That's a machine patent, not a software patent, so I don't count your citation as relevant. IIRC the first software-related patent was to Honeywell, for a building HVAC system that included software control, in the 1970s. At that time a physical system that included software as part of the control structure was first considered patentable. But pure software was still considered algorithmic, and algorithms were math, which is discovered, not patented. IIRC the change came in 1986 but I don't recall the details. But I do recall maintaining our company's software as a trade secret, with copyright as unpublished work. Patents were not possible.
Had software patents been allowed, such things as virtual memory and various fundamental aspects of operating systems and compilers would have been patentable. To my mind, one of the overriding arguments to void software patents was the sheer unfairness to those who built such a great structure and received no royalties, for over 30 years before software patents were allowed.
In those early days, lack of patents encouraged a lot of free sharing of new ideas, new research compounded on each others' research, and a recognition system based on respect rather than fees. There was some secrecy maintained for some particular ideas, but because of the way that software was distributed (almost entirely in source form), those secrets had a short lifetime once they were put into the commercial ecosystem. Even after patents were formally allowed, many invaluable advances that nowadays would be patented (to the detriment of everyone), such as the WWW itself, were not patented because for us in the business it just "wasn't done". IMHO the very success of the Internet rests on that shared contribution, going back to MIT and other universities and companies in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, working together without expectation of patent protection but expectation of either academic success or shared business success on a flat playing field, to build something bigger than any of the participants. Lack of patent walls greatly accelerated the network effect.
Ah yes - my grandmother's family invested heavily in the Trans Siberian Railrway - evidently most of their life savings. When the Bolsheviks repudiated those bonds, it changed my ancestor's lives, not for the better.
Funny thing, you're right. I never really knew what that other stuff tasted like. Dead beetles is about right on - or at least so I imagine, never having eaten a dead beetle (to my knowledge). Also, you can buy maple-flavored sausages but they are not the same, they're just bad-tasting sausage. Real Maple Syrup FTW. I'd be interested in comparing Canadian to Vermont though. I guess that's going on my list of things to do.
If I understand correctly, the Russians, Americans, Japanese, and several other nations agreed a long time ago on a common docking mechanism so that everyone's vehicles could dock with each other. This is a major advantage for international cooperation. Since so many nations use the same system, I assume that this is not a top secret design. Did the Chinese use the same mechanism, or are they standard a new competing-standards problem? I hope not the latter. It would really suck for all future space vehicle interactions to be subject to screwy adapters - especially when lives may be in immediate danger. IMHO the real test of Chinese docking would be to dock successfully with the USS.
I like to believe that the essential 'differentness' of space will quickly mean that the folks who are working in space will feel more cooperative and protective toward fellow space travelers than the groundlings below them. This will encourage more cooperation between teams in different orbital stations than the sponsoring nations might prefer. Geopolitics may affect space for a while, but I think in the long term the conflicts will be more about space folks needing less control from their terran sponsors. But maybe I read too many old SF stories with that thesis.
A long time ago somebody wise said that the long term success of every tech company depends on building your own competition. If you don't create the product that out-competes your cash cow, someone else will. Instead of trying to defend their little castle of Ads, Google must try to come up with products that make the ad revenue model obsolete, because a lot of other companies are trying to do that very thing. Google must continuously re-invent itself every couple of years from now on, or fall behind.
One of the fun things about tech markets is that you must essentially always be in that near-panic flop sweat to figure out how to get to the next step before your most recent success turns old and fails. And the more successful that success was, the harder others are working to turn it to failure. How's that song go? "What have you done for me lately?" That's the customer's refrain.
Most of these were originally designed under the AEC, before it was split into two groups, one of which was NRC. Prior to that promotion of nuclear power, bomb making and regulation were all under one umbrella. The conflict of interest - promoting vs. regulating - was the reason to split them up.
The machine vs. building issue was a world view thing. The French did it right, we did it wrong.
Also, when most of these reactors were designed, the AEC assumption was that a nuke plant would last 20-30 years, then we'd fill it with concrete and leave it for 10,000 years. Not very forward-thinking, but that was the plan. Then in the 1970s the utilities realized that since they couldn't keep building them, they'd actually have to maintain them. So for about 15 years they used a method based on day labor - bring in guys to work for two days and pay them a lot, they'd have a lifetime dose, and they could never work on a nuke again. By 1990 or thereabouts, that was no longer going to work - hence the need for a robotic system, for which my controller design was going to be used. I left the company toward the end of the fab process, but I believe that the system was in use for a number of years after that, and maybe still.
