Capitalism works only in an efficient market. In the real world, markets are not efficient - i.e. there is not true transparency in operation, and even if there were there is still a lag between the value and the valuation. Right now, that lag is several weeks to several months in general, but can easily be pushed out to a several years by creative accounting. People are, well, human, and will attempt to game the system for their own good in nearly all cases.
I don't think it's necessarily a function of modern communication, but the ability to maximize your short term gains seems to be enhanced by the easy flow of capital that has come along with instant communication.
Capitalism works as a theory, and works to a certain extent in reality. It's not perfect, though. Without a perfectly efficient system, there will always be a chance to game the system, and there will always be people who take advantage of that chance. I think capitalism is good, but that there is no perfect way to protect everyone from the reckless/selfish among us.
Depends on if it's a locked configuration. The ATT SIM is the standard GSM (presuming it operates on all int'l frequencies). You can drop in a SIM from just about anywhere in the world. Since this is a US product, and AT&T probably helped out with the advert budget, it's hyped as such. Plus, in the US, AT&T is one of the most ubiquitous providers.
You'd think for GM/Chry/Ford they'd be able to find a chassis that isn't based on a $50,000 auto, and then take it and have it custom made in small runs from carbon fiber composites. They might - just might - have the capacity to leverage some efficiency in purchasing motors and batteries, and incorporating (otherwise expensive) IP from their portfolio to provide a bit better price than $100k.
The Aptera is one of the goofiest looking cars in the world, and yet it's got a waiting list out the door at $30k. You mean to tell me that GM/Chrys can figure out how to sell a $40-50,000 SUV that gets 12MPG in the city to a soccer mom, but they can't take a 4 door sedan that retails for $18k, strip out the entire engine and drivetrain, and put in a competent electric power plant for under $40k?
Sure, that rules out a moderate segment of the public, but up until the economy went to absolute shit, GM only sold a total of 27,000 Hummers in 2008. And that was all three body styles. Surely that's a niche market - and it did quite well until gas prices went sky high. They can't justify putting a useful $40,000-$60,000 car on the road for a few tens of thousands who (a) have the money and (b) want an alternative?
Speaking of hummers...do you know the difference between a tire and 300 blow jobs?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . One is a Goodyear, the other is a GREAT year!
...you had a couple thousand years to gather data. One of the biggest issues is that we're trying to extrapolate a very high order polynomial with poorly defined points which are close together. And we're trying to do it with many factors contributing. The problem is that everyone wants the answer now, or at the latest in time for Fall sweeps. You just don't get that kind of historic data in such a short period.
Well, anymore than they guy next to you on the subway. As far as I know, the whole global warming issue comes down to computer modeling which extrapolates historic data (for which we have an exceptionally short, well documented data set). There's no simple, theoretical mathematics which describes the interaction of human activity with the global environment. Tight now, the most effective way we have of predicting long term climatological trends is via computer simulations, which happen to vary in accuracy based on the time scale seen, the boundary conditions, the granularity of the simulation, and our ability to model accurately.
I happen to side with the camp which says we're affecting the system, and that life on earth has grown accustomed to the current conditions. I won't argue what the "best" conditions are, just that the current conditions (less human population growth) appear to be conducive to human life and overall stability. I'm not really of the mind that accelerating a change away from this local equilibrium is a smart bet. Sort of "a bird in the hand" take on environmentalism.
So, as with most bankruptcies, the shareholders will be left with worthless paper, and Paul Allen will end up dropping from 51% to 35% ownership? I sure hope he's fronting the $8B in debt forgiveness for that new share.
Oh, very nice indeed. You might call it crowdsourcing your transcoding tasks to minimize both wasted computational power and personal time. In fact, I might go so far as to call this a "green" technology for home theater buffs. Oddly enough, I already do this. I don't own a BD drive, but I own the discs. I use the net to download pre-compressed copies that will play on both my media server and popcorn hour. Now, I'm not all good and light; I've probably got 20-30 titles (out of about 400-450) for which I don't own a physical copy. Then again, that's probably close to the number of movies in my collection I haven't ever watched (hey, I busy). The two sets only have about a 30-50% intersecion.
They exist, but any teen would be too embarrassed to carry them. It's actually a good punishment - even subtle public ridicule is pretty effective on children (and I mean that in the best way possible).
