I've bought textbooks from overseas before as they were 1/4 the cost of a one here and nearly identical (paper is cheaper, quality control is non-existent and rarely some chapters/questions are different). The textbook explicitly says not for purchase or resale outside of India (or whatever country).
He made $37,000 in revenue according to the article -- this isn't just a few books, this is an import business he set up. In this case, the student bought and sold them for profit. This is clearly trying to circumvent the publisher's distribution methods.
The publishers are douches for marking them up massively for first world countries, but it's their right and they're within the law to do this.
Absolutely. Publishers can price their books any way they want. They can also print whatever directives they want on the cover. However, that doesn't mean those directives are in any way binding on the purchaser. The First Sale doctrine say that they are not. If the cheap books were sold in West Virginia with a directive saying "not for resale outside of West Virginia" and and the buyer resold them in California, there would be no question. The buyer can do this.
The problem is that if you don't grant H1-Bs the companies will pretty much move operations offshore if they are large enough to support that sort of operation.
This
Except the part about being large enough. A company doesn't have to be large to off-shore. It is routine now for startups with fewer than 20 employees to have half of them off shore. Many VC's impose an off-shoring strategy as a pre-requisite for getting funding.
Frankly, complaining about H1B's is fighting the last war. If a company uses H1B's they will hire fewer Americans but they will hire some and even the H1B's contribute to the local economy. If they off-shore, no Americans will be hired and none of those employed will contribute to the local economy.
But wait, some say: "We can just move up the food chain. The architects and lead designers will still be here, right?" Well, they might work here (questionable if their subordinates are overseas) but the engineers in the best position to move up are the ones working overseas. That's because they are working and because they have been allowed to learn on the job rather than be required to arrive as a fully-formed expert.
I'm amazed that they found a clear seasonal pattern in a lake going back 52,000 years. Lakes are short lived structures, geologically speaking and 52,000 years is quite far into the last ice age. I guess the lake somehow managed to avoid being glaciated and managed to avoid being washed away by the melt waters. Impressive! I haven't located an ice age map of Japan so I don't know how much, if any, of Japan was actually covered by ice. It is far enough North but the ice sheet was not uniform. (Parts of Alaska were ice free)
The way I understood "trickle down" was that rich people would have so much money that they would buy all sorts of items that would, in turn, create jobs to produce such items, lifting up the lower classes. I'm not saying I understood it correctly, because it sure looks like, "Let's give money to rich people."
Almost. The idea is that investors will have more money to invest in expanding existing business or creating new ones. This makes a certain amount of sense with a 50's style isolated industrial economy. If you wanted to make your money work for you, you pretty much had to invest in activities that created jobs in the US.
Unfortunately, it doesn't really work today. Globalization and various rent seeking oportunities ensure that, most of the time, it is more profitable to invest in ways that don't create American jobs. Opening a new factory is great but it doesn't help workers in the US much if that factory is in China. Investing in elaborate schemes to harvest money from regular investers in the stock market doesn't really help anyone.
Depressingly, "trickle up" doesn't work all that well either. If people spend their surplus buying foreign made goods, benefit to the overall economy is quite limited.
If all you need a PC for is your calendar and email, then, sure, your idea sounds great.
At the last company I worked at the engineers all got new workstations. Super high end stuff, basically the fastest desktop machines money could buy at the time. And Autocad performance was still just in the "OK, but meh...." range for the stuff they were working on.
Do you want to be the one who has to explain to them that from now on they're going to be doing their work on a phone?
Good luck with that.
Why are you doing the grunt work on the desktop? I'm an electrical engineer and it has been a dozen years since I worked any place where the real work was done on the desktop pc (actually workstation). Even then, were were always running jobs on other machines becuase the one on your desk was busy. Since then, the model has been to run the real work on the servers in the machine room. The desktop pc was only for basic office tasks, email, and user interface to the server apps.
In the earliest case, these were actual desktop pc's but laptops in docking stations quickly became the standard. This solved the problem of having to provide and manage both a desktop pc and a laptop. A phone in a docking station would seem to be the next logical step since, once gain, it cuts down on the number of systems that must be managed by or for each user.
Tmobile is good in some markets, and very competitive with price, but has very limited genuine 4G coverage.
