I tried hard to be cynical about this, but really it's a pretty good match. Twitter's enforced lo-fi nature makes it a perfect format for a high cost per bit medium like satellite, but it's used in bulk enough to justify access plans with moderate usage instead of trying to milk corporate customers for $1/packet or something. Perhaps the constellation operators have finally found their market.
I am very happy with my current job, but there have always been a few ideas for things I've wanted to develop on the side. Ideally I'd keep my day job
Stop right there and put a period at the end. That's the opening of the letter you send to HR.
The next part is, "But I'll quit if I have to."
Then stop and consider real hard whether this is actually true before you sign your name to it.
Then the ball's in their court. You'll either get canned in short order, or they'll sit down with you and negotiate a contract where you belong to them during business hours but you own your own soul afterward. Which result you get depends on what kind of company it is... Some really do think that owning your whole life like property is the proper order of the world and be offended at your sheer audacity of thinking otherwise. Perhaps if they're paying really well that will be worth it, but if that was the case, you wouldn't be here now, would you?
I personally suggest you reneg even if you live in a state where such IP agreements are invalid. They can still sue you for the rights to your New Big Thing, and you will not have the time or money to fight it even if you'd theoretically win in the end. Get it in clear writing that you own your own time.
What is the meaning of that question? I take particular issue with "Meaning".
Does it mean "purpose"? If so, life's purpose is defined by its creator; if there is no creator, it's purpose is self-defining; empirically, the one we've decided on is "keep reproducing until you deplete all available means to do so and/or come up with something else to do".
Does it really mean "Meaning" as in "This means something"? A creator may have intended some meaning; if there is no creator, I'm afraid all it can mean is "Stuff can successfully self-reproduce for at least a few billion years on this particular rock". Any other meaning is entirely made up by us.
I suppose in that sense data mining the meaning of life is as good an answer as any.
Personally, I think "Meaning" is a worthless question, and "Purpose"... well, it's only what you make of it. Mine is to try to make this world a better place for it's inhabitants at least until we can make contact with and/or go somewhere more exciting. I accept that this may take a while.
Who wasn't expecting it? Reducing your infrastructure footprint is bullet item 1 on practically any presentation on "let's switch from big, stateful, slow circuit-switched stuff to small, stateless, fast packet-switched gear". Is there anyone who's done networking in the last decade that didn't know this? Didn't they get the memo?
Oh, right. AT&T. They don't care. They don't have to.
...isn't that implicit approval that what you did was legal?
No, that's implicit approval that you didn't also commit tax evasion.
The rulings are pretty self-consistent. You can even deduct the expenses for your illegal business:
"While embezzlers, thieves, and the like are forced to report their ill-gotten gains as income for tax purposes, they may also take deductions for costs relating to criminal activity. For example, in Commissioner v. Tellier, a taxpayer was found guilty of engaging in business activities that violated the Securities Act of 1933.[7] The taxpayer subsequently tried to deduct from his gross income the legal fees he spent while defending himself.[8] The Supreme Court held that the taxpayer was allowed to deduct the legal fees from his gross income because they meet the requirements of 162(a).[9], which allows the taxpayer to deduct all the “ordinary and necessary expenses paid or incurred during the taxable year in carrying on a trade or business.”[10] The Court reasoned (and the Internal Revenue Service did not contest the point) that it was ordinary and necessary for a person engaged in a business to expect to have legal fees associated with that business, even though such things may only happen once in a lifetime.[11] Therefore, the taxpayer in Tellier was allowed to deduct his legal fees from his gross income, even though he incurred the fees because of his crime. The Tellier court reiterated that the purpose of the tax code was to tax net income, not punish unlawful behavior.[12] The Court suggested that if this was not the case, Congress would change the tax code to include special tax rules for illegal conduct.[13]" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_of_illegal_income_in_the_United_States
That's a fantastic link. It's perfect reading for geeks with a moderate interest in chemistry - lots of juicy technical info mixed with tons of fun anecdotes of the utterly insane things we've tried in our passionate (and sometimes suicidal) desire to fly higher.
Hydrazine is also used as a low-power monopropellant for the maneuvering thrusters of spacecraft, and the Space Shuttle's auxiliary power units (APUs). In addition, monopropellant hydrazine-fueled rocket engines are often used in terminal descent of spacecraft. A collection of such engines was used in both Viking program landers as well as the Phoenix lander launched in August 2007.
