She tried to address this in the (public consumption) press conference. Apparently there isn't enough phosphorus left in the medium to explain the growth they see. (like physically counting all of the phosphorus atoms you need and there isn't enough to go around. So "de-arsenating" doesn't cover it.
It is bigger than that. Firstly, arsenic is more reactive and as such the backbone of the DNA would be very unstable. That's a huge problem - how did this organism solve it? That could be a second Nobel prize right there.
Also, although adenosine will bind arsenate to make an arsenic based AMP analog (AMA?), it is the final phosphate from ATP that gets bound in the backbone. You have to have lots of machinery altered to get ATP built with arsenate on the terminus and transport that arsenate enzymaticly into the growing DNA chain. It's been about 25 years since I did biochemistry, but there's about a hundred "holy crap" things about this discovery. Each of those little pieces of the discovery will get you the cover of Science or Nature if you unlock it. Really, this is a super-cool finding. Short of putting ET on the dais I don't know what would be more shocking.
That's nearly 10x your figure for New York City. 24 million customers in a tight, high-rise apartment configuration. Easy to see how infrastructure costs could be lower in an area like that. Heck, if the average family is 4 people and you only get 10% subscription rates, you'd still have lower per customer costs than Los Angeles at 100% subscription rates.
I think it's typically assumed that if you know how to program, you ought to be able to interact with a standard relational database. There's almost no prospects out there for someone who does SQL and nothing else...
They actually have titles and everything. They are called DBA around my shop. The good ones are like old-school unix guys who wax poetic about their favorite shell script and kernel optimizations.
If you are a PHP or other front end developer who creates SQL to power it, you are very, very likely not a SQL master. A good programmer with experience can create SQL databases and queries that work well. His code will be amateurish and inefficient to a good DBA. They do the same thing OS programmers do, delving into the deep inner-workings of the database engine to find all the little tricks, optimizations and security gotchas.
Good DBAs tend to be more math oriented personalities than the larger developer population. Probably because they have to live in a world dominated by set theory and complex logic.
BTW, if your experience with DBAs is a bunch of Microsoft Certified Professionals who are proud that they can create a stored procedure to fill a ticket - then you haven't been working with a good DBA. Those guys are the equivalent of the "web developer" who can use the GUI development environment to put a couple of forms together. A good DBA will take that query that you spent two days optimizing to get from 15 minute run times to 2 minute run times and get your results in milliseconds. Often the optimizations they make won't even seem logical to the untrained - until you watch how much faster they run. They are able to do this because they've spent years focusing on one platform.
Still don't buy it? Ok, a quick example. One of my analysts was faced with a set of tasks that was taking too long and causing application timeouts. These tasks involved importing and parsing millions of rows and then joining to many tables of tens or hundreds of millions of rows in a highly transactional environment. After banging his head against the limitations of the database engine for a week or so, he finally decided that he needed to expand the functionality of the engine. So he added a couple of customization DLL's to the engine (written in C#) to add two new commands with the features he needed. He was able to get an already well-optimized run time of two minutes down to about 35 milliseconds. Oh, and my team is already finding lots of other places to use the new features he added, knocking a few percent off of the CPU load on the server and improving response times.
I'm changing my baseless speculation from US launch to jet airliner optical illusion. Others have said it better, but if you look at the video with "am I looking at a highly zoomed view of a jet contrail?" in mind, you might just see a jet instead of a rocket.
I'm going to change my vote. I still stand by the "it ain't a threat" conclusion based on the military non-reaction. But having finally had an opportunity to re-watch the video, I'm now going with jet con-trail. Others made a better case for it, so I'll let their arguments speak for the jet version.
