>The country you were born in, or the country of your descent precludes choice in the matter
Nonsense, there's this thing called emigration that's available to everyone. Every day you live in your birth country instead of leaving is a fresh choice in the matter.
True, but we don't need one - we're not trying to solve for the motion of an N-body system, we're trying to find the average distance between two bodies whose motion has already been well-characterized by observation.
Our current approximations aren't perfect, but I believe they're generally accepted as accurate enough to project planetary positions for several centuries in either direction of the epoch.
Not really - the equation to reasonably accurately describe a planet's position in space is actually a pretty ugly kludge of approximations of the various perturbations it's subjected to, even in polar coordinates. Combine that with the math for finding the vector difference between two points as expressed in polar coordinates... the math is going to get ugly.
A skilled mathematician would probably have no great trouble performing the integration, but very few scientists are skilled mathematicians.
Tough question, but only because "Library of Congress" is an ill-defined unit of mass. If we just look at the ~32 million books in their collection, assuming they have an average mass of 0.5kg/book, we're talking 16 million kg. Meanwhile a proton masses 1.7*10^-27kg
So: (10^10protons/cm^2) * (4.047*10^8 cm^2 / 1 furlong^2) * (1.7*10^-27kg / 1 proton) * (1 Library of Congress / 16*10^6 kg), make sure the units all cancel, and..
425*10^-18 Libraries of Congress per square furlong.
Hey, still beats the U.S. process, where every time a hole is found everybody ignores it, and possibly tries to silence those trying to raise awareness of the problem.
That's how the insurance company could put leverage on doctors and hospitals. I'm not talking about them.
My question is if there's only one insurance company with an absolute monopoly, and it's NOT government controlled, how do you keep them from charging completely outrageous premiums - like they've been doing for decades?
Government controlled insurance monopolies have a pretty good track record, but hierofalcon's wording suggests they want to consider private alternatives as well. And I just don't see any way that would realistically end up being anything but a huge corporate handout at the expense of everyone else.
Oh, I mostly agree, I was mainly attacking the idea of being able to do such a thing through a private organization, which you seem to want to leave as an option.
I would say the actual problem that it always runs up against is political corruption. RE: Microsoft vs.... pretty much everyone who's ever accused them of anti-competitive behavior.
If the enforcers aren't actually primarily interested maintaining a competitive environment, then you can always find a technicality to let things slip through.
And not just Microsoft - if legislation to actually ensure competitive markets were ever to be seriously proposed, every F'ing major corporation that does business here would start piling on the lobbyist dollars to make sure it died a swift death.
Because even if the cost of extraction and refining is orders of magnitude more expensive than mining on Earth (several orders seems unlikely), it's still cheaper once you include the shipping costs to the moon or orbit. At least once you get a good system worked out. It's that early research that's especially expensive, which is why it's mostly governments and magacorporations currently looking to get involved.
>curved wraparound prescription lenses is even more expensive Is that even possible? I would think the optical challenges would be all but intractable. At best you could get curved wraparound non-prescription lenses that have a prescription lens carved into the front-facing portion.
>We just need one insurer that pays for everything. Mmm hmm.
And how exactly do we keep this new total monopoly on medical insurance from increasing their prices outrageously? Even with half a dozen major insurers, their profit margins were pretty ridiculous before federal Romneycare/Obamacare, and that situation has only been modestly improved.
We don't need socialized *medicine*, but most of the developed world doesn't have that anyway - what they have is socialized medical *insurance*, with the hospitals and doctors still being privately run, with all the (potential) market-driven benefits that can bring, but all dealing with the single government-run not-for-profit insurance company that doesn't put up with all the bullshit cost inflation that lines the pockets of both the hospital and insurance agency, who can pass all the costs on to their customers anyway.
Or alternately, we could just break up any company that controls more than about 10% of the market, and certainly ban any mergers that would push anyone over that threshold, which seems to be around the point that economists agree that free-market principles no longer work effectively.
