The BBC reported yesterday that Berlusconi (sp?) had presided over the "ground breaking" for their sea barrier system that morning... so it seems they have finally gotten their act together.
Of course, you could look in a real dictionary, like the OED, and see what they have to say. And they say that access as a verb can be traced back to at least 1962, in a comp sci context no less:
access, v. 1. trans. a. To gain access to (data, etc., held in a computer or computer-based system, or the system itself).
1962 A. M. ANGEL in M. C. Yovits Large-Capacity Memory Techniques for Computing Systems 150 Through a system of binary-coded addresses notched into each card, a particular card may be accessed for read and write operations.
First molecule to emit light when electricity is applied? That would surprise the people working on organic LEDs, not to mention slightly older guys like Thom Edison, who managed to coax light out of graphite coated thread....
While this is a useful cautionary tale, you have to be a bit careful in your interpretation of it. It is quite easy to show (and it is a typical undergraduate classical mechanics homework problem) that the perturbations of Mercury's orbit CAN NOT be explained within the Newtonian model by the addition of another point source (ie, a planet), because any such explanation would cause a larger than observed perturbation to the orbits of Venus, Earth, and Mars. And this was a well known issue BEFORE Einstein started working on his GR theory. In other words, physicists knew there was something wrong with the theory long before they had a theoretical solution, because the preminent gravitational model of the time was predicting the wrong thing when confronted with the available data.
The cautionary aspect of the tale, though, is well understood by the larger physics community, and dozens of modified and new models of gravity HAVE been proposed in the literature to explain the apparent "missing mass" of the universe without invoking unobserved particles; but they all run afoul of some observation or other. The current model has been arrived at by the consensus of a large number of physicists and astronomers around the globe over a long span of time... it isn't a flash in the pan, and while it could be wrong, the data on many length and time scales just seems to get more compelling as we add to it, rather than less.
In this case, we understand GR, its cosmological implications, and the requisite post-Newtonian approximation schemes well enough that we have developed a model that match ALL known observations with the inclusion of dark matter and dark energy components. It isn't just one or two observations of rotation curves that have pushed us in the direction of dark matter, but literally dozens of observations, from widely different length and time scales, from cosmic background radiation to rotation curves, from earthbound laboratory measurements to interstellar radiotelescope observations. It is certainly POSSIBLE that there is a theoretical description available that doesn't require dark matter/energy, AND explains all of the data, but it looks more likely to the daily practitioner that the current theory is good at the length scales it is being applied to, and the dark matter/energy is the simpler solution.
I'd like to point out one other cautionary tale to those who want to blame the theory, and points out that well tested theories are not tossed out immediately when new or contradictory data comes along: in the early part of the 20th century, observations of beta decay led many physicists to conclude that the very fundamental conservation laws of energy and momentum (and the entire theoretical framework that so neatly explains them) would have to be tossed out the window, because the observed decay products (electrons and nuclei) didn't appear to follow those conservation laws. But some very smart people, including Pauli, said "Wait, the theory has worked so well up to now that we should look for a SIMPLER explanation; we propose a to-date unobserved particle with no charge and no mass produced in association with electrons in these decays." That was scoffed at by many, but a few years later just that very particle was observed: the electron neutrino. My point is just that, while you need to keep an open mind and be willing to challenge both experiment AND theory, you have to do so with the WHOLE picture in mind, and not just a tiny corner.... that is what science and the scientific process is all about.
Who actually owns copies of those standards? I know I don't - simply because they charge several hundred bucks a copy.
I actually own copies of both, and each one only cost $18. The cost is huge for the hardcopy versions... but ANSI (to mention just one) sells pdf versions through their online store. The C++ standard document is ISO-IEC 14882-1998, while the C99 standard document is ANSI-ISO-IEC 9899-1999. The other thing to search on is "programming language c++" and "programming language c"
I just did a little perusal via google, and found the numbers through CY2000, as compiled by the NSF (sorry, forgot to write down the URL). In CY2000, total R&D expenditures in all fields in the United States were about 264 Billion 1996 US dollars, while the Federal Government supplied a 70 Billion, or 26%. DoD expenditures on R&D were about 19.1 Billion 1996 US dollars, or about 7% of the total.
As a trend, both total R&D and Federally funded R&D have risen over the last decade, in both real dollar terms and as a fraction of UD GDP. However, the rate of R&D investment has grown much faster in the private sector than in the Federal Sector: in 1993, private investment in R&D was 63% of the total, while by 2000, private investment had risen to 74% of the total. And that is in REAL dollar terms.
Nope, it's your cable. They built it on public easments with monopoly protection.
First, the cable in most places wasn't paid for by the government; easements, yes, hardware, no. The exceptions to this general statement are in places where the cost of installing the cable and hardware could never have been recouped (sparse rural areas, etc.) over their lifecycle; and that was paid for by the government by a universal connectivity tax imposed on the customer base... a tax which is still imposed on every line, in spite of the fact that "universal connectivity" was achieved two generations ago.
Further, the monopoly protection was granted in return for nearly 100 years of delivery of government mandated QOS guarantees, universal access, interoperability and standards compliance that have driven world telecom markets, a steady tax stream (collected by the Bells on their dime for the FCC and local governments), rental income on many of those public easements, government mandated rate structures, etc, etc, etc. The government granted phone monopoly has for a very long time been a cash cow for the federal government, and local states take in a big chunk of revenue as well. The monopoly grant was a tit-for-tat public-good agreement that has long since been paid off, because it achieved its objectives of universal access to a nationwide publicly accessible switched voice network.
Now demands have been made that others can use those lines AT COST
And you'll find that the ILECs don't really argue against access (they might if the opportunity presented itself, but that isn't their main objection). Their argument is that the definition of AT COST is unfair and discriminatory. The definition in force until this FCC decision of AT COST only allowed the inclusion of ongoing direct maintenance costs, and that even those numbers were being low balled by regulators (according to the ILECs). The ILEC argument is that AT COST should be defined in terms of total LIFECYCLE costs, particularly since maintenance is such a relatively small fraction of the purchase-installation-maintenance-disposal cycle.