NORAD says "We can confirm that there is no threat to our nation, and from all indications this was not a launch by a foreign military,"
These are the "push the button" guys. They would know if it was a foreign shot. I'd guess it was some military test or CIA spy satellite and they haven't given the press relations guys the cover story yet. But one thing's for sure, it ain't China or Russia. These countries are fully aware of where the lines are drawn, and launching an ICBM 35 miles off the coast is way, way over the line. You won't see a US sub pulling up outside Shanghai and launching a missile. It is way too dangerous to the peace. None of these countries are run by cowboys or rubes, despite the best efforts of our leaders to appear otherwise.
Given the possibility of this being a "secret military missile", or it being just an aircraft contrail that someone mistook for a missile, which do you think is more likely?
I take it you didn't watch the video. It is clearly a rather large rocket, clearly on a trajectory headed for at least space, perhaps orbit. Because the thing was launched so close to US military bases and US population centers, I discount the notion that it could be a foreign launch (based on the fact that we haven't gone to Def-Con 1 or whatever they call it these days). It is also retrograde in orientation, which means it isn't likely a civilian launch (from a company like Sea Launch). Therefore I would suppose that it is indeed a US military launch. Probably some anti-ballistic missile test over the south pacific. Just because the spokesman at the local Navy office didn't have the answer doesn't mean that "the military" doesn't know what it is. If they really didn't know what it was, there'd be fighter jets scrambling all over the place and an announcement from the oval office to follow. Because it got a big "meh" from the military, I'd say it's ours...
Going 120 mph max with a 0-60 in roughly 4 seconds certainly isn't the performance envelope of a golf cart.
This is true, but after driving a roadster one of the ways I described the experience was that it was like driving the world's fastest golf cart. The mindblowingly instantaneous acceleration is only encountered in an electric, and the foot-off-accelerator instantaneous deceleration of the electric takes some getting used to. Take your foot off the "gas" in a Tesla and you don't coast like you do in a 4-door sedan, you decelerate fairly hard. All-in-all I highly recommend taking the Tesla for a spin. It will induce giggles like a carnival ride.
I may be wrong, but I blamed this on the "Lost" phenomenon. With everyone and his brother pretending that inserting something random into the story was deep and insightful, they thought that it would work for them. The "there's a deeper conspiracy" idea works well, but you have to actually have a deeper conspiracy in mind at the start and stick with it. The good series know the ending before they start. The bad ones just have a single cool idea and then flail around once they've given you the single cool idea. BSG was good because it had a defined story arc in mind - love or hate the ending, at least they had one.
The first season of Heroes was entertaining because they had a formula of slowly revealing special powers and slowly revealing a series of machinations that would lead to the destruction of New York. Once that fate was averted, they just kept piling on powers and conspiracies. After a while they got stuck, so they used a fiat to take away everyone's powers. Then they could start all over with the formula. But it was too late. They had lost the original charm and lost their audience. By the end it just looked like they were throwing stuff against the wall to see what stuck. (Oooh, look! Spooky carnival!)
Really? We are having the "my pro wrestling isn't as stupid as your pro wrestling" argument? On Slashdot? Can't we just agree that it is all stupid enough that there is no need to draw a distinction in stupidity?
Actually, I'd imagine it would take a ton of energy to push something through water
The smart way to do it is not to push the metal through the water, but to get the water moving by pumping it around. It'll then carry the barges / vehicles without any particular fanfare. When you pump water continuously from one end of a canal system to the other (which can of course be directly adjacent to one another, and for transport purposes, incorporate locks so as to make the entire system continuous), the entire canal will move continuously. Anything floating on the canal will move as well, no extra charge.
Hey, that's brilliant. Instead of moving a few hundred tons of barge through the water and deal with losses from turbulence around the few tens of meters of barge, move billions of tons of water through a canal, dealing with losses from turbulence along the hundreds of miles of the canal and support plumbing. That should be way more efficient!
Ok, maybe that was a little too snarky. Sorry about that.... Still a dumb idea, but sorry for the over-snarkage.
Want to see rail done quick, on the cheap, with good results in a large country that's sparsely populated (on average)? Look at how the USSR did it.
Ok, I'll play.