>You can get a pair of single focus glasses, with all the non designers do dads, for about $50.
Really? Where? I remember shopping EyeBuyDirect years ago, and was looking at $60 for a set of basic frames with a midrange refraction lens (I don't care for coke-bottle lenses) and adaptive-tinting, which I would consider decidedly non-designer doo-dads. I seem to recall the ultra-thin lenses almost doubled the price, but I don't care for that much chromatic aberration anyway, color-smear is bad enough with the midrange lenses.
Me too, but I've met a lot of people that wouldn't know where to begin.
With sufficient wealth and laziness (or just incompetence), any task is best done by someone else.
I've also dealt with a few fitters over the years that were able to bend a particularly stubborn pair of glasses into something extremely comfortable and secure. Most though... well, there's a reason I mostly refit my glasses myself. How exactly are you supposed to take a fitter seriously if they don't even fold down your ear to see where the problem is?
Why? Do you have stories specifically about Zenni? I would expect that they, like everyone else, buy standard lens blanks and then trim them to fit the frames you choose. It seems very unlikely that a modern automated lens-trimming machine would be able to screw up "cut this shape out of a circle".
No, lasik burns off parts of your lens, at the front of the eye, in order to reshape it so that it properly focuses light on the back of the eye - the retina.
If it were burning off the back of the eye it would simply make you blind.
As soon as you sit down and learn them. Here, this image contains most of the information that you need to effectively use basic trig, and will help you to visualize how the primary trig functions interact: https://commons.wikimedia.org/...
sine and cosine are probably the most important ones, as they decompose angle-and-distance polar coordinates into (x,y) rectangular ones, and it's extremely difficult to perform rotations or general-case not-perfectly-horizontal-or-vertical translations without them.
Heck, they're very useful for 2D transformations. It's almost impossible to rotate something in 2D without using trig.
Frankly, I'd say anyone who works with computer generated/animated graphics, and doesn't already understand the usage and value of trig functions, has missed an incredibly important part of their education that should be rectified as soon as possible.
Because any time you want to move or place anything in a not-perfectly-vertical-or-horizontal straight line, trigonometry is the natural solution. You can kludge together various alternatives, but trig handles everything seamlessly and consistently. They are the fundamental tools necessary for translating back and forth between rectangular grid coordinates, and angle-and-distance polar coordinates.
You can do computer graphics and animations without them, but it's like juggling with your hands tied behind your back - you work much too hard, and the result is never as good as it could have been.
Besides, most modern CPUs have single-instruction trig functions built in, they're that important, so why not make them accessible?
The point is rather that you *won't* be transporting all that infrastructure into space - just enough to be able to jump-start on building the rest. Presumably the vast majority of "high tech" materials and components would continue being produced on Earth, but if you can make it out of iron or aluminum with only limited working, you can build it in space. And that probably covers at least 95% of the mass of most equipment, if not far more.
There's already been some really interesting developments in 3D printing bulk metals with space in mind. Admittedly cast iron isn't the strongest building material - but it's easy to work with, and if you have to make your first generation of heavy equipment considerably more massive than otherwise necessary, so what? There's plenty of local raw materials to work with, and it's not like it needs to support it's own weight.
And once you've got the heavy equipment necessary to make worked iron and steel components, then the components for the second-generation and later factories don't have to deal with the limitations of cast metal anymore. And you can always recycle the original factories once more sophisticated factories render it useless.
And of course, once you're building in orbit, you can build things that would collapse under their own weight on Earth. Factories, habitats, even interplanetary spaceships. Something like the SpaceX Starliner for example is massively overbuilt for traveling between planets - you could use the same mass of materials to make something far more spacious in orbit, and only use the sturdy high-acceleration rockets as "long-boats" for getting to and from a planet's surface.
>No, if you launch something from the Moon, it'll end up in a very elongated and unstable Earth-Lunar orbit
It'll almost certainly be an Earth orbit, there's no benefit to putting it in a high enough orbit that it can orbit both (unless it's destined for one of the L-points I suppose), and doing so would require those rockets anyway. And the moon isn't massive enough to make much difference anyway, other than as a destabilizing influence.