The interesting bit is that the water used in the steam generator cycle is so pure that it eats stainless steel. So the inches-thick SS tubes gradually get eaten away and have to be cut out and replaced, about every 20 years.
People have largely forgotten the 'killer fog' of London, 1952. The combination of an inversion, humidity and coal-fired home heaters made for a 'fog' (we now call smog) that killed IIRC 1200 people.
And coal dust explosions are infamous - they are a type of fuel-air explosion. I suppose that coal dust could be used anywhere that the combination diesel-ammonium nitrate explosives could be used. See also Minor Scale.
I worked on the control system for a nuclear plant maintenance robotic system back in 1990 (actually the controller was based on my design:) ). I learned something interesting about the nuclear power industry. The short version is - in France, nuclear power plants were considered machines, like airplanes. They were constructed and maintained like machines - they were all basically alike (in a given generation), and the differences were only in details of siting, etc. So each new one was just like the previous one, so everyone concerned knew pretty much how to avoid common problems like piping layout. And when a problem showed up in one, it would be fixed in all of them, much like FAA requires a problem in one 747 to be dealt with in every similar plane. (The paperwork for each 747, back when it was actual paper, weighed a significant fraction of the actual plane.)
In the US, these plants were considered buildings, and were designed (mostly in the 1960s and early 1970s) by architects (using components, but put together in different ways). So every facility is different. The architects generally weren't familiar in advance so had to learn while designing. As a result, many plants have things like pipes that go through a walkway at waist high, so the workers have to climb over or under it, and pipes that had to be re-routed on-site (often halting construction for a period of time) because they collided with another one in the design. (These were all designed before modern CAD systems had the capability to catch that.) And, because they are all different, a problem in one may or may not be found in any other, so there's no easy way to pro-actively fix problems that are found in one plant, because the design may not match in the correct way.
In an earlier job we were reviewing nuclear plant construction drawings with regard to the possibility of scanning them and generating CAD models. We found that the drawings in question were the worst engineering drawings we'd ever seen. They were essentially done without design rules, with multiple system layers all on one drawing - everything from concrete footers to electrical to plumbing all on one drawing, with pieces actually cut out and replaced by a redrawn section! I can't say that all plants were like this, but certainly this one was. It was unreadable by humans, much less computer scanners.
The plants we were working with also had radically different cleanliness standards - they are all run by independent companies, with different rules and traditions. One plant was so clean that the whole radon-in-houses problem was identified when a worker set off the radiation detectors going IN to the plant. The interior radiation level was maintained substantially lower than the ambient in the area - the place made 'hospital clean' look like a swamp. Others, based on what we heard, were more like that guy down the street with the cars in his yard.
I know someone who lives off the grid, on 60 acres. He started out with a diesel generator until he got his house built, now he has solar and a bit of wind. He has a very nice power system. The system looks at the wire every second to see if there is any demand, and if there is it provide the full 2 or 3 KW. The rest of the time it doesn't waste its own power maintaining the level. He had a heck of a time tracking down all the stray hidden power drains - even an LED on some piece of equipment was enough to trigger the system to come on. I think he averages about 1.5 KWH per day, including the water well. He has wood heat.
Yep. I was too lazy to look up Li-ion battery data as well. If they are 3X better, then it's still 1000 lbs. of batteries. And looking back at my arithmetic, I may have swapped Kg for lb., which makes things 2.2 times worse. Let's see - lead-acid = 40 WH / Kg. We need 40000 WH => 1000 Kg (not lb), and we can't use the whole amount, only 1/3 = 3000 Kg. So it is 2.2 times worse. You'll need 3000 Kg of lead-acid or 1000 Kg of Li-ion batteries. Sorry 'bout that.:P
At 20c per KWH, $8 would be 40 KWH of electricity. I think I actually pay more like 10c, but never mind. Using lead-acid batteries to produce 40 KWH of electricity would require (... quickly delving into Wikipedia...) about 1000 lbs. of batteries, assuming you could pull ALL the electricity out, which you can't - more like 30%. So, 3000 lbs. of batteries.
OTOH, a smallish car engine would do fine. Funny how that works.
There was a union, but that was not the primary issue. In this environment managers don't have a lot of leeway, unions don't change work rules that easily - they fought hard to get them in the first place, and regulators are just doing their job. Multiple sets of rules just had to be followed - even the ones that were contradictory (it IS gov't work...) Let's see if I can list some of them. I don't recall the reason but there was a reason why overtime was not allowed on this job, which he'd been on for a year or so already. Note that some of this is my conclusions based on what I was told, and my own experience and learning. We always see on TV the handsome protagonist cutting through red tape and slow bureaucracies with the force of his personality, but that's just not the way it works 99.999% of the time.
