent isn't 100% loss. You wanted shelter, you paid for it, you got it. If you buy that then I must also accept that interest payment on a mortgage isn't a 100% loss, although I tend to look at it that way. Of course the government distorts this by incentivizing interest. Yuck. We didn't get into the whole subsidy issue. I'd love to say more; but Slashdot is throwing "guru meditation" errors at me so this might not even post...
If he asked economists, he probably would get that kind of response since taxes and their impact on things are part of ECON. Economics has a lot of problems, one of which is that it tends to have a bit of a bag over its head. Then again, many academic disciplines have this problem since interdisciplinary studies tend to be frowned upon for political reasons. Anyway, I digress...
Eliminate Euclidean zoning for the most part. In case you're not aware that name comes from Euclid, Ohio where it was pioneered. It's the kind of zoning where "all the houses are here, all the businesses are there". Get rid of it, and you eliminate a lot of trips.
Of course you'd still have to have some compartmentalization for "noxious trades" like rendering plants, sewage treatment, etc. OTOH, the reason why so many of us cannot walk to a store without passing miles and miles of bland cooki-cutter tract homes is this bad zoning. It looks neat on a map. It's polluting and making us fat in real life.
Unfortunately, it would take a long time to undo. You don't plop commercial establishments into neighborhoods without getting NIMBY reactions. This is a side effect of the way home ownership works. For any other product you're happy when the cost comes down. For homes the model is b0rked so that people are unhappy when the cost comes down.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry when politcians talk about the need for affordable housing. We got that, and they called it a "housing crisis". The obvious solution is that most people should not own their homes, and non-leveraged REITs should be made available. The biggest argument for ownership, "I want to pound a nail" can be resolved with clear cut procedures in the lease for... pounding nails! Even major improvements could go in the lease--appraise the improvement, discount the rent for a contractual period, problem solved.
Anyway, stop forcing people to become leveraged real estate speculators just to get better control of their environment. BTW, I don't really hate the banks as much as some people; but yes, this would kill a huge portion of the banking industry so if you hate banks the non-leveraged REIT plan should be your cause celebre.
The movie market for me is very much an impulse market. I live within walking distance of a multiscreen theatre. If I'm in the mood, and there is a showing of something that looks interesting within 15 minutes, I'll pay the price. I'm a bad customer though--when the weather is pleasant enough to walk by the theatre, I'm more inclined to keep walking. It's been a long time since there was a movie that actually made me want to look up the show times.
No, you can't. If you take a public domain work and change it only a little bit, you've created a derivative work of the public domain work, and the expired copyright that once applied to the public domain work now applies to your new derivative work
Public Domain isn't like GPL. There's no "copyleft" or "contamination". The original text of the Consitution for example is Public Domain. You can't copyright it. OTOH, if you have James Earl Jones read it you can copyright the recording under the fullest extent of copyright law. You could even print it in a fancy font and copyright that. The closest thing to "adding a space" would be to take a photograph of it and copyright it. You can do that. The only difference between your copy and anybody elses would be subtle variations of color in the noise bits of the image. They're all yours, the original document and its text is all ours.
I think a good answer is "because people would be pissed off if they had to think too much about the price". Or perhaps another way of putting it is that "the market is more efficient when the price of the movie is fixed and other factors are allowed to fluctuate".
The producers know that their product will sell for a fixed price, and they aim to sell as many as possible. It's easier that way. Consumers know that there is one price at any given time, and they adjust it by waiting longer if they want to lower it.
Perhaps the best answer is, "this is the social contract, and everybody is happy enough with it".
Having the government dictate the type of sandwich you can serve on a flight doesn't make sense. From that PoV, I'd be moving toward libertarian which is exactly what we did. OTOH, getting rid of the EPA and letting individuals and corporations duke it out in civil court over issues of destruction of private property doesn't make sense either. From that PoV, I'm a damned awful statist technocrat who wants to rule you with an iron fist (noted with sarcasm).
Look. We've got a body of code called law (in fact, law is called "code" by lawyers) and some of it's bloat, some of it works fine, and some of it crashes our lives on a routine basis. We need to keep the parts that work, with an understanding of why they were put there. We need to get rid of the parts that crash, or were put there at the request of Hal from marketing because he got a free lunch from somebody.
In short and to reiterate, I'm in favor of what works. "Whatworksian".
