If you can write, or perform music, or draw a comic, or otherwise produce on a regular basis, it's been shown that 10,000 fans are about what you need to support you for life. (Sorry, can't quickly find a link.)
Think of it as ten thousand micro-patrons. (Or whatever the appropriate prefix for 1/10,000 might be -- deci-milli-patrons?)
Hell, John Locke built his million-ebook career on exactly this, with a few carefully targeted blog posts. He decided who the target market was for his thrillers, and fine-tuned his approach to appeal to those people. Not that he was being phony about it (he claims), just selective.
The article is a little behind the times. Yeah, a lot of authors (and I'm speaking here of writers who have proven they have the chops, being traditionally published also) were nervous about the 99-cent "race to the bottom". But these days a lot of readers are being heard from who wouldn't touch a 0.99 e-book, many of which frankly aren't worth the time to read even the free sample most outlets offer. (Note, I'm talking 99 cent novels here; 99 cents is a common - and acceptable - price point for a short story "single".)
Look at professional but self-publishing writers like Dean Wesley Smith, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, or JA Konrath (whom all also traditionally publish, although Konrath is getting out of that): their pricing is something like 0.99 for a short, 1.99-2.99 for a short novel (novelette) or collection of 5 or 6 stories, and 3.99-4.99 for a full length novel or longer collection.
Their sales are not hurting at the higher prices, in fact they're making more money. As far as readers are concerned, that's still cheaper than a mass-market paperback or a cup of coffee at Starbucks, so why not?
Sure, there are always a few who want it free, but when paying a buck or two or three is easier and safer than finding a pirated version, most folks will pay the money. As iTunes proved. And before you bring up DRM, most indie/self-published stuff is DRM-free. It's the big publishing houses that slap DRM and high prices on their e-books, to help discourage cannibalization of their dead-tree version sales. (And yes, you can read that as "to reduce their e-book sales".)
I'm a professional (but far from full-time) writer too, with stuff in magazines like Analog Science Fiction (and, back in the day, Byte) and a few e-books/e-stories up on various sites. No, I don't expect to get rich off of it -- most people don't, just as most people who play baseball or football don't make it to the big leagues. But writers -- those who are dedicated to their craft and put in the time and effort, same as any other profession -- can still make a living at it. No question that the industry is shifting, just as the music industry has, but it's not dead yet, nor is it likely to be in the near future. Some players will fade, others will rise, but in the long run quality demand beats quantity demand.
Iron, atomic number 26, is the minimum energy product for fission and fusion reactions. Going to a higher number above that (fusion) takes more energy than it yields, going to a lower energy below that (fission) ditto. Of course fusing lighter elements towards iron or fissioning heavier elements towards iron releases net energy. (Net per reaction, not counting whatever you're throwing away in e.g. confinement fields for hot fusion).
Nickel is atomic number 28, copper 29. Yes, you can bombard nickel with protons (H nuclei) and get copper, but at a net loss of energy per reaction.
At least, so says everything we've learned about nuclear chemistry in the last 70-plus years.
If this thing is real, and that's a bloody huge if, then we've got some physics to re-learn, or there's something else going on they're not telling us (eg load up the nickel crystalline matrix with deuterium or tritium and get some of the energy from straight hydrogen fusion). Myself, I think tachyonic neutrinos are more likely than Ni+p -> Cu producing energy.
Not really. It doesn't take many ebook sales to cover that. Three bestsellers at the $9.99 price point would do it, or ten $2.99 books, or fifteen $0.99 books (they take a bigger slice at that price point -- although I'm ignoring whatever goes to overhead on the sale.)
Anything beyond that is gravy. The $199 is a psychological price point; they'd sell far fewer at $209.
Ha! I don't know how many others will get it, but as someone who has been reading Analog since the Campbell days and was recently inducted into the MAFIA*, I appreciated it.
(* Members Appear Frequently In Analog, or Makes Appearances Frequently etc, depending on who you ask.)
SN1987a suggests that neutrinos travel pretty much exactly at the speed of light.
Which is odd when you consider that the neutrino oscillation observed in the Super Kamionde studies in 1998 pretty much proved that neutrinos have (some) mass. A non-massless particle ascending in a gravitational field (such as that of a supernova) should lose velocity as well as energy.
Do you really want to give them the distractions of Angry Birds and a zillion other apps? Do you really need color, for that matter? If iPads would pay for themselves in 18 months, Kindles (or equivalent) would pay for themselves in what, about 4 months?