If by "very limited" mean "they don't have any" then you're right. But then no-one else has LTE-Advanced either and that's only technology being called 4G that genuinely is.
30 mile range is a 15 mile radius. That's barely beyond practical bicycle range. If he had picked up cycling (with or without a helmet) instead of converting his civic to electric, it would be better for the environment, he would be healthier, and it would cost a whole lot less too.
.. i'd assume that whatever they were firing would have some kind of guidance control.
It's 2012. Why would you create a dumb ballistic projectile over that kind of distance?
Because your guidance system can't handle the launch acceleration. As mentioned in some off-site comments, guided artillery shells are just barely within the state of the art for survivability of an avionics subsystem.
You can't hit an object 20 miles away surface to surface by firing in a straight line either, and yet battleships have been hitting each other for a hundred years.
Yes, the high velocity lets you toss something on a ballistic flight 220 miles in the first place, and the thing arrives at it's target with quite a bit of that speed.
Battleship shells are explosive. The velocity at which they arrive is not terribly important. These rail guns are kinetic energy weapons. They aren't supposed to carry any explosives at all. If if the shell isn't moving fast when it hits the target, there isn't much damage.
You can't hit an object 220 miles away surface to surface by firing in a straight line. There's a big ball of rock and water in the way. If you have to fire in a balistic arc, is the high velocity of a rail gun of much use?
There's no reason he can't have a class of spaceship one day too. I don't understand why everyone is so bleak that he got a boat.
Because looking forward from the era of Apollo 11, it seemed so certain that there would be suitable space ships within Neil Armstrong's lifetime. Now the hero is gone and the best we can offer is a boat with a hope that "someday" there may be a space ship. Our ambitions and expectations have truly diminished.
Now explain why I would even *want* to use phone apps on my desktop?
CraigsNotifica is a far better Craig's List browser than anything I have found for the desktop. I think they are may be some Windows payware that is of similar capability but I don't run Windows.
It's interesting that his choice is an FPGA based processor. FPGA's are anything but open. The vendor's backend tools are the only ones allowed to exist. The file formats are architecture details are propriety and secret. Reverse engineer the format and try to create your own tools and the vendor will sue you.
But what if you have a moral objection to killing an animal for leather but prefer bio-engineered leather to any of the synthetic replacements and are willing to pay the premium for bio-engineered? Then this is perfect for you...
I'm betting anybody who is staying away from leather for ethical reasons is going to look at the idea of tank-grown leather and still be thinking "that still sounds nasty".
Then again, maybe a whole bunch of vegans are just waiting for tank-grown leather and there's a market for it.
There are an awful lot of Hindus whose objection to cow-hide has little to do with Western "organic/save the whales" ethics.
If you read the TFA it links to a paper that discusses Thorium use in an accelerator driven reactor. I guess in a sense this is a breeder but the Thorium fuel cycle only requires Plutonium to achieve criticality. Don't see a need for it in this kind of sub-critical design.
The conventional Thorium fuel cycle does not require plutonium at all. It just requires some fissile material to start the process. Enriched uranium is the conventional choice.
However, any Thorium reactor is a breeder. Fissile Uranium-230 is bred from non-fissile thorium and Uranium-230 is just as good of a bomb material as plutonium. That is, if you can can remove the U-232, which is a bit of a trick.
Using the particle accelerator removes the need for an enriched U-235 to start the reactor. That is useful since it could eliminate the need for any Uranium enrichment for the purpose of power generation.
I've had my computer-illiterate parents on a non-admin account for 20 years now, they still haven't gotten a virus. And yes, they're still computer-illiterate ^^
On what system? In 1992, Windows was at 3.1 and had no concept of non-admin account. Linux barely existed but it certainly wasn't something you would put your computer-illiterate parents on. Did OS/2 have this concept?
Ive always heard of particle accelerators as enormous power hogs. Is this really an effective means of generating net power? If neutrons can be generated efficiently, couldn't you also use this to generate power by directly fissioning U-238? (I.e., not breading plutonium)
I keep hearing about thorium reactors. What I've read of it seems to indicate it'd be much safer and cheaper to operate than what we've been using. I really haven't read about any downside to these. Anyone care to fill me in on why we aren't using them?