Actually, when I had my web page designed (going on 4 years ago), I specifically asked that all of the pages load in less than 10 seconds on a 56k dialup connection. That was a pretty tall order back then, but it's a good standard to try and hit. It's somewhat more critical now that there are more mobile devices accessing the web, and the vast majority of the country won't even get a sniff at 3G speeds for more than a decade. There is very little that can be added to a page with all the fancy programming we can put into them. Mostly, I (and my clients who need to find me) want information, and one of the best ways is simply readable text with static pictures. For the web, you can really compress the heck out of an image and still have it look crisp on a monitor.
A meeting with the girl, the guy, both sets of parents the DA, a teen counselor, and ideally a judge. Make it mandatory for all. Although it's technically a crime by the letter of the statute, it is probably not by the intent of the legislation writers. An explanation that it could be considered a crime; how the pictures could be misused, how they're not private (anything in the internet can get out), and how the future might not look favorably on what they consider a prank or what a 14 yo thinks is harmless fun.
Really, the legislature should address this in a sound fashion by identifying it as a different class of offense - ideally only for digital transmission (since polariods have always been around, and hard copies generally aren't forever) - and as a very low level misdemeanor that includes the potential for a fine and/or community service only, and drops of your record when you hit 18. This isn't life or death here, and it's not exploitation, but it does carry some inherent risks. Treat is as the foolishness of youth that it is.
On the contrary, the right to privacy and anonymity is one of the base requirements for the existence of free speech. Without a guarantee of privacy, much speech which dissents from the mainstream, identifies graft and corruption, or identifies wrong-doers would be stifled if there were consequences for the speaker. Whether it's a bully stealing lunch money, a contractor putting beach sand in concrete for a building, a tip line for identifying/finding criminals, or a Governor selling a senate seat - the implications of telling the truth which is detrimental to a powerful individual can be a personal risk which is just not tenable.
Yes, privacy can be used for evil; however it is critical that is be available.
We practice lockdown drills in the case someone storms the building with a gun, despite the fact that in my state, there's been ONE school gun fatality in 20 years.
I live near Virginia Tech, I know all about over-reaction* to astronomical odds after the fact. Heck, I just peer reviewed a high school renovation in the next county over that what amounts to a "sally-port" at the entrance, just like we do in jails.
*I'm not minimizing the tragedy; I'm a Hokie, and my daughter's daycare was about 1200 yards from the initial murder - it's very close to my heart. But the reaction by some has been really out of proportion to the actual threat of a repeat.
My local HS seems to be afraid of letting adults in to help for fear of...things that make adults scary, I guess. I can kind of see the paranoia, but this is a college town with a major brainy population and yet there's no way for a non-student to try and help. I'm a local practicing engineer (main street address consulting firm bearing my name) and a former NASA engineer but when I contacted the principal about offering to help organize/mentor a TARC team (http://www.rocketcontest.com), if there was student interest, I was sent a terse letter stating that any student clubs/activities must be requested by petition of a current student prior to April of the preceding academic year, with a faculty sponsor, and approved by the administration. My daughter is only 6, and I don't exactly run in the 14-17 year old set, so I'm not normally in the position to suggest clubs to random local teenagers. I can see where this has merit, don't get me wrong - they are crazy people out there, but it means that nobody from the outside can offer to help (if nobody knows there's a rocket contest, how can they form a group to participate?). To limit the possibilities more, seniors can't form a club (they won't be back after April) and incoming freshmen can't form a club (they aren't students yet). I started too late last year, but I think I'm going to see about visiting the science teachers in the next week or two, when the standardized tests are over, and see if I can get some inside help.
I hear your pain on (1); I think we'd be better off, overall, without them - or with some reduced scope and pressure. (2) is always an issue, but around me the parents can be leaned on a little bit - it is a college town and the professors make money even in a down economy. (3) is a tough one - some kids just don't care, though I put some (if not most) of that back on the parents. After two years in the "system" I'm amazed at how many kids parents equate "school" with "free daycare" and just don't give a rat's ass what goes on. And these are the grades when the parental involvement is the highest - it only goes downhill from here. While the elementary schools couldn't function without parent volunteers (I see them about 15-20% understaffed), the middle school, from what I understand, is downright hostile towards parent volunteers.