Without modification it will be in an orbit that intersects the moon orbit, probably a highly elliptical Hohmann transfer orbit with an apogee at lunar orbit distance, and a perigee near the destination orbit. From there, circularizing the orbit as desired takes a miniscule fraction of the delta-v necessary to reach orbit in the first place, and can be done with much smaller, weaker engines than the initial launch, since you don't have to overcome surface gravity, and won't have to worry about hitting the moon for many, many orbits (unless you specifically launched it on a resonant orbit that will hit the moon sometime soon)
Meanwhile, for sending raw materials to Earth - yes, you probably want an aerodynamically stable shape - but that's no big deal, one shape is much the same as another when casting ingots. And there's not even any specific need for parachutes, those are there to allow passengers and scientific equipment to survive landing. If an ingot breaks or flattens on impact - so what? You were going to melt it down anyway. As long as it's hitting in the middle of nowhere, impact isn't a big deal. Just pick a size that lets aerobraking slow down enough to suite you, and bombs away. An active control system might be nice to keep it on target, but there's no reason that couldn't detach at the last moment and land separately, or just be inexpensive enough that destroying it doesn't matter.
>you could also put your plant in the middle of the Nevada desert, and do the same thing there. Absolutely - all the more reason to learn to do it on the moon. Because we're clearly not going to do it on Earth unless the cost is cheaper than the current disaster. We could add severe environmental impact taxes or regulations to make current it unattractive, but not until we actually have another mature technology ready to take over for the current one.
Though there's still the possibility of moon-mining/refining producing lots of toxic waste that just isn't a problem on the moon, which has no air, water, or life to transport it out of your trash heap.
Slashdot Mirror
A tragic point. I stand corrected.
>The country you were born in, or the country of your descent precludes choice in the matter
Nonsense, there's this thing called emigration that's available to everyone. Every day you live in your birth country instead of leaving is a fresh choice in the matter.
True, but we don't need one - we're not trying to solve for the motion of an N-body system, we're trying to find the average distance between two bodies whose motion has already been well-characterized by observation.
Our current approximations aren't perfect, but I believe they're generally accepted as accurate enough to project planetary positions for several centuries in either direction of the epoch.
Not really - the equation to reasonably accurately describe a planet's position in space is actually a pretty ugly kludge of approximations of the various perturbations it's subjected to, even in polar coordinates. Combine that with the math for finding the vector difference between two points as expressed in polar coordinates... the math is going to get ugly.
A skilled mathematician would probably have no great trouble performing the integration, but very few scientists are skilled mathematicians.
Tough question, but only because "Library of Congress" is an ill-defined unit of mass. If we just look at the ~32 million books in their collection, assuming they have an average mass of 0.5kg/book, we're talking 16 million kg. Meanwhile a proton masses 1.7*10^-27kg
So: (10^10protons/cm^2) * (4.047*10^8 cm^2 / 1 furlong^2) * (1.7*10^-27kg / 1 proton) * (1 Library of Congress / 16*10^6 kg), make sure the units all cancel, and..
425*10^-18 Libraries of Congress per square furlong.
You're welcome. :-D
Hey, still beats the U.S. process, where every time a hole is found everybody ignores it, and possibly tries to silence those trying to raise awareness of the problem.
That's how the insurance company could put leverage on doctors and hospitals. I'm not talking about them.
My question is if there's only one insurance company with an absolute monopoly, and it's NOT government controlled, how do you keep them from charging completely outrageous premiums - like they've been doing for decades?
Government controlled insurance monopolies have a pretty good track record, but hierofalcon's wording suggests they want to consider private alternatives as well. And I just don't see any way that would realistically end up being anything but a huge corporate handout at the expense of everyone else.
Oh, I mostly agree, I was mainly attacking the idea of being able to do such a thing through a private organization, which you seem to want to leave as an option.