The ILECs further argue that by being kept out of markets like cable TV and long distance (remember, THOSE companies are not being forced to provide access to their infrastructure, at ANY cost) that they are being unfairly forced to shoulder a cost burden that no other telecom grouping is being asked to provide in return.
Does that really lead to a lack of investment by the ILECs? I don't have a clue; I'm sure that it is part of the issue, but there are certainly others. But it seems to me to be a fundamentally unsound premise that a long ago repaid, mutually beneficial, regulated monopoly agreement between the government and a private industry (an agreement, by the way, that was ruled to be illegal, and forcibly broken by the federal courts) can be used today to prop up competitors who are not being asked to provide very much in return...
The tax you are probably supposed to be paying if you purchase from out of state is not generally called a sales tax, and you don't owe it to the other state, but rather a Use tax, which you typically owe to your state of residence.
See, California can't tax the vendor in Nevada for selling you something by mail, because the vendor is not in their jurisdiction (CA and NV chosen at random, and maybe not even correctly). But the Nevada vendor doesn't pay the tax to Nevada, because they book the sale as occuring outside the state, and the Constitution prevents states from taxing interstate commerce. So, California (probably... most states have these laws) expects you, the California resident, to voluntarily cough up the lost sales tax revenue as a Use Tax on purchases that haven't been taxed by either California or another jurisdiction (state, in this case), except when California wouldn't charge sales tax on the item anyway. Some states go so far as to include a Use Tax schedule in their yearly state income tax returns. Unsurprisingly, since these purchases can't be tracked by the states (the vendor is outside the jurisdiction, and hasn't done anything to break the law of that jurisdiction), states have a pretty tough time enforcing their Use Tax laws. But that doesn't mean you aren't supposed to pay:-)
Not a lawyer, yada yada yada, but I have played on in a court room:-)
Try C++ Templates by Josuttis and Vandevoorde. Good stuff.
Re:Economics: win/lose or win/win?
on
Giant Sucking Noise
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· Score: 3, Informative
Money and power are finite resources.
That obviously isn't true. If it was true, we'd ALL be living in prehistory still, trying to eek out a meager existence in small hunter-gatherer bands, living to the ripe old age of 25-30, if we were lucky.
No, economies produce wealth (through the combination of base resources, capital, labor, increased productivity, etc. etc. etc.). Economies CAN and generally ARE win/win for this very reason. Economies at local, regional, national, and international scales grow far more and far more consistently than they shrink... the very definition of the creation of wealth.
Not only do I think you seriously misread what I wrote, but I strongly disagree with your main point that someone has to advocate and examine silly and impractical, oversimplified solutions to real and complex problems. If what you want is real, significant, and informed changes to our world, then this just isn't so.
I was certainly not saying that there are no solutions, so we should stick with what we've got. I thought that I was very clear in pointing out that there are very real solutions to the very real problems, but those problems and solutions are horrifically more complex than most of the posters in this article seem to be willing to accept.
The world in a complicated place, and where we are right now is the result of hundreds of thousands of individual decisions made by rational and irrational people over a huge span of human history. There are very concrete, comprehensible reasons that the world economy runs on petroleum and will continue to do so for the forseeable future, and they have little to nothing to do with "evil corporations" and "political conspiracies". The corporations may be evil (although, I would argue that the truth is far more complex and nuanced than that), and there may be political conspiracies (ditto), but even if you managed to root them out and change them overnight, you wouldn't be able to move away from petroleum overnight.
Moving away from that economy has costs and benefits, just like moving away from an animal driven economy to a petroleum economy had its costs and benefits. The way to achieve better utilization of energy resources and decrease emissions (whether they be particulates, NOx and SOx and COx, or other green house gasses) is to take concrete evolutionary steps today and tomorrow, and not assume that there is some vast underground conspiracy preventing your favorite pet revolutionary technology from "breaking out". Someday those revolutionary technologies will be available, but we don't have to wait for them; you just have to be realistic in your expectations. People aren't going to be willing to pay for a car that gets double the mileage with ten percent of the emissions, if doing so halves the number of people they can carry, reduces the range between fillups, eliminates storage space, reduces the overall safety of the vehicle, and dramatically increases the direct maintenance and disposal costs for the vehicle. Those are the things you get when with modern electric cars, for example. People buy SUVs for a reason, after all, and they aren't all slack jawed, environment hating, oil guzzling, high income, wasteful spenders.
Remember, too, that moving to a new energy base from petroleum will bring with it a new set of costs and benefits, many of which can't be predicted and understood until the change has already occurred, and others which can be understood in advance with proper study and reflection. We understand now that there are pollution risks associated with the petroleum powered internal combustion engine... but that was far from clear when people were clamoring for the conversion from the "pollution" of the horse drawn carriage era (ie dung). Consider, for instance, the following issues:
Battery and fuel cell technologies dramatically increase the amount of toxic components in automobiles. How do we deal with that waste stream? What about the environmental costs of the other new materials in these automobiles, like composites? They currently can't, for instance, be recycled.
What happens to the political situation (vis a vis militarism, democratization, and terrorism) coming out of the Middle East when they lose the ability to earn income from the single commodity that they have available to them? The rest of the world isn't going to pay $30 per barrel for 20 million barrels a day of sand.
Where do you get the energy to produce all of this hydrogen we would need? The "standard" answers of the extreme enviromentalists - solar, wind, tidal, fusion etc - with current technology are grossly insufficient at the present time and in the forseeable future to allow us to replace or even seriously supplement fossil fuel sources. Other solutions, like conservation and efficiency improvements (which would be helpful in any case) can make serious, but still vastly overstated improvements, and that isn't going to change.
How does fuel distribution work during the transition? You won't be able to drive very far in your spiffy new hydrogen powered SUV if the next closest hydrogen delivery station is more than a full tank away. And I wouldn't build a filling station if there are only a handful of cars that need my fuel. There are huge one time costs associated with a switchover, and they are going to be (in real dollars) vastly larger than the initial gasoline based startup was, due to our much stricter environmental, public, and worker safety laws.