Your damned right it's expensive. Most tracking packages which _aren't_ this advanced run close to $1000 for rockets; I suspect it's possible that you could send up a cellphone with the google tracking software to get the tracking data. Don't know what the cheapest phone is that can do that. Even so, a 3lb brick with a 2m long latex streamer coming in at terminal velocity has a chance of really ruining someones day.
I'm with you. Science fairs are uselessly limited by the venue and students experiences, as well as the primarily solitary work. You need someone to come up with a group/team project which does something cool. These types of projects rarely prove some fundamental science question, but they all use scientific principles (which can be weaved into the activity). For every student that comes up with a neat project, 99 will spend an entire weekend bored, trying to put together a diorama that will get them at least a B for the assignment.
It's an annual competition, and it geared towards getting 11-18 year olds into aerospace sciences. Many vendors in the model rocketry business give discounts to TARC teams, including building supplies, engines, design software, and flight electronics. There's a whole range of participation from the most simple to very complex. There may even be a local rocketeer, NAR (http://www.nar.org/) section, or Tripoli (http://www.tripoli.org/) prefecture close by who can help with the technical details. Membership in one of the national clubs brings a 1M+ insurance policy and a helpful intro magazine.
There's all sorts of ways to gauge progress, and lots of intermediate steps that can be used for credit (calc the launch profile by hand; code a basic simulator; determine Isp of the engines you use; design the rocket with cp and cg calcs; design a shock mount and test it). The involvement can be quite wide if you want to involve lots of disciplines -chemistry, physics, history are easy ones, but you can grab english if you add Vernesque literature, biology if you want to discuss spaceflight limitations, government if you want to get in to political treaties and regulation.
See, this would be far cooler if Moller hadn't set the bar so high with his vaporware. 4 seater, 350mph cruise, and 16MPG, and near VTOL - even when it turns out to be technically impossible - is still the standard flying car of my dreams.
Model rocketry (the NAR code) specifically prohibits guidance systems in these rockets. As for FAA permitting, new rules went into effect two months ago, and the requirements for larger motors - 40,960Ns of impulse - are severe, including 6DOF flight simulations and fallout prediction for every launch. http://www.rocketryplanet.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2740&Itemid=28
Putting it in perspective for those who haven't seen the financial side of the business is pretty important. Otherwise, they think they only cost $35/hr (70k/2000hrs). Most people grossly underestimate the overhead required to run a business, until they go out on their own. It's a hard day when you realize that on January 1, you've got to bring in $200,000-$300,000 in business before your office of 4 makes a single penny in profit; or that on the same day, you could fire everyone in the office and you'd still be on the hook for $100,000.
It matters because when you see your billing rate and think either (a) you should get paid more or (b) the company should let you explore more independent research, you need to know that a lot of things happen for that hour of billing to turn into an hour on your paycheck.
I usually get modded down for such revelations. I must admit it depresses me, too, that it takes 8 hours of my salary to pay for 1-3 hours of another, similar professionals time. It just seems so damned inefficient sometimes.
I'm going to give you the old-fart speech now, so you may tune out if you are disinterested in how business works.
I pay you $70,000 a year. You benefits and taxes cost me about 40% of your salary; we'll round it up to an even $100k to make the math easy. You will be "working" for about 1800-1900 hours a year - i.e. not on vacation, holiday, or out sick. If you are a gung-ho employee with a nose-to-the-grindstone ethic, of those 1800 you will already be spending about 20% unproductively - getting coffee/soda, going to the bathroom, chatting with co-workers about non-work stuff, surfing slashdot and doing adminstrative tasks like filling out your timecard or getting new pencil lead. We'll throw in a couple of days of training and round your productive hours to 1400. In all likelihood, you won't be 100% productive, especially right out of school. You'll take about 10-15% of a more advanced engineer's time, and a similar amount of your own, to figure out how we do what we do. You'll have to redo some things, sometimes two or three times, before you get it right. Counting the trainer's time against yours, you're going to lose about 40-50% of your time to learning the ropes, and another 10% to down time between assignments (meetings, startup, shutdown, etc). We're down to about 700 actual hours of production in your first year, and closer to 1000 your second and third, peaking near 1200 after that.
