Life has survived. but many species went extinct. I'm a little selfish. I want MY species to survive. Frontiers are good for us. I don't want tax money to pay for punching holes in the frontier but I would like to have our species be (mostly) free to go out and reach for that frontier.
One thing not mentioned here (yet) is how much more efficient we tool users could be when we're outside the bounds of our fragile ecosystem. What if we could strip-mine an asteroid using methods that would be cheap but possibly really bad to use on Earth. Also we could use engines outside of Earth's atmosphere which (if used in Earth's atmosphere) would be bad for Earth but for moving about the solar system these engines might be reasonable.
If we have to use rockets from Earth to transport every material the extra-terrestrial humans would need, we'd have a very limited existence off Earth. But if we can use human ingenuity and make what we need from materials we find off-Earth, I bet we can do much better than is obvious to us Earthbound people.
So far all of our experience off-planet has been supported entirely from materials brought from Earth. The only exception I can think of is power from the Sun. We need to change the ratio. We need to have it that most of the matter consumed and used off-Earth comes from off-Earth. That will take some ingenuity.
I read that NASA wants a new rocket to be flown 7 times without incident before it will qualify form manned-flight rating. Since SpaceX has yet to fly their new Block 5 rocket with the redesigned high-pressure helium tank, they have yet to start the 7-flight count. This, apparently, pushes the flight-qualification complete to after the end of 2018.
It is bad design if their upgrade programs brick their devices against all recovery methods. I've worked for several companies as a firmware engineer and our products were not brickable. The bootloader is not customer flashable, everything else is. Several of my products were RAID controllers in competition with LSI. I would suggest shouting far and wide that a consumer upgrade procedure was capable of bricking their device. Even the small computers which use uboot and like-bootloaders can be field recovered using an inexpensive (under $50) bring-up device if the manufacturers so choose. Designs like graphics controllers should have a recovery method using a PC app which placed the executable into RAM and then the user forces the graphics card into a special boot mode which looks for the executable at a pre-defined address.
I've never worked on a PC motherboard main-CPU design but I would think that a good BIOS design should have an A-image and a B-image where you can not bootload the A-image from itself and vice-versa.
One of the key symptoms is that the problem is much worse after waking up and is not so noticeable after 6 or 8 hours.
For persons having this issue, putting lights behind the monitor is not a solution. Working in a nearly dark room is also not a solution because the glare from what light sources remain make it very difficult to see anything except the light sources. Setting the UIs to light on dark is definitely helpful.
You were lucky. I always got at least chewed out for a boo-boo, if not worse.
At least your parents didn't cover it with Mecurochrome. Putting organic mercury compounds on a child's open wound is probably not the best idea (though I don't think any studies definitely proved that mercury was absorbed into the body from Mercurochrome). Plus it left your skin indelibly dyed a bright orange color.
you were lucky. At last your parents didn't just cut off the damaged limb.
They said they were at 10KV four years ago. Now they are looking for 1MW. That's kilovolts vs MegaWatts. The article said they were at 500KV. There is no indication how many watts they are at. The article didn't have enough information to understand how close they are to the goals.
Volts and Watts are related by Amps. P=IE Watts = Amps * Volts.
The United States has made it illegal to create low paying jobs in the United States. How else do you create a low paying job but to take it to a country where the country allows the creation of jobs in that pay category? Or am I reading this wrong?
Ethical b:being in accordance with the rules or standards for right conduct or practice, especially the standards of a profession: It was not considered ethical for physicians to advertise.
American Psychological Association (APA): ethical. (n.d.). Dictionary.com Unabridged. Retrieved February 05, 2011, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ethical Chicago Manual Style (CMS): ethical. Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House, Inc. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ethical (accessed: February 05, 2011). Modern Language Association (MLA): "ethical." Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House, Inc. 05 Feb. 2011. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ethical>. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE): Dictionary.com, "ethical," in Dictionary.com Unabridged. Source location: Random House, Inc. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ethical. Available: http://dictionary.reference.com./ Accessed: February 05, 2011. BibTeX Bibliography Style (BibTeX) @article {Dictionary.com2011,
title = {Dictionary.com Unabridged},
month = {Feb},
day = {05},
year = {2011},
url = {http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ethical}, }
This does beg the question, why are they doing motor vehicle inspections at all of they pass a car that can't safely (for everybody else - occupants of the car are at least responsible for their own safety?) go 90mph? And having done so, why would a gvt want to put a lower speed limit on a road where inspected cars can do 90mph?
