you know i seem to remember another point when we sent out explores to to a new world without the guaranty of profit or of returns in the investors lifetime we later called it the Americas.
You remember a time that pretty much never was. The explorers that set out for the America's may not have had a guarantee of profit, but they were sure as hell hoping for personal profit in their lifetimes and so were their investors.
Seems like the only feasible way to get people from here to another star system using what we know now, technology-wise.
Other than the minor sticking point that we don't actually have, or are even remotely close, to the technology required. And setting aside the assumptions you specify (which we don't actually have, or are even remotely close to the technology required to support)...
Wouldn't it be easier to just simulate the entire city on a supercomputer?
Simulations only work work when you have sufficient input data for the model to accurately reflect reality. This is, for any non trivial simulation, A Very Hard Problem - especially when the simulation is multi-dimensional.
For example, any errors in your model multiply across the interfaces. If your electrical model is only.999 accurate, and your sewage system (which uses electricity for the pumps, etc...) is only.999 accurate, then your model of these two systems can't be any more accurate than.998 (.999x.999). (Setting aside the issue of slight errors at the component and transport levels.) And without extensive (read "expensive") measurements on physical components, your model is only as good as your assumptions. (Adding extra decimal places of accuracy costs Really Big Bucks.)
So no, it isn't necessarily easier or cheaper to just simulate the city on a supercomputer.
That's the cost including the share of the fixed annual cost - I.E., an accounting fiction, not the actual amount that would be in the budget. As with any source, you have to be aware of the accuracy and assumptions behind it.
Why? Even if a Space Shuttle were available right now, it would be much cheaper to launch a new satellite to gain those extra years.
Given that a Shuttle launch only costs around $150m* USD, I suspect you're way off base. Doubly so since it cost 2.5 *billion* dollars to develop and launch in the first place. Now, admittedly you're not going to pay the full development costs the second time around, but you're still looking at probably 3-500 million plus for the new bird and nearly 200 million for the launch alone.
*That's what it costs to add a flight to the manifest.
More importantly, the records they found at the site indicate that the Mayans viewed the calendar as CYCLICAL
Which was something we already knew, and have known for decades.
and just like our Bad Girls of Linux Wall Calendar, the world doesn't end when the last day of the Calendar is reached.
Well, yes and no. They didn't believe that the world would positively end at the end of a given cycle. They *did* believe that when the world ended (and they were as certain that it would eventually end as Christians are today), it would happen at the end of a cycle.
I was a kid back in the 60's and 70's, so fewer options yet. And still there was a spectrum of attention spans and many distractions from sitting indoors doing, essentially, schoolwork.
Not true at all - if the US manufacturing industry was a country all by itself, it would have the sixth largest economy in the world with a GDP of over two trillion [2010] dollars.
What's actually happened is three fold: the manufacture of consumer goods has fled overseas, the productivity of individuals has gone up, and automation has taken over in a big way since the digital revolution. Yes, the manufacturing sector employs a hell of a lot fewer people than it did forty years ago, but no - it hasn't gone away. (In fact, over the last decade it's been growing.)
The majority have no more interest in Space than occasionally glancing up at the moon and no more interest in electrical engineering than how many gigs and how to plug it in.
And - that's always been true. There never was a golden age.
I think it is that there is too much brain dead easy entertainment.
There's always been brain dead and easy options for entertainment - and the type of kids who sought out Heathkits have always been in a distinct minority. The golden age you allude to never existed.
On top of which, as another poster said, kids that are interested in that kind of thing today have Mindstorm, or simulation games, or programming, or other things that weren't available back in Heathkit's heyday.
Hard to believe that. I have looked at porn sites, and most of them turn out to be directories of other porn sites that also turn out to be directories (the InterWebs is ridiculously awash with directories in all areas).
Then, quite frankly, you've been pretty dammed inept at "looking at porn sites"
The point is that you cannot predict where a link will take you. I have unintentionally found myself in a directory with thumbnails that distinctly look like under-age sex, with names like "Barely Legal Teens". At least they did not claim to be CP, but I am not sure how a court would decide whether it is.
Since the question posed by the grandparent was about popups, your point is pretty much irrelevant.
And since "barely legal" material can be bought at newsstands across the country, and rented/bought at video places across the country... you're pretty much inept at understanding porn genres too.
