Not so long ago, metallic aluminum was so rare that kings had jewelry made of it. Now it's in throwaway/recycled beer cans. At present there are many uses for platinum and other PG metals that are impractical when these metals run over $1000/ounce. And that cost is also why catalytics converters cost $1000s to replace. When (I say, not 'if') platinum costs drop below $10/ounce - just for one off-the-cuff idea - we might be able to put catalytic converters on entire utility power plants.
Disruptive technologies tend to disrupt existing businesses, but that is the essential value of technological advance. And (from Econ 101) in a mature economy, technological advance is the only thing that improves the standard of living. As you can easily see, reading this on your flat panel display on a laptop - or a cellphone - with the power of a supercomputer from not so long ago!:)
Cheap platinum will certainly eliminate the present degrading, deadly business of mining by hand thousands of tons of South African dirt for a single ounce of platinum. And IMHO that is a good thing. It may not even impact jewelry prices - there are presently two companies that are producing gem quality, and even better, diamonds of essentially arbitrary size but the gem diamond market has not collapsed. And synthetic sapphires and rubies have been around for decades but natural ones are still expensive. In fact the synthetic diamond process is probably more valuable for producing perfect single crystal integrated circuit chip substrates.
So there is a collection of asteroids, whose orbits interact in such a way that they implement a stored-program computer that computes the lifespan of the universe? It would be interesting to see how one might number orbits so that they constitute values in a numeric system. Whooo, this is pretty far out there! Thanks for thinking of it and inspiring some very weird ideas in my head!:D Somehow Perl is the perfect tool for this - it's already far out there.
There are a number of NEO asteroids of all sizes whose orbits could be modified from a solar to an Earth orbit (say, outside the lunar orbital distance with an Earth orbit of 30+ days - still close enough for useful research, and eventual exploitation) with a change in velocity of under 100 km/hour.
I don't see whatever it is you replied to, so I don't know what the 'nonsense' is that you refer to but it's not at all clear that Eminent Domain has any relevance - before E.D. can be relevant it must be established that a nation has de jure control over space activities (which gets into the question of whether an entity in space is still a 'person' under national law).
I have just returned from a very interesting panel discussion on Saturday afternoon (yesterday as I write this - video should be available on the website soon if not already) at NewSpace 2013 regarding the question of 'ownership' and right of use, mining claims, etc. This is an area of vigorous debate, and it will continue to be for the next 50-100 years. Most of the questions will end up being settled in court rather than in legislation, using rules derived from common and maritime law as much as the law of individual nations.
It's worth noting that the original attempt to control slots in Geostationary Orbit, which created a global monopoly called IntelSat, was eventually (and fortunately) overturned after 20 years of poor use. Now those slots are managed more effectively without government control, by a cooperative and competitive process among players. (IntelSat is now just one of those players, and does a good job.) One of the big risks of space exploitation is the potential for an attempt at a huge governmental central planning bureaucracy, which would almost certainly delay the benefits for decades, and would very likely kill the potential for space exploitation entirely.
If some space exploiters become trillionaires, they will do so in the process of improving the standard of living for the people of Earth, likely by a factor of 10.
What is pretty well established: under the Outer Space Treaty, a nation is responsible for the actions of 'persons' (corporate or natural) of that nation. Each nation is also responsible for any harm to the persons or property of other nations. No nation, and thus no person, may establish ownership of any celestial body, but there is some debate as to what a 'celestial body' entails, howerver the treaty does establish the principle that exploitation of the resources is part of the intent. So at this point some(most?) analysts believe that once you remove part of the body, that part is yours. This follows from 19th century mining law - a miner does not 'own' the mine - the government essentially licenses the miner to remove material, and the material removed becomes the miner's property. A smaller selection believe that once you 'move' a body, it's yours - what 'move' means is up for debate.
But one strong voice on the panel argued that in essence, the Outer Space, Moon and other treaties among Terran nations are de facto, and therefore in the long term de jure, irrelevant and without standing. Just as the American colonists eventually rejected the laws of Britain as applied to the colonies, 'spacers' will eventually if not sooner establish their own rule of law amongst themselves, which will be derived from existing common and natural law, and precedents as they might apply, probably primarily in tort (civil suit)). Her fundamental point was that the nations of Earth do not have, and are not likely to have, any method of enforcing their laws outside of some relatively small region around the planet, and this is as it should be - the laws of space should be based on the experience and needs of those who live and work there (and will be derived from applicable precedent here on Earth, such as maritime law.)
Sorry.:) To the extent you're correct, what you describe (other than the 90 day timeframe, which is impossible), is pretty much what we have with judicial review, which extends your concept to include a mechanism for appeal.
What I was trying to express was that almost every comment in this thread has an essential assumption that laws form a logical system, and can be determined to be either 'correct' or 'incorrect'. And it ain't that way. Even if it could, it would not be able to cover all the possible circumstances. (I would have used 'cases' but for the duplicity of meaning.) In that sense, your comment is not one of the more problematic ones - as noted, it's closer to what we have in practice, if I understand your meaning (your comment is a bit confusing to me).
A big part of the explosion of laws and regulations is due to the continuing effort to expand and refine them to cover every possible circumstance, which (as I was trying to express) is impossible. So we continue to chop the logic finer and finer, but in the process we actually create more ways for the real world to not quite fit the law. Every refinement and branch creates more end points from which eventually branches will be needed, and human activity will be further proscribed, channeled and constrained.
