Isn't it ironic - someone who has raised money based largely on the nostalgia for what he done in the past... commenting on the gaming industry making games just like the ones they've made in the past.
Seriously, as much as the Slashdot demographic complains about endless remakes, and the mining of the past... at every possible turn they demonstrate exactly *why* the entertainment industry keeps doing so.
That's like flying from LA to New York by first dismantling the plane in Miami and then putting it and all it's fuel on semi trailers, along with all the equipment and materials to build the runway and all the people needed and all the support equipment... and then moving it all off road from Miami to LA.
It's not a huge step towards anything - it's sheer insanity. You don't save any fuel by launching from the moon when you have to ship all the fuel there in the first place. You don't make something cost effective by spending trillions of dollars up front.
It's a critical component, granted, but only one of several.
As an automobile analogy - this is like proving air flows through a spiffy new carburetor. Way cool, and very critical... but very, very far from a complete test of the carburetor, let alone of the complete engine.
Sabre remains a very long way away from being proven to work.
President Obama loves small businesses so much that he's driving them bankrupt with expensive mandatory health insurance regulations.
Umm... ACA doesn't kick in until you have at least 50 employees.
No, fifty full-time-equivalent employees is just short of a Wal-Mart-sized store. If you're that big, you are not a small business. Period.
Retail sales aren't the only type of business... The vendor a business owner I know buys from has 200 employees (and according to the government qualifies as a small business), and his costs are going up because of the ACA. Guess what happens to the prices of the goods he buys from that vendor? And even though he only employs 20 people, he does provide health insurance, and those costs are going sharply up as insurance companies seek income to pay for the increased costs forced on them by the ACA.
And really, it's not all that hard to exceed fifty people for many businesses. I know a another guy that runs an engineering firm that services the local Naval shipyard... he employs over a hundred. Another friend works at an optical lab (that makes glasses for local and regional opticians) and his shop has around sixty at any given time. My mother works for a small private school for the underprivileged that employs around seventy five people... There's a whole lot of business goin' on that many people are ignorant of because it doesn't directly touch their daily lives.
You're bringing in at least three-quarters of a million dollars in profit annually just to cover the employee salaries alone
You pay employees out of income, not out of profit. Profit is what's left over *after* you've paid all of your costs.
You have to examine the assumptions behind the studies - almost all either stop counting when the money hits the cash register or treat all incoming cash as if it too were all spent locally. (Variants of the same thing really) Very few of them consider the cost of goods sold (or lump service businesses alongside wholesale and retail businesses) and where that money goes. When you do, the rates are a lot less dramatic.
Like someone else said, I specificly frequent local establishments in my neighbourhood, because I know the owners, they live down the street and I see them at the pub on weekends and on my sports teams.
These people, living in the neigbourhood make substantially more money than the assistant manager at "SomeBig MegaStore", and the a huge chunk of that money doesn't end up in some gated community in Arkansas.
The owners of *any* reasonable business make more money than assistant managers - apples to oranges. There's only one owner though....
The same goes for the ultimate destination of the money. They 'import' their goods [to your community] the same as "SomeBig MegaStore", and they (like you) buy most of their stock and spend most of their income on goods 'imported' [to your community]. The money may not end up in a gated compound in Arkansas, but it sure as hell doesn't stay in your community either.
Indeed, Not only is the game not even published yet... $4million is a pretty low budget for a modern PC game. It'll be interesting to see if they can pull it off all, let alone with all the "stretch goals", but it's hardly a wake up call.
I had friends building in a remote location, and running the power lines to the house would cost as much as a solar array with batteries to last through the night. With used electric car batteries, the cost of such a system would drop significantly.
The question here is startup costs versus operational costs. Solar panels and batteries both required maintenance and have to be replaced regularly... Power lines generally require little to no maintenance and require replacement only at great intervals.
Lacking a pressing or political/ideological reason for choosing solar, I'd have to pencil out the figures and study them closely before assuming solar is the better solution. There's considerations that people don't often think of in these assumptions, like the need for power during the day and the annual cycle of solar availability.