The point of arresting people who possess child pornography is that they might have paid for it, and thus encouraged someone to abuse children i.e. they indirectly caused harm to children.
And that's where I have a problem with convictions for the possession of CP for just that reason - they're not being convicted for causing harm, they're being convicted because they might have caused harm. Outside of the TSA/Homeland Security/drug possession* etc..., you pretty much can't be convicted because you might have done something - conviction requires proof beyond reasonable doubt.
Yet a line must be drawn somewhere; having images in a browser cache is not proof that a person paid for child pornography or otherwise encouraged its production.
Possession other than in your browser cache isn't proof that you paid for it either. Receipts, email, or bank and credit card records are proof that you paid for it.
*In many jurisdictions, possession over a certain ludicrously small amount is assumed under the law as de facto proof that you intend to distribute, allowing a much higher penalty to be imposed without the prosecution being burdened with the bothersome necessity to provide proof that you actually were dealing or intended to deal.
Let me see if I have this straight... Apple and Foxconn are working to improve worker conditions - when they and their "independent audit" claim that worker conditions aren't bad in the first place, and the article that ignited the firestorm was discovered to be fiction?
These look to me like behaviors of people who don't take care of themselves and/or who are lazy/inactive.
Yeah. Despite decades of research showing that poor sleep patterns can effect your health... it's all about the lazy people.
It makes more sense to me that it'd be the other way around...that inactivity tends to help cause obesity, and also correlates with sleeping in whenever you can, for example.
Does inactivity correlate with sleeping in? Get back to me with your cites and studies.
Airplane pilots are required to be up-to-date on their celestial navigation.
[[Citation needed.]] As outside of a few special purpose aircraft. I haven't seen an aircraft (civilian or military) equipped with a dome for taking star sights in decades. Not to mention, celestial navigation is for point-to-point navigation, not precision navigation in controlled airspace. (Like the airports cited in the summary.)
stop saying throwback. throwback is a marketing term coined by cola companies and snack food conglomerates to gin up their respective markets and attract new customers to the same unhealthy vapid product theyve sold for 50 years.
Nope, though abused by those companies, "throwback" is a word that's been around a very long time. Taking a gander at Google's Ngram viewer shows the term in use back to the early 1800's. Other sources indicate it's origin as being 1855 or 1888.
second, until makerbots start employing millions of people in well paid, safe factory conditions with competitive pay and honest retirement options, theres absolutely zero equivalent measure between a CnC factory that gets a building permit and a tax break from the city of brooklyn and the 1960's manufacturing explosion that dominated the northeast and ushered in american prosperity for hundreds of millions of people.
Wait, what? By the 1960's, the "explosion" in the Northeast was over - and manufacturers there were already feeling the cold touch of winter as production (and consumers) fled to other part of the country and overseas to avoid rising land and labor costs. Manufacturing was running on inertia not "exploding".
That's nothing. We're still flying B-52's with wire-wrapped computers. None of this modern solder.
Actually, wire-wrap is the "new fangled" technology of the pair... soldering goes back to the earliest days of electricity and electronics, while wire-wrap dates to the 1950's.
That being said, the [US] Navy was still buying wire-wrapped backplanes as late as the late 1980's. Wire-wrap has a lot of advantages if you're buying equipment meant to be in service for decades, rather than mass produced equipment intended to last only a handful of years at best. Also, with automated wire wrap, you can use one basic backplane frame for essentially an infinite number of components. The system I worked on for the Navy had over 150 different logical units using only three standard backplanes and a small handful of custom backplanes. This meant the spares pool could be pretty shallow because replacement backplanes could essentially be produced on-demand. Automated testing was also much easier because all of the component locations (for plug in modules) were located on a standard X-Y grid.
You sir are correct that piracy is theft as it usually involves the taking of physical goods by force yet RIAA/MPAA want to encourage everyone that a copyright violation is as bad if not worse then piracy, where people are injured/killed while the theft is taking place
Sorry, but no. Use of the term "piracy" for copyright violations and theft of intellectual property goes back for centuries.
It's not the RIAA/MPAA that's re-defining terms here, it's you.
Maybe, maybe not. The signals will still come through windows, through unpapered areas behind cabinets and shower stalls, etc... Even on papered walls, there's going to be leakage through light switches and electric plugs (especially if you have plastic boxes).