A friend of my brother years ago did do that. These two hippies were short on rent, so they went around the neighborhood and and scrounged up a bunch of free stuff, then held a garage sale. It went so well they did it again the next week, and the next. After a year the city told them they had to either quit or get a business license. By then they had already rented a storage unit to keep their inventory, so they went the next step and opened a storefront and called it 'Antiques and Funk'. Last I talked with him (about 1980) he was bitching about the 'hippies coming in and shoplifting'!:D
There's lots of incorrect assumptions in these comments, but I'll just pick on yours. The first essential problem is that the law is not a logical system although it has some appearances of one, because that's what makes it possible to even begin to make some sort of sense of things. But, even if it were a logical system, it would run into what I like to call the Goedel problem - the Incompleteness Theorem, which states very roughly, any logical system powerful enough to describe itself is incomplete. This means that there are statements that are true but unproveable, and statements that are provable but false, and statements that not even be assigned a truth value (that may appear at first glance to be either true or false).
Just for starters, "This statement is a lie." I visualize all this as a pair of trees, one black and one white, that start from 'true' and 'false' and attempt to cover all of a decision space. It turns out that there are places that can not be reached by either tree, and parts that are in one or the other depending on the angle you look from.
The second essential problem is that a law may require a person to act a certain way, but in a particular circumstance that may be a bad idea. For instance, it is certainly illegal to push someone out a window against their will - but what if you happen to know the room is about to explode? Should you break the law? (This is also why Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics can not be programmed in, but only established the same way our present legal system works - have the robot make a judgment, with the proviso that if they guess 'wrong' in a particular circumstance, they might be punished. This provides a motivation for the robot to do the 'right' thing, and to try to figure out what the right thing is, incorporating knowledge of law and ethics and whatever else might factor in.)
Finally, the legal system has to be viewed as a kind of neural network or similar 'living system' (complex adaptive systems are cool) composed of a large number of 'entities', that continuously tries to converge on an optimum in the context of a continuously varying environment.
Ah, Sun. How the mighty have fallen. Every company, like any organism, has a lifespan. Back in the early-mid 1980s when Sun had only been public for a little while, the stock was selling at $16.25 - one of my very first stock purchases. I bought 100 shares. Two years later the stock had not budged from $16.25, and I needed some cash so I sold it. (I should have at least done a little research, but...) A week later it was at $24 and never looked back. I think it split seven times by 2000. I think my $1625 would have been worth something over $100,000 by then.
The 3D printer is there for testing the whole principle of 3D printing - it's one of the ongoing experiments... But it's also produced useful things on the ISS already.
The ISS deliveries are one of the primary financial and technological drivers of companies like SpaceX to get their 'space legs' - and SpaceX has already been instrumental in dropping freight launch costs by 50% (not to just the ISS but all small/medium launches), saving everyone money with good ol' competition and innovation. Notice how important it has been for SpaceX and the other rocket companies to meet NASA requirements and succeed with their required tests before acceptance to launch to the ISS.
Also, it's already the case that the ISS is getting some things for free from companies that just want to have access, and aren't charging NASA for stuff that used to cost the government $$. I think that's how Nanoracks works, but I may be off.
As for charging companies - at some point that might happen. But recognize that assisting US companies (and I think companies from other ISS-supporting nations but I'm not sure) to do R&D has paid off handsomely in the past - the R&D tax credits of the 1980s was a primary cause of the tech boom that started in the 1980s, continued into the 1990s and to some extent still continues. Analyses of that showed a return on the order of 10x to 100x, possibly more depending on how you count, in tax revenues from the companies that resulted - companies like Oracle, Sun, and Apple. R&D support on the ISS will almost certainly result in a new space-based tech boom, if things proceed the way they are today. The quality of your life will be surprisingly dependent on how the tech advances developed on the ISS pan out.
And the government's teensy investment in allowing these startups (mostly) to have access to the station (using extra space on rockets that are going there anyway - no cost to gov) will pay for itself many times over. Which is better - to charge $1 million for launch and access today (thereby reducing the number of experiments that actually go there by a factor of twenty or 50 to one or two per year), eliminating a couple dozen new high tech businesses and their possible future revenues, tax receipts and benefits to society, or allow them access 'at cost' (which is nearly free in terms of marginal cost) and create this new industry - an industry that is likely to eventually become one or two orders of magnitude larger than the present Silicon Valley?
(Fun economics 101 facts: in a mature economy, technological advance is the only factor that increases the standard of living. All government programs can do is shuffle money from one hand to another, and shuffle money from one time to another.)
So, all in all, I recommend checking into what's going on today on the ISS - go to the NewSpace 2013 conference in San Jose July 25-27. Next year go to SpaceTech in Long Beach, and/or ISDC at LAX. See what's happening. There's a lot going on, and the ISS is a center of it. And quit with the sour grapes!!:D I bet you're just jealous 'cause you can't go up there yourself!
But this is the ISS, the over-budget, over-priced lab where the Italians made the trash module (DaVinci Module is a giant trashcan). Let's face it the ISS is a bit boring and dull. Oh look another crew oh look a spacewalk. Sorry if that's cynical but hell, let's go back to the moon, let's go to Mars or further instead of a few miles up.
I just have to chime in here. Things have changed. And whether it was too expensive or not, that's in the past.
Now, the ISS is a critical element in the commercial/private space research and development that will take us to those other places in a real, "moving in and staying" kinda way. Almost every piece of hardware and technology will be tested on the ISS before it goes anywhere. For example, right now on the ISS is a 3D printer being tested to see how it works in microgravity, and learn what engineering changes will be required. 3D printing, or 'additive manufacturing' is one of the critical enabling technologies for long term travel, such as trips to Mars. And a Bigelow expandable habitat will be sent up and attached to the ISS for long term testing, soon.
Believe it or not, today the govt. is actually working to get out of the way, and really allow the ISS to be as useful as it could be. I'm kinda involved in some of the 'New Space' efforts. One very cool thing that the govt has done is designate the ISS as a National Laboratory (like Los Alamos, LLL, Sandia, Argonne, etc.) and has set up a program to provide free access for qualifying research - free launch, free astronaut activities (limited to a bit of button pushing) and free return. Administration has been delegated to an NGO (CASIS). So this is a beyond-world-class scientific laboratory, available for free for whomever comes up with something interesting. And they (not just NASA, but several other agencies as well) _really_ want to show some good results - that's what will justify continued support.