- union work rules (which are contract terms that neither the union nor the employer can set aside "just this once")
- the general state and federal laws and regulations, including OSHA, environmental, wage and hour labor laws.
- federal contract laws and regulations. One of the most interesting of these is that federal contractors generally have to use union workers if applicable, and pay the "prevailing wage" (which is generally the highest wage in a given area, paid by the top-end companies).
- military contract rules, which apply to most defense projects
- security and other laws and rules that apply to working on machinery that drives some of the most top secret hardware on the planet
- insurance company rules and requirements that the contractor had to adhere to in order to be insured for the job
- nuclear safety regulations, which used to be stricter than those required for public utilities (I worked on some robotics for nuclear power plants - some, not all, of them are _really_ screwed up)
- military procedures, developed in advance to prevent every foreseeable problem and as many unforeseeable problems as possible. Observing that problem X can't happen here, so we don't have to do Y just doesn't cut it. And if the site manager, the contractor or the employee do take a short cut from the procedure, bad things WILL happen - loss of the contract, fines, demotions, liability in case anything (related or not) goes wrong, penalties and even jail time for violating military procedures.
So I can't say there's anyone in particular to blame, it's just the way things work out sometimes. This was an extreme case, but everyone was bound by the law and the other factors. In Utopia everyone involved closely could agree on the best way to do the job and just do it, but in reality we sometimes have to take the long, expensive boring route. It ain't nobody's fault (in this case.)
In at least a sense he/she's right - several Android makers do pay MS a license fee for every Android they ship. I don't recall if Dell is one of them.
Same reason we don't all use blackberries - some users or groups at DoD wanted other capabilities or just like Android or something, and they asked DISA to find or get something that was or could be certified.
Just a point of interest - one of the problems DoD has had for a long time (since early 1980s, from my own indirect experience) is that the time it takes to get through certification is generally longer than the modern device release cycles. Five to ten years is not uncommon. So for example, most of the chips used in most of the electronics in most of the DoD's planes, vehicles and tools have the capabilities and features of stuff that you gave to Goodwill five years ago. IIRC DoD funded some special fabs to continue making licensed copies of old chips, partly for security reasons but also because the original makers were not making those chips any more. And the same is true of entire units - radios based on 10 or 20 year old technology, for instance. I think it was in the early 1980s (as mentioned) that DoD started relaxing the requirements for the certification process, and allowing some makers to self-certify some of the stuff, just so DoD could use it before it was obsolete.
The government may or may not have to fulfill all those regulations, but they will have other employees doing that work. The contractor has to pay for that out of overhead, which must be included in the hourly rate for the contract.
Thanks. Nevertheless, it is a sad state of affairs. This is why business folks keep talking about the cost of regulations. Working for the guv is the extreme case.
Then you have to add additional costs for doing guvmint work - the paperwork shuffle is immense, plus the costs of meeting all of the regulations that cover whatever it is you're doing. And now you're getting into one of the extra costs - most companies don't bother to even try for guvmint jobs because it impacts everything you do, all your OTHER business. It essentially means that the government wants to know everything about your company, down to what kind of toilet paper you are using at home (OK, I'm exaggerating). Not only do you have to comply with the regulations, you have to prove you comply. And if you forget something, type a number wrong, etc. the government can and often will hound you and your company with audits and requests for information - indefinitely. They can come back 10 years later and take everything because you forgot to change the price of a widget soon enough back in the day, and maybe send you to jail.
Not only does all that increase the cost, and therefore the price, it also eliminates the competition. The only companies that are willing to jump through those hoops are the ones that - surprise!! - are tuned to being government contractors, who only compete with each other. And there is a level of comfort that goes both ways - governments LIKE to work with the gov't specialists - it gives them confidence that they won't get into trouble, get burned by a fly-by-nighter, etc. (Big companies do the same - they prefer to work with other big companies, big unions, and big government agencies.)
In the one semi-government contract I worked on, my company was hired by PRC, a so-called 'beltway bandit' that specializes in projects for local governments. We could not qualify for the job on our own - we didn't do gov't paperwork, we only made stuff and did projects. So the customer (Fairfax County VA) hired PRC to hire us. PRC paid us (IIRC) $1.5 million for the project, and billed the county (so I heard) $7 million. I don't recall every meeting or talking with a PRC employee after the contract was signed, but I wasn't in the loop so I can't say that was true of everyone in my company. We would have been perfectly happy working for the county directly, but the county preferred to pay PRC triple the cost.