What about the removal and disposal of all of those gasoline and diesel filling stations with their toxic waste? That is going to cost a bundle, and is unlike current station rebuilds because there will be no future revenue stream to cover the costs of disposal.
Plastics are some of the cheapest, safest, and most environmentally friendly materials we use today (since most of them can be recycled easily, and at a much lower cost than new production). But we really only use them because they are cheap, and they are only cheap because we use vast quantities of oil for power. What happens to the cost and use of plastics when the cheap supply of oil dries up following a conversion to hydrogen, or we manage to cut our use of it in half?
Like I said before, I'm not being pessimistic, nor do I think that there are no chances, solutions, or possibilities for change, even in the near future. I think in the long run it is innevitable that petroleum will, to a large extent, fall by the wayside for power generation, and that in the short term there are ways to convince people to change their habits toward conservation and energy efficiency. I just was hoping to raise the level of the discussion by pointing out that the world is a lot more complicated than most posters seem willing to admit, that real solutions to our problems will not only be more complicated than you hope and even expect, but that those new solutions will also have their own consequences, some understood and some unknown. Will the hydrogen economy engender its own protesting environmental groups, its own "No war for hydrogen" demonstrators?
People of good faith hoping to change the world have to realistically take real issues into account when they try to come to a decision. THAT is the only real hope we've got in this world, not calls for silly and impractical solutions, or accussations based on unsupportable allegations of fraud and conspiracy.
What would happen if all the major automakers decided tomorrow to start building electrics?
We would burn about the same amount of oil, and increase our use of coal.
We would burn about the same amount of oil, because you wouldn't be replacing very many gasoline powered cars on the roads; electrics are still too small and have too short a range to be useful for the majority of Americans. None of this is going to change until there is a dramatic improvement in the stored energy densities of batteries, and/or a reduction in the toxic waste produced in the creation and disposal of the batteries themselves. The last time I saw statistics, the sum total of all the "alternative fuel" vehicles sold in the world over any time period you choose to look it was LOWER than the increase in the number of vehicles in the world... that is, even with increased sales, we continue to fall further behind.
We would burn more coal because electric cars need to get the electricity to recharge their batteries from somewhere, and the cheapest source of electricity generation (that can be built today in North America and Asia (and even Europe, I believe)) is coal.
This is not to say that there aren't loads of technologies available to improve efficiency of fossil fueled vehicles, but most of them make vehicles MUCH more expensive (by almost any metric you choose)... and the vast majority of people (Americans AND non-Americans) have little incentive to spend more when they can get the same capabilities for less, EVEN IF it would be to their benefit in the long run (why else would people be willing to lease instead of buy vehicles? It is far far more cost effective in the long run to buy than to lease... ). Some of these technologies include hybrids, light composite frame and body materials, ceramic and aluminum engine blocks, high efficiency diesels, exhaust scrubbers, biofuels, superconducting electricity distribution grids, etc. etc. etc.
But none of them are perfect, and none of the forseeable technologies will eliminate our reliance on petroleum... not even that "holy grail" of environmentalists, the "Hydrogen Economy". Hydrogen isn't free after all... there are no large supplies of the stuff to drill or mine for, and there is none in the atmosphere to distill. You have to generate it by cracking water... using electricity, that you have to generate by some other means. And currently, the only good way to do THAT is to produce the electricity using nuclear (which the environmentalists ALSO hate and also has a time horizon before the exhaustion of the fuel), hydropower (environmentalists hate this too) or fossil fuels... and the inefficiencies involved in the seperation, storage, shipment, and sale of hydrogen currently would would require just about the same amount of fossil fuel usage as currently for the same energy extracted by the automobile (although we might be able to use different forms, such as more coal and less oil, and there would be far fewer plants to police). In other words, we'd be burning the same amount of fossil fuel to make the hydrogen as we currently burn to make the cars go in the first place.
There are no simple answers and very few real conspiracies, and I don't understand why otherwise intelligent people continue to believe that there are.
Light has mass, my friend. Proof to that is attached directly to what you call your brain.
No... this is proof that light carries ENERGY, not that light has MASS. You needn't have mass to carry energy; you need to have energy or momentum or both: E^2 = (mc^2)^2 + (pc)^2. Light gets by without mass, by carrying momentum. And the eye works by absorbing the energy and using it to drive chemical reactions.
When a television show is made by a studio, that studio holds the copyright on the show itself.
When it "sells" the show to a network for broadcast, it is generally using its copyrights to charge for a distribution license.
The individual stations that broadcast the show over the aether have paid the government for the exclusive right to use a given set of frequencies for the express purpose of delivering broadcasts. The government gets the right to do that from you (in the US).
In exchange for being given those exclusive broadcast rights over the airwaves, the received broadcasts are still subject to copyright law (check the appropriate sections of the USC and applicable court rulings, all of which I am too lazy to look up for you:-)
In exchange for giving up control over the broadcast spectrum to private interests, the government retains some rights for you the citizen such as the fair use right of time shift recording for personal use, and the right to control content to the extent that it violates community standards of decency (which is why the latter doesn't violate the First Amendment in the US). Note that this DOES NOT impinge upon the copyright law prohibition against distribution by sources not authorized by the copyright holder during the full course of the copyright term.
Your argument about cell phone transactions is specious, at best. It is generally illegal to record those private conversations, whether they go out over a landline or a cell transmission (because the citizenry has chosen to create/retain their rights to privacy in these cases), but I don't believe that has anything to do with copyright law.
However, even if it did, don't forget that copyright is a LIMITED monopoly, and one of the limitations of that monopoly is in situations of pressing government interest. A court ordered wiretap or a subpoena for phone records are just hte types of pressing interests that trump copyrights. Patents also have the same sort of limitations (don't forget the "taking" of the Wright airplane patents in the First World War).