So you're "cost" to the company in your first year is about $100/hr. Since we have to add overhead to that it's closer to $130 fully burdened. The company, to survive and be worth the investors time (private or public) should be between 20% and 30% profitable before they pay taxes, so we'll need to bill your time at $160/hr. There are very, very few things which a fresh-out college student can do which is worth $160 and hour. What would you willingly pay a fresh-out college grad $160 an hour for (happy ending jokes aside)?
And you want to take some company time to explore cool stuff? At $1200/day in opportunity cost, I think your manager would much rather go to Aruba.
In case you feel I'm being flip, I'm not. I happen to be an engineer with 20 years of experience, 2 technical degrees, and I run a small consulting engineering firm. Fresh outs, by the way, bill at about $65-75/hr in the real world, and about 50% more in the biggest cities. Senior engineers at my level up to double that. Note that I'm ignoring high and low outliers in those figures; data is not the plural of anecdote. I recently hired a freshout. He's pretty smart, got a double technical major (engr and physics), and writes better than 90% of the engineers out there. He cost me about $25,000 out of my pocket the first year, and will barely break even this year - he might make a few thousand. Next year I'm hoping to make back my initial investment. Three years to break even, and he's not making $70k. That's easier to absorb in a large firm, by the way, due to sheer numbers and volume of workflow. "Fun" isn't really an option unless you land one of the very few cool jobs where all they do is fun stuff, or you work for a firm funded by VCs who don't watch the books (very rare), or your company just has piles of cash flowing in the door and can't figure out where to store it all (Google).
BTW - if you're going to be a good manager of technical people, you'd better be good technically as well as a good manager. You need to know your basic engineering backwards so that when an engineer comes to you and the answer they've come up with is wrong, you can both recognize it is wrong and explain - from basic principles - how to get them back on track. Once you're a manager, you don't have to know the answer to 1%, but you have to be able to get within 10% in your head (without a calculator or a computer). There are lots of bad managers our there, by the way. Don't become one.
Yes, but at $150/sf, the additional cost for an unfinished room in any non-descript suburban neighborhood, your listening room would have to be exceedingly small to beat the price of cans. In fact, I suspect you would be hard pressed to cover a small room in good acoustic foam for that money, much less pay the acoustic engineer to design the system for you (remember, the design fee is built into the price of the headphones). If you live in a big city, you can multiply that sf number by a factor of 5 or more.
Headphones have many uses, including isolating yourself from the environment (listening on subway/bus/train/airplane/6 year olds) as well as the opposite (getting to listen to your content without disturbing others). They are also far more economical than an equivalent setup in free space which, as I pointed out above, can get fantastically expensive very quickly. I have a set of Sony MDR-V6 (well, not really - they're the commercial version, but I can't remember the number) which go for about $80-90. After switching to the beyerdynamic pads, they're comfortable for about 2 hours at a stretch and are great for watching movies when the rest of the family is asleep. They're every bit as good as my HT speakers. I also have a set of etymotics (3 something, about $120) which are fantastic when flying or mowing the lawn or golfing solo.
Life at the federal minimum wage, with any money he makes above that level garnished until 3x the amount he stole is repaid. He may receive no more than 2087x the federal minimum wage, including gifts or in-kind donations for the rest of his life. Anyone disobeying this order shall be held in contempt of court and be enjoined as jointly and severally liable for his court debt. Joint property with any party (including his wife) shall be sold and the proceeds split 50/50.
That way, if any of his family tries to help him out, they forfeit everything.
It's just a matter of crafting the ruling properly. If people can think up a way to make 20% per year by reselling mortgage risk multiple times on the same money, they can craft a ruling that will make him live like a pauper for the rest of his years. And THAT would be the best punishment for him.
after seeing it on a secretary's desktop at NASA in the early 90s. My comment was very close to "Yeah, but I can already get all that with gopher; I don't think it will take off." Now, in my defense, just six months later I predicted that in a few years you would see panel trucks with web addresses instead of 800 numbers. The couple of people I told that to looked at my like _I_ was crazy. Damn, I wish I would have put my retirement savings behind that thought.