In all hydrazine monopropellant engines, the hydrazine is passed by a catalyst such as iridium metal supported by high-surface-area alumina (aluminium oxide) or carbon nanofibers,[25] or more recently molybdenum nitride on alumina,[26] which causes it to decompose into ammonia, nitrogen gas, and hydrogen gas according to the following reactions:
It's not really about being "Green". Hydrazine is very toxic and extremely unstable. It's terribly dangerous to work with even when things are going right, and when a launch goes wrong you may end up dropping a hydrazine-filled satellite in an urban area. That's not good, so you have to considerably overengineer the tanks (adding weight, reducing payload) so they'll survive reentry and not poison people.
So why do we use this devil of a propellant?
Normal rocket juice is two parts - fuel (eg H2, kerosene) and oxidizer (eg O2, N20). You flow both into your combustion chamber, strike a spark, and away you go. That's great for long sessions of high-power lift. The problem is it's terrible for fine maneuvering. Maintaining the proper mixture gets harder with small flows, your spark plugs wear out with repeated firings, and generally the whole bipropellant setup is big, heavy, and complicated, and you want your satellite to be compact, light, and as simple as possible for reliability.
So that's where hydrazine comes in. It's the same property that makes it dangerously unstable that makes it an ideal fuel when you need very low impulse and very high reliability. You just open a small valve on the line from the pressurized tank tank to the engine - that's your only moving part. The hydrazine flows into the combustion chamber where there's a catalyst. It instantly and very exothermically decomposes into ammonia, nitrogen and hydrogen gas. The very high temperature rise makes the exhaust velocity really high, which is great for efficiency.
Et voila, you have a rocket engine where the only moving part is the flow control valve. Since you want to do complex maneuvers, you can sprinkle a bunch of these little, simple, lightweight engines all over your craft instead of having a couple big complex (fuel mixing) ones with vectoring (gimbals and actuators are just more things to fail, plus now you need flexible fuel lines), and you can do your maneuvers in tiny bursts that are too short to even get a bipropellant engine to light off.
Similarly, the very low parts count makes hydrazine turbine engines very useful where maximum reliability is required - for instance APUs for hydraulic power used for the space shuttle, and on military aircraft for emergency backups.
Finding a safe replacement would allow much safer handling, lighter safety systems, and allow monopropellant engines to be used in places that they're impractical now.
That's accounted for in the 4.3 sigma result. Part of it is the ratio of the signal to noise. That gave a 3.1 sigma confidence. Another sensor gave additional data. Neither was a 4.3 sigma in itself, but because they confirm each other, the chance that they were both a result of luck has gone down to 4.3 sigma.
Sigmas in a way tells how probable is to get these results
To be pedantic, it's a measure of the probability that random chance caused these results. A 4.3 sigma result means that if you just fed white noise into the sensors, you would get a result this strong 0.001% of the time - or to put it another way, if you run the test 100,000 times with absolutely no real signal, one of them will probably have a result this good.
The important distinction is that this is not a measure of "how likely we are right". There is a 1 in 100,000 chance that random luck caused this result, but there is also an unknown and hard to quantify possibility that our theory is wrong and some other mechanism caused this result.
It's kind of a misleading statistic. iPhones are all high end smartphones, whereas Android runs on everything and has replaced all but the lowest level feature phones and the low-end stuff accounts for a big part of sales. Low end users aren't Android enthusiasts and won't specifically seek out Android again when they go for their next upgrade.
As a recent migrant from an iPhone to a high end Android phone, I will say I'm never going back. There are ups and downs but on the whole Android is SO much less of a PITA.
about as insightful as noting that starving people crave food.
It's profoundly insightful when you notice people failing to eat (or hold down a job so they can eat) because they're too hung up on Facebook. Any time you have a strong drive that's possible. Most people can control it; some fail and become addicts.
And yes, I check it throughout the day. If that's an "addiction", it's a pretty good one to have.
That's not an addiction. An addiction is when the drive to do something is so strong that you can't stop it, even when you recognize that it's displacing other important things like showing up for work, sleeping, eating, and spending time with family.
Your use of social social media : social media addiction:: a glass of wine with dinner : alcoholism
Assuming the clickwrap license is a valid contract, maybe.