No. When you are a paid employee, you pay 7.5% FICA and your employer pays 7.5% - it's a shuck so you don't know how much Social Security is actually costing. The cost to the employer to have you there is 15% total. When you are self-employed you have to pay the full 15% all by yourself.
You just reminded me of a guy I met on a plane a long time ago. He was a welder for a company that did nuke maintenance in Washington state on the nuclear subs as part of their periodic refit (the subs, as most military ships, have to be torn down quite a ways every so many years and have everything fixed and updated, including the nuclear power plants). He had to have some kind of high security clearance, and was a very high end welder so his pay rate was pretty high; then working on nuclear equipment involved a substantial pay differential. Safety rules and work rules meant that his work day was as follows: 1.5 hours going through several levels of decontamination and clothing changes; 1 hour of actual welding; 1.5 hours coming back out of the decon cycle, 1 hour lunch, 1.5 hours of decon to go back in, 1 hour of work, 1.5 hours of decon. The contractor was required to have the lunch break by state and federal law, and there is no way to eat lunch inside a nuclear hazmat suit. And federal work rules did not allow working more than eight hours. So he spent six hours per day changing clothes and two hours per day working, getting paid for eight, at (IIRC) triple time for nuke+hazard duty. I don't know that there's any other way to do this, but it's expensive. If they went to a 12 hour day then they could get four more hours of actual work, tripling actual work hours per day, but that was impossible. It was kind of frustrating all round for the contractor, the employee (the guy I talked to) and the military folks but nothing could be done. It's been a long time so I might have some details wrong but that's the gist.
As for your numbered points, some good, some interesting, ideas but never gonna happen.
As a former contractor/consultant (not for government but industry) with my own S-Corp at the time, I will say that a consultant has to charge double or more the hourly payroll rate compared to a full-time employee, in order to break even. The contractor has his/her/its own insurance, facilities, computers, support staff, networking costs, telephones, etc., various taxes (local property, sales and company income taxes, etc.), and has to pay for his own travel and both halves of FICA not just the 1/2 that employees pay. And the contractor gets zero paid vacations or holidays - so that cost has to be factored into the hourly rate.
Also, most consultants have to do about as many hours developing the business as working on the project - for one guy that means eight hours generating business, after working eight hours on code (or whatever). If it's more than a one-man shop, then just look at it as 'cost of sales' (standard term) - most businesses have a cost of sales between 45% and 55%. And it's hard for a contractor/consultant to actually bill a full eight hours per day, five days a week.
For another data point, when I worked at a large high tech company in Oregon, the fully-loaded cost of a software engineer was 2.5 times salary. Buildings and janitors cost money, as do mainframes and managers, etc.
So, when you really add up all the hidden costs of having someone working at a desk, double for contracting is not surprising. The standard rule for consultants is charge double the hourly rate you would want for salary. If you actually manage to work the full 2000+ hours per year, you'll almost break even.
This is too far. Those people were STARVING - very nearly the entire country, not just a few. The wheat crop had failed, for several years in a row (and the french refused to plant potatoes despite pleas from the king) There was no middle class at all, the serfs could be (and were regularly) run down in the streets by the aristocracy without any repercussions - it was much more like a slave society than a modern one. In the US, the welfare system provides not just a crust of bread but cable TV (at least in some states).
The system here is not perfect but it's a darn sight better than that. In fact the average person during the 'boom' of the Roaring 20s had it worse than almost anybody in the US today, not to mention the depression (which is now seen in large part as having been kept going by the good intentions but bad policies of Roosevelt). When you have sold all your electronics, your clothes and your furniture in order to buy food, and are living in a makeshift tent down by the river because you could not pay the rent, you will still be better off than 20% to 30% of the people in the US during the Depression.
This government is not perfect but it's among the least 'bought and paid for' in history, even today. Try Indonesia 20 years ago, or Libya until recently - in both countries a single extended family owned as much as 90% of the assets. Or most any African country, or China - in China they didn't even have to buy and pay for it - the military and its friends own nearly all the big businesses.
I agree that corporations AND other institutions have been allowed to get too big, and the laws have been skewed (in the name of efficiency) to favor large corporations, large unions, large governmental agencies, all to the detriment of the smaller institutions, the states, communities, small business and people. But comparison with pre-revolutionary France is just the drugs talking.