You might want to take a closer look at your "cable tv agreement", that is, the legalese that most of us haven't read buried in the bills. I bet it says that you are paying neither for service (as in, no guarantees on service quality, and you have to pay anyway), nor for the shows (because they don't have the rights to sell you "shows"). You are probably paying for (essentially) an antenna that they don't guarantee will ever have any reception.
It doesn't say anything of the kind. The RF power output of Pioneer is miniscule:
Two radio transmitters, coupled to two traveling-wave-tube power amplifiers, each produced 8 W of transmitted power at S-band.source
So, we are picking up a signal from either an 8W or 16W transmitter (not quite sure if they are both used at the same time), 12 billion kilometers away. We talk to the Pioneers by sending a 325,000W signal. More power, more distance before it attenuates below the noise floor. Pump out enough power in a tight enough beam, and there isn't any reason to believe that we couldn't send signals all the way to the nearest few stars. Round Trip Time would be a bit of a pain, not to mention the time it might take to translate on both ends, but not technologically infeasible.
Exactly how much power you would have to transmit to be heard depends on many factors, such as the frequency chosen (which might be attenuated or masked by interstellar phenomena), the sensitivity of the receiver, the size of receiving dish, the directionality of the beam, the length of the transmission, the properties of the error correcting codes, the mathematical properties of the transmission (whether it could be distinguished from physical processes even IF it is received) etc. etc. etc. So I can't give you a single answer.
While I'm not the poster you are responding to: No, I don't think it is silly. By obvious extension of your argument, companies outside the US shouldn't have to produce products for sale in the US that meet our consumer safety requirements. And companies outside of Europe shouldn't have to produce products for sale in Europe that meet EU regulations on genetically engineered food content. And companies outside of (insert country name here) shouldn't have to meet (insert requirement here). Sale or distribution over the Internet doesn't and shouldn't exempt you from the laws of the countries you are selling in.
It isn't that the industry doesn't want to deal with the problem (although they don't want to, they have to anyway, since lots of people just leave their cellphones on in the air already), but that there just isn't the necessary capacity in the SPECTRUM to deal with the problem.
In any location that is within range of more than one cell tower, each tower has to use a non-intersecting set of frequencies for data transmission. If all the phones are on the ground, that isn't so much of a problem (but it is getting to be due to network usage); you generally only see a few towers at a time (line of sight interference by buildings, hills, dips in the road, etc.), and non-adjacent cells that are nearby can get away with reusing frequencies. In the air, the number of cells you can see is much larger (no line of sight interference, and a much larger distance to the horizon). To "deal with the problem" you would have to prevent frequency reuse even in NONADJACENT cells, over a very wide geographic area, in order to allow airborne cell phone use. Given current network utilization, future capacity needs, and allocated spectrum, there just aren't enough frequencies to parcel out.
The solution to the capacity problem on the ground is to put in more towers that provide coverage to a smaller piece of real estate. But doing so makes the airborne problem even worse.
Because they have no evidence of any such interference, or theoretical possiblity of such,
Just because the NYT doesn't go into a detailed description of the problem, supported mathematically with physically rigorous arguments does not mean that the DOD guys have no evidence of a problem or theoretical reason to be concerned. That is, absence of evidence about this potential problem in the article is not evidence that there is no potential problem in the field. Reallocation of spectrum, or sharing of spectrum between new devces and old devices that were not designed with the new uses in mind always has the potential to lead to unacceptable interference.
The concern is about new hardware that does not yet exist and is targetted for spectrum that has not been allocated for its use. The burden to prove that there will not be backwards compatibility issues in opening the spectrum to new use in on those wanting the access (the WiFi industry), not on those that already have access (ATC, weather radar, etc.) The argument in favor of opening the spectrum given in the article is a variation of "Trust us, it won't happen." Which may or may not be a faithful representation of the industry argument.
Because of the circumstances, the theoretical arguments you claim don't exist actually do exist, and rather clearly come down on the side of the DOD in this case: it is a trivial matter of freshman physics to show that ANY multiple uses in a restricted geographic area of the same chunk of frequency can lead to interference. Which does not mean that in practice there will be issues with WiFi; the industry arguments may be correct, and interference may be a non-issue. THAT appears to be the DOD's main concern: what will happen in practice. So the question that DOD thinks should be answered before the spectrum reallocation occurs is: Are the guarantees given by the manufacturers about their anti-interference measures strong enough? I for one would prefer to find out the answer before planes fall out of the sky.
More likely than ignorance, they (DOD scientists and engineers) are probably concerned that this new use of spectrum previously allocated for air traffic control, weather data collection, and defense purposes will cause problems for OLD radar equipment that IS NOT capable of changing frequencies. You know, the backwards compatibility problem. There are billions and billions of dollars worth of government (military and civilian) radar systems that could be affected, and no one is talking about paying to replace or upgrade those systems to eliminate the potential for interference.
Reading (somewhat between the lines of) the article, I find explicitly or implicitly the following points:
There exist critical radar systems for civilian and military air traffic control, as well as weather radar that CAN'T change the frequencies they are operating on.
The spectrum they have been allocated and are currently using is a logical location to put new WiFi capabilities, in geographic areas where they won't cause radar interference.
In areas where there is potential for interference, the manufacturers of new WiFi gear have designed their new systems to choose spectrum such that they don't interfere with those radars, in anticipation of those spectrum bands becoming available for such use.
The DOD is concerned that these designs do not provide sufficient guarantees that they won't cause the interference DOD is concerned about
The industry is unwilling (either because they don't think it is necessary, or they don't want to spend the money... take your pick) to go back to the drawing board and make stronger signal isolation guarantees.
The two sides are lobbying the FCC to see the truth of their beliefs.
I don't see a big conspiracy here... just two groups of people that don't quite agree with the technical points raised by the other side, and a number of issues that need more study before everyone will be happy.
While I wouldn't mind faster and more capable WiFi, I'd much rather that the tech industry be forced to make changes to ensure that interference won't be a problem NOW than having to do so AFTER someone's web surfing causes a plane to disappear from air traffic control screens....