First, you have to completely control your population. All monies must flow through the state.
Next, you must restrict all production to state-approved items. Be sure to restrict automobile production to low numbers of very low quality vehicles (Trabant).
Next, you control where people may live and work. This ensures that your rail line is properly aligned with your population demands.
Finally, you mandate the building of your railroad. You can do this without regard to cost-effectiveness or efficiency because of everything you accomplished in the other steps.
Maybe it is just me, but somehow I just don't see the Soviet model for building a railroad as having much application in the United States.
Henry Waxman won't allow it unless it's carbon negative
Well, if true that is just staggeringly stupid. It would be utterly impossible to make a hydrocarbon based fuel in a carbon negative way. You could get to carbon neutral, that's the theoretical maximum. Unless of course you wanted to pump it into the ground after you made it. Other than burying it in the ground, there is no such thing as a carbon-negative fuel.
I suppose you could posit a synthesis that tosses off inert carbon compounds as a side-effect, say calcium carbonate. But you would never design such a reaction because it would be inherently wasteful (and therefore more costly).
For more "through the looking glass" reporting from North Korea, try the Vice Guide. Similar to Lisa Ling's reporting, but with a more bizarre bent. One must see on the insanity of the regime is the museum of "tribute" from foreign leaders. They've collected all of the stupid little chachkies that various diplomats brought from around the world - plates with state seals, porcelain stuff from the gift shop, whatever - and placed them in a huge under-ground bunker museum. The official position is that these are items of tribute from every leader around the world who recognize that "Dear Leader" is the greatest leader and North Korea is the greatest country. Really.
For more reporting on the opaque world that is North Korea, I recommend the Vice Guide to North Korea. Similar to the reporting in the article, this is a hand-held digital camera video documentary done without government approval, but told by a westerner with only officially approved access. Even so, he manages to convey some of the desolation that is the communist dictatorship. The presentation put on by his hosts in hopes of showing off the might of the North Korean state fully supports the reputation they've earned of being "crazy".
Actually, the "drag over" sensor on your laptop is susceptible to gel fakes. The did this on Mythbusters. The scanner was even susceptible to the impressively sophisticated "paper photocopy" method....
You are conflating the stimulus bill with TARP. Last I read, somewhat over half of the stimulus has been spent. Recovery.gov (the official tracking site for the stimulus) says 91% has been made available. So you can go with my vague recollection of something I read "a while back", or go with the Fed's 91%. None of the money has been or is ever intended to be returned.
The TARP money as well as the GM/Chrysler bailout money was intended to be at least partially recoverable. According to these guys the TARP is winding down and will end up netting a loss of $100 billion. If you believe the completely unbiased and disinterested reporting here the net of all of the bailouts and TARP will eventually be a $30 billion loss for taxpayers. (of course that estimate excludes the $30 billion confiscated from GM's creditors and the loss of all shareholder equity and any other externalized costs).
Since you mention backup to the cloud - does anyone have experience with cloud backup? I'm using a service from Terramark at work that is semi-reasonably priced for corporate services, but out of reach for the home.
At home I'm trying Carbonite, but there is a feature that I really don't like. The backup service from Carbonite only stores copies of files currently on your hard drive. If you delete a file, it goes away on the backup within two weeks. So if I screw up and delete something important and it takes me a couple of months to realize it - well, too bad. I don't know about you, but I've seen plenty of situations where something got deleted and it wasn't noticed for a long time.
Anyone have a suggestion for a better online backup service?
I had a fully redundant SAN go TU because of a bug in a redundant controller. One controller needed a new battery; on re installation of the controller an entire shelf died. Instantly. Ouch! Still, no problem at that point, because we set up our LUNs to stripe vertically across the shelves - so we could lose a shelf and not go down. That's when the controller started issuing wonky commands and corrupted the rest of the array. Wham, 64 spindles offline in less than a minute. Yeah, that was a great day...