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That's a machine patent, not a software patent, so I don't count your citation as relevant. IIRC the first software-related patent was to Honeywell, for a building HVAC system that included software control, in the 1970s. At that time a physical system that included software as part of the control structure was first considered patentable. But pure software was still considered algorithmic, and algorithms were math, which is discovered, not patented. IIRC the change came in 1986 but I don't recall the details. But I do recall maintaining our company's software as a trade secret, with copyright as unpublished work. Patents were not possible.
Had software patents been allowed, such things as virtual memory and various fundamental aspects of operating systems and compilers would have been patentable. To my mind, one of the overriding arguments to void software patents was the sheer unfairness to those who built such a great structure and received no royalties, for over 30 years before software patents were allowed.
In those early days, lack of patents encouraged a lot of free sharing of new ideas, new research compounded on each others' research, and a recognition system based on respect rather than fees. There was some secrecy maintained for some particular ideas, but because of the way that software was distributed (almost entirely in source form), those secrets had a short lifetime once they were put into the commercial ecosystem. Even after patents were formally allowed, many invaluable advances that nowadays would be patented (to the detriment of everyone), such as the WWW itself, were not patented because for us in the business it just "wasn't done". IMHO the very success of the Internet rests on that shared contribution, going back to MIT and other universities and companies in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, working together without expectation of patent protection but expectation of either academic success or shared business success on a flat playing field, to build something bigger than any of the participants. Lack of patent walls greatly accelerated the network effect.
Ah yes - my grandmother's family invested heavily in the Trans Siberian Railrway - evidently most of their life savings. When the Bolsheviks repudiated those bonds, it changed my ancestor's lives, not for the better.
Funny thing, you're right. I never really knew what that other stuff tasted like. Dead beetles is about right on - or at least so I imagine, never having eaten a dead beetle (to my knowledge). Also, you can buy maple-flavored sausages but they are not the same, they're just bad-tasting sausage. Real Maple Syrup FTW. I'd be interested in comparing Canadian to Vermont though. I guess that's going on my list of things to do.
If I understand correctly, the Russians, Americans, Japanese, and several other nations agreed a long time ago on a common docking mechanism so that everyone's vehicles could dock with each other. This is a major advantage for international cooperation. Since so many nations use the same system, I assume that this is not a top secret design. Did the Chinese use the same mechanism, or are they standard a new competing-standards problem? I hope not the latter. It would really suck for all future space vehicle interactions to be subject to screwy adapters - especially when lives may be in immediate danger. IMHO the real test of Chinese docking would be to dock successfully with the USS.
I like to believe that the essential 'differentness' of space will quickly mean that the folks who are working in space will feel more cooperative and protective toward fellow space travelers than the groundlings below them. This will encourage more cooperation between teams in different orbital stations than the sponsoring nations might prefer. Geopolitics may affect space for a while, but I think in the long term the conflicts will be more about space folks needing less control from their terran sponsors. But maybe I read too many old SF stories with that thesis.
Nope, it's much older - IIRC from the late 1960s or early 1970s. But Jobs, more than most, followed that precept - and it's worked out OK so far.
A long time ago somebody wise said that the long term success of every tech company depends on building your own competition. If you don't create the product that out-competes your cash cow, someone else will. Instead of trying to defend their little castle of Ads, Google must try to come up with products that make the ad revenue model obsolete, because a lot of other companies are trying to do that very thing. Google must continuously re-invent itself every couple of years from now on, or fall behind.
One of the fun things about tech markets is that you must essentially always be in that near-panic flop sweat to figure out how to get to the next step before your most recent success turns old and fails. And the more successful that success was, the harder others are working to turn it to failure. How's that song go? "What have you done for me lately?" That's the customer's refrain.
I replied to the child - I don't know if you get notified about that, so it might be interesting.
Most of these were originally designed under the AEC, before it was split into two groups, one of which was NRC. Prior to that promotion of nuclear power, bomb making and regulation were all under one umbrella. The conflict of interest - promoting vs. regulating - was the reason to split them up.
The machine vs. building issue was a world view thing. The French did it right, we did it wrong.
Also, when most of these reactors were designed, the AEC assumption was that a nuke plant would last 20-30 years, then we'd fill it with concrete and leave it for 10,000 years. Not very forward-thinking, but that was the plan. Then in the 1970s the utilities realized that since they couldn't keep building them, they'd actually have to maintain them. So for about 15 years they used a method based on day labor - bring in guys to work for two days and pay them a lot, they'd have a lifetime dose, and they could never work on a nuke again. By 1990 or thereabouts, that was no longer going to work - hence the need for a robotic system, for which my controller design was going to be used. I left the company toward the end of the fab process, but I believe that the system was in use for a number of years after that, and maybe still.