Not to be contrary or anything, but do you have references to any studies that show this? I imagine that this conclusion is NOT true. My reasoning is the following: pricing on addictive substances is generally highly inelastic (that is, demand and price are only weakly coupled). That is, producers can demand just about any price they want, and the users will continue to pay that high price. The same is true of many currently LEGAL addictive substances: alcohol, tobacco, gasoline, heating oil, food, etc (okay, I admit that I'm using "addictive" a bit loosely here). The demand for these substances has little to do with the current price (when the price of gasoline rises 50%, for instance, you don't drive substantially less... you suck it up and pay the high price), and the current price has little to do with current end user demand. I don't see any reason that legalization of a currently illegal addictive substance would drive its price down. Nor do I see that driving down the price would greatly increase the number of users (the demand). I know that I, for instance, wouldn't run out and start to ingest cocaine or marijuana if it was suddenly legal...
Please throw me some links if I'm wrong though; I'm quite curious if there is information contrary to my reasoning.
not in Moscow - in real Russia, where most of space programs are located
I thought most of the Russian space program wasn't even located in Russia, but rather in Kazakhstan. The launch sites are all there at least: "Russia leases approximately 6,000 sq km of territory enclosing the Baykonur Cosmodrome" (CIA World Factbook)
I don't think NASA can write them off if they have any plans to expand the station. One of the only major technical reasons the Russians were invited in the first place is that they were the only country that had rocket designs with the heavy lift capability necessary to loft all of the various modules into orbit. It is possible, I suppose, that all of the remaining modules can be lofted by other smaller capacity launch vehicles, but I'm doubting that.
Slashdot Mirror
The BBC reported yesterday that Berlusconi (sp?) had presided over the "ground breaking" for their sea barrier system that morning ... so it seems they have finally gotten their act together.
Of course, you could look in a real dictionary, like the OED, and see what they have to say. And they say that access as a verb can be traced back to at least 1962, in a comp sci context no less:
access, v. 1. trans. a. To gain access to (data, etc., held in a computer or computer-based system, or the system itself).
1962 A. M. ANGEL in M. C. Yovits Large-Capacity Memory Techniques for Computing Systems 150 Through a system of binary-coded addresses notched into each card, a particular card may be accessed for read and write operations.
First molecule to emit light when electricity is applied? That would surprise the people working on organic LEDs, not to mention slightly older guys like Thom Edison, who managed to coax light out of graphite coated thread....
While this is a useful cautionary tale, you have to be a bit careful in your interpretation of it. It is quite easy to show (and it is a typical undergraduate classical mechanics homework problem) that the perturbations of Mercury's orbit CAN NOT be explained within the Newtonian model by the addition of another point source (ie, a planet), because any such explanation would cause a larger than observed perturbation to the orbits of Venus, Earth, and Mars. And this was a well known issue BEFORE Einstein started working on his GR theory. In other words, physicists knew there was something wrong with the theory long before they had a theoretical solution, because the preminent gravitational model of the time was predicting the wrong thing when confronted with the available data.
The cautionary aspect of the tale, though, is well understood by the larger physics community, and dozens of modified and new models of gravity HAVE been proposed in the literature to explain the apparent "missing mass" of the universe without invoking unobserved particles; but they all run afoul of some observation or other. The current model has been arrived at by the consensus of a large number of physicists and astronomers around the globe over a long span of time ... it isn't a flash in the pan, and while it could be wrong, the data on many length and time scales just seems to get more compelling as we add to it, rather than less.
In this case, we understand GR, its cosmological implications, and the requisite post-Newtonian approximation schemes well enough that we have developed a model that match ALL known observations with the inclusion of dark matter and dark energy components. It isn't just one or two observations of rotation curves that have pushed us in the direction of dark matter, but literally dozens of observations, from widely different length and time scales, from cosmic background radiation to rotation curves, from earthbound laboratory measurements to interstellar radiotelescope observations. It is certainly POSSIBLE that there is a theoretical description available that doesn't require dark matter/energy, AND explains all of the data, but it looks more likely to the daily practitioner that the current theory is good at the length scales it is being applied to, and the dark matter/energy is the simpler solution.
I'd like to point out one other cautionary tale to those who want to blame the theory, and points out that well tested theories are not tossed out immediately when new or contradictory data comes along: in the early part of the 20th century, observations of beta decay led many physicists to conclude that the very fundamental conservation laws of energy and momentum (and the entire theoretical framework that so neatly explains them) would have to be tossed out the window, because the observed decay products (electrons and nuclei) didn't appear to follow those conservation laws. But some very smart people, including Pauli, said "Wait, the theory has worked so well up to now that we should look for a SIMPLER explanation; we propose a to-date unobserved particle with no charge and no mass produced in association with electrons in these decays." That was scoffed at by many, but a few years later just that very particle was observed: the electron neutrino. My point is just that, while you need to keep an open mind and be willing to challenge both experiment AND theory, you have to do so with the WHOLE picture in mind, and not just a tiny corner .... that is what science and the scientific process is all about.
Who actually owns copies of those standards? I know I don't - simply because they charge several hundred bucks a copy.
I actually own copies of both, and each one only cost $18. The cost is huge for the hardcopy versions ... but ANSI (to mention just one) sells pdf versions through their online store. The C++ standard document is ISO-IEC 14882-1998, while the C99 standard document is ANSI-ISO-IEC 9899-1999. The other thing to search on is "programming language c++" and "programming language c"
I just did a little perusal via google, and found the numbers through CY2000, as compiled by the NSF (sorry, forgot to write down the URL). In CY2000, total R&D expenditures in all fields in the United States were about 264 Billion 1996 US dollars, while the Federal Government supplied a 70 Billion, or 26%. DoD expenditures on R&D were about 19.1 Billion 1996 US dollars, or about 7% of the total.
As a trend, both total R&D and Federally funded R&D have risen over the last decade, in both real dollar terms and as a fraction of UD GDP. However, the rate of R&D investment has grown much faster in the private sector than in the Federal Sector: in 1993, private investment in R&D was 63% of the total, while by 2000, private investment had risen to 74% of the total. And that is in REAL dollar terms.