But I guess sexy or shiny beats functional almost every time.
But updating the designs isn't the same as reusing the designs, is it? Not quite as bad as starting from scratch, but this is rocket engineering: you'll have to test everything, and probably find surprises.
Just because someone else (or some other part of the government) is throwing even more money away on something else stupid, doesn't make this a good idea.
will fly twice in the next decade and cost $30 billion through 2021,
In other words, $15 billion per flight.
With a "lift capacity" (not payload, so that figure has to include mass to carry the payload -- but we'll assume it's all payload) of 70 metric tons -- 154,000 pounds. That's just under $100,000/lb ($97,402/lb, or $214,285/kg) launch cost.
And you thought Shuttle was expensive...
(Mind, this is just the initial cost estimate. Given NASA's track record on such projects, it'll probably come in at around $100 billion by the time they're finished. That's a stack of dollar bills half way to geosynchronous orbit.)
they're reusing designs for some Saturn V components (the J-2 engine for the 2nd and 3rd stages of that rocket)
Actually TFA (vs the summary) says they're using the J-2X, which is almost but not completely unlike the original J-2. It's a redesign. Same fuels, same general design, but different in most details.
We're endlessly told by all the libertardians on slasdot that private companies don't have such failures [...] Either this story is false, or the libertardians are talking out of their asses.
Third option: you're making shit up (ie, a strawman) and you're the one talking out of your ass. Or in other words, [citation needed].
There simply are no other materials and no other ways of going into space. Period.
This is a classic example of what Arthur C. Clarke characterized as a "failure of imagination".
It totally ignores the near-infinite (ie, mind bogglingly huge) number of ways of combining those "92 or so elements", fashioning them into different structures, propellants, energy sources, etc and flying them. It's like saying that the problem with computers "is the basic reality of the universe [...] the fact that we only have" 1s and 0s to play with.
The Blue Origin design, while one that's been advocated since as long ago as Phil Bono's concepts in the mid 1960s, has never been test-flown at significant speeds and altitudes. Bezos' company really is breaking new ground here. (The design is more like General Dynamics' proposal for the SSX prototype than McDonnell-Douglas's which became DC-X.)
The studio may well own the copyright on the sound recording, just as a book publisher may own the copyright on the plates used to print a book, but unless they retain performance rights and other copyrights on the original song music and lyrics (which the original composer/songwriter could revert under this law), they can't let anyone perform that recording, or make additional copies of it. (Just as a book publisher couldn't use his plates to make additional copies of the book if the original copyright has reverted.)
The devil is partially in the details of the contract, of course. But there's no single copyright in a work, it's a collection of rights which can be sliced up and sublicensed all kinds of different ways, and over and over again unless the artist sold/licensed a right exclusively. (Writer/publisher Dean Wesley Smith compares this to a pie from which you can sell slices indefinitely, what he calls The Magic Bakery.)
(Disclaimer: IANAL, but I am a writer with a vested interest in understanding copyright law.)
Once to retrieve a couple of commercial communications satellites whose boost motors misfired -- they were brought back, refurbed and relaunched.
Another time to retrieve the (extremely) Long Duration Exposure Facility, a flying testbed to research the effect of space exposure on various materials and objects (including tomato seeds). It stayed up a couple years longer than originally planned when the Challenger disaster pushed the schedule back.
There may have been others, but that's what comes to mind.
Of course you don't really need wings to do that either. A large capsule with a heat shield and parachutes would do. (Picture something like the way the LM was housed in the upper stage of the Saturn V (although never intended to return to Earth), or Spectre's fictional spaceship-nabber in the Bond movie You Only Live Twice.
Slashdot Mirror
If you can write, or perform music, or draw a comic, or otherwise produce on a regular basis, it's been shown that 10,000 fans are about what you need to support you for life. (Sorry, can't quickly find a link.)
Think of it as ten thousand micro-patrons. (Or whatever the appropriate prefix for 1/10,000 might be -- deci-milli-patrons?)
Tolkien had another profession -- he was a college professor.
Hell, John Locke built his million-ebook career on exactly this, with a few carefully targeted blog posts. He decided who the target market was for his thrillers, and fine-tuned his approach to appeal to those people. Not that he was being phony about it (he claims), just selective.