Slashdot Mirror
Capitalism works only in an efficient market. In the real world, markets are not efficient - i.e. there is not true transparency in operation, and even if there were there is still a lag between the value and the valuation. Right now, that lag is several weeks to several months in general, but can easily be pushed out to a several years by creative accounting. People are, well, human, and will attempt to game the system for their own good in nearly all cases.
I don't think it's necessarily a function of modern communication, but the ability to maximize your short term gains seems to be enhanced by the easy flow of capital that has come along with instant communication.
Capitalism works as a theory, and works to a certain extent in reality. It's not perfect, though. Without a perfectly efficient system, there will always be a chance to game the system, and there will always be people who take advantage of that chance. I think capitalism is good, but that there is no perfect way to protect everyone from the reckless/selfish among us.
Depends on if it's a locked configuration. The ATT SIM is the standard GSM (presuming it operates on all int'l frequencies). You can drop in a SIM from just about anywhere in the world. Since this is a US product, and AT&T probably helped out with the advert budget, it's hyped as such. Plus, in the US, AT&T is one of the most ubiquitous providers.
You'd think for GM/Chry/Ford they'd be able to find a chassis that isn't based on a $50,000 auto, and then take it and have it custom made in small runs from carbon fiber composites. They might - just might - have the capacity to leverage some efficiency in purchasing motors and batteries, and incorporating (otherwise expensive) IP from their portfolio to provide a bit better price than $100k.
The Aptera is one of the goofiest looking cars in the world, and yet it's got a waiting list out the door at $30k. You mean to tell me that GM/Chrys can figure out how to sell a $40-50,000 SUV that gets 12MPG in the city to a soccer mom, but they can't take a 4 door sedan that retails for $18k, strip out the entire engine and drivetrain, and put in a competent electric power plant for under $40k?
Sure, that rules out a moderate segment of the public, but up until the economy went to absolute shit, GM only sold a total of 27,000 Hummers in 2008. And that was all three body styles. Surely that's a niche market - and it did quite well until gas prices went sky high. They can't justify putting a useful $40,000-$60,000 car on the road for a few tens of thousands who (a) have the money and (b) want an alternative?
Speaking of hummers...do you know the difference between a tire and 300 blow jobs?
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One is a Goodyear, the other is a GREAT year!
...you had a couple thousand years to gather data. One of the biggest issues is that we're trying to extrapolate a very high order polynomial with poorly defined points which are close together.
And we're trying to do it with many factors contributing. The problem is that everyone wants the answer now, or at the latest in time for Fall sweeps. You just don't get that kind of historic data in such a short period.
Well, anymore than they guy next to you on the subway. As far as I know, the whole global warming issue comes down to computer modeling which extrapolates historic data (for which we have an exceptionally short, well documented data set). There's no simple, theoretical mathematics which describes the interaction of human activity with the global environment. Tight now, the most effective way we have of predicting long term climatological trends is via computer simulations, which happen to vary in accuracy based on the time scale seen, the boundary conditions, the granularity of the simulation, and our ability to model accurately.
I happen to side with the camp which says we're affecting the system, and that life on earth has grown accustomed to the current conditions. I won't argue what the "best" conditions are, just that the current conditions (less human population growth) appear to be conducive to human life and overall stability. I'm not really of the mind that accelerating a change away from this local equilibrium is a smart bet. Sort of "a bird in the hand" take on environmentalism.
So, as with most bankruptcies, the shareholders will be left with worthless paper, and Paul Allen will end up dropping from 51% to 35% ownership? I sure hope he's fronting the $8B in debt forgiveness for that new share.
Oh, very nice indeed. You might call it crowdsourcing your transcoding tasks to minimize both wasted computational power and personal time. In fact, I might go so far as to call this a "green" technology for home theater buffs. Oddly enough, I already do this. I don't own a BD drive, but I own the discs. I use the net to download pre-compressed copies that will play on both my media server and popcorn hour. Now, I'm not all good and light; I've probably got 20-30 titles (out of about 400-450) for which I don't own a physical copy. Then again, that's probably close to the number of movies in my collection I haven't ever watched (hey, I busy). The two sets only have about a 30-50% intersecion.
They exist, but any teen would be too embarrassed to carry them. It's actually a good punishment - even subtle public ridicule is pretty effective on children (and I mean that in the best way possible).