Oh, my own answer is that they have some arbitrary goal that has nothing to do with safety. Like trimming our ranks of capable people who have low tolerance for boredom, or saving energy so the Afghanis can have when they take over.
in fact, the economy cratered. There's a sucker born every minute - or should I say, an idiot.
I'm pretty sure the House of Representatives, FHLMC and FNMA are the biggest culprits here.
I didn't call you an idiot. I called the idea of spending money despite having cut taxes idiocy. I think I'm actually agreeing with you there.
My grief is with the Fed Gvt for trying to do social engineering with tax money. FHLMC and FNMA were involved in criminal activity with huge amounts of money, at the behest of many elected federal politicians. This is where our attention should go. But this is not even surprising. Big governments always do this. The solution is to bring all of the expensive projects to a more local forum. The whole idea of having 50 states, each having their own rules and projects, is a great thing. The citizenry could move to the state which best met their own notions of goodness and we'd all be able to see what solutions were great and which were mistakes.
As it is, we really don't have a choice. The whole thing is a disaster. I have many issues with Bush's presidency, especially his interest in spending taxpayer money on projects which are of clearly debatable merit, i.e. nationbuilding, pharmaceutical programs, etc... Blech.
I have even more issues with the current crop of representatives. And they've mostly been in office since Jan 2008.
We did spend that money - we spent it on Second homes in the Hamptons, Ivy league tuition, yachts, etc. It did not result in more job creation - in fact, the economy cratered.
May I point out that homes and yachts are built by people who have jobs?
Fuck the economic Ayn Randists and their fixation with shaving off every cent from every thing and keeping it for themselves.
LET'S JUST DO THIS: IT'S ALREADY PAST TIME!
That would be lovely except that every time the fed spends a dollar, that's a huge amount of money that the private sector can't spend. The Fed has a horrible record of picking the right projects to back and is hugely inefficient at doing projects.
Consider convincing a more local government to back for infrastructure projects. Local governments are much much better at making good use of taxpayer money. This is self evident for many reasons. Get the Fed off our back so our states and counties can do the work that we think is important.
If only we had spent that 2 trillion or so that we spent on tax cuts and wars on research.
You can't spend money on a tax cut. The sentence doesn't make sense. How about spending the money DESPITE the Tax cut? That's just typical leftist idiocy.
I completely agree about not spending money on wars. However I think Fed spending taxpayer money on research is just as dumb as the rest of the pork crap the Fed has been doing all of my life.
Um... when did we stop spending on that? The Fed has also been using highway funding as a way to do unconstitutional things to the states for 50 years
the space program
Oh yes. That immediately led to all sorts of space activities by us citizens,
etc
keep listing! I'm loving this.
Once the government can create a network effect through jumpstarting an infrastructure
when does the Fed Gvt move back out? Please?
, private companies can move in and create huge economic ripple effects - again, I will use The Internet as a good example.
Um.. The fed didn't spend all that much "creating" the internet. But I'll give you that DARPA is a good example for you to use.
I agree wholeheartedly that we need to get back to a balanced budget,
Really? At what cost? EPA? HUD? DepEnergy? DepAgri? DeptEdu? DepDefence? FHLMC? FNMA? Health and Human Services? DepInterior? Medicare? Welfare? Social Security?
unfortunately, the last president actually was a drunken sailor ( or at least a dry drunk Vietnam evader ) who ran the country into the ground and amassed huge debts by giving tax breaks to the wealthy and engaging in two wars of choice.
Don't forget almost all of the presidents, with very few exceptions. Especially FDR and Obama.
I really think the problem isn't the presidents, it's the House of Representatives. Let's get that back under control, really. Cut costs down to the level where even the IRS is not needed. If the states what such and such a service, let them pick up the tab. The Fed has for too long been using Income Tax generated cash to control the states. Cut that out!
I suggest the next move should be winding back all the laws back to 1890 and then add back the things which are truly important. Divest each of the above agencies except those MANDATED by the Constitution.