The article is a little behind the times. Yeah, a lot of authors (and I'm speaking here of writers who have proven they have the chops, being traditionally published also) were nervous about the 99-cent "race to the bottom". But these days a lot of readers are being heard from who wouldn't touch a 0.99 e-book, many of which frankly aren't worth the time to read even the free sample most outlets offer. (Note, I'm talking 99 cent novels here; 99 cents is a common - and acceptable - price point for a short story "single".)
Look at professional but self-publishing writers like Dean Wesley Smith, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, or JA Konrath (whom all also traditionally publish, although Konrath is getting out of that): their pricing is something like 0.99 for a short, 1.99-2.99 for a short novel (novelette) or collection of 5 or 6 stories, and 3.99-4.99 for a full length novel or longer collection.
Their sales are not hurting at the higher prices, in fact they're making more money. As far as readers are concerned, that's still cheaper than a mass-market paperback or a cup of coffee at Starbucks, so why not?
Sure, there are always a few who want it free, but when paying a buck or two or three is easier and safer than finding a pirated version, most folks will pay the money. As iTunes proved. And before you bring up DRM, most indie/self-published stuff is DRM-free. It's the big publishing houses that slap DRM and high prices on their e-books, to help discourage cannibalization of their dead-tree version sales. (And yes, you can read that as "to reduce their e-book sales".)
I'm a professional (but far from full-time) writer too, with stuff in magazines like Analog Science Fiction (and, back in the day, Byte) and a few e-books/e-stories up on various sites. No, I don't expect to get rich off of it -- most people don't, just as most people who play baseball or football don't make it to the big leagues. But writers -- those who are dedicated to their craft and put in the time and effort, same as any other profession -- can still make a living at it. No question that the industry is shifting, just as the music industry has, but it's not dead yet, nor is it likely to be in the near future. Some players will fade, others will rise, but in the long run quality demand beats quantity demand.
Iron, atomic number 26, is the minimum energy product for fission and fusion reactions. Going to a higher number above that (fusion) takes more energy than it yields, going to a lower energy below that (fission) ditto. Of course fusing lighter elements towards iron or fissioning heavier elements towards iron releases net energy. (Net per reaction, not counting whatever you're throwing away in e.g. confinement fields for hot fusion).
Nickel is atomic number 28, copper 29. Yes, you can bombard nickel with protons (H nuclei) and get copper, but at a net loss of energy per reaction.
At least, so says everything we've learned about nuclear chemistry in the last 70-plus years.
If this thing is real, and that's a bloody huge if, then we've got some physics to re-learn, or there's something else going on they're not telling us (eg load up the nickel crystalline matrix with deuterium or tritium and get some of the energy from straight hydrogen fusion). Myself, I think tachyonic neutrinos are more likely than Ni+p -> Cu producing energy.
Not really. It doesn't take many ebook sales to cover that. Three bestsellers at the $9.99 price point would do it, or ten $2.99 books, or fifteen $0.99 books (they take a bigger slice at that price point -- although I'm ignoring whatever goes to overhead on the sale.)
Anything beyond that is gravy. The $199 is a psychological price point; they'd sell far fewer at $209.
To derive SR all you need is some basic assumptions about space and time (homogeneity, isotropy)
Which several analyses of the cosmic microwave background suggest may in fact not be valid assumptions.
and one extra bit that you don't find in classical physics: The invariance of a particular speed in all inertial frames.
So you're saying that you can derive SR from SR? Wait, what?
Ha! I don't know how many others will get it, but as someone who has been reading Analog since the Campbell days and was recently inducted into the MAFIA*, I appreciated it.
(* Members Appear Frequently In Analog, or Makes Appearances Frequently etc, depending on who you ask.)
Cheers
Maxwell's equations imply special relativity imply nothing can travel faster than light.
Maxwell's equations apply to electromagnetic phenomenon. They imply no more than that photons can't travel faster than light.
SN1987a suggests that neutrinos travel pretty much exactly at the speed of light.
Which is odd when you consider that the neutrino oscillation observed in the Super Kamionde studies in 1998 pretty much proved that neutrinos have (some) mass. A non-massless particle ascending in a gravitational field (such as that of a supernova) should lose velocity as well as energy.
Or Nooks, or some other e-reader.
Do you really want to give them the distractions of Angry Birds and a zillion other apps? Do you really need color, for that matter? If iPads would pay for themselves in 18 months, Kindles (or equivalent) would pay for themselves in what, about 4 months?
