Even if in a particular application the total cost of using the proprietary software is lower because it makes workers more productive? Remember that the cost of the person using a computer is far higher than the cost of the computer and software installed on it. A full time person costs ~$100K. A 10% efficiency change dwarfs most software costs.
I believe you are honest, I believe a lot of police are, but it seems like these plates create the potential for favoritism. No bribery, but the natural tendency for people to want to support people who support them. In a similar fashion an anti-police bumper sticker might well encourage a police officer to treat someone more harshly.
Police have a lot of leeway in traffic stops - which is fine, but it also makes it very easy for them to be influenced by a variety of subtle biases.
We are not out of physics - still lots of big mysteries: Dark matter, dark energy, unification, quantum gravity etc. It is possible though that we are running out of small scale experiments and future ones will on average become more expensive and take longer. Bigger accelerators. Bigger telescopes etc.
I hope this isn't true and that people can become more clever, but it might be.
What are they doing with the computers? Digital design? Publishing a newspaper? Handling invoices? Controlling a nuclear power plant? Software development? Defense work? Managing a taxi service?
The answer will depend entirely on the type of use.
I have a XP based oscilloscope - 20Gs/s, 3.5GHz, deep memory. The vendor won't upgrade it. A replacement is probably >$20K. One of its features is that it can run on the network, but that requires security. Our lab has other expensive XP based hardware as well.
I don't think Microsoft should be *required* to keep supporting XP, but there are a lot of people who are using it because it is the most practical choice for their application.
For normal desktop computing I upgrade hardware and software on a reasonable schedule. Laboratory equipment tends to have a much longer useful life than desktops and is much more expensive. Most of the computers I use are modern, but most of the $$ value of computers are expensive specialized lab equipment.
Quality of sound is inherently subjective. The sounds were not identical, just the double blind preference did not favor the Strad. If someone believes that a Strad (or tube amp, of vinyl, or whatever) sounds better, then does it make any sense to argue? This is 100% about entertainment, so the Strad may be better IF you are allowed to tell the audience that is what you are playing.
Personally I wouldn't buy a $1M violin (if I still played and could afford it),.and I also don't have a tube amp and got rid of my vinyl records many years ago. However if someone receives more enjoyment from those things than without them, its their $$$ to spend as they like.
Private flying is dangerous. NTSB statistics (2012 is what I have).
General avaiation (small planes and some business flights): 6.8 accidents, 1.24 fatalities / 100,000 hours Commercial aviation. 0.155 accidents, 0 fatalities/ 100,000 hours. There really is no comparison in the safety record.
For cars I see 1.1 deaths / 100M passenger miles. If we assume a 30mph average speed, that is something like.03 fatalities / 100,000 hours.
You can play with the statistics all sorts of (perfectly valid) ways, but by almost any reasonable analysis, general aviation is substantially more dangerous that either commercial or driving.
It varies. Between major airports, commercial will usually win in speed and cost. There are some trips that are faster and/or cheaper in a small plane than by other means, but in my experience (20 years of private flying), it isn't really all that common. I fly myself because I enjoy it, and I like the flexibility, but I can rarely justify it as an efficient means of transportation.
Figure a 4-seat Bonanza or Cirrus costs $200/hour to operate and flies at ~200mph. A Cessna 172 is considerably less, maybe $120/hour, flies at maybe 130mph, but can't carry as much, and has much more limited weather capability. (vague 1/2 of the total cost is fuel)
These are very rough costs, depends on how you count fixed costs, how fast you fly, etc etc.
Small aircraft are NOT a cost efficient way to get around in most cases.
As a private pilot the legal issues worry me. The pilot training, aircraft maintenance, and operating requirements are very different for different types operations. The "sharing costs" is based on the concept that you can fly your friends to Las Vegas and split the costs. It is assumed that you have reasonable informed your friends of the risks. If you are taking other "passengers" for some form of compensation, have they *really* been informed of the risks - which are dramatically higher for private flights than for air carriers.
If there is an aircraft malfunction and someone is injured, what are the insurance / lawsuit issues? what happens if a passenger damages your airplane - stepping in the wrong place, can do thousands of dollars of damage to some planes. What if you can't reach the intended destination due to weather - does the passenger get a refund? What if you are delayed? It is legal for private flights to operate under weather conditions that are not legal for commercial flights -what happens here? Fuel is less than 1/2 the total operating costs for my plane - do I get to split all costs, or just fuel?