The interesting bit is that the water used in the steam generator cycle is so pure that it eats stainless steel. So the inches-thick SS tubes gradually get eaten away and have to be cut out and replaced, about every 20 years.
People have largely forgotten the 'killer fog' of London, 1952. The combination of an inversion, humidity and coal-fired home heaters made for a 'fog' (we now call smog) that killed IIRC 1200 people.
And coal dust explosions are infamous - they are a type of fuel-air explosion. I suppose that coal dust could be used anywhere that the combination diesel-ammonium nitrate explosives could be used. See also Minor Scale.
I worked on the control system for a nuclear plant maintenance robotic system back in 1990 (actually the controller was based on my design :) ). I learned something interesting about the nuclear power industry. The short version is - in France, nuclear power plants were considered machines, like airplanes. They were constructed and maintained like machines - they were all basically alike (in a given generation), and the differences were only in details of siting, etc. So each new one was just like the previous one, so everyone concerned knew pretty much how to avoid common problems like piping layout. And when a problem showed up in one, it would be fixed in all of them, much like FAA requires a problem in one 747 to be dealt with in every similar plane. (The paperwork for each 747, back when it was actual paper, weighed a significant fraction of the actual plane.)
In the US, these plants were considered buildings, and were designed (mostly in the 1960s and early 1970s) by architects (using components, but put together in different ways). So every facility is different. The architects generally weren't familiar in advance so had to learn while designing. As a result, many plants have things like pipes that go through a walkway at waist high, so the workers have to climb over or under it, and pipes that had to be re-routed on-site (often halting construction for a period of time) because they collided with another one in the design. (These were all designed before modern CAD systems had the capability to catch that.) And, because they are all different, a problem in one may or may not be found in any other, so there's no easy way to pro-actively fix problems that are found in one plant, because the design may not match in the correct way.
In an earlier job we were reviewing nuclear plant construction drawings with regard to the possibility of scanning them and generating CAD models. We found that the drawings in question were the worst engineering drawings we'd ever seen. They were essentially done without design rules, with multiple system layers all on one drawing - everything from concrete footers to electrical to plumbing all on one drawing, with pieces actually cut out and replaced by a redrawn section! I can't say that all plants were like this, but certainly this one was. It was unreadable by humans, much less computer scanners.
The plants we were working with also had radically different cleanliness standards - they are all run by independent companies, with different rules and traditions. One plant was so clean that the whole radon-in-houses problem was identified when a worker set off the radiation detectors going IN to the plant. The interior radiation level was maintained substantially lower than the ambient in the area - the place made 'hospital clean' look like a swamp. Others, based on what we heard, were more like that guy down the street with the cars in his yard.
I know someone who lives off the grid, on 60 acres. He started out with a diesel generator until he got his house built, now he has solar and a bit of wind. He has a very nice power system. The system looks at the wire every second to see if there is any demand, and if there is it provide the full 2 or 3 KW. The rest of the time it doesn't waste its own power maintaining the level. He had a heck of a time tracking down all the stray hidden power drains - even an LED on some piece of equipment was enough to trigger the system to come on. I think he averages about 1.5 KWH per day, including the water well. He has wood heat.
Yep. I was too lazy to look up Li-ion battery data as well. If they are 3X better, then it's still 1000 lbs. of batteries. And looking back at my arithmetic, I may have swapped Kg for lb., which makes things 2.2 times worse. Let's see - lead-acid = 40 WH / Kg. We need 40000 WH => 1000 Kg (not lb), and we can't use the whole amount, only 1/3 = 3000 Kg. So it is 2.2 times worse. You'll need 3000 Kg of lead-acid or 1000 Kg of Li-ion batteries. Sorry 'bout that. :P
At 20c per KWH, $8 would be 40 KWH of electricity. I think I actually pay more like 10c, but never mind. Using lead-acid batteries to produce 40 KWH of electricity would require (... quickly delving into Wikipedia ...) about 1000 lbs. of batteries, assuming you could pull ALL the electricity out, which you can't - more like 30%. So, 3000 lbs. of batteries.
OTOH, a smallish car engine would do fine. Funny how that works.
That thing looks like the original saucer-shaped predecessor of the Moller SkyCar might look without the body.
There was a union, but that was not the primary issue. In this environment managers don't have a lot of leeway, unions don't change work rules that easily - they fought hard to get them in the first place, and regulators are just doing their job. Multiple sets of rules just had to be followed - even the ones that were contradictory (it IS gov't work...) Let's see if I can list some of them. I don't recall the reason but there was a reason why overtime was not allowed on this job, which he'd been on for a year or so already. Note that some of this is my conclusions based on what I was told, and my own experience and learning. We always see on TV the handsome protagonist cutting through red tape and slow bureaucracies with the force of his personality, but that's just not the way it works 99.999% of the time.