BTW, taxing the wealthy is no way to balance the budget. A wealthy is paying my paycheck, and I'm paying taxes. Much better to induce the wealthy to create jobs. It's a multiplicative effect. Besides, I WANT to be wealthy. I spend too much time bellyaching on Slashdot to ever make it though. =8^)
I am really starting to think that a large percentage of my fellow humans are just insane. Do you guys really think that we will be burning toxic shit to get out power in the future? Is that the best we can do? For a bunch of technophiles, this is an awfully Luddite-like position.
The key is to get manufacturing to be completely off-planet. This nonsense of needing to get the energy down to the planetary surface to use it is nuts. Further, the waste products from manufacturing should not be left on the surface either. Turn the entire surface into a park and place to spend your weekends, and raise the kids and such.
Tesla is brought to you by the same people who brought us PayPal and SpaceX. Except that they appear to have been subsidized with federal tax taxpayer money (something I despise) they could be good people doing a good/hard thing at the wrong time. I suspect that if the fed-govt wasn't so expensive these days that Tesla could stand on its own.
I remember the good old days, when Congress would appropriate money for projects. When, exactly, did Presidents get signing authority on the national checkbook?
The president is spending from the checkbook on an account created for him by Congress. This is the stimulus bill money from last year for which there was an immediate need. "Immediate"' is clearly not what it once was.
Abengoa Solar, a unit of the Seville, Spain-based engineering company, will receive a $1.45 billion loan guarantee to build a solar-power plant in Arizona that will create 1,600 construction jobs and 85 permanent jobs, according to White House documents released in conjunction with Obama’s address. The power plant will be the first of its kind in the U.S. and generate enough energy to power 70,000 homes, Obama said.
1.45billion to power 70,000 homes. That's $20,000 per home?
Slashdot Mirror
Life has survived. but many species went extinct. I'm a little selfish. I want MY species to survive.
Frontiers are good for us. I don't want tax money to pay for punching holes in the frontier but I would like to have our species be (mostly) free to go out and reach for that frontier.
One thing not mentioned here (yet) is how much more efficient we tool users could be when we're outside the bounds of our fragile ecosystem. What if we could strip-mine an asteroid using methods that would be cheap but possibly really bad to use on Earth. Also we could use engines outside of Earth's atmosphere which (if used in Earth's atmosphere) would be bad for Earth but for moving about the solar system these engines might be reasonable.
If we have to use rockets from Earth to transport every material the extra-terrestrial humans would need, we'd have a very limited existence off Earth. But if we can use human ingenuity and make what we need from materials we find off-Earth, I bet we can do much better than is obvious to us Earthbound people.
So far all of our experience off-planet has been supported entirely from materials brought from Earth. The only exception I can think of is power from the Sun. We need to change the ratio. We need to have it that most of the matter consumed and used off-Earth comes from off-Earth. That will take some ingenuity.
I like it.
I read that NASA wants a new rocket to be flown 7 times without incident before it will qualify form manned-flight rating. Since SpaceX has yet to fly their new Block 5 rocket with the redesigned high-pressure helium tank, they have yet to start the 7-flight count. This, apparently, pushes the flight-qualification complete to after the end of 2018.
It is bad design if their upgrade programs brick their devices against all recovery methods. I've worked for several companies as a firmware engineer and our products were not brickable. The bootloader is not customer flashable, everything else is. Several of my products were RAID controllers in competition with LSI. I would suggest shouting far and wide that a consumer upgrade procedure was capable of bricking their device. Even the small computers which use uboot and like-bootloaders can be field recovered using an inexpensive (under $50) bring-up device if the manufacturers so choose. Designs like graphics controllers should have a recovery method using a PC app which placed the executable into RAM and then the user forces the graphics card into a special boot mode which looks for the executable at a pre-defined address.
I've never worked on a PC motherboard main-CPU design but I would think that a good BIOS design should have an A-image and a B-image where you can not bootload the A-image from itself and vice-versa.
Some people who have glare problems have Fuchs' Dystrophy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuchs'_dystrophy
One of the key symptoms is that the problem is much worse after waking up and is not so noticeable after 6 or 8 hours.
For persons having this issue, putting lights behind the monitor is not a solution. Working in a nearly dark room is also not a solution because the glare from what light sources remain make it very difficult to see anything except the light sources. Setting the UIs to light on dark is definitely helpful.
WiFaux
Followed closely by WiFumm
You were lucky. I always got at least chewed out for a boo-boo, if not worse.