We are also talking a lot of money here. A Bonanza or Cirrus total operating cost is probably ~$200/hour, so a "quick flight" from San Francisco to Las Vegas is $1000 round trip, close to 2X that in my Baron. Non-pilot passengers may expect a level of service and performance that just isn't reasonable for small planes.
Its a nice idea, and I'd love to participate, but there are too many possible problems.
Considering the high visibility of space missions, I'd value a statistical life around $1B. For most activities its much less - I forget the official number used in planning things, but probably $10-$100M. Remember that there are ways to spend money that will (statistically) save lives.
I think the life value ceases to be usable as the probability of death gets near 1. I wouldn't for example allow someone to buy a human hunting license for $100M, because the idea that a wealthy person can kill a poor person with impunity is damaging to the idea of american democracy (or at least what I think it should be).
I place a higher value on astronauts lives because their deaths are very visible - in addition to their personal death (worth say $10-100M), there is the demoralization of the 300 million Americans who are aware of that death.
All these numbers are very rough, I haven't thought about them carefully.
You are right and wrong. The specific problems that killed the Apollo 1, and Challenger astronauts were preventable, but in general with very complex systems you can't eliminate all risks. Engineers make mistakes. Managers incorrectly evaluate risks. Adding bureaucracy and reviews can reduce these risks, but also slows down and increase the costs of the projects, so there has to be some limit. Is it worth spending an extra $1B to prevent a death?
We are in a hurry because just as there is a time value to money, there is a time value to information. Learning something now is more valuable than learning it 10 years from now because we have an extra 10 years of use of that knowledge.
It depends on the long term goal. Personally I have a long term goal of human expansion into the universe, and I believe that to further that goal we need to try - accepting that many of the explorers will die. If the goal is pure planetary science, then it may well be possible to do it with robots.
I am content for there to me more Challengers and Apollo 1's. We honor brave people because they take risks. I believe it is wonderful and noble that people are willing to die to expand mankind's reach. This loss of life is not needless, it is the natural result of pushing the limits.
We could, we just don't want to. It would take an Apollo program style effort and we don't have the will to do that anymore.
We have reasonably long term habitation in the ISS. We can dust off old NERVA designs, they were about ready to fly test articles. Huge amounts of work to do, hundreds of billions of dollars, but we could do it for less than the cost of the Iraq war.
The answer to the Fermi paradox is that we simply aren't worth talking to.
Magellan didn't survive Magellan's expedition. Scott died trying to get to the South Pole. Mallory died climbing Mt Everest.
How many still die climbing everest even though its been climbed thousands of times? How many people die in bat-suits?
We are not talking about forcing people to take risks, but rather of looking for people who are willing to risk death to become immortalized in history. Have we become such collective cowards that we will not accept risks that daredevils accept daily for fun?
Take volunteers. Make sure that they understand the risk and are not in any way coerced. Send them out. If they die, build a grand monument to their heroism, and look for more volunteers. If they succeed build grand monuments, and bury them there when they die later - as they inevitably will.
In a hundred years everyone reading this will be dead. Give a few of them a chance to do die doing something magnificent.
I guess "harsh interrogation" is what you get when you aren't very good at torture???? The terminology is fundamentally stupid - if you are compelling someone to do something they don't want to do, and continue to do worse things, isn't that torture- whether its sleep deprivation, water-boarding or the rack really doesn't seem important.
China is not under US law. The US government and US companies may try to find ways to convince / pressure China to agree with our policies, just as China will try to find ways to pressure us.
The US government blocking a site in the US would be the exact opposite of freedom of speech. The entire point is to allow anyone to say anything they want without government restriction, unless the speech is specifically disallowed for other reasons: libel, copyright, child porn, etc.
Oh, you mean "should" they impose penalties without due process.....
Americans sadly seem willing to trade their hard won rights and freedoms for a little safety. Certainly not the way I'd vote (assuming there was a candidate who didn't support this), but one of the disadvantages of a democracy is that sometimes the will of the majority isn't very clever.
No, only the people investing in this are idiots, the ones collecting the money are quite clever.
