He also made a briefcase that has a fingerprint scan that requires the fingerprint of someone else to open it.
The meaning escapes me. Does that mean you need two people's fingerprints? The authorized person and another person? Or does the fingerprint scanner that locks the briefcase have a second fingerprint scanner that locks the first scanner? I don't get this. Not that it really matters.
Exactly. The recording industry is a monument to subverting the copyright system to provide perpetual income for people who create nothing. Not to mention subverting the legal system itself by buying legislators. Record companies have absolutely no moral ground to stand on, they just have a big stick to hit with.
Because the shuttle is only a supported flight platform for a very narrow range of parameters on a given mission.
I have to agree with that. But with the shuttle's 30-ton-or-so cargo capacity, one thing that would seem reasonable would be to take along a few hundred pounds of extra rations, just in case. Nothing boosts morale like an ample food supply.
Running at the highest level tolerable seems like an odd educational philosophy for a society based on communism or socialism. All but the smartest get left behind. Unless Russians are innately more intelligent than other people, I can't imagine typical elementary school kids grasping the details of physics and chemistry. A few in each class sure, but the general mass of students must feel largely like failures. I wonder if that partially explains the level of corruption at low levels in their system. When you feel inferior you resort to cheating because it seems like your only option.
Got no time for this crap. I have to rush on over to the computer store and pick me up some quality Russian-made software products. I hear their programmers are the best in the world. Can't wait to get my hands on... uhhhhh... Tetris?
My guess is that the next elevator behind you would stop and you would somehow board it, then the one above would be jettisoned off the ribbon in some way. This seems like a contingency they'll have to plan for. I wish I had thought of asking that question at NorWesCon last weekend. The Liftport folks gave a presentation and took a lot of questions. The trip up will take 7 days. They plan to send up one elevator per day, so 6 elevators at a time will be on the ribbon. Once the elevator gets to the orbital station, it will be kept there as raw material for large structures such as solar power satellites. They aren't going to have elevators climb back down.
Presumably people will have to return to Earth in a re-entry craft that will have been hauled up the ribbon. Wish I had thought to ask about that too. Re-entry from geostationary orbit would probably be simpler than from low orbit, because from low orbit you have to lose about 17,000 mph velocity. From geostationary maybe you could spiral down at a gentler rate.
Liftport plans to anchor their ribbon to a floating platform at sea. Because the upper end will be in geostationary orbit, the bottom end has to be on the equator. They have scoped out a region of the South Pacific that averages 3 days of clouds per year and has not had lightning in 10 years, according to NOAA.
Originally they envisioned a huge buoy-like platform similar to an oil-drilling rig, but the sea environment in that area is so corrosive they came up with the idea of a platform that will sit on 3 specially built ships, that can periodically slide out one at a time to go to drydock for maintenance.
The Liftport people were at NorWesCon last weekend. They demonstrated a small prototype of their climbing robot and presented quite a lot of information. The company president impressed me as very methodical and well organized, not the least bit flaky. He pointed out that the manufacture of longer and longer carbon nanotubes has far outstripped Moore's Law, going from nanometers to centimeters in the past 4 years. After a couple more orders of magnitude I'm guessing they'll be able to make them as long as they want.
they stand to substantially decrease their tax burden. Is this a breech of the company's "do no evil" mission statement
The article says NOTHING about taxes, and the suggestion that the salary cut might be a tax-cutting ploy makes me wonder if the poster has ever actually paid income tax, or for that matter understands simple arithmetic. The highest income tax rate is currently 35%. Cutting 100% of their salary (except the $1) to avoid paying the 35% tax is no gain. Duh.
But along the same lines, grown adults have told me with a straight face that buying on credit is good because the interest is tax deductible. Ridiculous. The interest deduction only saves you the amount of tax that you would have paid if you had kept the money instead of paying it out as interest. But of course, you have to pay the interest in the first place. So if your tax rate is 25%, you have to pay $1000 interest to lower your tax by $250. That's a smart thing?
Don't forget channel surfing, which has been around for decades. Many people sit in front of the tv for hours, flipping through the channels over and over looking for something good to watch, even though they just cycled through all the same channels a minute ago and know that the same shows are still on.
There's been a story on the web for years about a guy who tries to pay for a burrito with a $2 bill and the Taco Bell people have no idea there is such a thing. I just reread it and it still made me laugh out loud.