- union work rules (which are contract terms that neither the union nor the employer can set aside "just this once")
- the general state and federal laws and regulations, including OSHA, environmental, wage and hour labor laws.
- federal contract laws and regulations. One of the most interesting of these is that federal contractors generally have to use union workers if applicable, and pay the "prevailing wage" (which is generally the highest wage in a given area, paid by the top-end companies).
- military contract rules, which apply to most defense projects
- security and other laws and rules that apply to working on machinery that drives some of the most top secret hardware on the planet
- insurance company rules and requirements that the contractor had to adhere to in order to be insured for the job
- nuclear safety regulations, which used to be stricter than those required for public utilities (I worked on some robotics for nuclear power plants - some, not all, of them are _really_ screwed up)
- military procedures, developed in advance to prevent every foreseeable problem and as many unforeseeable problems as possible. Observing that problem X can't happen here, so we don't have to do Y just doesn't cut it. And if the site manager, the contractor or the employee do take a short cut from the procedure, bad things WILL happen - loss of the contract, fines, demotions, liability in case anything (related or not) goes wrong, penalties and even jail time for violating military procedures.
So I can't say there's anyone in particular to blame, it's just the way things work out sometimes. This was an extreme case, but everyone was bound by the law and the other factors. In Utopia everyone involved closely could agree on the best way to do the job and just do it, but in reality we sometimes have to take the long, expensive boring route. It ain't nobody's fault (in this case.)
In at least a sense he/she's right - several Android makers do pay MS a license fee for every Android they ship. I don't recall if Dell is one of them.
Same reason we don't all use blackberries - some users or groups at DoD wanted other capabilities or just like Android or something, and they asked DISA to find or get something that was or could be certified.
Just a point of interest - one of the problems DoD has had for a long time (since early 1980s, from my own indirect experience) is that the time it takes to get through certification is generally longer than the modern device release cycles. Five to ten years is not uncommon. So for example, most of the chips used in most of the electronics in most of the DoD's planes, vehicles and tools have the capabilities and features of stuff that you gave to Goodwill five years ago. IIRC DoD funded some special fabs to continue making licensed copies of old chips, partly for security reasons but also because the original makers were not making those chips any more. And the same is true of entire units - radios based on 10 or 20 year old technology, for instance. I think it was in the early 1980s (as mentioned) that DoD started relaxing the requirements for the certification process, and allowing some makers to self-certify some of the stuff, just so DoD could use it before it was obsolete.
+1 :D
The government may or may not have to fulfill all those regulations, but they will have other employees doing that work. The contractor has to pay for that out of overhead, which must be included in the hourly rate for the contract.
Thanks. Nevertheless, it is a sad state of affairs. This is why business folks keep talking about the cost of regulations. Working for the guv is the extreme case.
Then you have to add additional costs for doing guvmint work - the paperwork shuffle is immense, plus the costs of meeting all of the regulations that cover whatever it is you're doing. And now you're getting into one of the extra costs - most companies don't bother to even try for guvmint jobs because it impacts everything you do, all your OTHER business. It essentially means that the government wants to know everything about your company, down to what kind of toilet paper you are using at home (OK, I'm exaggerating). Not only do you have to comply with the regulations, you have to prove you comply. And if you forget something, type a number wrong, etc. the government can and often will hound you and your company with audits and requests for information - indefinitely. They can come back 10 years later and take everything because you forgot to change the price of a widget soon enough back in the day, and maybe send you to jail.
Not only does all that increase the cost, and therefore the price, it also eliminates the competition. The only companies that are willing to jump through those hoops are the ones that - surprise!! - are tuned to being government contractors, who only compete with each other. And there is a level of comfort that goes both ways - governments LIKE to work with the gov't specialists - it gives them confidence that they won't get into trouble, get burned by a fly-by-nighter, etc. (Big companies do the same - they prefer to work with other big companies, big unions, and big government agencies.)
In the one semi-government contract I worked on, my company was hired by PRC, a so-called 'beltway bandit' that specializes in projects for local governments. We could not qualify for the job on our own - we didn't do gov't paperwork, we only made stuff and did projects. So the customer (Fairfax County VA) hired PRC to hire us. PRC paid us (IIRC) $1.5 million for the project, and billed the county (so I heard) $7 million. I don't recall every meeting or talking with a PRC employee after the contract was signed, but I wasn't in the loop so I can't say that was true of everyone in my company. We would have been perfectly happy working for the county directly, but the county preferred to pay PRC triple the cost.