1) They are more complex than Uranium reactors we use now. The fuel is cheaper but fuel is not a major contributor to the cost of running a nuclear power plant. 2) They are inherently breeder reactors and that raises concerns about nuclear proliferation. U-232 contamination makes it actually rather difficult to use a Thorium reactor to make bomb material but not everyone is satisfied that is it difficult enough. 3) U-232 contamination also makes normal operation more difficult too. U-232 is an intense gamma emitter. All handling must be done remotely. 4) Politics has made it difficult to get even modernized non-breeder reactors built, much less anything as radical like thorium.
Consider that many of the recommended fruits, nuts, soy products and whatever haven't been available locally or year-round until the (recent) advent of air freight and refrigerated shipping (so, what does your vegetarian carbon footprint look like), I wonder how one was expected to maintain such a diet thousands of years ago.
They cheated. Vegetarianism has been widespread in India for a lot longer than there has been air freight. However, vegans are really rare. The rest supplement with their vegetable matter with a great deal of dairy.
That's what people say, however I know several very long term vegans and they seem quite a bit healthier than your average red meat loving American.
disclaimer: I love hamburgers.
The average red meat loving American doesn't understand good nutrition and certainly doesn't practice it.
That sort of sloppy eating practice doesn't work on a vegan diet. Just to survive, one *has* to very careful about what one eats. It is that care and attention about their body that makes them healthy. They would be even healthier if they applied to the same attention to an omnivorous diet.
Your thinking makes no sense to me. Kickstarter is designed to get funding for a commercial endeavor. I dare you to go to any venture capitalist or investment firm without a working prototype.
Actually this is how it is usually done. For any non-trivial hardware project, the costs required to produce a working prototype are far beyond what the founders can handle without major investment backing. You don't seriously believe that Nvidia produced first silicon before seeking investment do you?
Of course, that's what it is no very hard to get a hardware startup going these days. Investors are spoiled by e-commerce where a couple of guys can put together a new site and attract customers in months with no equipment at all beyond their personal PC's.
Kickstarter's promise is get past this obstacle. Really, though, it has come to be a means to polish and manufacturer moderately advanced hobby projects. The winning recipe seems to be keep the actual hardware content as trivial as possible.
Compelling reasons: well, for starters, that colony would be insurance against an extinction-level asteroid impact here on Earth.
Aside from the small area that gets turned in a crater, everywhere on Earth post-impact will be more habitable than anywhere on Mars.
Even given a hypothetical event that somehow sterilizes the Earth, a Mars colony will only save you if they can be completely self sufficient. That means they need to be able to produce every piece of technology needed to keep the colony going from raw materials. Chips from sand. Metals would need to be extracted from mines on Mars. Chemicals produced from, perhaps, biological sources. (On Earth, most start from oil, and sometimes coal and natural gas. None of these exist on Mars)
The required population to do all that is probably in the millions.
Thing is, it wasn't the GMO crops that are reputed to give you the cancer. It's the pesticide. Now, class, for 10 bonus points, who didn't know pesticides are dangerous?
True, but the GMO crops are what enables farmers to spray pesticides directly onto the crops. It sounds to me like nature is working this out for everyone, anyway: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19594335
Some GMO crops are modified for resistance to herbicides, permitting, but not requiring more use of chemicals. Other GMO's are modified to resist the pests themselves, thus permitting less chemicals to be used. A third group of GMO's are modified for reasons completely unrelated to herbicides or pesticides.
Exotic matter, by definition, requires violations of the known laws of physics.
That's a very peculiar definition of exotic mater you have there. Elsewhere, "exotic matter" generally refers to matter of a type neither observed nor predicted by current theory. No violation of known physics is implied. It is just that we haven't seen any and there is no particular reason to believe that it exists.
The particular flavor of exotic matter needed for the warp drive is "negative" matter. Negative matter has negative energy. Unlike antimatter where antimatter + matter = lots of energy, negative matter + matter = nothing.
'Last I heard, running the usual math through with negative matter results in some situations that don't make a lot of sense. They aren't necessarily wrong or forbidden, we just don't know what they mean. Math is like that sometimes.