The problems with these kinds of distributed system aren't so much technological anymore... but economic and operational. Who pays for them? Who maintains them? Who operates them? Who manages operations?
These are the hard questions to answer. (Though no doubt, I'll get plenty of replies with a variety of shallow and ill thought out answers...) These are the questions that need to have at least trial solutions before the system can be rolled out.
NASA doesn't have an unlimited budget, or unlimited manpower... and that's setting aside the engineering issues involved in making complex equipment last out there where it can't be serviced. So they look at what they want to accomplish, see if it can be realistically accomplished on schedule and on budget*, and then set that as their basic goal. Then, once the basic goals are accomplished, they look at extensions.
* With the caveat that NASA is really, really bad at making accurate schedule and budget projections. (And this isn't a new thing or limited to just manned missions.)
" Tresset believes that it might be a good idea to imbue all personal robots with some sort of artistic skill to encourage an emotional bond"
If he finds a way, I'm all for it. But his current robot is a webcam hooked to a photoshop filter and piped to a mechanical arm - technically very impressive, but not actually artistic in any useful sense of the word.
On that basis, why would you *not* accept BitCoin, if you think there are customers keen to spend them?
There's more to such a decision than just tax/accounting issues... What is the 'float' - the time between BitPay collecting on my behalf and when they credit it to my account? How often can I collect my balance from BitPay and are there fees for the transfer? (The answers are "daily" and "yes, but not directly" according to BitPay, and there are sharp daily limits to boot.) Then you have to make what's really a gut check call - how stable and reliable do you believe BitPay to be, and how likely to be there next week, next month, next year?
I'm on Slashdot, so I'm looking at things from the viewpoint of professional
My apologies, I thought you actually read and comprehended what I wrote and were replying to that. I see now that you're merely an extraordinarily clueless elitist asshole with the intelligence of a rotting cabbage.
With non-business travelers, many of us don't have a lot of vacation per year; many jobs only give you a pathetic 2 weeks/year. If you take a week of that to have a vacation, you're not going to want to spend over half that time driving.
So, flying is by default the only option, due to a lack of time.
That depends on how far you're traveling... Unless you live someplace remote, or just *have* to go to Disneyland... there's generally things to do within a few hours drive. And those places were doing a thriving business before 9/11 and (modulo the downturn) are doing roughly the same business today.
We fly on vacation only about every fourth year, since there's lots of interesting places to stay within just a few hours drive. In fact, that's pretty much true of my entire extended family and has been stretching back into the 1970's. We just rarely fly. But of those I know who *do* fly (a pretty good number), pretty much none of them complain at the volume level that Slashdot does, and the subject of the TSA pretty much never comes up. The complaints are about the same ol', same ol' that airline passengers have been complaining about for decades.
So, once again, you're confusing the Slashdot echo chamber with how Joe Sixpack thinks.
Which is an interesting thing to say, since you then turn around and basically agree with me. Except for the part where you create, out of thin air, a cost that Papa John's wasn't paying - at that point, you went off into cloud cuckoo land.
Expect a wave of insurance companies going under over the next decade, if they aren't bailed out to the tune of billions or trillions (which the government doesn't have).
This is exact opposite of what will happen. Since many policies will be subsidized, heavily, cost inflation will continue
If cost inflation continues - then somebody has to pay. The money isn't coming out of thin air, and the subsidy isn't going to grow indefinitely, exactly as Medicare and Medicaid haven't. The insurance companies love it because in the short term it's a recipe for tremendous growth, by as per usual they (and you) aren't thinking about the longer term - when the shell game ends.
Those of who are reality-based
And for those of who understand the economy
I wouldn't use the word "us" in either sentence if I were you, because you neither understand the economy, nor are reality based.
Papa John's is reacting to the new economic reality they face under the Obama regime. It's that simple. Obamacare will force them to cut hours and let people go. They know that. We know that. This has never changed since the concept was first floated. It's reality.