No. When you are a paid employee, you pay 7.5% FICA and your employer pays 7.5% - it's a shuck so you don't know how much Social Security is actually costing. The cost to the employer to have you there is 15% total. When you are self-employed you have to pay the full 15% all by yourself.
You just reminded me of a guy I met on a plane a long time ago. He was a welder for a company that did nuke maintenance in Washington state on the nuclear subs as part of their periodic refit (the subs, as most military ships, have to be torn down quite a ways every so many years and have everything fixed and updated, including the nuclear power plants). He had to have some kind of high security clearance, and was a very high end welder so his pay rate was pretty high; then working on nuclear equipment involved a substantial pay differential. Safety rules and work rules meant that his work day was as follows: 1.5 hours going through several levels of decontamination and clothing changes; 1 hour of actual welding; 1.5 hours coming back out of the decon cycle, 1 hour lunch, 1.5 hours of decon to go back in, 1 hour of work, 1.5 hours of decon. The contractor was required to have the lunch break by state and federal law, and there is no way to eat lunch inside a nuclear hazmat suit. And federal work rules did not allow working more than eight hours. So he spent six hours per day changing clothes and two hours per day working, getting paid for eight, at (IIRC) triple time for nuke+hazard duty. I don't know that there's any other way to do this, but it's expensive. If they went to a 12 hour day then they could get four more hours of actual work, tripling actual work hours per day, but that was impossible. It was kind of frustrating all round for the contractor, the employee (the guy I talked to) and the military folks but nothing could be done. It's been a long time so I might have some details wrong but that's the gist.
As for your numbered points, some good, some interesting, ideas but never gonna happen.
As a former contractor/consultant (not for government but industry) with my own S-Corp at the time, I will say that a consultant has to charge double or more the hourly payroll rate compared to a full-time employee, in order to break even. The contractor has his/her/its own insurance, facilities, computers, support staff, networking costs, telephones, etc., various taxes (local property, sales and company income taxes, etc.), and has to pay for his own travel and both halves of FICA not just the 1/2 that employees pay. And the contractor gets zero paid vacations or holidays - so that cost has to be factored into the hourly rate.
Also, most consultants have to do about as many hours developing the business as working on the project - for one guy that means eight hours generating business, after working eight hours on code (or whatever). If it's more than a one-man shop, then just look at it as 'cost of sales' (standard term) - most businesses have a cost of sales between 45% and 55%. And it's hard for a contractor/consultant to actually bill a full eight hours per day, five days a week.
For another data point, when I worked at a large high tech company in Oregon, the fully-loaded cost of a software engineer was 2.5 times salary. Buildings and janitors cost money, as do mainframes and managers, etc.
So, when you really add up all the hidden costs of having someone working at a desk, double for contracting is not surprising. The standard rule for consultants is charge double the hourly rate you would want for salary. If you actually manage to work the full 2000+ hours per year, you'll almost break even.
Ever hear of the French Revolution?
This is too far. Those people were STARVING - very nearly the entire country, not just a few. The wheat crop had failed, for several years in a row (and the french refused to plant potatoes despite pleas from the king) There was no middle class at all, the serfs could be (and were regularly) run down in the streets by the aristocracy without any repercussions - it was much more like a slave society than a modern one. In the US, the welfare system provides not just a crust of bread but cable TV (at least in some states).
The system here is not perfect but it's a darn sight better than that. In fact the average person during the 'boom' of the Roaring 20s had it worse than almost anybody in the US today, not to mention the depression (which is now seen in large part as having been kept going by the good intentions but bad policies of Roosevelt). When you have sold all your electronics, your clothes and your furniture in order to buy food, and are living in a makeshift tent down by the river because you could not pay the rent, you will still be better off than 20% to 30% of the people in the US during the Depression.
This government is not perfect but it's among the least 'bought and paid for' in history, even today. Try Indonesia 20 years ago, or Libya until recently - in both countries a single extended family owned as much as 90% of the assets. Or most any African country, or China - in China they didn't even have to buy and pay for it - the military and its friends own nearly all the big businesses.
I agree that corporations AND other institutions have been allowed to get too big, and the laws have been skewed (in the name of efficiency) to favor large corporations, large unions, large governmental agencies, all to the detriment of the smaller institutions, the states, communities, small business and people. But comparison with pre-revolutionary France is just the drugs talking.