Over 90% of the serving members of the 3 branches of government were lawyers.
Not even close ....
Just some food for thought....
Nope, it's your cable. They built it on public easments with monopoly protection.
First, the cable in most places wasn't paid for by the government; easements, yes, hardware, no. The exceptions to this general statement are in places where the cost of installing the cable and hardware could never have been recouped (sparse rural areas, etc.) over their lifecycle; and that was paid for by the government by a universal connectivity tax imposed on the customer base ... a tax which is still imposed on every line, in spite of the fact that "universal connectivity" was achieved two generations ago.
Further, the monopoly protection was granted in return for nearly 100 years of delivery of government mandated QOS guarantees, universal access, interoperability and standards compliance that have driven world telecom markets, a steady tax stream (collected by the Bells on their dime for the FCC and local governments), rental income on many of those public easements, government mandated rate structures, etc, etc, etc. The government granted phone monopoly has for a very long time been a cash cow for the federal government, and local states take in a big chunk of revenue as well. The monopoly grant was a tit-for-tat public-good agreement that has long since been paid off, because it achieved its objectives of universal access to a nationwide publicly accessible switched voice network.
Now demands have been made that others can use those lines AT COST
And you'll find that the ILECs don't really argue against access (they might if the opportunity presented itself, but that isn't their main objection). Their argument is that the definition of AT COST is unfair and discriminatory. The definition in force until this FCC decision of AT COST only allowed the inclusion of ongoing direct maintenance costs, and that even those numbers were being low balled by regulators (according to the ILECs). The ILEC argument is that AT COST should be defined in terms of total LIFECYCLE costs, particularly since maintenance is such a relatively small fraction of the purchase-installation-maintenance-disposal cycle.
The ILECs further argue that by being kept out of markets like cable TV and long distance (remember, THOSE companies are not being forced to provide access to their infrastructure, at ANY cost) that they are being unfairly forced to shoulder a cost burden that no other telecom grouping is being asked to provide in return.
Does that really lead to a lack of investment by the ILECs? I don't have a clue; I'm sure that it is part of the issue, but there are certainly others. But it seems to me to be a fundamentally unsound premise that a long ago repaid, mutually beneficial, regulated monopoly agreement between the government and a private industry (an agreement, by the way, that was ruled to be illegal, and forcibly broken by the federal courts) can be used today to prop up competitors who are not being asked to provide very much in return...
The tax you are probably supposed to be paying if you purchase from out of state is not generally called a sales tax, and you don't owe it to the other state, but rather a Use tax, which you typically owe to your state of residence.
See, California can't tax the vendor in Nevada for selling you something by mail, because the vendor is not in their jurisdiction (CA and NV chosen at random, and maybe not even correctly). But the Nevada vendor doesn't pay the tax to Nevada, because they book the sale as occuring outside the state, and the Constitution prevents states from taxing interstate commerce. So, California (probably ... most states have these laws) expects you, the California resident, to voluntarily cough up the lost sales tax revenue as a Use Tax on purchases that haven't been taxed by either California or another jurisdiction (state, in this case), except when California wouldn't charge sales tax on the item anyway. Some states go so far as to include a Use Tax schedule in their yearly state income tax returns. Unsurprisingly, since these purchases can't be tracked by the states (the vendor is outside the jurisdiction, and hasn't done anything to break the law of that jurisdiction), states have a pretty tough time enforcing their Use Tax laws. But that doesn't mean you aren't supposed to pay :-)
Not a lawyer, yada yada yada, but I have played on in a court room :-)
Try C++ Templates by Josuttis and Vandevoorde. Good stuff.
Money and power are finite resources.
That obviously isn't true. If it was true, we'd ALL be living in prehistory still, trying to eek out a meager existence in small hunter-gatherer bands, living to the ripe old age of 25-30, if we were lucky.
No, economies produce wealth (through the combination of base resources, capital, labor, increased productivity, etc. etc. etc.). Economies CAN and generally ARE win/win for this very reason. Economies at local, regional, national, and international scales grow far more and far more consistently than they shrink ... the very definition of the creation of wealth.
Not only do I think you seriously misread what I wrote, but I strongly disagree with your main point that someone has to advocate and examine silly and impractical, oversimplified solutions to real and complex problems. If what you want is real, significant, and informed changes to our world, then this just isn't so.
I was certainly not saying that there are no solutions, so we should stick with what we've got. I thought that I was very clear in pointing out that there are very real solutions to the very real problems, but those problems and solutions are horrifically more complex than most of the posters in this article seem to be willing to accept.
The world in a complicated place, and where we are right now is the result of hundreds of thousands of individual decisions made by rational and irrational people over a huge span of human history. There are very concrete, comprehensible reasons that the world economy runs on petroleum and will continue to do so for the forseeable future, and they have little to nothing to do with "evil corporations" and "political conspiracies". The corporations may be evil (although, I would argue that the truth is far more complex and nuanced than that), and there may be political conspiracies (ditto), but even if you managed to root them out and change them overnight, you wouldn't be able to move away from petroleum overnight.
Moving away from that economy has costs and benefits, just like moving away from an animal driven economy to a petroleum economy had its costs and benefits. The way to achieve better utilization of energy resources and decrease emissions (whether they be particulates, NOx and SOx and COx, or other green house gasses) is to take concrete evolutionary steps today and tomorrow, and not assume that there is some vast underground conspiracy preventing your favorite pet revolutionary technology from "breaking out". Someday those revolutionary technologies will be available, but we don't have to wait for them; you just have to be realistic in your expectations. People aren't going to be willing to pay for a car that gets double the mileage with ten percent of the emissions, if doing so halves the number of people they can carry, reduces the range between fillups, eliminates storage space, reduces the overall safety of the vehicle, and dramatically increases the direct maintenance and disposal costs for the vehicle. Those are the things you get when with modern electric cars, for example. People buy SUVs for a reason, after all, and they aren't all slack jawed, environment hating, oil guzzling, high income, wasteful spenders.