Some people knew it - but many people lived under a reality distortion field that lead them to believe that there would be no consequences of any kind under the new law. Those of us who pointed out the flaws in the plan and pointed out that you couldn't alter the trajectory of billions of dollars without consequences were and are being called haters, and liars, and ignorant... and worse.
The worst part is that Obamacare doesn't actually do anything to reform health care or control costs. It's a shell game to hide the mounting costs.
Still, the effects of this farce are only beginning to be felt. The shell game they've been playing about funding is going to end, with a shell lifted to reveal... nothing. Expect a wave of insurance companies going under over the next decade, if they aren't bailed out to the tune of billions or trillions (which the government doesn't have). Since many underwriters and insurance companies also provide other forms of insurance, the ripple effects through the economy will be staggering.
And those ignorant people under the reality distortion field won't understand that these consequences were as predictable as the sun rising. They simply cannot comprehend TANSTAAFL.
Consistently full flights would indicate otherwise. I know it's Slashdot's collective wet dream that the airlines fail because they're flying empty due to mass consumer protest - but it just ain't happening. Flying remains the most convenient way to travel any significant distance, and people appear inclined to put up with the inconveniences.
On the other hand, the existence of sites like Kayak and others offering a convenient way of finding the cheapest flights, and the popularity of airline miles as credit card rewards point to TFA being correct. Such behavior would also be consistent with the general behavior of the American consumer, which judges things primarily on price.
they can't say "OK, we're dedicating $100,000 this year to our Facebook budget" and then choose when and what to post based on that, as the price per post can change
The price changes only if you select "auto bid" rather than entering a fixed bid. Facebook even helpfully points this out in their help files.
And he's seriously over reacting too. Facebook didn't tell him he couldn't post, nor did they "charge him" or require him to pay to post - they offered to sell him advertising slots to expand the reach of his posts. Hell, even my tiny three post a week photoblog page (https://www.facebook.com/FairwaterPhotography) gets those offers. I just click "no thanks" and go on my merry way.
So, there's something else going on here... either he's a jackass (not impossible), clueless on the matter (improbable but not impossible), or he has another agenda entirely (likely).
But I wish him luck in finding an equally efficient broad demographic platform - Twitter isn't it, and neither is MySpace.
Well, I confess I'm not a conoisseur of these subjects, but the technology he proposes is one we've had (not really "we", but you Americans) since the 60's: Saturn V launchers, habitation modules akin to the Lunar Module AND the ISS etc. Maybe I'm too easily influenced, maybe I'm too hopeful, but I'm inclined to believe what he said.
Well, other the fact that ISS type systems would require considerable modification... (the thermal environment is radically different, as is the radiation and micro meteor environments) Nor is the Lunar Module a particularly useful design element, as no Mars lander will be anything like it.
And you missed his (not significantly tested) system of producing fuel on Mars.
Slashdot Mirror
So, no... NASA didn't refer to this as "earth-shattering" or "a breakthrough", and the original poster is talking out of his ass.
Isn't it ironic - someone who has raised money based largely on the nostalgia for what he done in the past... commenting on the gaming industry making games just like the ones they've made in the past.
Seriously, as much as the Slashdot demographic complains about endless remakes, and the mining of the past... at every possible turn they demonstrate exactly *why* the entertainment industry keeps doing so.
Then maybe you should get off your dead ass and read more science journalism and less tabloids.
That's like flying from LA to New York by first dismantling the plane in Miami and then putting it and all it's fuel on semi trailers, along with all the equipment and materials to build the runway and all the people needed and all the support equipment... and then moving it all off road from Miami to LA.
It's not a huge step towards anything - it's sheer insanity. You don't save any fuel by launching from the moon when you have to ship all the fuel there in the first place. You don't make something cost effective by spending trillions of dollars up front.
No budget, and relying on you for (free) voluntary support? My only recommendation is to walk away as fast as you can.
Something shy of about two or three million IIRC...