Slashdot Mirror
I've bought textbooks from overseas before as they were 1/4 the cost of a one here and nearly identical (paper is cheaper, quality control is non-existent and rarely some chapters/questions are different). The textbook explicitly says not for purchase or resale outside of India (or whatever country).
He made $37,000 in revenue according to the article -- this isn't just a few books, this is an import business he set up. In this case, the student bought and sold them for profit. This is clearly trying to circumvent the publisher's distribution methods.
The publishers are douches for marking them up massively for first world countries, but it's their right and they're within the law to do this.
Absolutely. Publishers can price their books any way they want. They can also print whatever directives they want on the cover. However, that doesn't mean those directives are in any way binding on the purchaser. The First Sale doctrine say that they are not. If the cheap books were sold in West Virginia with a directive saying "not for resale outside of West Virginia" and and the buyer resold them in California, there would be no question. The buyer can do this.
The problem is that if you don't grant H1-Bs the companies will pretty much move operations offshore if they are large enough to support that sort of operation.
This
Except the part about being large enough. A company doesn't have to be large to off-shore. It is routine now for startups with fewer than 20 employees to have half of them off shore. Many VC's impose an off-shoring strategy as a pre-requisite for getting funding.
Frankly, complaining about H1B's is fighting the last war. If a company uses H1B's they will hire fewer Americans but they will hire some and even the H1B's contribute to the local economy. If they off-shore, no Americans will be hired and none of those employed will contribute to the local economy.
But wait, some say: "We can just move up the food chain. The architects and lead designers will still be here, right?" Well, they might work here (questionable if their subordinates are overseas) but the engineers in the best position to move up are the ones working overseas. That's because they are working and because they have been allowed to learn on the job rather than be required to arrive as a fully-formed expert.
I'm amazed that they found a clear seasonal pattern in a lake going back 52,000 years. Lakes are short lived structures, geologically speaking and 52,000 years is quite far into the last ice age. I guess the lake somehow managed to avoid being glaciated and managed to avoid being washed away by the melt waters. Impressive! I haven't located an ice age map of Japan so I don't know how much, if any, of Japan was actually covered by ice. It is far enough North but the ice sheet was not uniform. (Parts of Alaska were ice free)
The way I understood "trickle down" was that rich people would have so much money that they would buy all sorts of items that would, in turn, create jobs to produce such items, lifting up the lower classes. I'm not saying I understood it correctly, because it sure looks like, "Let's give money to rich people."
Almost. The idea is that investors will have more money to invest in expanding existing business or creating new ones. This makes a certain amount of sense with a 50's style isolated industrial economy. If you wanted to make your money work for you, you pretty much had to invest in activities that created jobs in the US.
Unfortunately, it doesn't really work today. Globalization and various rent seeking oportunities ensure that, most of the time, it is more profitable to invest in ways that don't create American jobs. Opening a new factory is great but it doesn't help workers in the US much if that factory is in China. Investing in elaborate schemes to harvest money from regular investers in the stock market doesn't really help anyone.
Depressingly, "trickle up" doesn't work all that well either. If people spend their surplus buying foreign made goods, benefit to the overall economy is quite limited.
If all you need a PC for is your calendar and email, then, sure, your idea sounds great.
At the last company I worked at the engineers all got new workstations. Super high end stuff, basically the fastest desktop machines money could buy at the time. And Autocad performance was still just in the "OK, but meh...." range for the stuff they were working on.
Do you want to be the one who has to explain to them that from now on they're going to be doing their work on a phone?
Good luck with that.
Why are you doing the grunt work on the desktop? I'm an electrical engineer and it has been a dozen years since I worked any place where the real work was done on the desktop pc (actually workstation). Even then, were were always running jobs on other machines becuase the one on your desk was busy. Since then, the model has been to run the real work on the servers in the machine room. The desktop pc was only for basic office tasks, email, and user interface to the server apps.
In the earliest case, these were actual desktop pc's but laptops in docking stations quickly became the standard. This solved the problem of having to provide and manage both a desktop pc and a laptop. A phone in a docking station would seem to be the next logical step since, once gain, it cuts down on the number of systems that must be managed by or for each user.
Tmobile is good in some markets, and very competitive with price, but has very limited genuine 4G coverage.