At least your parents didn't cover it with Mecurochrome. Putting organic mercury compounds on a child's open wound is probably not the best idea (though I don't think any studies definitely proved that mercury was absorbed into the body from Mercurochrome). Plus it left your skin indelibly dyed a bright orange color.
you were lucky. At last your parents didn't just cut off the damaged limb.
They said they were at 10KV four years ago. Now they are looking for 1MW. That's kilovolts vs MegaWatts. The article said they were at 500KV. There is no indication how many watts they are at. The article didn't have enough information to understand how close they are to the goals.
Volts and Watts are related by Amps. P=IE Watts = Amps * Volts.
The United States has made it illegal to create low paying jobs in the United States. How else do you create a low paying job but to take it to a country where the country allows the creation of jobs in that pay category? Or am I reading this wrong?
Ethical b:being in accordance with the rules or standards for right conduct or practice, especially the standards of a profession: It was not considered ethical for physicians to advertise.
American Psychological Association (APA):
ethical. (n.d.). Dictionary.com Unabridged. Retrieved February 05, 2011, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ethical
Chicago Manual Style (CMS):
ethical. Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House, Inc. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ethical (accessed: February 05, 2011).
Modern Language Association (MLA):
"ethical." Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House, Inc. 05 Feb. 2011. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ethical>.
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE):
Dictionary.com, "ethical," in Dictionary.com Unabridged. Source location: Random House, Inc. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ethical. Available: http://dictionary.reference.com./ Accessed: February 05, 2011.
BibTeX Bibliography Style (BibTeX)
@article {Dictionary.com2011,
title = {Dictionary.com Unabridged},
month = {Feb},
day = {05},
year = {2011},
url = {http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ethical},
}
So was it IBM who made the date on the IBM-PC have 2 digits?
Actually I was being paid for my coding for 3 years before IBM-DOS was shipped.
The biggest computer mistake of all time has to be Microsoft's using 2 digits for the year! How quickly we forget!
So where terrorism once required smuggling a bomb or gun on-board, now terrorists could aim a radio at the airplane to crash it?
This does beg the question, why are they doing motor vehicle inspections at all of they pass a car that can't safely (for everybody else - occupants of the car are at least responsible for their own safety?) go 90mph? And having done so, why would a gvt want to put a lower speed limit on a road where inspected cars can do 90mph?
Oh, my own answer is that they have some arbitrary goal that has nothing to do with safety. Like trimming our ranks of capable people who have low tolerance for boredom, or saving energy so the Afghanis can have when they take over.
in fact, the economy cratered. There's a sucker born every minute - or should I say, an idiot.
I'm pretty sure the House of Representatives, FHLMC and FNMA are the biggest culprits here.
I didn't call you an idiot. I called the idea of spending money despite having cut taxes idiocy. I think I'm actually agreeing with you there.
My grief is with the Fed Gvt for trying to do social engineering with tax money. FHLMC and FNMA were involved in criminal activity with huge amounts of money, at the behest of many elected federal politicians. This is where our attention should go. But this is not even surprising. Big governments always do this. The solution is to bring all of the expensive projects to a more local forum. The whole idea of having 50 states, each having their own rules and projects, is a great thing. The citizenry could move to the state which best met their own notions of goodness and we'd all be able to see what solutions were great and which were mistakes.
As it is, we really don't have a choice. The whole thing is a disaster. I have many issues with Bush's presidency, especially his interest in spending taxpayer money on projects which are of clearly debatable merit, i.e. nationbuilding, pharmaceutical programs, etc...
Blech.
I have even more issues with the current crop of representatives. And they've mostly been in office since Jan 2008.
You either need to raise taxes or reduce spending
I completely agree with this! Reducing spending seems like a great way for the fed gvt to go!
We did spend that money - we spent it on Second homes in the Hamptons, Ivy league tuition, yachts, etc. It did not result in more job creation - in fact, the economy cratered.
May I point out that homes and yachts are built by people who have jobs?
Fuck the economic Ayn Randists and their fixation with shaving off every cent from every thing and keeping it for themselves.
LET'S JUST DO THIS: IT'S ALREADY PAST TIME!
That would be lovely except that every time the fed spends a dollar, that's a huge amount of money that the private sector can't spend. The Fed has a horrible record of picking the right projects to back and is hugely inefficient at doing projects.