A good point. I was indeed thinking lens in the optical sense, rather than anatomical. And the cornea does the bulk of the work on that front.
Even in a newspaper, not everything benefits from a rectilinear layout.
I would say the actual problem that it always runs up against is political corruption. RE: Microsoft vs.... pretty much everyone who's ever accused them of anti-competitive behavior.
If the enforcers aren't actually primarily interested maintaining a competitive environment, then you can always find a technicality to let things slip through.
And not just Microsoft - if legislation to actually ensure competitive markets were ever to be seriously proposed, every F'ing major corporation that does business here would start piling on the lobbyist dollars to make sure it died a swift death.
Because even if the cost of extraction and refining is orders of magnitude more expensive than mining on Earth (several orders seems unlikely), it's still cheaper once you include the shipping costs to the moon or orbit. At least once you get a good system worked out. It's that early research that's especially expensive, which is why it's mostly governments and magacorporations currently looking to get involved.
I suspect you're lying, as I know way too many people who actually want those damned ugly plastic frames.
Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained with bad taste.
>curved wraparound prescription lenses is even more expensive
Is that even possible? I would think the optical challenges would be all but intractable. At best you could get curved wraparound non-prescription lenses that have a prescription lens carved into the front-facing portion.
>We just need one insurer that pays for everything.
Mmm hmm.
And how exactly do we keep this new total monopoly on medical insurance from increasing their prices outrageously? Even with half a dozen major insurers, their profit margins were pretty ridiculous before federal Romneycare/Obamacare, and that situation has only been modestly improved.
We don't need socialized *medicine*, but most of the developed world doesn't have that anyway - what they have is socialized medical *insurance*, with the hospitals and doctors still being privately run, with all the (potential) market-driven benefits that can bring, but all dealing with the single government-run not-for-profit insurance company that doesn't put up with all the bullshit cost inflation that lines the pockets of both the hospital and insurance agency, who can pass all the costs on to their customers anyway.
Or alternately, we could just break up any company that controls more than about 10% of the market, and certainly ban any mergers that would push anyone over that threshold, which seems to be around the point that economists agree that free-market principles no longer work effectively.
>You can get a pair of single focus glasses, with all the non designers do dads, for about $50.
Really? Where? I remember shopping EyeBuyDirect years ago, and was looking at $60 for a set of basic frames with a midrange refraction lens (I don't care for coke-bottle lenses) and adaptive-tinting, which I would consider decidedly non-designer doo-dads. I seem to recall the ultra-thin lenses almost doubled the price, but I don't care for that much chromatic aberration anyway, color-smear is bad enough with the midrange lenses.
Me too, but I've met a lot of people that wouldn't know where to begin.
With sufficient wealth and laziness (or just incompetence), any task is best done by someone else.
I've also dealt with a few fitters over the years that were able to bend a particularly stubborn pair of glasses into something extremely comfortable and secure. Most though... well, there's a reason I mostly refit my glasses myself. How exactly are you supposed to take a fitter seriously if they don't even fold down your ear to see where the problem is?
Why? Do you have stories specifically about Zenni? I would expect that they, like everyone else, buy standard lens blanks and then trim them to fit the frames you choose. It seems very unlikely that a modern automated lens-trimming machine would be able to screw up "cut this shape out of a circle".
No, lasik burns off parts of your lens, at the front of the eye, in order to reshape it so that it properly focuses light on the back of the eye - the retina.
If it were burning off the back of the eye it would simply make you blind.
As soon as you sit down and learn them. Here, this image contains most of the information that you need to effectively use basic trig, and will help you to visualize how the primary trig functions interact: https://commons.wikimedia.org/...
sine and cosine are probably the most important ones, as they decompose angle-and-distance polar coordinates into (x,y) rectangular ones, and it's extremely difficult to perform rotations or general-case not-perfectly-horizontal-or-vertical translations without them.
Heck, they're very useful for 2D transformations. It's almost impossible to rotate something in 2D without using trig.