Slashdot Mirror
Awright, if achieving a fraction of c large enough to make the trip non-generational for the astronauts isn't practical then maybe the poem is spot-on after all. Break the light barrier, or forget about it.
You're quite right that you don't need to exceed C. I decided to take the lazy way out to analyze this problem. Please note, that site has a crappy interface. There are probably better relativistic trip calculators out there.
What's interesting is that you can subject both the earth and the ship to a fairly long wait time (we're both in it together) or you can give the ship a reasonably short wait time if you can get to 0.99c. The aforementioned lack of sync with Earth is still a problem of course. Single digit years on the ship, multi-decades go by on Earth. I don't know if that calculator takes into account the fact that you have to accelerate to some fraction of C and then decelerate to orbit. Having the deceleration fail would be a world of suck too, not to mention the kinetic energy of a dust particle at relativistic velocities.
Anyway, it was a bit of doggeral I banged out on a whim. If you can come up with some good rhyme and meter that's also good physics, have at it.
The universe mocks us.
Here's silver candy,
It doesn't make you fat.
It'll get you girls and all of that.
It only sells for a modest fee.
A quintillion dollars
Or exceeding C.
...you have a truck bomb up on blocks in your front yard.
So nat'ralists observe, a flea
Hath smaller fleas that on him prey,
And these have smaller fleas that bite 'em,
And so proceed ad infinitum.
--Jonathan Swift.
As long as it isn't dihydrogen monoxide. That stuff's dangerous!
Millions of consumers have already started tackling, now a 300 million pound defensive lineman jumps on the pile. The official keeps blowing the whistle and nobody cares. It'll be interesting to see who has the ball when the pull everybody off. Go 49ers!
The whole thing was sarcastic humor. The request for an odd sum over half a million dollars should have been a clue.
For those who don't understand the free market concept, let me clue you in. It solves problems because it's an ideal. How do you obtain an ideal economic order, you say? Just send me $588,987 and I'll tell you. You must agreee not to share the plans with others. Those are my terms. I can set them, because it's a free market.
Until housing is regarded as a consumer item that is desirable to make cheaply, this will not happen. Our ENTIRE FINANCIAL SYSTEM is predicated on the notion that a house is an investment which must appreciate. There is no intrinsic need for this of course, it's just the way things are. The idea is so ingrained in people's thought processes that it just doesn't occur to them that it's wrong. I'm tired of re-hashing this on Slashdot. Even most people here don't get it.
This, like all other ideas that are supposed to make housing affordable, will run into the same brick wall: Nobody actually wants affordable housing because our system is designed to force all but the wealthiest consumers to have leveraged real estate as their largest investment. When leveraged investments decline in value, those who hold them experience amplified losses.
According to the Daily Paul, it's not affiliated with Ron Paul.
That said, I would be surprised if Paul supported SOPA/PIPA. Unfortunately I too find the bad outweighs the good with Ron Paul. I think a lot of his ideas are like spice. We need a dash of Ron Paul in the system; but I can't stomach a plate full of pepper.
28% of all geniuses make perfect guesses at statistics on Slashdot. FWIW, Mozart was a prodigy and died at 35. We need to define "prodigy" and compare it to contemporary mortality figures to get a real answer though.
No way man. I'm Spartacus. Me. Hear that? Me and nobody else. Spartacus. Deal with it.
Everybody knows it, head hunters know it, employers know it, so why do they carry on asking those "skills"?
You told two people you're a people person. Then they told two people they were people persons. And so on, and so on, and so on...
Today I learned that "splutnik" is screen, and "frob" is plot. I think the function would be better if it returned an int to indicated that you attempted to frob outside the bounds of the splutnik.
On the Internet, nobody knows you're not a badass with a .44 at the ready under the driver's seat. (suppressed laughter). Yes we do. (open laughter).
I jumped off my bed, from the edge of what I call "space".
I'd say designers should do it only if you have tools designers can use that don't result in a doubling of the hardware requirements. Also, the designers must admit that not everybody wants eye candy and some people just want text. They should offer a way to turn off the eye candy. I'm pointing my fingers at you, almost the entire WWW.
The other elephant: collision. If we get any significant fraction of c, how are we going to know when a rock the size of a marble is in our path? At that velocity, it's bye-bye charlie when it hits you.