But they would still have to waste time showing up in court to make that argument. You lose filing fees, they lose a plane ticket and wasting some executive's time.
It's kind of exploiting the legal system, but hey, I'm tired of being on the sucking end of that arrangement. Letting them swallow for a turn would feel nice.
Yes, it's your constitutional right to watch porn, but it's a perfectly reasonable request to go to a computer where the screen isn't facing the whole room. Please just do it before people start citing you as a reason why we need more laws and less rights.
The distinction I'm trying to draw is not automation, but connection. Robots are independently powered, vs remote manipulators which are direct mechanical linkages and move solely by the force input of the human.
The power grid is in no way capable of supporting mass adoption of EVs. Where tiered pricing is possible or existent, prices for daytime power would necessarily skyrocket and people could only afford to charge at night.
Why is this a problem? The grid runs pretty tight during peak hours but at night there's plenty of capacity. About 80% of current vehicle needs can be met with the current power grid. That's plenty enough to get the ball rolling and we can upgrade the other 20% capacity when we need it.
Most people's needs can be met by charging at night. The ones who can't - say, taxis, which can't run a full day on one charge - just continue to run on gas for now.
We don't have to hold up the whole thing just because it's not ready for a small number of use cases.
Well, that's true. I was just looking at it in regards to toppling the last guy, but his continuing work (like anyone's if they're trying to do anything big) will be dangerously controversial.
The guy who wants him dead is dead himself and didn't have a lot of people who liked him enough to seek vengeance. I'd say odds are in el Mufti's favor.
Slashdot Mirror
I tried hard to be cynical about this, but really it's a pretty good match. Twitter's enforced lo-fi nature makes it a perfect format for a high cost per bit medium like satellite, but it's used in bulk enough to justify access plans with moderate usage instead of trying to milk corporate customers for $1/packet or something. Perhaps the constellation operators have finally found their market.
Meta-whoosh!
I am very happy with my current job, but there have always been a few ideas for things I've wanted to develop on the side. Ideally I'd keep my day job
Stop right there and put a period at the end. That's the opening of the letter you send to HR.
The next part is, "But I'll quit if I have to."
Then stop and consider real hard whether this is actually true before you sign your name to it.
Then the ball's in their court. You'll either get canned in short order, or they'll sit down with you and negotiate a contract where you belong to them during business hours but you own your own soul afterward. Which result you get depends on what kind of company it is... Some really do think that owning your whole life like property is the proper order of the world and be offended at your sheer audacity of thinking otherwise. Perhaps if they're paying really well that will be worth it, but if that was the case, you wouldn't be here now, would you?
I personally suggest you reneg even if you live in a state where such IP agreements are invalid. They can still sue you for the rights to your New Big Thing, and you will not have the time or money to fight it even if you'd theoretically win in the end. Get it in clear writing that you own your own time.
"What is the meaning of life?"
What is the meaning of that question? I take particular issue with "Meaning".
Does it mean "purpose"? If so, life's purpose is defined by its creator; if there is no creator, it's purpose is self-defining; empirically, the one we've decided on is "keep reproducing until you deplete all available means to do so and/or come up with something else to do".
Does it really mean "Meaning" as in "This means something"? A creator may have intended some meaning; if there is no creator, I'm afraid all it can mean is "Stuff can successfully self-reproduce for at least a few billion years on this particular rock". Any other meaning is entirely made up by us.
I suppose in that sense data mining the meaning of life is as good an answer as any.
Personally, I think "Meaning" is a worthless question, and "Purpose"... well, it's only what you make of it. Mine is to try to make this world a better place for it's inhabitants at least until we can make contact with and/or go somewhere more exciting. I accept that this may take a while.
Who wasn't expecting it? Reducing your infrastructure footprint is bullet item 1 on practically any presentation on "let's switch from big, stateful, slow circuit-switched stuff to small, stateless, fast packet-switched gear". Is there anyone who's done networking in the last decade that didn't know this? Didn't they get the memo?
Oh, right. AT&T. They don't care. They don't have to.
...isn't that implicit approval that what you did was legal?
No, that's implicit approval that you didn't also commit tax evasion.