Actually, when I had my web page designed (going on 4 years ago), I specifically asked that all of the pages load in less than 10 seconds on a 56k dialup connection. That was a pretty tall order back then, but it's a good standard to try and hit. It's somewhat more critical now that there are more mobile devices accessing the web, and the vast majority of the country won't even get a sniff at 3G speeds for more than a decade. There is very little that can be added to a page with all the fancy programming we can put into them. Mostly, I (and my clients who need to find me) want information, and one of the best ways is simply readable text with static pictures. For the web, you can really compress the heck out of an image and still have it look crisp on a monitor.
A meeting with the girl, the guy, both sets of parents the DA, a teen counselor, and ideally a judge. Make it mandatory for all. Although it's technically a crime by the letter of the statute, it is probably not by the intent of the legislation writers. An explanation that it could be considered a crime; how the pictures could be misused, how they're not private (anything in the internet can get out), and how the future might not look favorably on what they consider a prank or what a 14 yo thinks is harmless fun.
Really, the legislature should address this in a sound fashion by identifying it as a different class of offense - ideally only for digital transmission (since polariods have always been around, and hard copies generally aren't forever) - and as a very low level misdemeanor that includes the potential for a fine and/or community service only, and drops of your record when you hit 18. This isn't life or death here, and it's not exploitation, but it does carry some inherent risks. Treat is as the foolishness of youth that it is.
On the contrary, the right to privacy and anonymity is one of the base requirements for the existence of free speech. Without a guarantee of privacy, much speech which dissents from the mainstream, identifies graft and corruption, or identifies wrong-doers would be stifled if there were consequences for the speaker. Whether it's a bully stealing lunch money, a contractor putting beach sand in concrete for a building, a tip line for identifying/finding criminals, or a Governor selling a senate seat - the implications of telling the truth which is detrimental to a powerful individual can be a personal risk which is just not tenable.
Yes, privacy can be used for evil; however it is critical that is be available.
We practice lockdown drills in the case someone storms the building with a gun, despite the fact that in my state, there's been ONE school gun fatality in 20 years.
I live near Virginia Tech, I know all about over-reaction* to astronomical odds after the fact. Heck, I just peer reviewed a high school renovation in the next county over that what amounts to a "sally-port" at the entrance, just like we do in jails.
*I'm not minimizing the tragedy; I'm a Hokie, and my daughter's daycare was about 1200 yards from the initial murder - it's very close to my heart. But the reaction by some has been really out of proportion to the actual threat of a repeat.
My local HS seems to be afraid of letting adults in to help for fear of...things that make adults scary, I guess. I can kind of see the paranoia, but this is a college town with a major brainy population and yet there's no way for a non-student to try and help. I'm a local practicing engineer (main street address consulting firm bearing my name) and a former NASA engineer but when I contacted the principal about offering to help organize/mentor a TARC team (http://www.rocketcontest.com), if there was student interest, I was sent a terse letter stating that any student clubs/activities must be requested by petition of a current student prior to April of the preceding academic year, with a faculty sponsor, and approved by the administration. My daughter is only 6, and I don't exactly run in the 14-17 year old set, so I'm not normally in the position to suggest clubs to random local teenagers. I can see where this has merit, don't get me wrong - they are crazy people out there, but it means that nobody from the outside can offer to help (if nobody knows there's a rocket contest, how can they form a group to participate?). To limit the possibilities more, seniors can't form a club (they won't be back after April) and incoming freshmen can't form a club (they aren't students yet). I started too late last year, but I think I'm going to see about visiting the science teachers in the next week or two, when the standardized tests are over, and see if I can get some inside help.
I hear your pain on (1); I think we'd be better off, overall, without them - or with some reduced scope and pressure. (2) is always an issue, but around me the parents can be leaned on a little bit - it is a college town and the professors make money even in a down economy. (3) is a tough one - some kids just don't care, though I put some (if not most) of that back on the parents. After two years in the "system" I'm amazed at how many kids parents equate "school" with "free daycare" and just don't give a rat's ass what goes on. And these are the grades when the parental involvement is the highest - it only goes downhill from here. While the elementary schools couldn't function without parent volunteers (I see them about 15-20% understaffed), the middle school, from what I understand, is downright hostile towards parent volunteers.