Didn't read the article yet, but to answer the question asked in the post, 10,000 barrels a day at say $60 a barrel equals $600,000/day, times 60 days equals $36,000,000 savings per year. The conversion cost is anybody's guess, but instinct tells me $36 million probably wouldn't even be enough for one average state. So figure a 50-year payoff period for the country? Forget it.
I see in lots of the comments already a strong awareness of what is happening in American politics. Outright thugs with a lust for wealth and power are getting away with wrapping themselves in flags and crosses, because reluctance to change views is a basic feature of conservative thinking. Sticking with the tried and true, not changing horses in mid-stream, weathering tough times with your beliefs intact -- these are sensible, down-to-earth attitudes that work if you have honest leadership, otherwise they play right into the hands of evil.
Looking at it a different way, I see what is happening as inevitable. We all know that people who are good at hacking systems will eventually hack any system.
I realize I could go online and download the song for free, but I won't do that. That's stealing. It's wrong. That's not to say I won't ever download for free. If I had already owned the CD and just wanted it to play and it was a matter of availability, I definitely would have downloaded it for free. I will also download music to sample it, but I won't keep it. I will buy the CD or erase the song.
Criterion 2 means government shouldn't do anything without unanimous consent, because a law that isn't enforced isn't a law, it's a suggestion. So when you ask, "is it important enough...?" apparently you would have to be asking everybody to agree on that, which isn't gonna happen anytime soon on this planet. Civilization is about cooperation and interdependence, not about a bunch of loners in survival shacks.
Yes, and it was reported even earlier. This article from 2000 talks about the same (Dobelle) system, and I remember a similar thing was being done in England a few years ago. The blind test subject was able to drive a car around an empty parking lot avoiding cones or something. But that device was said to work only on someone who could see for part of their life.
These systems all seem to involve a grid of electrodes laid on the surface of the visual cortex. Another article I read back then talked about someone working on a 3-dimensional grid, using very thin wires (and a lot more of them) that were to be actually embedded in the visual cortex. It was expected to achieve much better resolution. Can't find any reference to that though. Maybe it didn't pan out.
I haven't even read the article but I was compelled to come in here and make sure somebody rebutted that statement. I've been a contractor at MS on and off for years, and although there are lots of smart people there, they probably aren't any smarter than you are, and they certainly aren't any less smart than the ones I knew there in 1990 who became millionnaires because of Windows 3.1.
Those folks didn't get rich because they're brilliant programmers, they got rich because Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer are brilliant business tycoons. The proof is in the plethora of ex-MS employees whose own startups failed in the late 90s. I was a contractor at one of those too... high rise offices with breathtaking view, high-energy 20-something CEO with breathtaking secretary... product never saw the light of day.
Many of the men who survived sailing with Columbus, Magellan, etc, no doubt considered themselves a cut above the ordinary run of sailors, but how many of them can you name?
Ok, got that off my chest, now to go back and read the Apache article. Looks pretty interesting.
I thought this was the best line in the article. Many marketing people are so self-indoctrinated that they actually believe their own BS. When you can think like that, it's easy to define jail as education and torture as medicine. God help us if business succeeds in its quest to become government.
There are people who scream Socialism whenever something like this is proposed. But if a city can use private contractors to provide thousands of people with WiFi for $5000/year, it seems like a sterling example of something that should be a public service. It would be a bargain at 10 times that price.
I completely agree that this is crap, and the post was misleading as well. There is no house or "rooms and structures," just some possibly Volkswagen-size piles of computers. Yawn.
For those interested here's an excellent but long dry 1993 paper from the USGS that gives arguments on both sides of the biogenic/abiogenic debate.
More recently I read that the abiogenic theory is quietly but not publicly accepted by most scientists involved, because the leading biogenesis adherents are highly influential. The phrase that stuck in my mind was that abiogenesis is just "waiting for a few more obituaries," or words to that effect. I tried to find that article but no luck.
Anyway here are the key arguments according to the USGS: (sorry for the long quote). Whichever side you believe, the issue has been debated for many years by many experts, so dismissing either argument as "just stupid" is just arrogantly ignorant. In favor of the biogenic origin of petroleum, the following four observations have been advanced:
(1) Petroleum contains groups of molecules which are clearly identified as the breakdown products of complex, but common, organic molecules that occur in plants, and that could not have been built up in a non-biological process.
(2) Petroleum frequently shows the phenomenon of optical activity, i.e. a rotation of the plane of polarization when polarized light is passed through it. This implies that molecules which can have either a right-handed or a left-handed symmetry are not equally represented, but that one symmetry is preferred. This is normally a characteristic of biological materials and absent in fluids of non-biological origin.