This could be as important for space research and development as anything we've seen. Scheduling of experiments (built into one of the three standard rack systems, from the Nanorack size to full 19" rack) has changed so that, where in the past it could take two or three years to get an experiment approved and launched, now it's possible to get your experiment launched in a few months. It still will cost a company $300,000 or so to design, build, test and get through the approval process (quite a bit less for a volunteer/student project with free labor and scrounged materials) but this is a game changer.
One company I'm (distantly) involved with is doing biotech research, and plans to run two or more experiments per year over the next couple of years. If their research pans out, the fruit of that research may well justify at least the cost of running the station over that time.
TL;DR - the ISS is turning from a government boutique research facility into a major tool for independent R&D, and will be instrumental in making commercial space and space development economically and technically possible.
In the 1930s, a famous comedian/pundit (Will Rogers) said that one should "always speak in such a way that you would not be afraid to give your pet parrot to the town gossip." Maybe this is the parrot.
Suggestion: before deciding, read the court transcript and review the evidence. That will give you a better, but still insufficient understanding of the case as presented to the jury - which has very little to do with the case as presented to us, the great unwashed.
Having said that, and IANAL, but much of the relevant facts (the details) haven't really made it into the media. Apparently, according to his statement to police, at the time of the actual conflict, Zimmerman was no longer following Martin (had he lost him?) and was returning to his car. Martin jumped out of some bushes (apparently he circled back?), and the fight started. The fact that Z was initially following M is only somewhat relevant - it goes to Z's state of mind. AFAIK, unless there's a court order or something, it's not illegal to follow someone around.
The 'Stand your ground' law was never part of this except in the media. It was not applicable to either party.
Martin was being portrayed as an innocent young naive boy who happened to be out shopping. His background and recent history (showing apparent pot smoking, racist remarks and some other things I forget) could have helped show that he was actually capable of attacking Zimmerman. Since that was never brought into court, it can't be used as a political tool to argue that Zimmerman got off - the prosecution was given every opportunity to railroad Zimmerman (regardless of one's opinion of the cast, had Zimmerman been convicted the case would have been tossed on appeal due to the judge's and prosecutor's actions). So Zimmerman was acquitted even despite having every possible weapon thrown at him.
WRT reporting, NBC actually cut Zimmerman's 911 call to make it seem like he was making racist remarks - I am fully expecting ZImmerman to sue NBC, and settle for something in 7 figures. Martin was shown on TV multiple times as a cute 9- or 10-year old. The race thing was amplified over and over again - Zimmerman was repeatedly described as a 'white hispanic' - whatever that is. As the old adage says, "if it bleeds it leads" - the media are in the business of selling eyes to the advertisers, and sometimes they go to far. Also, if you've ever had the media report on something that you are personally familiar with, I'll be willing to bet that you said they got it all wrong. Extrapolate, and you'll note that they get it all wrong most of the time. Most media people these days are undereducated journalism majors, who can only be described as 'the naive man on the street, expressing ignorant amazement at the goings on around them." IMHO, of course.:D
Well, some friends and I (shameless plug - Space Finance Group) are working on a consolation prize for you - we're working to help commercial space development along. It's early days yet, but I'm looking forward to more 'New Space' companies becoming profitable, and growing, and pretty soon maybe actually making money without depending on government contracts. And I think that's coming, sooner than it may seem just now. So it's possible you may be able to see the Earth from above in your new orbital hotel 'room', in your lifetime. Put it on your bucket list.
See also the conference: New Space 2013, July 25-27 in San Jose.
Yes, Perl is a paragon of structure and consistency:
Exactly what the EXPR argument to when does is hard to describe precisely, but in general, it tries to guess what you want done. Sometimes it is interpreted as $_ ~~ EXPR, and sometimes it is not. It also behaves differently when lexically enclosed by a given block than it does when dynamically enclosed by a foreach loop. The rules are far too difficult to understand to be described here. See Experimental Details on given and when later on.
Yep, it's often a problem.:D And I'm only partially defending it, but it does have a place (and like any tool, should not be used in other places where it doesn't belong.) Also, IANA investment banker, but I've seen them work on this stuff a bit.
But it's how a huge amount of financial business gets done. Think of it as a powerful multidimensional calculator - an engineer would not resort to a program written by IT every time they want to work out the forces acting on a girder - in fact a former coworker used to use a spreadsheet to compute the voltages and currents in electronic circuits (I assume he still does). Spreadsheets are just visual programming tools - a set of mostly-canned programs that you can plug values into, and combine together - and can be used, and abused.
Modeling is primarily about trying things to see what you get, and then trying other things to confirm from another angle. Often you don't know what the angles are until you are doing it.
If this list were in any type of order, Microsoft Excel would probably be at the top. This brainchild of Bill Gates allows investment bankers to do things our parents could have only imagined. This program allows us to value companies using all types of inputs, assumptions and formulas. Back in the old days, bankers had to do this on pen and paper, and most valuations were just like Ebay auctions with bidders using their gut to value the company. And if you decided you wanted to change one little number in the 1,000 rows of data? Well, basically you were screwed. But with handy Excel, once you have the setup in place you can make small changes and everything flows through. It’s simply amazing. Microsoft Excel allows me to do anything my bosses’ hearts desire. Want to see an accretion/dilution analysis by 9am tomorrow morning? No problem. Excel and I will get to work! It truly is amazing to think how things used to be done.
Indeed. In my experience the only language that (historically) used more memory and cycles to get things done than OO was LISP - and I think that was largely corrected in later implementations of LISP. I have a project just now that uses a canned, very OO library to process (oddly enough) Excel spreadsheets. One particular sheet, with about 3000 mostly empty rows of data (no formulas), results in running out of memory after 20 minutes and 8 GB. The cause? I think each cell results in multiple separate objects being created.