So the lesson is, redundancy is to prevent you from needing a backup. Backups are for when that didn't work.
Raw size does matter here. A larger receptor is better.
Which explains why the small dishes now do similar things that the old big ones did?
Or it could have something to do with the wavelength of the radio signal being received. Longer wavelengths require larger receivers. For an example compare your eyes (wavelengths measured in angstroms) with a radio telescope (wavelength measured in meters). (of course, power and efficiency also enter into it, but the bigger factor at play is the wavelength)
Having been an engineer and entrepreneur, I can say that building a company IS as exciting and interesting as building a product.
Seconded. Also seconded is the notion that it is not nearly as easy to get your ideas implemented in a company as it is in technology. Once an organization reaches a certain size it takes on a completely different dynamic and every problem has to be re-solved. Actually, this happens at several growth points, so there is always something challenging to solve.
Managing a single person consulting business is different from managing a 10 man group. Which is different from 50 people. Another big leap happens around 100-150... then you start acting like a big bureaucracy as you near 500. So all along the way there is new and different problems to solve. I'm sure that running General Electric is even more different and challenging - but I've never run a group that big.
Actually, I find that the definition of "middle class" is "roughly what I make". Everyone from $18k per year to $180k per year thinks they are middle class. Heck, most people who earn millions only do so for a very, very brief time (athletes or musicians with a career measured in single digit years, entrepreneurs selling a business realizing all of the gain in a single year, etc.) - so they can still consider themselves middle class the rest of the time. Once you retire you are on a "fixed income" so you aren't going to consider yourself wealthy even if you are sitting on a mountain of wealth (or in the case of public employees a huge pension).
No, in the US, pretty much everyone is middle class.
Slashdot Mirror
She tried to address this in the (public consumption) press conference. Apparently there isn't enough phosphorus left in the medium to explain the growth they see. (like physically counting all of the phosphorus atoms you need and there isn't enough to go around. So "de-arsenating" doesn't cover it.
It is bigger than that. Firstly, arsenic is more reactive and as such the backbone of the DNA would be very unstable. That's a huge problem - how did this organism solve it? That could be a second Nobel prize right there.
Also, although adenosine will bind arsenate to make an arsenic based AMP analog (AMA?), it is the final phosphate from ATP that gets bound in the backbone. You have to have lots of machinery altered to get ATP built with arsenate on the terminus and transport that arsenate enzymaticly into the growing DNA chain. It's been about 25 years since I did biochemistry, but there's about a hundred "holy crap" things about this discovery. Each of those little pieces of the discovery will get you the cover of Science or Nature if you unlock it. Really, this is a super-cool finding. Short of putting ET on the dais I don't know what would be more shocking.
You mean like South Korea? Population density: 1,271/sq mi
Los Angeles County: 2,427/sq mi
New York City: 5,435.7/sq mi
Why are our cities, with double or even quadruple the density, still stuck with speeds two orders of magnitude slower with higher costs?
Why are you comparing a country with a city? Half the people in Korea live in Seoul. Population Density: 44,775.7/sq mi
That's nearly 10x your figure for New York City. 24 million customers in a tight, high-rise apartment configuration. Easy to see how infrastructure costs could be lower in an area like that. Heck, if the average family is 4 people and you only get 10% subscription rates, you'd still have lower per customer costs than Los Angeles at 100% subscription rates.
I think it's typically assumed that if you know how to program, you ought to be able to interact with a standard relational database. There's almost no prospects out there for someone who does SQL and nothing else...
They actually have titles and everything. They are called DBA around my shop. The good ones are like old-school unix guys who wax poetic about their favorite shell script and kernel optimizations.
If you are a PHP or other front end developer who creates SQL to power it, you are very, very likely not a SQL master. A good programmer with experience can create SQL databases and queries that work well. His code will be amateurish and inefficient to a good DBA. They do the same thing OS programmers do, delving into the deep inner-workings of the database engine to find all the little tricks, optimizations and security gotchas.