(3) Some petroleums show a clear preference for molecules with an odd number of carbon atoms over those with an even number. Such an odd-even effect can be understood as arising from the breakdown of a class of molecules that are common in biological substances, and may be difficult to account for in other ways.
(4) Petroleum is mostly found in sedimentary deposits and only rarely in the primary rocks of the crust below; even among the sediment, it favors those that are geologically young. In many cases such sediment appears to be rich in carbonaceous materials that were interpreted as of biological origin, and as source material for the petroleum deposit.
On the other side of the argument, in favor of an origin from deeply buried materials incorporated in the Earth when it formed, the following observations have been cited:
(1) Petroleum and methane are found frequently in geographic patterns of long lines or arcs, which are related more to deep-seated large-scale structural features of the crust, than to the smaller scale patchwork of the sedimentary deposits.
(2) Hydrocarbon-rich areas tend to be hydrocarbon-rich at many different levels, corresponding to quite different geological epochs, and extending down to the crystalline basement that underlies the sediment. An invasion of an area by hydrocarbon fluids from below could better account for this than the chance of successive deposition.
(3) Some petroleums from deeper and hotter levels lack almost completely the biological evidence . Optical activity and the odd-even carbon number effect are sometimes totally absent, and it would be difficult to suppose that such a thorough destruction of the biological molecules had occurred as would be required to account for this, yet leaving the bulk substance quite similar to other crude oils.
(4) Methane is found in many locations where a biogenic origin is improbable or where biological deposits seem inadequate: in great ocean rifts in the absence of any substantial sediments; in fissures in igneous and metamorphic rocks, even at great depth; in active volcanic regions, even where there is a minimum of sediments; and there are massive amounts of methane hydrates (methane-water ice combinations) in permafrost and ocean deposits, where it is doubtful that an adequate quantity and distribution of biological source material is present.
(5) The hydrocarbon deposits of a large area often show common chemical o
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He also made a briefcase that has a fingerprint scan that requires the fingerprint of someone else to open it.
The meaning escapes me. Does that mean you need two people's fingerprints? The authorized person and another person? Or does the fingerprint scanner that locks the briefcase have a second fingerprint scanner that locks the first scanner? I don't get this. Not that it really matters.
Exactly. The recording industry is a monument to subverting the copyright system to provide perpetual income for people who create nothing. Not to mention subverting the legal system itself by buying legislators. Record companies have absolutely no moral ground to stand on, they just have a big stick to hit with.
Because the shuttle is only a supported flight platform for a very narrow range of parameters on a given mission.
I have to agree with that. But with the shuttle's 30-ton-or-so cargo capacity, one thing that would seem reasonable would be to take along a few hundred pounds of extra rations, just in case. Nothing boosts morale like an ample food supply.
Hat
Reynolds
Wrap
Jerry Pournelle once remarked in his Byte Magazine column that he cleaned his keyboards in the shower.
Running at the highest level tolerable seems like an odd educational philosophy for a society based on communism or socialism. All but the smartest get left behind. Unless Russians are innately more intelligent than other people, I can't imagine typical elementary school kids grasping the details of physics and chemistry. A few in each class sure, but the general mass of students must feel largely like failures. I wonder if that partially explains the level of corruption at low levels in their system. When you feel inferior you resort to cheating because it seems like your only option.
Got no time for this crap. I have to rush on over to the computer store and pick me up some quality Russian-made software products. I hear their programmers are the best in the world. Can't wait to get my hands on... uhhhhh... Tetris?
My guess is that the next elevator behind you would stop and you would somehow board it, then the one above would be jettisoned off the ribbon in some way. This seems like a contingency they'll have to plan for. I wish I had thought of asking that question at NorWesCon last weekend. The Liftport folks gave a presentation and took a lot of questions. The trip up will take 7 days. They plan to send up one elevator per day, so 6 elevators at a time will be on the ribbon. Once the elevator gets to the orbital station, it will be kept there as raw material for large structures such as solar power satellites. They aren't going to have elevators climb back down.
Presumably people will have to return to Earth in a re-entry craft that will have been hauled up the ribbon. Wish I had thought to ask about that too. Re-entry from geostationary orbit would probably be simpler than from low orbit, because from low orbit you have to lose about 17,000 mph velocity. From geostationary maybe you could spiral down at a gentler rate.