Your damned right it's expensive. Most tracking packages which _aren't_ this advanced run close to $1000 for rockets; I suspect it's possible that you could send up a cellphone with the google tracking software to get the tracking data. Don't know what the cheapest phone is that can do that. Even so, a 3lb brick with a 2m long latex streamer coming in at terminal velocity has a chance of really ruining someones day.
I'm with you. Science fairs are uselessly limited by the venue and students experiences, as well as the primarily solitary work. You need someone to come up with a group/team project which does something cool. These types of projects rarely prove some fundamental science question, but they all use scientific principles (which can be weaved into the activity). For every student that comes up with a neat project, 99 will spend an entire weekend bored, trying to put together a diorama that will get them at least a B for the assignment.
http://www.rocketcontest.org/
It's an annual competition, and it geared towards getting 11-18 year olds into aerospace sciences. Many vendors in the model rocketry business give discounts to TARC teams, including building supplies, engines, design software, and flight electronics. There's a whole range of participation from the most simple to very complex. There may even be a local rocketeer, NAR (http://www.nar.org/) section, or Tripoli (http://www.tripoli.org/) prefecture close by who can help with the technical details. Membership in one of the national clubs brings a 1M+ insurance policy and a helpful intro magazine.
There's all sorts of ways to gauge progress, and lots of intermediate steps that can be used for credit (calc the launch profile by hand; code a basic simulator; determine Isp of the engines you use; design the rocket with cp and cg calcs; design a shock mount and test it). The involvement can be quite wide if you want to involve lots of disciplines -chemistry, physics, history are easy ones, but you can grab english if you add Vernesque literature, biology if you want to discuss spaceflight limitations, government if you want to get in to political treaties and regulation.
Very nice reference - obscure; appropriate. Hadn't thought about Weird Science in many years.
...Top Secret was funny, too...but he sucked as Batman...
See, this would be far cooler if Moller hadn't set the bar so high with his vaporware. 4 seater, 350mph cruise, and 16MPG, and near VTOL - even when it turns out to be technically impossible - is still the standard flying car of my dreams.
Model rocketry (the NAR code) specifically prohibits guidance systems in these rockets. As for FAA permitting, new rules went into effect two months ago, and the requirements for larger motors - 40,960Ns of impulse - are severe, including 6DOF flight simulations and fallout prediction for every launch. http://www.rocketryplanet.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2740&Itemid=28
Putting it in perspective for those who haven't seen the financial side of the business is pretty important. Otherwise, they think they only cost $35/hr (70k/2000hrs). Most people grossly underestimate the overhead required to run a business, until they go out on their own. It's a hard day when you realize that on January 1, you've got to bring in $200,000-$300,000 in business before your office of 4 makes a single penny in profit; or that on the same day, you could fire everyone in the office and you'd still be on the hook for $100,000.
It matters because when you see your billing rate and think either (a) you should get paid more or (b) the company should let you explore more independent research, you need to know that a lot of things happen for that hour of billing to turn into an hour on your paycheck.
I usually get modded down for such revelations. I must admit it depresses me, too, that it takes 8 hours of my salary to pay for 1-3 hours of another, similar professionals time. It just seems so damned inefficient sometimes.
I'm going to give you the old-fart speech now, so you may tune out if you are disinterested in how business works.
I pay you $70,000 a year. You benefits and taxes cost me about 40% of your salary; we'll round it up to an even $100k to make the math easy. You will be "working" for about 1800-1900 hours a year - i.e. not on vacation, holiday, or out sick. If you are a gung-ho employee with a nose-to-the-grindstone ethic, of those 1800 you will already be spending about 20% unproductively - getting coffee/soda, going to the bathroom, chatting with co-workers about non-work stuff, surfing slashdot and doing adminstrative tasks like filling out your timecard or getting new pencil lead. We'll throw in a couple of days of training and round your productive hours to 1400. In all likelihood, you won't be 100% productive, especially right out of school. You'll take about 10-15% of a more advanced engineer's time, and a similar amount of your own, to figure out how we do what we do. You'll have to redo some things, sometimes two or three times, before you get it right. Counting the trainer's time against yours, you're going to lose about 40-50% of your time to learning the ropes, and another 10% to down time between assignments (meetings, startup, shutdown, etc). We're down to about 700 actual hours of production in your first year, and closer to 1000 your second and third, peaking near 1200 after that.