Good DBAs tend to be more math oriented personalities than the larger developer population. Probably because they have to live in a world dominated by set theory and complex logic.
BTW, if your experience with DBAs is a bunch of Microsoft Certified Professionals who are proud that they can create a stored procedure to fill a ticket - then you haven't been working with a good DBA. Those guys are the equivalent of the "web developer" who can use the GUI development environment to put a couple of forms together. A good DBA will take that query that you spent two days optimizing to get from 15 minute run times to 2 minute run times and get your results in milliseconds. Often the optimizations they make won't even seem logical to the untrained - until you watch how much faster they run. They are able to do this because they've spent years focusing on one platform.
Still don't buy it? Ok, a quick example. One of my analysts was faced with a set of tasks that was taking too long and causing application timeouts. These tasks involved importing and parsing millions of rows and then joining to many tables of tens or hundreds of millions of rows in a highly transactional environment. After banging his head against the limitations of the database engine for a week or so, he finally decided that he needed to expand the functionality of the engine. So he added a couple of customization DLL's to the engine (written in C#) to add two new commands with the features he needed. He was able to get an already well-optimized run time of two minutes down to about 35 milliseconds. Oh, and my team is already finding lots of other places to use the new features he added, knocking a few percent off of the CPU load on the server and improving response times.
And yet even then, we had porn....
it took all night to get a single picture, but we had porn!
And compressed audio too - remember ST-Mod files?
I'm changing my baseless speculation from US launch to jet airliner optical illusion. Others have said it better, but if you look at the video with "am I looking at a highly zoomed view of a jet contrail?" in mind, you might just see a jet instead of a rocket.
I'm going to change my vote. I still stand by the "it ain't a threat" conclusion based on the military non-reaction. But having finally had an opportunity to re-watch the video, I'm now going with jet con-trail. Others made a better case for it, so I'll let their arguments speak for the jet version.
NORAD says "We can confirm that there is no threat to our nation, and from all indications this was not a launch by a foreign military,"
These are the "push the button" guys. They would know if it was a foreign shot. I'd guess it was some military test or CIA spy satellite and they haven't given the press relations guys the cover story yet. But one thing's for sure, it ain't China or Russia. These countries are fully aware of where the lines are drawn, and launching an ICBM 35 miles off the coast is way, way over the line. You won't see a US sub pulling up outside Shanghai and launching a missile. It is way too dangerous to the peace. None of these countries are run by cowboys or rubes, despite the best efforts of our leaders to appear otherwise.
Given the possibility of this being a "secret military missile", or it being just an aircraft contrail that someone mistook for a missile, which do you think is more likely?
I take it you didn't watch the video. It is clearly a rather large rocket, clearly on a trajectory headed for at least space, perhaps orbit. Because the thing was launched so close to US military bases and US population centers, I discount the notion that it could be a foreign launch (based on the fact that we haven't gone to Def-Con 1 or whatever they call it these days). It is also retrograde in orientation, which means it isn't likely a civilian launch (from a company like Sea Launch). Therefore I would suppose that it is indeed a US military launch. Probably some anti-ballistic missile test over the south pacific. Just because the spokesman at the local Navy office didn't have the answer doesn't mean that "the military" doesn't know what it is. If they really didn't know what it was, there'd be fighter jets scrambling all over the place and an announcement from the oval office to follow. Because it got a big "meh" from the military, I'd say it's ours...
They have a special bundle that includes the T-Hub, T-Box and T-Touch all in a velveteen container. They call it the T-Bag.
Going 120 mph max with a 0-60 in roughly 4 seconds certainly isn't the performance envelope of a golf cart.
This is true, but after driving a roadster one of the ways I described the experience was that it was like driving the world's fastest golf cart. The mindblowingly instantaneous acceleration is only encountered in an electric, and the foot-off-accelerator instantaneous deceleration of the electric takes some getting used to. Take your foot off the "gas" in a Tesla and you don't coast like you do in a 4-door sedan, you decelerate fairly hard. All-in-all I highly recommend taking the Tesla for a spin. It will induce giggles like a carnival ride.