Consider convincing a more local government to back for infrastructure projects. Local governments are much much better at making good use of taxpayer money. This is self evident for many reasons. Get the Fed off our back so our states and counties can do the work that we think is important.
If only we had spent that 2 trillion or so that we spent on tax cuts and wars on research.
You can't spend money on a tax cut. The sentence doesn't make sense. How about spending the money DESPITE the Tax cut? That's just typical leftist idiocy.
I completely agree about not spending money on wars. However I think Fed spending taxpayer money on research is just as dumb as the rest of the pork crap the Fed has been doing all of my life.
the national highway system
Um... when did we stop spending on that? The Fed has also been using highway funding as a way to do unconstitutional things to the states for 50 years
the space program
Oh yes. That immediately led to all sorts of space activities by us citizens,
etc
keep listing! I'm loving this.
Once the government can create a network effect through jumpstarting an infrastructure
when does the Fed Gvt move back out? Please?
, private companies can move in and create huge economic ripple effects - again, I will use The Internet as a good example.
Um.. The fed didn't spend all that much "creating" the internet. But I'll give you that DARPA is a good example for you to use.
I agree wholeheartedly that we need to get back to a balanced budget,
Really? At what cost? EPA? HUD? DepEnergy? DepAgri? DeptEdu? DepDefence? FHLMC? FNMA? Health and Human Services? DepInterior? Medicare? Welfare? Social Security?
unfortunately, the last president actually was a drunken sailor ( or at least a dry drunk Vietnam evader ) who ran the country into the ground and amassed huge debts by giving tax breaks to the wealthy and engaging in two wars of choice.
Don't forget almost all of the presidents, with very few exceptions. Especially FDR and Obama.
I really think the problem isn't the presidents, it's the House of Representatives. Let's get that back under control, really. Cut costs down to the level where even the IRS is not needed. If the states what such and such a service, let them pick up the tab. The Fed has for too long been using Income Tax generated cash to control the states. Cut that out!
I suggest the next move should be winding back all the laws back to 1890 and then add back the things which are truly important. Divest each of the above agencies except those MANDATED by the Constitution.
BTW, taxing the wealthy is no way to balance the budget. A wealthy is paying my paycheck, and I'm paying taxes. Much better to induce the wealthy to create jobs. It's a multiplicative effect. Besides, I WANT to be wealthy. I spend too much time bellyaching on Slashdot to ever make it though. =8^)
I am really starting to think that a large percentage of my fellow humans are just insane. Do you guys really think that we will be burning toxic shit to get out power in the future? Is that the best we can do? For a bunch of technophiles, this is an awfully Luddite-like position.
The key is to get manufacturing to be completely off-planet. This nonsense of needing to get the energy down to the planetary surface to use it is nuts. Further, the waste products from manufacturing should not be left on the surface either. Turn the entire surface into a park and place to spend your weekends, and raise the kids and such.
Just thinkin.
Agree totally!
You're right, that's even better with an even brighter future if fusion ever (and it will!) pays off.
When fusion goes off it will be very bright, and rather brief.
oh. pays off? NM
You're saying that Congress essentially gave him a blank check to spend how he likes. Not exactly the kind of checks and balances that we should have.
You would prefer that the House of Representatives not do block granting of a trillion dollars at a time to the President with no strings?
Tesla is brought to you by the same people who brought us PayPal and SpaceX.
Except that they appear to have been subsidized with federal tax taxpayer money (something I despise) they could be good people doing a good/hard thing at the wrong time. I suspect that if the fed-govt wasn't so expensive these days that Tesla could stand on its own.
I remember the good old days, when Congress would appropriate money for projects. When, exactly, did Presidents get signing authority on the national checkbook?
The president is spending from the checkbook on an account created for him by Congress. This is the stimulus bill money from last year for which there was an immediate need. "Immediate"' is clearly not what it once was.
Abengoa Solar, a unit of the Seville, Spain-based engineering company, will receive a $1.45 billion loan guarantee to build a solar-power plant in Arizona that will create 1,600 construction jobs and 85 permanent jobs, according to White House documents released in conjunction with Obama’s address.
The power plant will be the first of its kind in the U.S. and generate enough energy to power 70,000 homes, Obama said.
1.45billion to power 70,000 homes.
That's $20,000 per home?