OK, maybe "it's an investment" is the biggest argument for ownership; but IMHO it's a bad argument. Food and clothing are just as essential as housing; but we don't regard them as investments. Your rent isn't 100% loss. You wanted shelter, you paid for it, you got it. If you buy that then I must also accept that interest payment on a mortgage isn't a 100% loss, although I tend to look at it that way. Of course the government distorts this by incentivizing interest. Yuck. We didn't get into the whole subsidy issue. I'd love to say more; but Slashdot is throwing "guru meditation" errors at me so this might not even post...
If he asked economists, he probably would get that kind of response since taxes and their impact on things are part of ECON. Economics has a lot of problems, one of which is that it tends to have a bit of a bag over its head. Then again, many academic disciplines have this problem since interdisciplinary studies tend to be frowned upon for political reasons. Anyway, I digress...
Eliminate Euclidean zoning for the most part. In case you're not aware that name comes from Euclid, Ohio where it was pioneered. It's the kind of zoning where "all the houses are here, all the businesses are there". Get rid of it, and you eliminate a lot of trips.
Of course you'd still have to have some compartmentalization for "noxious trades" like rendering plants, sewage treatment, etc. OTOH, the reason why so many of us cannot walk to a store without passing miles and miles of bland cooki-cutter tract homes is this bad zoning. It looks neat on a map. It's polluting and making us fat in real life.
Unfortunately, it would take a long time to undo. You don't plop commercial establishments into neighborhoods without getting NIMBY reactions. This is a side effect of the way home ownership works. For any other product you're happy when the cost comes down. For homes the model is b0rked so that people are unhappy when the cost comes down.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry when politcians talk about the need for affordable housing. We got that, and they called it a "housing crisis". The obvious solution is that most people should not own their homes, and non-leveraged REITs should be made available. The biggest argument for ownership, "I want to pound a nail" can be resolved with clear cut procedures in the lease for... pounding nails! Even major improvements could go in the lease--appraise the improvement, discount the rent for a contractual period, problem solved.
Anyway, stop forcing people to become leveraged real estate speculators just to get better control of their environment. BTW, I don't really hate the banks as much as some people; but yes, this would kill a huge portion of the banking industry so if you hate banks the non-leveraged REIT plan should be your cause celebre.
The movie market for me is very much an impulse market. I live within walking distance of a multiscreen theatre. If I'm in the mood, and there is a showing of something that looks interesting within 15 minutes, I'll pay the price. I'm a bad customer though--when the weather is pleasant enough to walk by the theatre, I'm more inclined to keep walking. It's been a long time since there was a movie that actually made me want to look up the show times.
No, you can't. If you take a public domain work and change it only a little bit, you've created a derivative work of the public domain work, and the expired copyright that once applied to the public domain work now applies to your new derivative work
Public Domain isn't like GPL. There's no "copyleft" or "contamination". The original text of the Consitution for example is Public Domain. You can't copyright it. OTOH, if you have James Earl Jones read it you can copyright the recording under the fullest extent of copyright law. You could even print it in a fancy font and copyright that. The closest thing to "adding a space" would be to take a photograph of it and copyright it. You can do that. The only difference between your copy and anybody elses would be subtle variations of color in the noise bits of the image. They're all yours, the original document and its text is all ours.
I think a good answer is "because people would be pissed off if they had to think too much about the price". Or perhaps another way of putting it is that "the market is more efficient when the price of the movie is fixed and other factors are allowed to fluctuate".
The producers know that their product will sell for a fixed price, and they aim to sell as many as possible. It's easier that way. Consumers know that there is one price at any given time, and they adjust it by waiting longer if they want to lower it.
Perhaps the best answer is, "this is the social contract, and everybody is happy enough with it".
Having the government dictate the type of sandwich you can serve on a flight doesn't make sense. From that PoV, I'd be moving toward libertarian which is exactly what we did. OTOH, getting rid of the EPA and letting individuals and corporations duke it out in civil court over issues of destruction of private property doesn't make sense either. From that PoV, I'm a damned awful statist technocrat who wants to rule you with an iron fist (noted with sarcasm).
Look. We've got a body of code called law (in fact, law is called "code" by lawyers) and some of it's bloat, some of it works fine, and some of it crashes our lives on a routine basis. We need to keep the parts that work, with an understanding of why they were put there. We need to get rid of the parts that crash, or were put there at the request of Hal from marketing because he got a free lunch from somebody.
In short and to reiterate, I'm in favor of what works. "Whatworksian".