It's a critical component, granted, but only one of several.
As an automobile analogy - this is like proving air flows through a spiffy new carburetor. Way cool, and very critical... but very, very far from a complete test of the carburetor, let alone of the complete engine.
Sabre remains a very long way away from being proven to work.
Retail sales aren't the only type of business... The vendor a business owner I know buys from has 200 employees (and according to the government qualifies as a small business), and his costs are going up because of the ACA. Guess what happens to the prices of the goods he buys from that vendor? And even though he only employs 20 people, he does provide health insurance, and those costs are going sharply up as insurance companies seek income to pay for the increased costs forced on them by the ACA.
And really, it's not all that hard to exceed fifty people for many businesses. I know a another guy that runs an engineering firm that services the local Naval shipyard... he employs over a hundred. Another friend works at an optical lab (that makes glasses for local and regional opticians) and his shop has around sixty at any given time. My mother works for a small private school for the underprivileged that employs around seventy five people... There's a whole lot of business goin' on that many people are ignorant of because it doesn't directly touch their daily lives.
You pay employees out of income, not out of profit. Profit is what's left over *after* you've paid all of your costs.
You have to examine the assumptions behind the studies - almost all either stop counting when the money hits the cash register or treat all incoming cash as if it too were all spent locally. (Variants of the same thing really) Very few of them consider the cost of goods sold (or lump service businesses alongside wholesale and retail businesses) and where that money goes. When you do, the rates are a lot less dramatic.
The owners of *any* reasonable business make more money than assistant managers - apples to oranges. There's only one owner though....
The same goes for the ultimate destination of the money. They 'import' their goods [to your community] the same as "SomeBig MegaStore", and they (like you) buy most of their stock and spend most of their income on goods 'imported' [to your community]. The money may not end up in a gated compound in Arkansas, but it sure as hell doesn't stay in your community either.
Indeed, Not only is the game not even published yet... $4million is a pretty low budget for a modern PC game. It'll be interesting to see if they can pull it off all, let alone with all the "stretch goals", but it's hardly a wake up call.
The question here is startup costs versus operational costs. Solar panels and batteries both required maintenance and have to be replaced regularly... Power lines generally require little to no maintenance and require replacement only at great intervals.
Lacking a pressing or political/ideological reason for choosing solar, I'd have to pencil out the figures and study them closely before assuming solar is the better solution. There's considerations that people don't often think of in these assumptions, like the need for power during the day and the annual cycle of solar availability.
The problems with these kinds of distributed system aren't so much technological anymore... but economic and operational. Who pays for them? Who maintains them? Who operates them? Who manages operations?
These are the hard questions to answer. (Though no doubt, I'll get plenty of replies with a variety of shallow and ill thought out answers...) These are the questions that need to have at least trial solutions before the system can be rolled out.
NASA doesn't have an unlimited budget, or unlimited manpower... and that's setting aside the engineering issues involved in making complex equipment last out there where it can't be serviced. So they look at what they want to accomplish, see if it can be realistically accomplished on schedule and on budget*, and then set that as their basic goal. Then, once the basic goals are accomplished, they look at extensions.
* With the caveat that NASA is really, really bad at making accurate schedule and budget projections. (And this isn't a new thing or limited to just manned missions.)
" Tresset believes that it might be a good idea to imbue all personal robots with some sort of artistic skill to encourage an emotional bond"
If he finds a way, I'm all for it. But his current robot is a webcam hooked to a photoshop filter and piped to a mechanical arm - technically very impressive, but not actually artistic in any useful sense of the word.
There's more to such a decision than just tax/accounting issues... What is the 'float' - the time between BitPay collecting on my behalf and when they credit it to my account? How often can I collect my balance from BitPay and are there fees for the transfer? (The answers are "daily" and "yes, but not directly" according to BitPay, and there are sharp daily limits to boot.) Then you have to make what's really a gut check call - how stable and reliable do you believe BitPay to be, and how likely to be there next week, next month, next year?