Read it closer. They only insure the "major appliances", which they list specifically, and which are more tolerant of over-voltage than delicate electronic devices.
Have you actually bought any major appliances in the last decade or so? I have, and pretty much all of them have embedded controllers and such, which pretty much moves them into the "sensitive electronics" category. They're also much harder to surge protect than my computer or DVR because of their much higher current draw. Not to mention, I've lived in Florida (back in the 70's), and I've seen "major appliances" taken out by lightning storms. "More tolerant of over voltage" does not mean "immune to the effects".
So, combined with local protection for more sensitive gear, the offer seems like a pretty good deal.
And you should read closer yourself - Not only did the OP *specifically mention* it only covered appliances, the list on the page is *specifically noted* as being examples.
Because they didn't exist in the Jurassic [dinosaur] era? Besides, while there is (and has been for a long time) a great deal of fascination with the dinosaurs, for the megafauna of later eras... not so much.
Minor pet peeve of mine... Between anorectic fashion models and overweight "accept me as I am" reactions to the fashion models, the "sensible middle" has been lost.
That's true of so many things in Western society...
Slashdot Mirror
Well, you seem to miss the point - this isn't a real live city.
You remember a time that pretty much never was. The explorers that set out for the America's may not have had a guarantee of profit, but they were sure as hell hoping for personal profit in their lifetimes and so were their investors.
Other than the minor sticking point that we don't actually have, or are even remotely close, to the technology required. And setting aside the assumptions you specify (which we don't actually have, or are even remotely close to the technology required to support)...
Yeah, then it's feasible.
Simulations only work work when you have sufficient input data for the model to accurately reflect reality. This is, for any non trivial simulation, A Very Hard Problem - especially when the simulation is multi-dimensional.
.999 accurate, and your sewage system (which uses electricity for the pumps, etc...) is only .999 accurate, then your model of these two systems can't be any more accurate than .998 (.999x.999). (Setting aside the issue of slight errors at the component and transport levels.) And without extensive (read "expensive") measurements on physical components, your model is only as good as your assumptions. (Adding extra decimal places of accuracy costs Really Big Bucks.)
For example, any errors in your model multiply across the interfaces. If your electrical model is only
So no, it isn't necessarily easier or cheaper to just simulate the city on a supercomputer.
That's the cost including the share of the fixed annual cost - I.E., an accounting fiction, not the actual amount that would be in the budget. As with any source, you have to be aware of the accuracy and assumptions behind it.
See: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/space/controversy/ for more information, or google about for "cost to add a shuttle flight to the manifest".
Given that a Shuttle launch only costs around $150m* USD, I suspect you're way off base. Doubly so since it cost 2.5 *billion* dollars to develop and launch in the first place. Now, admittedly you're not going to pay the full development costs the second time around, but you're still looking at probably 3-500 million plus for the new bird and nearly 200 million for the launch alone.
*That's what it costs to add a flight to the manifest.
Which was something we already knew, and have known for decades.
Well, yes and no. They didn't believe that the world would positively end at the end of a given cycle. They *did* believe that when the world ended (and they were as certain that it would eventually end as Christians are today), it would happen at the end of a cycle.
I was a kid back in the 60's and 70's, so fewer options yet. And still there was a spectrum of attention spans and many distractions from sitting indoors doing, essentially, schoolwork.
There was no golden age.
Not true at all - if the US manufacturing industry was a country all by itself, it would have the sixth largest economy in the world with a GDP of over two trillion [2010] dollars.
What's actually happened is three fold: the manufacture of consumer goods has fled overseas, the productivity of individuals has gone up, and automation has taken over in a big way since the digital revolution. Yes, the manufacturing sector employs a hell of a lot fewer people than it did forty years ago, but no - it hasn't gone away. (In fact, over the last decade it's been growing.)
And - that's always been true. There never was a golden age.
There's always been brain dead and easy options for entertainment - and the type of kids who sought out Heathkits have always been in a distinct minority. The golden age you allude to never existed.
On top of which, as another poster said, kids that are interested in that kind of thing today have Mindstorm, or simulation games, or programming, or other things that weren't available back in Heathkit's heyday.
Then, quite frankly, you've been pretty dammed inept at "looking at porn sites"
Since the question posed by the grandparent was about popups, your point is pretty much irrelevant.