I may be wrong, but I blamed this on the "Lost" phenomenon. With everyone and his brother pretending that inserting something random into the story was deep and insightful, they thought that it would work for them. The "there's a deeper conspiracy" idea works well, but you have to actually have a deeper conspiracy in mind at the start and stick with it. The good series know the ending before they start. The bad ones just have a single cool idea and then flail around once they've given you the single cool idea. BSG was good because it had a defined story arc in mind - love or hate the ending, at least they had one.
The first season of Heroes was entertaining because they had a formula of slowly revealing special powers and slowly revealing a series of machinations that would lead to the destruction of New York. Once that fate was averted, they just kept piling on powers and conspiracies. After a while they got stuck, so they used a fiat to take away everyone's powers. Then they could start all over with the formula. But it was too late. They had lost the original charm and lost their audience. By the end it just looked like they were throwing stuff against the wall to see what stuck. (Oooh, look! Spooky carnival!)
Really? We are having the "my pro wrestling isn't as stupid as your pro wrestling" argument? On Slashdot? Can't we just agree that it is all stupid enough that there is no need to draw a distinction in stupidity?
The smart way to do it is not to push the metal through the water, but to get the water moving by pumping it around. It'll then carry the barges / vehicles without any particular fanfare. When you pump water continuously from one end of a canal system to the other (which can of course be directly adjacent to one another, and for transport purposes, incorporate locks so as to make the entire system continuous), the entire canal will move continuously. Anything floating on the canal will move as well, no extra charge.
Hey, that's brilliant. Instead of moving a few hundred tons of barge through the water and deal with losses from turbulence around the few tens of meters of barge, move billions of tons of water through a canal, dealing with losses from turbulence along the hundreds of miles of the canal and support plumbing. That should be way more efficient!
Ok, maybe that was a little too snarky. Sorry about that.... Still a dumb idea, but sorry for the over-snarkage.
Want to see rail done quick, on the cheap, with good results in a large country that's sparsely populated (on average)? Look at how the USSR did it.
Ok, I'll play.
First, you have to completely control your population. All monies must flow through the state.
Next, you must restrict all production to state-approved items. Be sure to restrict automobile production to low numbers of very low quality vehicles (Trabant).
Next, you control where people may live and work. This ensures that your rail line is properly aligned with your population demands.
Finally, you mandate the building of your railroad. You can do this without regard to cost-effectiveness or efficiency because of everything you accomplished in the other steps.
Maybe it is just me, but somehow I just don't see the Soviet model for building a railroad as having much application in the United States.
Henry Waxman won't allow it unless it's carbon negative
Well, if true that is just staggeringly stupid. It would be utterly impossible to make a hydrocarbon based fuel in a carbon negative way. You could get to carbon neutral, that's the theoretical maximum. Unless of course you wanted to pump it into the ground after you made it. Other than burying it in the ground, there is no such thing as a carbon-negative fuel.
I suppose you could posit a synthesis that tosses off inert carbon compounds as a side-effect, say calcium carbonate. But you would never design such a reaction because it would be inherently wasteful (and therefore more costly).
For more "through the looking glass" reporting from North Korea, try the Vice Guide. Similar to Lisa Ling's reporting, but with a more bizarre bent. One must see on the insanity of the regime is the museum of "tribute" from foreign leaders. They've collected all of the stupid little chachkies that various diplomats brought from around the world - plates with state seals, porcelain stuff from the gift shop, whatever - and placed them in a huge under-ground bunker museum. The official position is that these are items of tribute from every leader around the world who recognize that "Dear Leader" is the greatest leader and North Korea is the greatest country. Really.