Liftport plans to anchor their ribbon to a floating platform at sea. Because the upper end will be in geostationary orbit, the bottom end has to be on the equator. They have scoped out a region of the South Pacific that averages 3 days of clouds per year and has not had lightning in 10 years, according to NOAA.
Originally they envisioned a huge buoy-like platform similar to an oil-drilling rig, but the sea environment in that area is so corrosive they came up with the idea of a platform that will sit on 3 specially built ships, that can periodically slide out one at a time to go to drydock for maintenance.
The Liftport people were at NorWesCon last weekend. They demonstrated a small prototype of their climbing robot and presented quite a lot of information. The company president impressed me as very methodical and well organized, not the least bit flaky. He pointed out that the manufacture of longer and longer carbon nanotubes has far outstripped Moore's Law, going from nanometers to centimeters in the past 4 years. After a couple more orders of magnitude I'm guessing they'll be able to make them as long as they want.
they stand to substantially decrease their tax burden. Is this a breech of the company's "do no evil" mission statement
The article says NOTHING about taxes, and the suggestion that the salary cut might be a tax-cutting ploy makes me wonder if the poster has ever actually paid income tax, or for that matter understands simple arithmetic. The highest income tax rate is currently 35%. Cutting 100% of their salary (except the $1) to avoid paying the 35% tax is no gain. Duh.
But along the same lines, grown adults have told me with a straight face that buying on credit is good because the interest is tax deductible. Ridiculous. The interest deduction only saves you the amount of tax that you would have paid if you had kept the money instead of paying it out as interest. But of course, you have to pay the interest in the first place. So if your tax rate is 25%, you have to pay $1000 interest to lower your tax by $250. That's a smart thing?
Don't forget channel surfing, which has been around for decades. Many people sit in front of the tv for hours, flipping through the channels over and over looking for something good to watch, even though they just cycled through all the same channels a minute ago and know that the same shows are still on.
There's been a story on the web for years about a guy who tries to pay for a burrito with a $2 bill and the Taco Bell people have no idea there is such a thing. I just reread it and it still made me laugh out loud.
You forgot Mannecdraketiva.
Didn't read the article yet, but to answer the question asked in the post, 10,000 barrels a day at say $60 a barrel equals $600,000/day, times 60 days equals $36,000,000 savings per year. The conversion cost is anybody's guess, but instinct tells me $36 million probably wouldn't even be enough for one average state. So figure a 50-year payoff period for the country? Forget it.
Great way to open this thread!
I see in lots of the comments already a strong awareness of what is happening in American politics. Outright thugs with a lust for wealth and power are getting away with wrapping themselves in flags and crosses, because reluctance to change views is a basic feature of conservative thinking. Sticking with the tried and true, not changing horses in mid-stream, weathering tough times with your beliefs intact -- these are sensible, down-to-earth attitudes that work if you have honest leadership, otherwise they play right into the hands of evil.
Looking at it a different way, I see what is happening as inevitable. We all know that people who are good at hacking systems will eventually hack any system.
I realize I could go online and download the song for free, but I won't do that. That's stealing. It's wrong. That's not to say I won't ever download for free. If I had already owned the CD and just wanted it to play and it was a matter of availability, I definitely would have downloaded it for free. I will also download music to sample it, but I won't keep it. I will buy the CD or erase the song.
Note to Mark:
GIVE!
IT!
A!
REST!
Shhhhh! Don't tell them. Maybe they'll just stay there.
Criterion 2 means government shouldn't do anything without unanimous consent, because a law that isn't enforced isn't a law, it's a suggestion. So when you ask, "is it important enough...?" apparently you would have to be asking everybody to agree on that, which isn't gonna happen anytime soon on this planet. Civilization is about cooperation and interdependence, not about a bunch of loners in survival shacks.
Yes, and it was reported even earlier. This article from 2000 talks about the same (Dobelle) system, and I remember a similar thing was being done in England a few years ago. The blind test subject was able to drive a car around an empty parking lot avoiding cones or something. But that device was said to work only on someone who could see for part of their life.
These systems all seem to involve a grid of electrodes laid on the surface of the visual cortex. Another article I read back then talked about someone working on a 3-dimensional grid, using very thin wires (and a lot more of them) that were to be actually embedded in the visual cortex. It was expected to achieve much better resolution. Can't find any reference to that though. Maybe it didn't pan out.