You could have gone further - every arithmetic and logical operation can be performed by (IIRC) a series of XORs and NOTs. I look forward to your implementation, preferably using fluidics!:D
I'm not a stock trader, but if I were, I'd much rather bang out a spreadsheet in 20 minutes (or modify one I'm already using) than wait several days at best for 'some dork in IT' to get a round tuit. Assuming it's possible to explain what I want to the IT guy*. In fact, IT will probably _never_ get a round tuit - they've got bigger fish to fry, and they're six months or two years behind schedule already. And the problem I'm working on will be over and done in 20 minutes - I need the model NOW, before London closes.
*I've got a friend in risk management at a big investment bank. I'm more up to speed on economics and finance than most geeks, and he twists my head around within the first two minutes, talking about differential velocity on secondary options, or something. It's basics to him but would require a week or two for me to figure out what he's talking about well enough so I could actually write the code he actually needs.
The reality (sad ?) is that a huge percentage of financial modeling by the investment banks is done on Excel. Every trader has their own custom versions. Some flash crash-type events have been traced back to bugs in the spreadsheets. Excel makes it very easy to build a useful financial model very quickly, without a lot of 'programming' - although it is still programming, just don't tell those guys. (It's been pointed out elsewhere here that Lotus Improv and its descendants were/are better, and the descendants are still in use).
A book on functional programming pointed out that spreadsheets are a pretty good example of functional programming. I forget the details.
Lotus had a cool object-based spreadsheet system on the Next computer, called Improv. Improv attempted to redefine what spreadsheets were and how they worked, and once you got used to it, it was great. The basic principle was separation of data, views, and formulas (was this pre-figuring MVC?), and individual sheets could be any size - I'm not sure about 'triangular' per se though.
But alas, Improv never sold well on either NextStep (although it was very popular amongst financial modeling folks, and sold a lot of Nexts) or Windows 3.1 (W31 was probably way underpowered for the job). According to the Wiki article above, there are some descendants still in use.
Some still do. IIRC Prius used to, but has switched. But this article says (2010) that Toyota uses Ni-Cd for hybrids, Li Ion for pure electrics. According to a quote in this article,
Geoffrey May, a UK based consultant to the battery industry, is more sceptical. 'More than 95 per cent of hybrid electric vehicles on the road today use nickel metal hydride batteries and that is not going to change any time soon because the main manufacturers of HEVs have invested huge amounts of money in production facilities. It is a technology that works and it is safe: there have been no reported incidents of battery fires with nickel metal hydride as have happened with lithium ion.'
Also, mining and refining lithium (or any material) has its environmental costs. Then there's this:
“The Metal Mining Effluent Regulations do not specifically regulate all of the individual substances of concern that might be released from the mining or processing of rare earth elements and lithium,” says the report.
The regulations “were not specifically designed to manage the environmental aspects of these mining processes.”
Around the turn of this century, China began to separate the mixed salts of Tsaidam Basin lake beds on a large-scale. Separating naturally crystallised sodium, potassium, magnesium and lithium salts requires heavy-duty toxic solvents (such as isobutanol and chloroform), known to cause cancer. Since the Qinghai authorities were keen to industrialise their province – known for its poverty, remoteness and cold climate – land-use controls and environmental regulations were not a priority. From the provincial capital Xining, spreading out to the famous Kumbum Monastery, industrial plants took up land, pouring effluents into nearby streams. Potash and magnesium plants were built and expanded in Gormo, Xining and along the connecting railway line.
Bottom line: At this point the environmental impact of lithium mining and processing (especially at the new higher volumes to be expected) is not well understood, and apparently not yet subject to sufficient mitigation. We just don't yet know. But my point remains - over time, all these externalities will be applied to every one of these resources, to approximately the same extent, and as such their actual cost will reflect those externalities, to approximately the same extent. That is, if we go about this sanely - a dubious prospect!:D
I don't know the specific geology of the Keys, but most places with ocean interfaces are either raising or lowering with respect to sea level. For an example of short term movement, the shore of Japan close to the quake and tsunami in some cases is feet lower than it was before the quake because as the pressure built up over centuries, that land bowed upward, and when the stress was released the land dropped again. And on the Oregon coast there is a shallow marsh that before January of 1700 was a cedar forest, but it dropped six feet in that earthquake.
Other areas are dropping or rising more gradually. Many Pacific islands would be gradually going under water over the next few centuries regardless of the global sea level change.
Basically, the entire surface of the Earth is a bunch of scum piles being shifted around on an ocean of semi-liquid material, bumping into each other and tilting in various ways. As the Asian and Indian Ocean plates collide and tilt up to form the Himalayas, the other ends of those places are dropping. And there is now evidence that the Atlantic plate is cracking in the middle, offshore of Portugal because of similar activities.
My original argument (way back up the thread somewhere was that, eventually, all the externalities of all these resources/methods/markets or whatever would be at least computable, and most of them would be incorporated into the pricing - my example was that oil spills have increasingly been incorporated into the cost model of the oil companies, as it manifests in the cost of ships, the cost of insurance, the cost of large amounts of cash in contingency reserves, not doing anything, etc. I think I mentioned the cost of Maconda to BP required the company to sell off some large oil leases, substantially reducing their future value and revenues (not to mention the reduction in sales due to people boycotting BP stations - hard to quantify, not large, but probably significant)
I think the thrust of most comments has been that the externalities of electric vehicles have not yet been completely figured out and accounted for, while those related to oil have been pretty well understood and largely, though not completely, included in the computations and, if anything, overemphasized in the public mind. I don't think most readers here are ignoring those for oil, or other traditional resources.