Frankly, I'd say anyone who works with computer generated/animated graphics, and doesn't already understand the usage and value of trig functions, has missed an incredibly important part of their education that should be rectified as soon as possible.
Because any time you want to move or place anything in a not-perfectly-vertical-or-horizontal straight line, trigonometry is the natural solution. You can kludge together various alternatives, but trig handles everything seamlessly and consistently. They are the fundamental tools necessary for translating back and forth between rectangular grid coordinates, and angle-and-distance polar coordinates.
You can do computer graphics and animations without them, but it's like juggling with your hands tied behind your back - you work much too hard, and the result is never as good as it could have been.
Besides, most modern CPUs have single-instruction trig functions built in, they're that important, so why not make them accessible?
The point is rather that you *won't* be transporting all that infrastructure into space - just enough to be able to jump-start on building the rest. Presumably the vast majority of "high tech" materials and components would continue being produced on Earth, but if you can make it out of iron or aluminum with only limited working, you can build it in space. And that probably covers at least 95% of the mass of most equipment, if not far more.
There's already been some really interesting developments in 3D printing bulk metals with space in mind. Admittedly cast iron isn't the strongest building material - but it's easy to work with, and if you have to make your first generation of heavy equipment considerably more massive than otherwise necessary, so what? There's plenty of local raw materials to work with, and it's not like it needs to support it's own weight.
And once you've got the heavy equipment necessary to make worked iron and steel components, then the components for the second-generation and later factories don't have to deal with the limitations of cast metal anymore. And you can always recycle the original factories once more sophisticated factories render it useless.
And of course, once you're building in orbit, you can build things that would collapse under their own weight on Earth. Factories, habitats, even interplanetary spaceships. Something like the SpaceX Starliner for example is massively overbuilt for traveling between planets - you could use the same mass of materials to make something far more spacious in orbit, and only use the sturdy high-acceleration rockets as "long-boats" for getting to and from a planet's surface.
>No, if you launch something from the Moon, it'll end up in a very elongated and unstable Earth-Lunar orbit
It'll almost certainly be an Earth orbit, there's no benefit to putting it in a high enough orbit that it can orbit both (unless it's destined for one of the L-points I suppose), and doing so would require those rockets anyway. And the moon isn't massive enough to make much difference anyway, other than as a destabilizing influence.
Without modification it will be in an orbit that intersects the moon orbit, probably a highly elliptical Hohmann transfer orbit with an apogee at lunar orbit distance, and a perigee near the destination orbit. From there, circularizing the orbit as desired takes a miniscule fraction of the delta-v necessary to reach orbit in the first place, and can be done with much smaller, weaker engines than the initial launch, since you don't have to overcome surface gravity, and won't have to worry about hitting the moon for many, many orbits (unless you specifically launched it on a resonant orbit that will hit the moon sometime soon)
Meanwhile, for sending raw materials to Earth - yes, you probably want an aerodynamically stable shape - but that's no big deal, one shape is much the same as another when casting ingots. And there's not even any specific need for parachutes, those are there to allow passengers and scientific equipment to survive landing. If an ingot breaks or flattens on impact - so what? You were going to melt it down anyway. As long as it's hitting in the middle of nowhere, impact isn't a big deal. Just pick a size that lets aerobraking slow down enough to suite you, and bombs away. An active control system might be nice to keep it on target, but there's no reason that couldn't detach at the last moment and land separately, or just be inexpensive enough that destroying it doesn't matter.
>you could also put your plant in the middle of the Nevada desert, and do the same thing there.
Absolutely - all the more reason to learn to do it on the moon. Because we're clearly not going to do it on Earth unless the cost is cheaper than the current disaster. We could add severe environmental impact taxes or regulations to make current it unattractive, but not until we actually have another mature technology ready to take over for the current one.
Though there's still the possibility of moon-mining/refining producing lots of toxic waste that just isn't a problem on the moon, which has no air, water, or life to transport it out of your trash heap.