I haven't even read the article but I was compelled to come in here and make sure somebody rebutted that statement. I've been a contractor at MS on and off for years, and although there are lots of smart people there, they probably aren't any smarter than you are, and they certainly aren't any less smart than the ones I knew there in 1990 who became millionnaires because of Windows 3.1.
Those folks didn't get rich because they're brilliant programmers, they got rich because Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer are brilliant business tycoons. The proof is in the plethora of ex-MS employees whose own startups failed in the late 90s. I was a contractor at one of those too... high rise offices with breathtaking view, high-energy 20-something CEO with breathtaking secretary... product never saw the light of day.
Many of the men who survived sailing with Columbus, Magellan, etc, no doubt considered themselves a cut above the ordinary run of sailors, but how many of them can you name?
Ok, got that off my chest, now to go back and read the Apache article. Looks pretty interesting.
You have captured the essence.
speaking of essence, no personal hygiene references?
I thought this was the best line in the article. Many marketing people are so self-indoctrinated that they actually believe their own BS. When you can think like that, it's easy to define jail as education and torture as medicine. God help us if business succeeds in its quest to become government.
There are people who scream Socialism whenever something like this is proposed. But if a city can use private contractors to provide thousands of people with WiFi for $5000/year, it seems like a sterling example of something that should be a public service. It would be a bargain at 10 times that price.
I completely agree that this is crap, and the post was misleading as well. There is no house or "rooms and structures," just some possibly Volkswagen-size piles of computers. Yawn.
For those interested here's an excellent but long dry 1993 paper from the USGS that gives arguments on both sides of the biogenic/abiogenic debate.
More recently I read that the abiogenic theory is quietly but not publicly accepted by most scientists involved, because the leading biogenesis adherents are highly influential. The phrase that stuck in my mind was that abiogenesis is just "waiting for a few more obituaries," or words to that effect. I tried to find that article but no luck.
Anyway here are the key arguments according to the USGS: (sorry for the long quote). Whichever side you believe, the issue has been debated for many years by many experts, so dismissing either argument as "just stupid" is just arrogantly ignorant.
In favor of the biogenic origin of petroleum, the following four observations have been advanced:
(1) Petroleum contains groups of molecules which are clearly identified as the breakdown products of complex, but common, organic molecules that occur in plants, and that could not have been built up in a non-biological process.
(2) Petroleum frequently shows the phenomenon of optical activity, i.e. a rotation of the plane of polarization when polarized light is passed through it. This implies that molecules which can have either a right-handed or a left-handed symmetry are not equally represented, but that one symmetry is preferred. This is normally a characteristic of biological materials and absent in fluids of non-biological origin.
(3) Some petroleums show a clear preference for molecules with an odd number of carbon atoms over those with an even number. Such an odd-even effect can be understood as arising from the breakdown of a class of molecules that are common in biological substances, and may be difficult to account for in other ways.
(4) Petroleum is mostly found in sedimentary deposits and only rarely in the primary rocks of the crust below; even among the sediment, it favors those that are geologically young. In many cases such sediment appears to be rich in carbonaceous materials that were interpreted as of biological origin, and as source material for the petroleum deposit.
On the other side of the argument, in favor of an origin from deeply buried materials incorporated in the Earth when it formed, the following observations have been cited:
(1) Petroleum and methane are found frequently in geographic patterns of long lines or arcs, which are related more to deep-seated large-scale structural features of the crust, than to the smaller scale patchwork of the sedimentary deposits.
(2) Hydrocarbon-rich areas tend to be hydrocarbon-rich at many different levels, corresponding to quite different geological epochs, and extending down to the crystalline basement that underlies the sediment. An invasion of an area by hydrocarbon fluids from below could better account for this than the chance of successive deposition.
(3) Some petroleums from deeper and hotter levels lack almost completely the biological evidence . Optical activity and the odd-even carbon number effect are sometimes totally absent, and it would be difficult to suppose that such a thorough destruction of the biological molecules had occurred as would be required to account for this, yet leaving the bulk substance quite similar to other crude oils.
(4) Methane is found in many locations where a biogenic origin is improbable or where biological deposits seem inadequate: in great ocean rifts in the absence of any substantial sediments; in fissures in igneous and metamorphic rocks, even at great depth; in active volcanic regions, even where there is a minimum of sediments; and there are massive amounts of methane hydrates (methane-water ice combinations) in permafrost and ocean deposits, where it is doubtful that an adequate quantity and distribution of biological source material is present.
(5) The hydrocarbon deposits of a large area often show common chemical o