Its really difficult to imagine that this is cheaper per power output than a conventional generator. the balloon is big, fragile and probably limited lifetime. Subject to weather, ice, lightning, etc. The supports are not at all trivial - picture holding a balloon on a windy day - the wind X tether will tend to push the balloon downwards - this will significantly limit the max wind speed where this can be used. At the same time the tethers need to resist the torque of the turbine - or it needs counter-rotating blades which are less efficient and more complex. You need a large clear area or if the balloon deflates it could land on something doing damage. If multiple balloons are close to each other, a very stiff multi-point support is needed or they will collide if the winds shift. That still doesn't solve the strong wind problem listed above, so the tethers need to have a system to reel in the balloons when bad weather is predicted. The higher wind speed is nice, but its difficult to imagine building one of these that is anywhere near the scale of a large modern windmill.
This is just a dumb idea.
There are very strong winds very high up (30,000'), but the long tethers cause all sorts of problems - and you need a huge clear area around the supports. (imaging dropping 20 kilometers of ultra-strong cable across a city.........(buses, trains etc.....)
In that case this is MUCH more serious. Sexting has sometimes been considered child pornography, a FELONY offense. Pressuring an underage person to reveal incriminating information that has the potential to send her to prison and ruin her life should be illegal.
I don't know the law on questioning minors. Can the police question a minor without parental consent, and without a miranda warning? If so, this seems like a big weakness in our legal system. (since one cannot reasonably assume a minor is educated in their legal rights).
Yes, I think it only makes sense if the total company revenue is roughly constant after the change. Low data users would end up paying less, high users would pay more. It would even allow a bit more range in services offered.
It might make sense to have different data rates at different times. Then it would make sense for torrents to run at low-use times of day.
This is the same sort of problem we have with gas stations - how do you know you got 10 gallons, not 9.5, in a business with very small margins. Spot checks by an independent agency and very large fines would help. Maybe some company will make a router that is certified and will keep track. If you think you are being ripped off,you can use one and find out - again this needs to be paired with large fines.
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Even if in a particular application the total cost of using the proprietary software is lower because it makes workers more productive? Remember that the cost of the person using a computer is far higher than the cost of the computer and software installed on it. A full time person costs ~$100K. A 10% efficiency change dwarfs most software costs.
I believe you are honest, I believe a lot of police are, but it seems like these plates create the potential for favoritism. No bribery, but the natural tendency for people to want to support people who support them. In a similar fashion an anti-police bumper sticker might well encourage a police officer to treat someone more harshly.
Police have a lot of leeway in traffic stops - which is fine, but it also makes it very easy for them to be influenced by a variety of subtle biases.
We are not out of physics - still lots of big mysteries: Dark matter, dark energy, unification, quantum gravity etc. It is possible though that we are running out of small scale experiments and future ones will on average become more expensive and take longer. Bigger accelerators. Bigger telescopes etc.
I hope this isn't true and that people can become more clever, but it might be.
What are they doing with the computers? Digital design? Publishing a newspaper? Handling invoices? Controlling a nuclear power plant? Software development? Defense work? Managing a taxi service?
The answer will depend entirely on the type of use.
I have a XP based oscilloscope - 20Gs/s, 3.5GHz, deep memory. The vendor won't upgrade it. A replacement is probably >$20K. One of its features is that it can run on the network, but that requires security. Our lab has other expensive XP based hardware as well.
I don't think Microsoft should be *required* to keep supporting XP, but there are a lot of people who are using it because it is the most practical choice for their application.
For normal desktop computing I upgrade hardware and software on a reasonable schedule. Laboratory equipment tends to have a much longer useful life than desktops and is much more expensive. Most of the computers I use are modern, but most of the $$ value of computers are expensive specialized lab equipment.
Quality of sound is inherently subjective. The sounds were not identical, just the double blind preference did not favor the Strad. If someone believes that a Strad (or tube amp, of vinyl, or whatever) sounds better, then does it make any sense to argue? This is 100% about entertainment, so the Strad may be better IF you are allowed to tell the audience that is what you are playing.
Personally I wouldn't buy a $1M violin (if I still played and could afford it), .and I also don't have a tube amp and got rid of my vinyl records many years ago. However if someone receives more enjoyment from those things than without them, its their $$$ to spend as they like.