If by "very limited" mean "they don't have any" then you're right. But then no-one else has LTE-Advanced either and that's only technology being called 4G that genuinely is.
30 mile range is a 15 mile radius. That's barely beyond practical bicycle range. If he had picked up cycling (with or without a helmet) instead of converting his civic to electric, it would be better for the environment, he would be healthier, and it would cost a whole lot less too.
.. i'd assume that whatever they were firing would have some kind of guidance control.
It's 2012. Why would you create a dumb ballistic projectile over that kind of distance?
Because your guidance system can't handle the launch acceleration. As mentioned in some off-site comments, guided artillery shells are just barely within the state of the art for survivability of an avionics subsystem.
You can't hit an object 20 miles away surface to surface by firing in a straight line either, and yet battleships have been hitting each other for a hundred years.
Yes, the high velocity lets you toss something on a ballistic flight 220 miles in the first place, and the thing arrives at it's target with quite a bit of that speed.
Battleship shells are explosive. The velocity at which they arrive is not terribly important. These rail guns are kinetic energy weapons. They aren't supposed to carry any explosives at all. If if the shell isn't moving fast when it hits the target, there isn't much damage.
You can't hit an object 220 miles away surface to surface by firing in a straight line. There's a big ball of rock and water in the way. If you have to fire in a balistic arc, is the high velocity of a rail gun of much use?
There's no reason he can't have a class of spaceship one day too. I don't understand why everyone is so bleak that he got a boat.
Because looking forward from the era of Apollo 11, it seemed so certain that there would be suitable space ships within Neil Armstrong's lifetime. Now the hero is gone and the best we can offer is a boat with a hope that "someday" there may be a space ship. Our ambitions and expectations have truly diminished.
Thank you, Press-release-dot.
Now explain why I would even *want* to use phone apps on my desktop?
CraigsNotifica is a far better Craig's List browser than anything I have found for the desktop. I think they are may be some Windows payware that is of similar capability but I don't run Windows.
It's interesting that his choice is an FPGA based processor. FPGA's are anything but open. The vendor's backend tools are the only ones allowed to exist. The file formats are architecture details are propriety and secret. Reverse engineer the format and try to create your own tools and the vendor will sue you.
I'm betting anybody who is staying away from leather for ethical reasons is going to look at the idea of tank-grown leather and still be thinking "that still sounds nasty".
Then again, maybe a whole bunch of vegans are just waiting for tank-grown leather and there's a market for it.
There are an awful lot of Hindus whose objection to cow-hide has little to do with Western "organic/save the whales" ethics.
If you read the TFA it links to a paper that discusses Thorium use in an accelerator driven reactor. I guess in a sense this is a breeder but the Thorium fuel cycle only requires Plutonium to achieve criticality. Don't see a need for it in this kind of sub-critical design.
The conventional Thorium fuel cycle does not require plutonium at all. It just requires some fissile material to start the process. Enriched uranium is the conventional choice.
However, any Thorium reactor is a breeder. Fissile Uranium-230 is bred from non-fissile thorium and Uranium-230 is just as good of a bomb material as plutonium. That is, if you can can remove the U-232, which is a bit of a trick.
Using the particle accelerator removes the need for an enriched U-235 to start the reactor. That is useful since it could eliminate the need for any Uranium enrichment for the purpose of power generation.
I've had my computer-illiterate parents on a non-admin account for 20 years now, they still haven't gotten a virus. And yes, they're still computer-illiterate ^^
On what system? In 1992, Windows was at 3.1 and had no concept of non-admin account. Linux barely existed but it certainly wasn't something you would put your computer-illiterate parents on. Did OS/2 have this concept?
Ive always heard of particle accelerators as enormous power hogs. Is this really an effective means of generating net power? If neutrons can be generated efficiently, couldn't you also use this to generate power by directly fissioning U-238? (I.e., not breading plutonium)
I keep hearing about thorium reactors. What I've read of it seems to indicate it'd be much safer and cheaper to operate than what we've been using. I really haven't read about any downside to these. Anyone care to fill me in on why we aren't using them?
1) They are more complex than Uranium reactors we use now. The fuel is cheaper but fuel is not a major contributor to the cost of running a nuclear power plant.