Remember, too, that moving to a new energy base from petroleum will bring with it a new set of costs and benefits, many of which can't be predicted and understood until the change has already occurred, and others which can be understood in advance with proper study and reflection. We understand now that there are pollution risks associated with the petroleum powered internal combustion engine ... but that was far from clear when people were clamoring for the conversion from the "pollution" of the horse drawn carriage era (ie dung). Consider, for instance, the following issues:
Like I said before, I'm not being pessimistic, nor do I think that there are no chances, solutions, or possibilities for change, even in the near future. I think in the long run it is innevitable that petroleum will, to a large extent, fall by the wayside for power generation, and that in the short term there are ways to convince people to change their habits toward conservation and energy efficiency. I just was hoping to raise the level of the discussion by pointing out that the world is a lot more complicated than most posters seem willing to admit, that real solutions to our problems will not only be more complicated than you hope and even expect, but that those new solutions will also have their own consequences, some understood and some unknown. Will the hydrogen economy engender its own protesting environmental groups, its own "No war for hydrogen" demonstrators?
People of good faith hoping to change the world have to realistically take real issues into account when they try to come to a decision. THAT is the only real hope we've got in this world, not calls for silly and impractical solutions, or accussations based on unsupportable allegations of fraud and conspiracy.
What would happen if all the major automakers decided tomorrow to start building electrics?
We would burn about the same amount of oil, and increase our use of coal.
We would burn about the same amount of oil, because you wouldn't be replacing very many gasoline powered cars on the roads; electrics are still too small and have too short a range to be useful for the majority of Americans. None of this is going to change until there is a dramatic improvement in the stored energy densities of batteries, and/or a reduction in the toxic waste produced in the creation and disposal of the batteries themselves. The last time I saw statistics, the sum total of all the "alternative fuel" vehicles sold in the world over any time period you choose to look it was LOWER than the increase in the number of vehicles in the world ... that is, even with increased sales, we continue to fall further behind.
We would burn more coal because electric cars need to get the electricity to recharge their batteries from somewhere, and the cheapest source of electricity generation (that can be built today in North America and Asia (and even Europe, I believe)) is coal.
This is not to say that there aren't loads of technologies available to improve efficiency of fossil fueled vehicles, but most of them make vehicles MUCH more expensive (by almost any metric you choose) ... and the vast majority of people (Americans AND non-Americans) have little incentive to spend more when they can get the same capabilities for less, EVEN IF it would be to their benefit in the long run (why else would people be willing to lease instead of buy vehicles? It is far far more cost effective in the long run to buy than to lease ... ). Some of these technologies include hybrids, light composite frame and body materials, ceramic and aluminum engine blocks, high efficiency diesels, exhaust scrubbers, biofuels, superconducting electricity distribution grids, etc. etc. etc.
But none of them are perfect, and none of the forseeable technologies will eliminate our reliance on petroleum ... not even that "holy grail" of environmentalists, the "Hydrogen Economy". Hydrogen isn't free after all ... there are no large supplies of the stuff to drill or mine for, and there is none in the atmosphere to distill. You have to generate it by cracking water ... using electricity, that you have to generate by some other means. And currently, the only good way to do THAT is to produce the electricity using nuclear (which the environmentalists ALSO hate and also has a time horizon before the exhaustion of the fuel), hydropower (environmentalists hate this too) or fossil fuels ... and the inefficiencies involved in the seperation, storage, shipment, and sale of hydrogen currently would would require just about the same amount of fossil fuel usage as currently for the same energy extracted by the automobile (although we might be able to use different forms, such as more coal and less oil, and there would be far fewer plants to police). In other words, we'd be burning the same amount of fossil fuel to make the hydrogen as we currently burn to make the cars go in the first place.
There are no simple answers and very few real conspiracies, and I don't understand why otherwise intelligent people continue to believe that there are.
Light has mass, my friend. Proof to that is attached directly to what you call your brain.
No... this is proof that light carries ENERGY, not that light has MASS. You needn't have mass to carry energy; you need to have energy or momentum or both: E^2 = (mc^2)^2 + (pc)^2. Light gets by without mass, by carrying momentum. And the eye works by absorbing the energy and using it to drive chemical reactions.
Not a lawyer and all that, but:
Your argument about cell phone transactions is specious, at best. It is generally illegal to record those private conversations, whether they go out over a landline or a cell transmission (because the citizenry has chosen to create/retain their rights to privacy in these cases), but I don't believe that has anything to do with copyright law.
However, even if it did, don't forget that copyright is a LIMITED monopoly, and one of the limitations of that monopoly is in situations of pressing government interest. A court ordered wiretap or a subpoena for phone records are just hte types of pressing interests that trump copyrights. Patents also have the same sort of limitations (don't forget the "taking" of the Wright airplane patents in the First World War).
You might want to take a closer look at your "cable tv agreement", that is, the legalese that most of us haven't read buried in the bills. I bet it says that you are paying neither for service (as in, no guarantees on service quality, and you have to pay anyway), nor for the shows (because they don't have the rights to sell you "shows"). You are probably paying for (essentially) an antenna that they don't guarantee will ever have any reception.
It doesn't say anything of the kind. The RF power output of Pioneer is miniscule:
Two radio transmitters, coupled to two traveling-wave-tube power amplifiers, each produced 8 W of transmitted power at S-band. source
So, we are picking up a signal from either an 8W or 16W transmitter (not quite sure if they are both used at the same time), 12 billion kilometers away. We talk to the Pioneers by sending a 325,000W signal. More power, more distance before it attenuates below the noise floor. Pump out enough power in a tight enough beam, and there isn't any reason to believe that we couldn't send signals all the way to the nearest few stars. Round Trip Time would be a bit of a pain, not to mention the time it might take to translate on both ends, but not technologically infeasible.