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Not so long ago, metallic aluminum was so rare that kings had jewelry made of it. Now it's in throwaway/recycled beer cans. At present there are many uses for platinum and other PG metals that are impractical when these metals run over $1000/ounce. And that cost is also why catalytics converters cost $1000s to replace. When (I say, not 'if') platinum costs drop below $10/ounce - just for one off-the-cuff idea - we might be able to put catalytic converters on entire utility power plants.
Disruptive technologies tend to disrupt existing businesses, but that is the essential value of technological advance. And (from Econ 101) in a mature economy, technological advance is the only thing that improves the standard of living. As you can easily see, reading this on your flat panel display on a laptop - or a cellphone - with the power of a supercomputer from not so long ago! :)
Cheap platinum will certainly eliminate the present degrading, deadly business of mining by hand thousands of tons of South African dirt for a single ounce of platinum. And IMHO that is a good thing. It may not even impact jewelry prices - there are presently two companies that are producing gem quality, and even better, diamonds of essentially arbitrary size but the gem diamond market has not collapsed. And synthetic sapphires and rubies have been around for decades but natural ones are still expensive. In fact the synthetic diamond process is probably more valuable for producing perfect single crystal integrated circuit chip substrates.
So there is a collection of asteroids, whose orbits interact in such a way that they implement a stored-program computer that computes the lifespan of the universe? It would be interesting to see how one might number orbits so that they constitute values in a numeric system. :D Somehow Perl is the perfect tool for this - it's already far out there.
Whooo, this is pretty far out there! Thanks for thinking of it and inspiring some very weird ideas in my head!
There are a number of NEO asteroids of all sizes whose orbits could be modified from a solar to an Earth orbit (say, outside the lunar orbital distance with an Earth orbit of 30+ days - still close enough for useful research, and eventual exploitation) with a change in velocity of under 100 km/hour.
I don't see whatever it is you replied to, so I don't know what the 'nonsense' is that you refer to but it's not at all clear that Eminent Domain has any relevance - before E.D. can be relevant it must be established that a nation has de jure control over space activities (which gets into the question of whether an entity in space is still a 'person' under national law).
I have just returned from a very interesting panel discussion on Saturday afternoon (yesterday as I write this - video should be available on the website soon if not already) at NewSpace 2013 regarding the question of 'ownership' and right of use, mining claims, etc. This is an area of vigorous debate, and it will continue to be for the next 50-100 years. Most of the questions will end up being settled in court rather than in legislation, using rules derived from common and maritime law as much as the law of individual nations.
It's worth noting that the original attempt to control slots in Geostationary Orbit, which created a global monopoly called IntelSat, was eventually (and fortunately) overturned after 20 years of poor use. Now those slots are managed more effectively without government control, by a cooperative and competitive process among players. (IntelSat is now just one of those players, and does a good job.) One of the big risks of space exploitation is the potential for an attempt at a huge governmental central planning bureaucracy, which would almost certainly delay the benefits for decades, and would very likely kill the potential for space exploitation entirely.
If some space exploiters become trillionaires, they will do so in the process of improving the standard of living for the people of Earth, likely by a factor of 10.
What is pretty well established: under the Outer Space Treaty, a nation is responsible for the actions of 'persons' (corporate or natural) of that nation. Each nation is also responsible for any harm to the persons or property of other nations. No nation, and thus no person, may establish ownership of any celestial body, but there is some debate as to what a 'celestial body' entails, howerver the treaty does establish the principle that exploitation of the resources is part of the intent. So at this point some(most?) analysts believe that once you remove part of the body, that part is yours. This follows from 19th century mining law - a miner does not 'own' the mine - the government essentially licenses the miner to remove material, and the material removed becomes the miner's property. A smaller selection believe that once you 'move' a body, it's yours - what 'move' means is up for debate.
But one strong voice on the panel argued that in essence, the Outer Space, Moon and other treaties among Terran nations are de facto, and therefore in the long term de jure, irrelevant and without standing. Just as the American colonists eventually rejected the laws of Britain as applied to the colonies, 'spacers' will eventually if not sooner establish their own rule of law amongst themselves, which will be derived from existing common and natural law, and precedents as they might apply, probably primarily in tort (civil suit)). Her fundamental point was that the nations of Earth do not have, and are not likely to have, any method of enforcing their laws outside of some relatively small region around the planet, and this is as it should be - the laws of space should be based on the experience and needs of those who live and work there (and will be derived from applicable precedent here on Earth, such as maritime law.)
Sorry. :) To the extent you're correct, what you describe (other than the 90 day timeframe, which is impossible), is pretty much what we have with judicial review, which extends your concept to include a mechanism for appeal.
What I was trying to express was that almost every comment in this thread has an essential assumption that laws form a logical system, and can be determined to be either 'correct' or 'incorrect'. And it ain't that way. Even if it could, it would not be able to cover all the possible circumstances. (I would have used 'cases' but for the duplicity of meaning.) In that sense, your comment is not one of the more problematic ones - as noted, it's closer to what we have in practice, if I understand your meaning (your comment is a bit confusing to me).
A big part of the explosion of laws and regulations is due to the continuing effort to expand and refine them to cover every possible circumstance, which (as I was trying to express) is impossible. So we continue to chop the logic finer and finer, but in the process we actually create more ways for the real world to not quite fit the law. Every refinement and branch creates more end points from which eventually branches will be needed, and human activity will be further proscribed, channeled and constrained.
A friend of my brother years ago did do that. These two hippies were short on rent, so they went around the neighborhood and and scrounged up a bunch of free stuff, then held a garage sale. It went so well they did it again the next week, and the next. After a year the city told them they had to either quit or get a business license. By then they had already rented a storage unit to keep their inventory, so they went the next step and opened a storefront and called it 'Antiques and Funk'. Last I talked with him (about 1980) he was bitching about the 'hippies coming in and shoplifting'! :D
There's lots of incorrect assumptions in these comments, but I'll just pick on yours. The first essential problem is that the law is not a logical system although it has some appearances of one, because that's what makes it possible to even begin to make some sort of sense of things. But, even if it were a logical system, it would run into what I like to call the Goedel problem - the Incompleteness Theorem, which states very roughly, any logical system powerful enough to describe itself is incomplete. This means that there are statements that are true but unproveable, and statements that are provable but false, and statements that not even be assigned a truth value (that may appear at first glance to be either true or false).