2) They are inherently breeder reactors and that raises concerns about nuclear proliferation. U-232 contamination makes it actually rather difficult to use a Thorium reactor to make bomb material but not everyone is satisfied that is it difficult enough.
3) U-232 contamination also makes normal operation more difficult too. U-232 is an intense gamma emitter. All handling must be done remotely.
4) Politics has made it difficult to get even modernized non-breeder reactors built, much less anything as radical like thorium.
Consider that many of the recommended fruits, nuts, soy products and whatever haven't been available locally or year-round until the (recent) advent of air freight and refrigerated shipping (so, what does your vegetarian carbon footprint look like), I wonder how one was expected to maintain such a diet thousands of years ago.
They cheated. Vegetarianism has been widespread in India for a lot longer than there has been air freight. However, vegans are really rare. The rest supplement with their vegetable matter with a great deal of dairy.
That's what people say, however I know several very long term vegans and they seem quite a bit healthier than your average red meat loving American.
disclaimer: I love hamburgers.
The average red meat loving American doesn't understand good nutrition and certainly doesn't practice it.
That sort of sloppy eating practice doesn't work on a vegan diet. Just to survive, one *has* to very careful about what one eats. It is that care and attention about their body that makes them healthy. They would be even healthier if they applied to the same attention to an omnivorous diet.
Your thinking makes no sense to me. Kickstarter is designed to get funding for a commercial endeavor. I dare you to go to any venture capitalist or investment firm without a working prototype.
Actually this is how it is usually done. For any non-trivial hardware project, the costs required to produce a working prototype are far beyond what the founders can handle without major investment backing. You don't seriously believe that Nvidia produced first silicon before seeking investment do you?
Of course, that's what it is no very hard to get a hardware startup going these days. Investors are spoiled by e-commerce where a couple of guys can put together a new site and attract customers in months with no equipment at all beyond their personal PC's.
Kickstarter's promise is get past this obstacle. Really, though, it has come to be a means to polish and manufacturer moderately advanced hobby projects. The winning recipe seems to be keep the actual hardware content as trivial as possible.
The article did not report how they determined that the drinks were safe or in what quantities.
Chemical/biological issues from one or two bottles is probably going to be minimal.
Radioactivity from drinking nothing but nuked beer for months could be problem.
Compelling reasons: well, for starters, that colony would be insurance against an extinction-level asteroid impact here on Earth.
Aside from the small area that gets turned in a crater, everywhere on Earth post-impact will be more habitable than anywhere on Mars.
Even given a hypothetical event that somehow sterilizes the Earth, a Mars colony will only save you if they can be completely self sufficient. That means they need to be able to produce every piece of technology needed to keep the colony going from raw materials. Chips from sand. Metals would need to be extracted from mines on Mars. Chemicals produced from, perhaps, biological sources. (On Earth, most start from oil, and sometimes coal and natural gas. None of these exist on Mars)
The required population to do all that is probably in the millions.
Thing is, it wasn't the GMO crops that are reputed to give you the cancer. It's the pesticide. Now, class, for 10 bonus points, who didn't know pesticides are dangerous?
True, but the GMO crops are what enables farmers to spray pesticides directly onto the crops. It sounds to me like nature is working this out for everyone, anyway: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19594335
Some GMO crops are modified for resistance to herbicides, permitting, but not requiring more use of chemicals.
Other GMO's are modified to resist the pests themselves, thus permitting less chemicals to be used.
A third group of GMO's are modified for reasons completely unrelated to herbicides or pesticides.
Exotic matter, by definition, requires violations of the known laws of physics.
That's a very peculiar definition of exotic mater you have there. Elsewhere, "exotic matter" generally refers to matter of a type neither observed nor predicted by current theory. No violation of known physics is implied. It is just that we haven't seen any and there is no particular reason to believe that it exists.
The particular flavor of exotic matter needed for the warp drive is "negative" matter. Negative matter has negative energy. Unlike antimatter where antimatter + matter = lots of energy, negative matter + matter = nothing.
'Last I heard, running the usual math through with negative matter results in some situations that don't make a lot of sense. They aren't necessarily wrong or forbidden, we just don't know what they mean. Math is like that sometimes.