Exactly how much power you would have to transmit to be heard depends on many factors, such as the frequency chosen (which might be attenuated or masked by interstellar phenomena), the sensitivity of the receiver, the size of receiving dish, the directionality of the beam, the length of the transmission, the properties of the error correcting codes, the mathematical properties of the transmission (whether it could be distinguished from physical processes even IF it is received) etc. etc. etc. So I can't give you a single answer.
While I'm not the poster you are responding to: No, I don't think it is silly. By obvious extension of your argument, companies outside the US shouldn't have to produce products for sale in the US that meet our consumer safety requirements. And companies outside of Europe shouldn't have to produce products for sale in Europe that meet EU regulations on genetically engineered food content. And companies outside of (insert country name here) shouldn't have to meet (insert requirement here). Sale or distribution over the Internet doesn't and shouldn't exempt you from the laws of the countries you are selling in.
It isn't that the industry doesn't want to deal with the problem (although they don't want to, they have to anyway, since lots of people just leave their cellphones on in the air already), but that there just isn't the necessary capacity in the SPECTRUM to deal with the problem.
In any location that is within range of more than one cell tower, each tower has to use a non-intersecting set of frequencies for data transmission. If all the phones are on the ground, that isn't so much of a problem (but it is getting to be due to network usage); you generally only see a few towers at a time (line of sight interference by buildings, hills, dips in the road, etc.), and non-adjacent cells that are nearby can get away with reusing frequencies. In the air, the number of cells you can see is much larger (no line of sight interference, and a much larger distance to the horizon). To "deal with the problem" you would have to prevent frequency reuse even in NONADJACENT cells, over a very wide geographic area, in order to allow airborne cell phone use. Given current network utilization, future capacity needs, and allocated spectrum, there just aren't enough frequencies to parcel out.
The solution to the capacity problem on the ground is to put in more towers that provide coverage to a smaller piece of real estate. But doing so makes the airborne problem even worse.
Because they have no evidence of any such interference, or theoretical possiblity of such,
Just because the NYT doesn't go into a detailed description of the problem, supported mathematically with physically rigorous arguments does not mean that the DOD guys have no evidence of a problem or theoretical reason to be concerned. That is, absence of evidence about this potential problem in the article is not evidence that there is no potential problem in the field. Reallocation of spectrum, or sharing of spectrum between new devces and old devices that were not designed with the new uses in mind always has the potential to lead to unacceptable interference.
The concern is about new hardware that does not yet exist and is targetted for spectrum that has not been allocated for its use. The burden to prove that there will not be backwards compatibility issues in opening the spectrum to new use in on those wanting the access (the WiFi industry), not on those that already have access (ATC, weather radar, etc.) The argument in favor of opening the spectrum given in the article is a variation of "Trust us, it won't happen." Which may or may not be a faithful representation of the industry argument.
Because of the circumstances, the theoretical arguments you claim don't exist actually do exist, and rather clearly come down on the side of the DOD in this case: it is a trivial matter of freshman physics to show that ANY multiple uses in a restricted geographic area of the same chunk of frequency can lead to interference. Which does not mean that in practice there will be issues with WiFi; the industry arguments may be correct, and interference may be a non-issue. THAT appears to be the DOD's main concern: what will happen in practice. So the question that DOD thinks should be answered before the spectrum reallocation occurs is: Are the guarantees given by the manufacturers about their anti-interference measures strong enough? I for one would prefer to find out the answer before planes fall out of the sky.
More likely than ignorance, they (DOD scientists and engineers) are probably concerned that this new use of spectrum previously allocated for air traffic control, weather data collection, and defense purposes will cause problems for OLD radar equipment that IS NOT capable of changing frequencies. You know, the backwards compatibility problem. There are billions and billions of dollars worth of government (military and civilian) radar systems that could be affected, and no one is talking about paying to replace or upgrade those systems to eliminate the potential for interference.
Reading (somewhat between the lines of) the article, I find explicitly or implicitly the following points:
I don't see a big conspiracy here ... just two groups of people that don't quite agree with the technical points raised by the other side, and a number of issues that need more study before everyone will be happy.
While I wouldn't mind faster and more capable WiFi, I'd much rather that the tech industry be forced to make changes to ensure that interference won't be a problem NOW than having to do so AFTER someone's web surfing causes a plane to disappear from air traffic control screens ....
Not to be contrary or anything, but do you have references to any studies that show this? I imagine that this conclusion is NOT true. My reasoning is the following: pricing on addictive substances is generally highly inelastic (that is, demand and price are only weakly coupled). That is, producers can demand just about any price they want, and the users will continue to pay that high price. The same is true of many currently LEGAL addictive substances: alcohol, tobacco, gasoline, heating oil, food, etc (okay, I admit that I'm using "addictive" a bit loosely here). The demand for these substances has little to do with the current price (when the price of gasoline rises 50%, for instance, you don't drive substantially less ... you suck it up and pay the high price), and the current price has little to do with current end user demand. I don't see any reason that legalization of a currently illegal addictive substance would drive its price down. Nor do I see that driving down the price would greatly increase the number of users (the demand). I know that I, for instance, wouldn't run out and start to ingest cocaine or marijuana if it was suddenly legal...
Please throw me some links if I'm wrong though; I'm quite curious if there is information contrary to my reasoning.
not in Moscow - in real Russia, where most of space programs are located
I thought most of the Russian space program wasn't even located in Russia, but rather in Kazakhstan. The launch sites are all there at least: "Russia leases approximately 6,000 sq km of territory enclosing the Baykonur Cosmodrome" (CIA World Factbook)
I don't think NASA can write them off if they have any plans to expand the station. One of the only major technical reasons the Russians were invited in the first place is that they were the only country that had rocket designs with the heavy lift capability necessary to loft all of the various modules into orbit. It is possible, I suppose, that all of the remaining modules can be lofted by other smaller capacity launch vehicles, but I'm doubting that.
I got asked a very similar question on my PhD final oral exam, and even gave the right answer: It's a phase space thing!
(the PDG gives 885.7s+/- 0.8s, by the way ... about 14.75 minutes)