But I guess sexy or shiny beats functional almost every time.
But updating the designs isn't the same as reusing the designs, is it? Not quite as bad as starting from scratch, but this is rocket engineering: you'll have to test everything, and probably find surprises.
Just because someone else (or some other part of the government) is throwing even more money away on something else stupid, doesn't make this a good idea.
Okay, TFA (I know, I know) says 20km.
The air's pretty thin 1000 km up -- considering that the Space Station orbits at less than half that. Maybe 10 km?
will fly twice in the next decade and cost $30 billion through 2021,
In other words, $15 billion per flight.
With a "lift capacity" (not payload, so that figure has to include mass to carry the payload -- but we'll assume it's all payload) of 70 metric tons -- 154,000 pounds. That's just under $100,000/lb ($97,402/lb, or $214,285/kg) launch cost.
And you thought Shuttle was expensive...
(Mind, this is just the initial cost estimate. Given NASA's track record on such projects, it'll probably come in at around $100 billion by the time they're finished. That's a stack of dollar bills half way to geosynchronous orbit.)
they're reusing designs for some Saturn V components (the J-2 engine for the 2nd and 3rd stages of that rocket)
Actually TFA (vs the summary) says they're using the J-2X, which is almost but not completely unlike the original J-2. It's a redesign. Same fuels, same general design, but different in most details.
For years I used to joke that if mankind ever does discover FTL, it'll be some computer chip maker trying to make CPUs faster.
I've changed my mind. It will be by some financial trading company trying to squeeze a few more milliseconds off a long distance transaction.
We're endlessly told by all the libertardians on slasdot that private companies don't have such failures [...] Either this story is false, or the libertardians are talking out of their asses.
Third option: you're making shit up (ie, a strawman) and you're the one talking out of your ass. Or in other words, [citation needed].
I'm not sure it's really in our interest to have private industry
If you'd just left it that, you would have conveyed your real meaning much better. Good writing is all about conciseness, however stupid the message.
There simply are no other materials and no other ways of going into space. Period.
This is a classic example of what Arthur C. Clarke characterized as a "failure of imagination".
It totally ignores the near-infinite (ie, mind bogglingly huge) number of ways of combining those "92 or so elements", fashioning them into different structures, propellants, energy sources, etc and flying them. It's like saying that the problem with computers "is the basic reality of the universe [...] the fact that we only have" 1s and 0s to play with.
Get a grip.
Mod parent up, he's exactly right.
The Blue Origin design, while one that's been advocated since as long ago as Phil Bono's concepts in the mid 1960s, has never been test-flown at significant speeds and altitudes. Bezos' company really is breaking new ground here. (The design is more like General Dynamics' proposal for the SSX prototype than McDonnell-Douglas's which became DC-X.)
The studio may well own the copyright on the sound recording, just as a book publisher may own the copyright on the plates used to print a book, but unless they retain performance rights and other copyrights on the original song music and lyrics (which the original composer/songwriter could revert under this law), they can't let anyone perform that recording, or make additional copies of it. (Just as a book publisher couldn't use his plates to make additional copies of the book if the original copyright has reverted.)
The devil is partially in the details of the contract, of course. But there's no single copyright in a work, it's a collection of rights which can be sliced up and sublicensed all kinds of different ways, and over and over again unless the artist sold/licensed a right exclusively. (Writer/publisher Dean Wesley Smith compares this to a pie from which you can sell slices indefinitely, what he calls The Magic Bakery.)
(Disclaimer: IANAL, but I am a writer with a vested interest in understanding copyright law.)
A couple of times.
Once to retrieve a couple of commercial communications satellites whose boost motors misfired -- they were brought back, refurbed and relaunched.
Another time to retrieve the (extremely) Long Duration Exposure Facility, a flying testbed to research the effect of space exposure on various materials and objects (including tomato seeds). It stayed up a couple years longer than originally planned when the Challenger disaster pushed the schedule back.
There may have been others, but that's what comes to mind.
Of course you don't really need wings to do that either. A large capsule with a heat shield and parachutes would do. (Picture something like the way the LM was housed in the upper stage of the Saturn V (although never intended to return to Earth), or Spectre's fictional spaceship-nabber in the Bond movie You Only Live Twice.
There are ways to generate a (small, but lethal in this case) EMP that don't require a nuke. But a shotgun is still easier.