My apologies, I thought you actually read and comprehended what I wrote and were replying to that. I see now that you're merely an extraordinarily clueless elitist asshole with the intelligence of a rotting cabbage.
That depends on how far you're traveling... Unless you live someplace remote, or just *have* to go to Disneyland... there's generally things to do within a few hours drive. And those places were doing a thriving business before 9/11 and (modulo the downturn) are doing roughly the same business today.
We fly on vacation only about every fourth year, since there's lots of interesting places to stay within just a few hours drive. In fact, that's pretty much true of my entire extended family and has been stretching back into the 1970's. We just rarely fly. But of those I know who *do* fly (a pretty good number), pretty much none of them complain at the volume level that Slashdot does, and the subject of the TSA pretty much never comes up. The complaints are about the same ol', same ol' that airline passengers have been complaining about for decades.
So, once again, you're confusing the Slashdot echo chamber with how Joe Sixpack thinks.
Which is an interesting thing to say, since you then turn around and basically agree with me. Except for the part where you create, out of thin air, a cost that Papa John's wasn't paying - at that point, you went off into cloud cuckoo land.
If cost inflation continues - then somebody has to pay. The money isn't coming out of thin air, and the subsidy isn't going to grow indefinitely, exactly as Medicare and Medicaid haven't. The insurance companies love it because in the short term it's a recipe for tremendous growth, by as per usual they (and you) aren't thinking about the longer term - when the shell game ends.
I wouldn't use the word "us" in either sentence if I were you, because you neither understand the economy, nor are reality based.
Some people knew it - but many people lived under a reality distortion field that lead them to believe that there would be no consequences of any kind under the new law. Those of us who pointed out the flaws in the plan and pointed out that you couldn't alter the trajectory of billions of dollars without consequences were and are being called haters, and liars, and ignorant... and worse.
The worst part is that Obamacare doesn't actually do anything to reform health care or control costs. It's a shell game to hide the mounting costs.
Still, the effects of this farce are only beginning to be felt. The shell game they've been playing about funding is going to end, with a shell lifted to reveal... nothing. Expect a wave of insurance companies going under over the next decade, if they aren't bailed out to the tune of billions or trillions (which the government doesn't have). Since many underwriters and insurance companies also provide other forms of insurance, the ripple effects through the economy will be staggering.
And those ignorant people under the reality distortion field won't understand that these consequences were as predictable as the sun rising. They simply cannot comprehend TANSTAAFL.
Consistently full flights would indicate otherwise. I know it's Slashdot's collective wet dream that the airlines fail because they're flying empty due to mass consumer protest - but it just ain't happening. Flying remains the most convenient way to travel any significant distance, and people appear inclined to put up with the inconveniences.
On the other hand, the existence of sites like Kayak and others offering a convenient way of finding the cheapest flights, and the popularity of airline miles as credit card rewards point to TFA being correct. Such behavior would also be consistent with the general behavior of the American consumer, which judges things primarily on price.
The price changes only if you select "auto bid" rather than entering a fixed bid. Facebook even helpfully points this out in their help files.
And he's seriously over reacting too. Facebook didn't tell him he couldn't post, nor did they "charge him" or require him to pay to post - they offered to sell him advertising slots to expand the reach of his posts. Hell, even my tiny three post a week photoblog page (https://www.facebook.com/FairwaterPhotography) gets those offers. I just click "no thanks" and go on my merry way.
So, there's something else going on here... either he's a jackass (not impossible), clueless on the matter (improbable but not impossible), or he has another agenda entirely (likely).
But I wish him luck in finding an equally efficient broad demographic platform - Twitter isn't it, and neither is MySpace.
Who enforces the collection?
Well, other the fact that ISS type systems would require considerable modification... (the thermal environment is radically different, as is the radiation and micro meteor environments) Nor is the Lunar Module a particularly useful design element, as no Mars lander will be anything like it.
And you missed his (not significantly tested) system of producing fuel on Mars.
Etc... etc....