The rulings are pretty self-consistent. You can even deduct the expenses for your illegal business:
"While embezzlers, thieves, and the like are forced to report their ill-gotten gains as income for tax purposes, they may also take deductions for costs relating to criminal activity. For example, in Commissioner v. Tellier, a taxpayer was found guilty of engaging in business activities that violated the Securities Act of 1933.[7] The taxpayer subsequently tried to deduct from his gross income the legal fees he spent while defending himself.[8] The Supreme Court held that the taxpayer was allowed to deduct the legal fees from his gross income because they meet the requirements of 162(a).[9], which allows the taxpayer to deduct all the “ordinary and necessary expenses paid or incurred during the taxable year in carrying on a trade or business.”[10] The Court reasoned (and the Internal Revenue Service did not contest the point) that it was ordinary and necessary for a person engaged in a business to expect to have legal fees associated with that business, even though such things may only happen once in a lifetime.[11] Therefore, the taxpayer in Tellier was allowed to deduct his legal fees from his gross income, even though he incurred the fees because of his crime. The Tellier court reiterated that the purpose of the tax code was to tax net income, not punish unlawful behavior.[12] The Court suggested that if this was not the case, Congress would change the tax code to include special tax rules for illegal conduct.[13]" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_of_illegal_income_in_the_United_States
That's a fantastic link. It's perfect reading for geeks with a moderate interest in chemistry - lots of juicy technical info mixed with tons of fun anecdotes of the utterly insane things we've tried in our passionate (and sometimes suicidal) desire to fly higher.
Impulse != Specific Impulse
You never need low specific impulse. You need high specific impulse for efficiency, and low impulse for precision stationkeeping.
Wikipedia says:
Hydrazine is also used as a low-power monopropellant for the maneuvering thrusters of spacecraft, and the Space Shuttle's auxiliary power units (APUs). In addition, monopropellant hydrazine-fueled rocket engines are often used in terminal descent of spacecraft. A collection of such engines was used in both Viking program landers as well as the Phoenix lander launched in August 2007.
In all hydrazine monopropellant engines, the hydrazine is passed by a catalyst such as iridium metal supported by high-surface-area alumina (aluminium oxide) or carbon nanofibers,[25] or more recently molybdenum nitride on alumina,[26] which causes it to decompose into ammonia, nitrogen gas, and hydrogen gas according to the following reactions:
Countercitation needed. :)
It's not really about being "Green". Hydrazine is very toxic and extremely unstable. It's terribly dangerous to work with even when things are going right, and when a launch goes wrong you may end up dropping a hydrazine-filled satellite in an urban area. That's not good, so you have to considerably overengineer the tanks (adding weight, reducing payload) so they'll survive reentry and not poison people.
So why do we use this devil of a propellant?
Normal rocket juice is two parts - fuel (eg H2, kerosene) and oxidizer (eg O2, N20). You flow both into your combustion chamber, strike a spark, and away you go. That's great for long sessions of high-power lift. The problem is it's terrible for fine maneuvering. Maintaining the proper mixture gets harder with small flows, your spark plugs wear out with repeated firings, and generally the whole bipropellant setup is big, heavy, and complicated, and you want your satellite to be compact, light, and as simple as possible for reliability.
So that's where hydrazine comes in. It's the same property that makes it dangerously unstable that makes it an ideal fuel when you need very low impulse and very high reliability. You just open a small valve on the line from the pressurized tank tank to the engine - that's your only moving part. The hydrazine flows into the combustion chamber where there's a catalyst. It instantly and very exothermically decomposes into ammonia, nitrogen and hydrogen gas. The very high temperature rise makes the exhaust velocity really high, which is great for efficiency.
Et voila, you have a rocket engine where the only moving part is the flow control valve. Since you want to do complex maneuvers, you can sprinkle a bunch of these little, simple, lightweight engines all over your craft instead of having a couple big complex (fuel mixing) ones with vectoring (gimbals and actuators are just more things to fail, plus now you need flexible fuel lines), and you can do your maneuvers in tiny bursts that are too short to even get a bipropellant engine to light off.
Similarly, the very low parts count makes hydrazine turbine engines very useful where maximum reliability is required - for instance APUs for hydraulic power used for the space shuttle, and on military aircraft for emergency backups.
Finding a safe replacement would allow much safer handling, lighter safety systems, and allow monopropellant engines to be used in places that they're impractical now.