And since "barely legal" material can be bought at newsstands across the country, and rented/bought at video places across the country... you're pretty much inept at understanding porn genres too.
And that's where I have a problem with convictions for the possession of CP for just that reason - they're not being convicted for causing harm, they're being convicted because they might have caused harm. Outside of the TSA/Homeland Security/drug possession* etc..., you pretty much can't be convicted because you might have done something - conviction requires proof beyond reasonable doubt.
Possession other than in your browser cache isn't proof that you paid for it either. Receipts, email, or bank and credit card records are proof that you paid for it.
*In many jurisdictions, possession over a certain ludicrously small amount is assumed under the law as de facto proof that you intend to distribute, allowing a much higher penalty to be imposed without the prosecution being burdened with the bothersome necessity to provide proof that you actually were dealing or intended to deal.
Let me see if I have this straight... Apple and Foxconn are working to improve worker conditions - when they and their "independent audit" claim that worker conditions aren't bad in the first place, and the article that ignited the firestorm was discovered to be fiction?
Interesting.
Yeah. Despite decades of research showing that poor sleep patterns can effect your health... it's all about the lazy people.
Does inactivity correlate with sleeping in? Get back to me with your cites and studies.
[[Citation needed.]] As outside of a few special purpose aircraft. I haven't seen an aircraft (civilian or military) equipped with a dome for taking star sights in decades. Not to mention, celestial navigation is for point-to-point navigation, not precision navigation in controlled airspace. (Like the airports cited in the summary.)
Nope, though abused by those companies, "throwback" is a word that's been around a very long time. Taking a gander at Google's Ngram viewer shows the term in use back to the early 1800's. Other sources indicate it's origin as being 1855 or 1888.
Wait, what? By the 1960's, the "explosion" in the Northeast was over - and manufacturers there were already feeling the cold touch of winter as production (and consumers) fled to other part of the country and overseas to avoid rising land and labor costs. Manufacturing was running on inertia not "exploding".
Not once in all my years of browsing some pretty shady corners of the web.
Seriously, CP providers learned pretty early on to go at least semi-underground and to not make themselves or their customers visible targets.
Actually, wire-wrap is the "new fangled" technology of the pair... soldering goes back to the earliest days of electricity and electronics, while wire-wrap dates to the 1950's.
That being said, the [US] Navy was still buying wire-wrapped backplanes as late as the late 1980's. Wire-wrap has a lot of advantages if you're buying equipment meant to be in service for decades, rather than mass produced equipment intended to last only a handful of years at best. Also, with automated wire wrap, you can use one basic backplane frame for essentially an infinite number of components. The system I worked on for the Navy had over 150 different logical units using only three standard backplanes and a small handful of custom backplanes. This meant the spares pool could be pretty shallow because replacement backplanes could essentially be produced on-demand. Automated testing was also much easier because all of the component locations (for plug in modules) were located on a standard X-Y grid.
Sorry, but no. Use of the term "piracy" for copyright violations and theft of intellectual property goes back for centuries.
It's not the RIAA/MPAA that's re-defining terms here, it's you.
Maybe, maybe not. The signals will still come through windows, through unpapered areas behind cabinets and shower stalls, etc... Even on papered walls, there's going to be leakage through light switches and electric plugs (especially if you have plastic boxes).
Have you actually bought any major appliances in the last decade or so? I have, and pretty much all of them have embedded controllers and such, which pretty much moves them into the "sensitive electronics" category. They're also much harder to surge protect than my computer or DVR because of their much higher current draw. Not to mention, I've lived in Florida (back in the 70's), and I've seen "major appliances" taken out by lightning storms. "More tolerant of over voltage" does not mean "immune to the effects".
So, combined with local protection for more sensitive gear, the offer seems like a pretty good deal.
And you should read closer yourself - Not only did the OP *specifically mention* it only covered appliances, the list on the page is *specifically noted* as being examples.
Because they didn't exist in the Jurassic [dinosaur] era? Besides, while there is (and has been for a long time) a great deal of fascination with the dinosaurs, for the megafauna of later eras... not so much.
That's true of so many things in Western society...
This. As is so often quoted here on Slashdot: "correlation is not causation".
OTOH, Slashdot has to have something for it's daily Two Minute Hate and the TSA is an easy and popular target.