So you're "cost" to the company in your first year is about $100/hr. Since we have to add overhead to that it's closer to $130 fully burdened. The company, to survive and be worth the investors time (private or public) should be between 20% and 30% profitable before they pay taxes, so we'll need to bill your time at $160/hr. There are very, very few things which a fresh-out college student can do which is worth $160 and hour. What would you willingly pay a fresh-out college grad $160 an hour for (happy ending jokes aside)?
And you want to take some company time to explore cool stuff? At $1200/day in opportunity cost, I think your manager would much rather go to Aruba.
In case you feel I'm being flip, I'm not. I happen to be an engineer with 20 years of experience, 2 technical degrees, and I run a small consulting engineering firm. Fresh outs, by the way, bill at about $65-75/hr in the real world, and about 50% more in the biggest cities. Senior engineers at my level up to double that. Note that I'm ignoring high and low outliers in those figures; data is not the plural of anecdote. I recently hired a freshout. He's pretty smart, got a double technical major (engr and physics), and writes better than 90% of the engineers out there. He cost me about $25,000 out of my pocket the first year, and will barely break even this year - he might make a few thousand. Next year I'm hoping to make back my initial investment. Three years to break even, and he's not making $70k. That's easier to absorb in a large firm, by the way, due to sheer numbers and volume of workflow. "Fun" isn't really an option unless you land one of the very few cool jobs where all they do is fun stuff, or you work for a firm funded by VCs who don't watch the books (very rare), or your company just has piles of cash flowing in the door and can't figure out where to store it all (Google).
BTW - if you're going to be a good manager of technical people, you'd better be good technically as well as a good manager. You need to know your basic engineering backwards so that when an engineer comes to you and the answer they've come up with is wrong, you can both recognize it is wrong and explain - from basic principles - how to get them back on track. Once you're a manager, you don't have to know the answer to 1%, but you have to be able to get within 10% in your head (without a calculator or a computer). There are lots of bad managers our there, by the way. Don't become one.
Yes, but at $150/sf, the additional cost for an unfinished room in any non-descript suburban neighborhood, your listening room would have to be exceedingly small to beat the price of cans. In fact, I suspect you would be hard pressed to cover a small room in good acoustic foam for that money, much less pay the acoustic engineer to design the system for you (remember, the design fee is built into the price of the headphones). If you live in a big city, you can multiply that sf number by a factor of 5 or more.
Headphones have many uses, including isolating yourself from the environment (listening on subway/bus/train/airplane/6 year olds) as well as the opposite (getting to listen to your content without disturbing others). They are also far more economical than an equivalent setup in free space which, as I pointed out above, can get fantastically expensive very quickly. I have a set of Sony MDR-V6 (well, not really - they're the commercial version, but I can't remember the number) which go for about $80-90. After switching to the beyerdynamic pads, they're comfortable for about 2 hours at a stretch and are great for watching movies when the rest of the family is asleep. They're every bit as good as my HT speakers. I also have a set of etymotics (3 something, about $120) which are fantastic when flying or mowing the lawn or golfing solo.
Life at the federal minimum wage, with any money he makes above that level garnished until 3x the amount he stole is repaid. He may receive no more than 2087x the federal minimum wage, including gifts or in-kind donations for the rest of his life. Anyone disobeying this order shall be held in contempt of court and be enjoined as jointly and severally liable for his court debt. Joint property with any party (including his wife) shall be sold and the proceeds split 50/50.
That way, if any of his family tries to help him out, they forfeit everything.
It's just a matter of crafting the ruling properly. If people can think up a way to make 20% per year by reselling mortgage risk multiple times on the same money, they can craft a ruling that will make him live like a pauper for the rest of his years. And THAT would be the best punishment for him.
after seeing it on a secretary's desktop at NASA in the early 90s. My comment was very close to "Yeah, but I can already get all that with gopher; I don't think it will take off." Now, in my defense, just six months later I predicted that in a few years you would see panel trucks with web addresses instead of 800 numbers. The couple of people I told that to looked at my like _I_ was crazy. Damn, I wish I would have put my retirement savings behind that thought.