Just for starters, "This statement is a lie." I visualize all this as a pair of trees, one black and one white, that start from 'true' and 'false' and attempt to cover all of a decision space. It turns out that there are places that can not be reached by either tree, and parts that are in one or the other depending on the angle you look from.
The second essential problem is that a law may require a person to act a certain way, but in a particular circumstance that may be a bad idea. For instance, it is certainly illegal to push someone out a window against their will - but what if you happen to know the room is about to explode? Should you break the law? (This is also why Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics can not be programmed in, but only established the same way our present legal system works - have the robot make a judgment, with the proviso that if they guess 'wrong' in a particular circumstance, they might be punished. This provides a motivation for the robot to do the 'right' thing, and to try to figure out what the right thing is, incorporating knowledge of law and ethics and whatever else might factor in.)
Finally, the legal system has to be viewed as a kind of neural network or similar 'living system' (complex adaptive systems are cool) composed of a large number of 'entities', that continuously tries to converge on an optimum in the context of a continuously varying environment.
Ah, Sun. How the mighty have fallen. Every company, like any organism, has a lifespan. Back in the early-mid 1980s when Sun had only been public for a little while, the stock was selling at $16.25 - one of my very first stock purchases. I bought 100 shares. Two years later the stock had not budged from $16.25, and I needed some cash so I sold it. (I should have at least done a little research, but ...) A week later it was at $24 and never looked back. I think it split seven times by 2000. I think my $1625 would have been worth something over $100,000 by then.
The 3D printer is there for testing the whole principle of 3D printing - it's one of the ongoing experiments... But it's also produced useful things on the ISS already.
The ISS deliveries are one of the primary financial and technological drivers of companies like SpaceX to get their 'space legs' - and SpaceX has already been instrumental in dropping freight launch costs by 50% (not to just the ISS but all small/medium launches), saving everyone money with good ol' competition and innovation. Notice how important it has been for SpaceX and the other rocket companies to meet NASA requirements and succeed with their required tests before acceptance to launch to the ISS.
Also, it's already the case that the ISS is getting some things for free from companies that just want to have access, and aren't charging NASA for stuff that used to cost the government $$. I think that's how Nanoracks works, but I may be off.
As for charging companies - at some point that might happen. But recognize that assisting US companies (and I think companies from other ISS-supporting nations but I'm not sure) to do R&D has paid off handsomely in the past - the R&D tax credits of the 1980s was a primary cause of the tech boom that started in the 1980s, continued into the 1990s and to some extent still continues. Analyses of that showed a return on the order of 10x to 100x, possibly more depending on how you count, in tax revenues from the companies that resulted - companies like Oracle, Sun, and Apple. R&D support on the ISS will almost certainly result in a new space-based tech boom, if things proceed the way they are today. The quality of your life will be surprisingly dependent on how the tech advances developed on the ISS pan out.
And the government's teensy investment in allowing these startups (mostly) to have access to the station (using extra space on rockets that are going there anyway - no cost to gov) will pay for itself many times over. Which is better - to charge $1 million for launch and access today (thereby reducing the number of experiments that actually go there by a factor of twenty or 50 to one or two per year), eliminating a couple dozen new high tech businesses and their possible future revenues, tax receipts and benefits to society, or allow them access 'at cost' (which is nearly free in terms of marginal cost) and create this new industry - an industry that is likely to eventually become one or two orders of magnitude larger than the present Silicon Valley?
(Fun economics 101 facts: in a mature economy, technological advance is the only factor that increases the standard of living. All government programs can do is shuffle money from one hand to another, and shuffle money from one time to another.)
So, all in all, I recommend checking into what's going on today on the ISS - go to the NewSpace 2013 conference in San Jose July 25-27. Next year go to SpaceTech in Long Beach, and/or ISDC at LAX. See what's happening. There's a lot going on, and the ISS is a center of it. And quit with the sour grapes!! :D I bet you're just jealous 'cause you can't go up there yourself!
But this is the ISS, the over-budget, over-priced lab where the Italians made the trash module (DaVinci Module is a giant trashcan). Let's face it the ISS is a bit boring and dull. Oh look another crew oh look a spacewalk. Sorry if that's cynical but hell, let's go back to the moon, let's go to Mars or further instead of a few miles up.
I just have to chime in here. Things have changed. And whether it was too expensive or not, that's in the past.
Now, the ISS is a critical element in the commercial/private space research and development that will take us to those other places in a real, "moving in and staying" kinda way. Almost every piece of hardware and technology will be tested on the ISS before it goes anywhere. For example, right now on the ISS is a 3D printer being tested to see how it works in microgravity, and learn what engineering changes will be required. 3D printing, or 'additive manufacturing' is one of the critical enabling technologies for long term travel, such as trips to Mars. And a Bigelow expandable habitat will be sent up and attached to the ISS for long term testing, soon.
Believe it or not, today the govt. is actually working to get out of the way, and really allow the ISS to be as useful as it could be. I'm kinda involved in some of the 'New Space' efforts. One very cool thing that the govt has done is designate the ISS as a National Laboratory (like Los Alamos, LLL, Sandia, Argonne, etc.) and has set up a program to provide free access for qualifying research - free launch, free astronaut activities (limited to a bit of button pushing) and free return. Administration has been delegated to an NGO (CASIS). So this is a beyond-world-class scientific laboratory, available for free for whomever comes up with something interesting. And they (not just NASA, but several other agencies as well) _really_ want to show some good results - that's what will justify continued support.