Private flying is dangerous.
NTSB statistics (2012 is what I have).
General avaiation (small planes and some business flights): 6.8 accidents, 1.24 fatalities / 100,000 hours
Commercial aviation. 0.155 accidents, 0 fatalities/ 100,000 hours.
There really is no comparison in the safety record.
For cars I see 1.1 deaths / 100M passenger miles. If we assume a 30mph average speed, that is something like .03 fatalities / 100,000 hours.
You can play with the statistics all sorts of (perfectly valid) ways, but by almost any reasonable analysis, general aviation is substantially more dangerous that either commercial or driving.
These and other safety statistics at NTSB.
It varies. Between major airports, commercial will usually win in speed and cost. There are some trips that are faster and /or cheaper in a small plane than by other means, but in my experience (20 years of private flying), it isn't really all that common. I fly myself because I enjoy it, and I like the flexibility, but I can rarely justify it as an efficient means of transportation.
Figure a 4-seat Bonanza or Cirrus costs $200/hour to operate and flies at ~200mph. A Cessna 172 is considerably less, maybe $120/hour, flies at maybe 130mph, but can't carry as much, and has much more limited weather capability. (vague 1/2 of the total cost is fuel)
These are very rough costs, depends on how you count fixed costs, how fast you fly, etc etc.
Small aircraft are NOT a cost efficient way to get around in most cases.
People use aircraft to travel because their time is valuable.
As a private pilot the legal issues worry me. The pilot training, aircraft maintenance, and operating requirements are very different for different types operations. The "sharing costs" is based on the concept that you can fly your friends to Las Vegas and split the costs. It is assumed that you have reasonable informed your friends of the risks. If you are taking other "passengers" for some form of compensation, have they *really* been informed of the risks - which are dramatically higher for private flights than for air carriers.
If there is an aircraft malfunction and someone is injured, what are the insurance / lawsuit issues? what happens if a passenger damages your airplane - stepping in the wrong place, can do thousands of dollars of damage to some planes. What if you can't reach the intended destination due to weather - does the passenger get a refund? What if you are delayed? It is legal for private flights to operate under weather conditions that are not legal for commercial flights -what happens here? Fuel is less than 1/2 the total operating costs for my plane - do I get to split all costs, or just fuel?
We are also talking a lot of money here. A Bonanza or Cirrus total operating cost is probably ~$200/hour, so a "quick flight" from San Francisco to Las Vegas is $1000 round trip, close to 2X that in my Baron. Non-pilot passengers may expect a level of service and performance that just isn't reasonable for small planes.
Its a nice idea, and I'd love to participate, but there are too many possible problems.
Considering the high visibility of space missions, I'd value a statistical life around $1B. For most activities its much less - I forget the official number used in planning things, but probably $10-$100M. Remember that there are ways to spend money that will (statistically) save lives.
I think the life value ceases to be usable as the probability of death gets near 1. I wouldn't for example allow someone to buy a human hunting license for $100M, because the idea that a wealthy person can kill a poor person with impunity is damaging to the idea of american democracy (or at least what I think it should be).
I place a higher value on astronauts lives because their deaths are very visible - in addition to their personal death (worth say $10-100M), there is the demoralization of the 300 million Americans who are aware of that death.
All these numbers are very rough, I haven't thought about them carefully.
You are right and wrong. The specific problems that killed the Apollo 1, and Challenger astronauts were preventable, but in general with very complex systems you can't eliminate all risks. Engineers make mistakes. Managers incorrectly evaluate risks. Adding bureaucracy and reviews can reduce these risks, but also slows down and increase the costs of the projects, so there has to be some limit. Is it worth spending an extra $1B to prevent a death?
We are in a hurry because just as there is a time value to money, there is a time value to information. Learning something now is more valuable than learning it 10 years from now because we have an extra 10 years of use of that knowledge.
Engineering isn't perfect, In large complex projects people will make mistakes, and that is one of the risks astronauts face.
It depends on the long term goal. Personally I have a long term goal of human expansion into the universe, and I believe that to further that goal we need to try - accepting that many of the explorers will die. If the goal is pure planetary science, then it may well be possible to do it with robots.