For more reporting on the opaque world that is North Korea, I recommend the Vice Guide to North Korea. Similar to the reporting in the article, this is a hand-held digital camera video documentary done without government approval, but told by a westerner with only officially approved access. Even so, he manages to convey some of the desolation that is the communist dictatorship. The presentation put on by his hosts in hopes of showing off the might of the North Korean state fully supports the reputation they've earned of being "crazy".
Actually, the "drag over" sensor on your laptop is susceptible to gel fakes. The did this on Mythbusters. The scanner was even susceptible to the impressively sophisticated "paper photocopy" method....
You are conflating the stimulus bill with TARP. Last I read, somewhat over half of the stimulus has been spent. Recovery.gov (the official tracking site for the stimulus) says 91% has been made available. So you can go with my vague recollection of something I read "a while back", or go with the Fed's 91%. None of the money has been or is ever intended to be returned.
The TARP money as well as the GM/Chrysler bailout money was intended to be at least partially recoverable. According to these guys the TARP is winding down and will end up netting a loss of $100 billion. If you believe the completely unbiased and disinterested reporting here the net of all of the bailouts and TARP will eventually be a $30 billion loss for taxpayers. (of course that estimate excludes the $30 billion confiscated from GM's creditors and the loss of all shareholder equity and any other externalized costs).
Since you mention backup to the cloud - does anyone have experience with cloud backup? I'm using a service from Terramark at work that is semi-reasonably priced for corporate services, but out of reach for the home.
At home I'm trying Carbonite, but there is a feature that I really don't like. The backup service from Carbonite only stores copies of files currently on your hard drive. If you delete a file, it goes away on the backup within two weeks. So if I screw up and delete something important and it takes me a couple of months to realize it - well, too bad. I don't know about you, but I've seen plenty of situations where something got deleted and it wasn't noticed for a long time.
Anyone have a suggestion for a better online backup service?
As long as we are trading horror stories...
I had a fully redundant SAN go TU because of a bug in a redundant controller. One controller needed a new battery; on re installation of the controller an entire shelf died. Instantly. Ouch! Still, no problem at that point, because we set up our LUNs to stripe vertically across the shelves - so we could lose a shelf and not go down. That's when the controller started issuing wonky commands and corrupted the rest of the array. Wham, 64 spindles offline in less than a minute. Yeah, that was a great day...
So the lesson is, redundancy is to prevent you from needing a backup. Backups are for when that didn't work.
Raw size does matter here.
A larger receptor is better.
Which explains why the small dishes now do similar things that the old big ones did?
Or it could have something to do with the wavelength of the radio signal being received. Longer wavelengths require larger receivers. For an example compare your eyes (wavelengths measured in angstroms) with a radio telescope (wavelength measured in meters). (of course, power and efficiency also enter into it, but the bigger factor at play is the wavelength)
Having been an engineer and entrepreneur, I can say that building a company IS as exciting and interesting as building a product.
Seconded. Also seconded is the notion that it is not nearly as easy to get your ideas implemented in a company as it is in technology. Once an organization reaches a certain size it takes on a completely different dynamic and every problem has to be re-solved. Actually, this happens at several growth points, so there is always something challenging to solve.
Managing a single person consulting business is different from managing a 10 man group. Which is different from 50 people. Another big leap happens around 100-150... then you start acting like a big bureaucracy as you near 500. So all along the way there is new and different problems to solve. I'm sure that running General Electric is even more different and challenging - but I've never run a group that big.
Actually, I find that the definition of "middle class" is "roughly what I make". Everyone from $18k per year to $180k per year thinks they are middle class. Heck, most people who earn millions only do so for a very, very brief time (athletes or musicians with a career measured in single digit years, entrepreneurs selling a business realizing all of the gain in a single year, etc.) - so they can still consider themselves middle class the rest of the time. Once you retire you are on a "fixed income" so you aren't going to consider yourself wealthy even if you are sitting on a mountain of wealth (or in the case of public employees a huge pension).
No, in the US, pretty much everyone is middle class.