This could be as important for space research and development as anything we've seen. Scheduling of experiments (built into one of the three standard rack systems, from the Nanorack size to full 19" rack) has changed so that, where in the past it could take two or three years to get an experiment approved and launched, now it's possible to get your experiment launched in a few months. It still will cost a company $300,000 or so to design, build, test and get through the approval process (quite a bit less for a volunteer/student project with free labor and scrounged materials) but this is a game changer.
One company I'm (distantly) involved with is doing biotech research, and plans to run two or more experiments per year over the next couple of years. If their research pans out, the fruit of that research may well justify at least the cost of running the station over that time.
TL;DR - the ISS is turning from a government boutique research facility into a major tool for independent R&D, and will be instrumental in making commercial space and space development economically and technically possible.
"1984" indeed - against the law to turn off or block the camera in your home.
In the 1930s, a famous comedian/pundit (Will Rogers) said that one should "always speak in such a way that you would not be afraid to give your pet parrot to the town gossip." Maybe this is the parrot.
Suggestion: before deciding, read the court transcript and review the evidence. That will give you a better, but still insufficient understanding of the case as presented to the jury - which has very little to do with the case as presented to us, the great unwashed.
Having said that, and IANAL, but much of the relevant facts (the details) haven't really made it into the media. Apparently, according to his statement to police, at the time of the actual conflict, Zimmerman was no longer following Martin (had he lost him?) and was returning to his car. Martin jumped out of some bushes (apparently he circled back?), and the fight started. The fact that Z was initially following M is only somewhat relevant - it goes to Z's state of mind. AFAIK, unless there's a court order or something, it's not illegal to follow someone around.
The 'Stand your ground' law was never part of this except in the media. It was not applicable to either party.
Martin was being portrayed as an innocent young naive boy who happened to be out shopping. His background and recent history (showing apparent pot smoking, racist remarks and some other things I forget) could have helped show that he was actually capable of attacking Zimmerman. Since that was never brought into court, it can't be used as a political tool to argue that Zimmerman got off - the prosecution was given every opportunity to railroad Zimmerman (regardless of one's opinion of the cast, had Zimmerman been convicted the case would have been tossed on appeal due to the judge's and prosecutor's actions). So Zimmerman was acquitted even despite having every possible weapon thrown at him.
WRT reporting, NBC actually cut Zimmerman's 911 call to make it seem like he was making racist remarks - I am fully expecting ZImmerman to sue NBC, and settle for something in 7 figures. Martin was shown on TV multiple times as a cute 9- or 10-year old. The race thing was amplified over and over again - Zimmerman was repeatedly described as a 'white hispanic' - whatever that is. As the old adage says, "if it bleeds it leads" - the media are in the business of selling eyes to the advertisers, and sometimes they go to far. Also, if you've ever had the media report on something that you are personally familiar with, I'll be willing to bet that you said they got it all wrong. Extrapolate, and you'll note that they get it all wrong most of the time. Most media people these days are undereducated journalism majors, who can only be described as 'the naive man on the street, expressing ignorant amazement at the goings on around them." IMHO, of course. :D
Well, some friends and I (shameless plug - Space Finance Group) are working on a consolation prize for you - we're working to help commercial space development along. It's early days yet, but I'm looking forward to more 'New Space' companies becoming profitable, and growing, and pretty soon maybe actually making money without depending on government contracts. And I think that's coming, sooner than it may seem just now. So it's possible you may be able to see the Earth from above in your new orbital hotel 'room', in your lifetime. Put it on your bucket list.
See also the conference: New Space 2013, July 25-27 in San Jose.
Yes, Perl is a paragon of structure and consistency:
Exactly what the EXPR argument to when does is hard to describe precisely, but in general, it tries to guess what you want done. Sometimes it is interpreted as $_ ~~ EXPR, and sometimes it is not. It also behaves differently when lexically enclosed by a given block than it does when dynamically enclosed by a foreach loop. The rules are far too difficult to understand to be described here. See Experimental Details on given and when later on.
- Perldoc
Yep, it's often a problem. :D And I'm only partially defending it, but it does have a place (and like any tool, should not be used in other places where it doesn't belong.) Also, IANA investment banker, but I've seen them work on this stuff a bit.
But it's how a huge amount of financial business gets done. Think of it as a powerful multidimensional calculator - an engineer would not resort to a program written by IT every time they want to work out the forces acting on a girder - in fact a former coworker used to use a spreadsheet to compute the voltages and currents in electronic circuits (I assume he still does). Spreadsheets are just visual programming tools - a set of mostly-canned programs that you can plug values into, and combine together - and can be used, and abused.
Modeling is primarily about trying things to see what you get, and then trying other things to confirm from another angle. Often you don't know what the angles are until you are doing it.
See Excel Shortcuts: A Modeling Must
And this from "Things investment bankers love":
If this list were in any type of order, Microsoft Excel would probably be at the top. This brainchild of Bill Gates allows investment bankers to do things our parents could have only imagined. This program allows us to value companies using all types of inputs, assumptions and formulas. Back in the old days, bankers had to do this on pen and paper, and most valuations were just like Ebay auctions with bidders using their gut to value the company. And if you decided you wanted to change one little number in the 1,000 rows of data? Well, basically you were screwed. But with handy Excel, once you have the setup in place you can make small changes and everything flows through. It’s simply amazing. Microsoft Excel allows me to do anything my bosses’ hearts desire. Want to see an accretion/dilution analysis by 9am tomorrow morning? No problem. Excel and I will get to work! It truly is amazing to think how things used to be done.
I knew it was something like that! :D It's been a couple of decades since I thought about this topic. I stand corrected.