I am content for there to me more Challengers and Apollo 1's. We honor brave people because they take risks. I believe it is wonderful and noble that people are willing to die to expand mankind's reach. This loss of life is not needless, it is the natural result of pushing the limits.
We could, we just don't want to. It would take an Apollo program style effort and we don't have the will to do that anymore.
We have reasonably long term habitation in the ISS. We can dust off old NERVA designs, they were about ready to fly test articles. Huge amounts of work to do, hundreds of billions of dollars, but we could do it for less than the cost of the Iraq war.
The answer to the Fermi paradox is that we simply aren't worth talking to.
Magellan didn't survive Magellan's expedition. Scott died trying to get to the South Pole. Mallory died climbing Mt Everest.
How many still die climbing everest even though its been climbed thousands of times? How many people die in bat-suits?
We are not talking about forcing people to take risks, but rather of looking for people who are willing to risk death to become immortalized in history. Have we become such collective cowards that we will not accept risks that daredevils accept daily for fun?
Take volunteers. Make sure that they understand the risk and are not in any way coerced. Send them out. If they die, build a grand monument to their heroism, and look for more volunteers. If they succeed build grand monuments, and bury them there when they die later - as they inevitably will.
In a hundred years everyone reading this will be dead. Give a few of them a chance to do die doing something magnificent.
I guess "harsh interrogation" is what you get when you aren't very good at torture???? The terminology is fundamentally stupid - if you are compelling someone to do something they don't want to do, and continue to do worse things, isn't that torture- whether its sleep deprivation, water-boarding or the rack really doesn't seem important.
China is not under US law. The US government and US companies may try to find ways to convince / pressure China to agree with our policies, just as China will try to find ways to pressure us.
The US government blocking a site in the US would be the exact opposite of freedom of speech. The entire point is to allow anyone to say anything they want without government restriction, unless the speech is specifically disallowed for other reasons: libel, copyright, child porn, etc.
Yes, they have a bunch of guys with guns.
Oh, you mean "should" they impose penalties without due process.....
Americans sadly seem willing to trade their hard won rights and freedoms for a little safety. Certainly not the way I'd vote (assuming there was a candidate who didn't support this), but one of the disadvantages of a democracy is that sometimes the will of the majority isn't very clever.
No, only the people investing in this are idiots, the ones collecting the money are quite clever.
Its really difficult to imagine that this is cheaper per power output than a conventional generator. the balloon is big, fragile and probably limited lifetime. Subject to weather, ice, lightning, etc. The supports are not at all trivial - picture holding a balloon on a windy day - the wind X tether will tend to push the balloon downwards - this will significantly limit the max wind speed where this can be used. At the same time the tethers need to resist the torque of the turbine - or it needs counter-rotating blades which are less efficient and more complex. You need a large clear area or if the balloon deflates it could land on something doing damage. If multiple balloons are close to each other, a very stiff multi-point support is needed or they will collide if the winds shift. That still doesn't solve the strong wind problem listed above, so the tethers need to have a system to reel in the balloons when bad weather is predicted. The higher wind speed is nice, but its difficult to imagine building one of these that is anywhere near the scale of a large modern windmill.
This is just a dumb idea.
There are very strong winds very high up (30,000'), but the long tethers cause all sorts of problems - and you need a huge clear area around the supports. (imaging dropping 20 kilometers of ultra-strong cable across a city.........(buses, trains etc.....)
In that case this is MUCH more serious. Sexting has sometimes been considered child pornography, a FELONY offense. Pressuring an underage person to reveal incriminating information that has the potential to send her to prison and ruin her life should be illegal.
I don't know the law on questioning minors. Can the police question a minor without parental consent, and without a miranda warning? If so, this seems like a big weakness in our legal system. (since one cannot reasonably assume a minor is educated in their legal rights).
Yes, I think it only makes sense if the total company revenue is roughly constant after the change. Low data users would end up paying less, high users would pay more. It would even allow a bit more range in services offered.
It might make sense to have different data rates at different times. Then it would make sense for torrents to run at low-use times of day.
This is the same sort of problem we have with gas stations - how do you know you got 10 gallons, not 9.5, in a business with very small margins. Spot checks by an independent agency and very large fines would help. Maybe some company will make a router that is certified and will keep track. If you think you are being ripped off ,you can use one and find out - again this needs to be paired with large fines.