If you manage to fall and break ANYTHING in 1/6 gravity - let alone a hip! - you're long overdue for some natural selection.
That's accounted for in the 4.3 sigma result. Part of it is the ratio of the signal to noise. That gave a 3.1 sigma confidence. Another sensor gave additional data. Neither was a 4.3 sigma in itself, but because they confirm each other, the chance that they were both a result of luck has gone down to 4.3 sigma.
Sigmas in a way tells how probable is to get these results
To be pedantic, it's a measure of the probability that random chance caused these results. A 4.3 sigma result means that if you just fed white noise into the sensors, you would get a result this strong 0.001% of the time - or to put it another way, if you run the test 100,000 times with absolutely no real signal, one of them will probably have a result this good.
The important distinction is that this is not a measure of "how likely we are right". There is a 1 in 100,000 chance that random luck caused this result, but there is also an unknown and hard to quantify possibility that our theory is wrong and some other mechanism caused this result.
It's kind of a misleading statistic. iPhones are all high end smartphones, whereas Android runs on everything and has replaced all but the lowest level feature phones and the low-end stuff accounts for a big part of sales. Low end users aren't Android enthusiasts and won't specifically seek out Android again when they go for their next upgrade.
As a recent migrant from an iPhone to a high end Android phone, I will say I'm never going back. There are ups and downs but on the whole Android is SO much less of a PITA.
about as insightful as noting that starving people crave food.
It's profoundly insightful when you notice people failing to eat (or hold down a job so they can eat) because they're too hung up on Facebook. Any time you have a strong drive that's possible. Most people can control it; some fail and become addicts.
And yes, I check it throughout the day. If that's an "addiction", it's a pretty good one to have.
That's not an addiction. An addiction is when the drive to do something is so strong that you can't stop it, even when you recognize that it's displacing other important things like showing up for work, sleeping, eating, and spending time with family.
Your use of social social media : social media addiction :: a glass of wine with dinner : alcoholism
Assuming the clickwrap license is a valid contract, maybe.
But they would still have to waste time showing up in court to make that argument. You lose filing fees, they lose a plane ticket and wasting some executive's time.
It's kind of exploiting the legal system, but hey, I'm tired of being on the sucking end of that arrangement. Letting them swallow for a turn would feel nice.
Yes, it's your constitutional right to watch porn, but it's a perfectly reasonable request to go to a computer where the screen isn't facing the whole room. Please just do it before people start citing you as a reason why we need more laws and less rights.
The implication is clearly that we (as a community) shouldn't discourage people from using OSS code, or they'd start rewriting it to "get around" it.
That's the entire argument for the GPL.
It's also the argument for the BSD-type license. This is exactly why we have different open source licenses.
If you'd rather that more people would use your stuff and not have to rewrite it, you use a BSD license.
If you prefer that people have an incentive to keep the derived code open, you use the GPL.
You're right, "Waldos" is a bad term. I meant the devices that bear the name in real life - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_manipulator - not the proper Heinlein sort.
The distinction I'm trying to draw is not automation, but connection. Robots are independently powered, vs remote manipulators which are direct mechanical linkages and move solely by the force input of the human.
By my distinction, R/C toys are robots.
How about this for the distinguishing line?: Robots have a motor. Waldos are powered by humans.
I can't think of any counterexamples off the top of my head.
The power grid is in no way capable of supporting mass adoption of EVs. Where tiered pricing is possible or existent, prices for daytime power would necessarily skyrocket and people could only afford to charge at night.
Why is this a problem? The grid runs pretty tight during peak hours but at night there's plenty of capacity. About 80% of current vehicle needs can be met with the current power grid. That's plenty enough to get the ball rolling and we can upgrade the other 20% capacity when we need it.
Most people's needs can be met by charging at night. The ones who can't - say, taxis, which can't run a full day on one charge - just continue to run on gas for now.
We don't have to hold up the whole thing just because it's not ready for a small number of use cases.
Well, that's true. I was just looking at it in regards to toppling the last guy, but his continuing work (like anyone's if they're trying to do anything big) will be dangerously controversial.
The guy who wants him dead is dead himself and didn't have a lot of people who liked him enough to seek vengeance. I'd say odds are in el Mufti's favor.
Thanks, that's an excellent point.