Indeed. In my experience the only language that (historically) used more memory and cycles to get things done than OO was LISP - and I think that was largely corrected in later implementations of LISP. I have a project just now that uses a canned, very OO library to process (oddly enough) Excel spreadsheets. One particular sheet, with about 3000 mostly empty rows of data (no formulas), results in running out of memory after 20 minutes and 8 GB. The cause? I think each cell results in multiple separate objects being created.
You could have gone further - every arithmetic and logical operation can be performed by (IIRC) a series of XORs and NOTs. I look forward to your implementation, preferably using fluidics! :D
I'm not a stock trader, but if I were, I'd much rather bang out a spreadsheet in 20 minutes (or modify one I'm already using) than wait several days at best for 'some dork in IT' to get a round tuit. Assuming it's possible to explain what I want to the IT guy*. In fact, IT will probably _never_ get a round tuit - they've got bigger fish to fry, and they're six months or two years behind schedule already. And the problem I'm working on will be over and done in 20 minutes - I need the model NOW, before London closes.
*I've got a friend in risk management at a big investment bank. I'm more up to speed on economics and finance than most geeks, and he twists my head around within the first two minutes, talking about differential velocity on secondary options, or something. It's basics to him but would require a week or two for me to figure out what he's talking about well enough so I could actually write the code he actually needs.
The reality (sad ?) is that a huge percentage of financial modeling by the investment banks is done on Excel. Every trader has their own custom versions. Some flash crash-type events have been traced back to bugs in the spreadsheets. Excel makes it very easy to build a useful financial model very quickly, without a lot of 'programming' - although it is still programming, just don't tell those guys. (It's been pointed out elsewhere here that Lotus Improv and its descendants were/are better, and the descendants are still in use).
A book on functional programming pointed out that spreadsheets are a pretty good example of functional programming. I forget the details.
Lotus had a cool object-based spreadsheet system on the Next computer, called Improv. Improv attempted to redefine what spreadsheets were and how they worked, and once you got used to it, it was great. The basic principle was separation of data, views, and formulas (was this pre-figuring MVC?), and individual sheets could be any size - I'm not sure about 'triangular' per se though.
But alas, Improv never sold well on either NextStep (although it was very popular amongst financial modeling folks, and sold a lot of Nexts) or Windows 3.1 (W31 was probably way underpowered for the job). According to the Wiki article above, there are some descendants still in use.
Some still do. IIRC Prius used to, but has switched. But this article says (2010) that Toyota uses Ni-Cd for hybrids, Li Ion for pure electrics. According to a quote in this article,
Geoffrey May, a UK based consultant to the battery industry, is more sceptical. 'More than 95 per cent of hybrid electric vehicles on the road today use nickel metal hydride batteries and that is not going to change any time soon because the main manufacturers of HEVs have invested huge amounts of money in production facilities. It is a technology that works and it is safe: there have been no reported incidents of battery fires with nickel metal hydride as have happened with lithium ion.'
Also, mining and refining lithium (or any material) has its environmental costs. Then there's this:
“The Metal Mining Effluent Regulations do not specifically regulate all of the individual substances of concern that might be released from the mining or processing of rare earth elements and lithium,” says the report.
The regulations “were not specifically designed to manage the environmental aspects of these mining processes.”
And this
Around the turn of this century, China began to separate the mixed salts of Tsaidam Basin lake beds on a large-scale. Separating naturally crystallised sodium, potassium, magnesium and lithium salts requires heavy-duty toxic solvents (such as isobutanol and chloroform), known to cause cancer. Since the Qinghai authorities were keen to industrialise their province – known for its poverty, remoteness and cold climate – land-use controls and environmental regulations were not a priority. From the provincial capital Xining, spreading out to the famous Kumbum Monastery, industrial plants took up land, pouring effluents into nearby streams. Potash and magnesium plants were built and expanded in Gormo, Xining and along the connecting railway line.
Bottom line: At this point the environmental impact of lithium mining and processing (especially at the new higher volumes to be expected) is not well understood, and apparently not yet subject to sufficient mitigation. We just don't yet know. But my point remains - over time, all these externalities will be applied to every one of these resources, to approximately the same extent, and as such their actual cost will reflect those externalities, to approximately the same extent. That is, if we go about this sanely - a dubious prospect! :D
I don't know the specific geology of the Keys, but most places with ocean interfaces are either raising or lowering with respect to sea level. For an example of short term movement, the shore of Japan close to the quake and tsunami in some cases is feet lower than it was before the quake because as the pressure built up over centuries, that land bowed upward, and when the stress was released the land dropped again. And on the Oregon coast there is a shallow marsh that before January of 1700 was a cedar forest, but it dropped six feet in that earthquake.
Other areas are dropping or rising more gradually. Many Pacific islands would be gradually going under water over the next few centuries regardless of the global sea level change.
Basically, the entire surface of the Earth is a bunch of scum piles being shifted around on an ocean of semi-liquid material, bumping into each other and tilting in various ways. As the Asian and Indian Ocean plates collide and tilt up to form the Himalayas, the other ends of those places are dropping. And there is now evidence that the Atlantic plate is cracking in the middle, offshore of Portugal because of similar activities.
My original argument (way back up the thread somewhere was that, eventually, all the externalities of all these resources/methods/markets or whatever would be at least computable, and most of them would be incorporated into the pricing - my example was that oil spills have increasingly been incorporated into the cost model of the oil companies, as it manifests in the cost of ships, the cost of insurance, the cost of large amounts of cash in contingency reserves, not doing anything, etc. I think I mentioned the cost of Maconda to BP required the company to sell off some large oil leases, substantially reducing their future value and revenues (not to mention the reduction in sales due to people boycotting BP stations - hard to quantify, not large, but probably significant)
I think the thrust of most comments has been that the externalities of electric vehicles have not yet been completely figured out and accounted for, while those related to oil have been pretty well understood and largely, though not completely, included in the computations and, if anything, overemphasized in the public mind. I don't think most readers here are ignoring those for oil, or other traditional resources.