If I go to California to buy something, I have to pay California's taxes and not my own. If I pay someone to go to California to buy something for me, I'd have to pay California's taxes and no my own.
That may be true of California, but it's not universally true across the entire country. Buy something in Washington that you'll be taking back to another state and you don't pay Washington taxes at all.
Here's why states hate this idea.
Um, I don't know where you've been - but the states love the idea of being able to tax Amazon and other internet retailers. They want to tax goods shipped to their state and and force Amazon to collect the revenue for them, but are currently unable to do so because of the Federal ban on doing so.
Space rocket technology has been around since the late 50's. It's not like there's any major secrets
Actually, there are. Not so much military type secrets, but trade secrets and proprietary processes. Rocketry is still very much an art, as everyone from Armadillo to SpaceX is discovering. We haven't had that many design generations, and total flight experience is pretty low overall.
they probably already have Soviet designs, which have proved more reliable than our stuff.
That's what the urban legend would have you believe - but it's utterly false. The difference in reliability between American and Russian vehicles is statistically insignificant. (And the Soyuz capsule in particular has the questionable tendency to break just enough to ride the ragged edge between survival and loss of crew...)
Well, it does really boil down to politics. NASA is willing to team with China because the Administration is bullish on China. NASA is unwilling to team with Russia because Congress doesn't want to because of Russia's violation of various technology transfer treaties. (Congress is currently making noises about not renewing or canceling the special dispensation that allows NASA astronauts to fly on Soyuz.)
The basic technology for the Chinese program did originally come from Russia, but they've gone considerably beyond that now. However, real the problem is that China doesn't actually appear to be interested in much more than the "Potemkin village" program they currently have. They spend just enough and fly just enough and try just enough that they appear to have a space program (a modern hallmark of a 'Great Nation', as battlewagons were back before WWII) but no more. Sure, China produces a lot of press releases and Brave Pronunciations Of Grand Goals In Space... But there doesn't seem to ever be much in the way of actual progress. (Though it does keep columnists and bloggers busy pandering to the easily excitable demographic.)
In real terms, I.E. if PV cells produce a large fraction of electrical power demand, yes - 25 years is short lived. (Not to mention that 'guarantee' is pretty much meaningless as all manufacturers 'guarantees' are. They're betting nobody keeps track and files claims.)
Would you rather have 100 tons of waste annually from a thermal reactor plant, or 2 tons from a breeder reactor? It's radiocative either way.
Well, which I'd rather have depends on the kind and level of radioactivity. 100 tons of Alpha emitter is a hell of a lot safer to handle than (for example) 2 tons of neutron or Beta emitters.
I.E. what matters is the number of Curie's present, not the raw weight of the material.
It goes like this, with GPS the jinn of mapping was out of the bottle, you no longer needed spot-highs, theodolites and thousands of hours work. digital cameras, GPS and drone-aircraft have made wide area mapping cheap
Well, it's made the crudest sort of low level mapping cheap in the same way McDonald's has made the crudest sort of cooking cheap. A friend of mine works for a local public utility, their mapping department has actually grown larger over the past decade because of the increased need for IT support and the unchanged need for GIS professionals, cartographers, and engineers.
and obsoleted most uses of spy satalites.
At least with regards to how the public (incorrectly) believes that spy satellites work. Real spy satellites work in the UV and IR bands as well as visible light. They also revisit areas of interest on a regular basis and are in orbits designed to maintain a constant sun angle for each visit.
I am sorry, I thing this anti Google stuff is the veriest nonsense, while what Google is doing is very much in the Public Interest.
It is not in any way in the public interest for a single company to control all 'orphaned' books past, present, and future. It is very much against the public interest for this to be done without the authors consent. It is incredibly not in the public interest for this to happen by default in violation of the current laws because of a boneheaded decision by a stupid judge.
I am fed to the back teeth with Luddites railing against Google for doing, systematically, what is legal, and what anyone could do.
Which is exactly the point WRT books and Google scanning them - it is not only against the law, Google is trying to rig it so that nobody but them can do it. Anyone in the future who tries is not only violating copyright law, they'll also be violating Google's court awarded monopoly.
For those that can't be bothered to read TFA: They are looking into banning the addition of caffeine to alcoholic drinks. They have said nothing about banning the use of coffee as an ingredient.
Because, as I very carefully spelled out in the first part of the message - there isn't any point. These rovers can't reach but a very small portion of Mars and can only answer a limited set of scientific questions.
The end of the arm is a cluster of scientific instruments, not a bucket like your excavator. Not only can it not pick up anything, using it to push rocks/soils around or to lift the vehicle risks damaging or destroying the very instruments that are the rovers reason for being. It's akin to sticking your head into a grinder to save the tip of your little finger.
But... why aren't there six more of these things wandering around by now?
Why should there be six more wandering around? Their landing systems only allow them to reach a very small proportion of the Martian surface and they are only designed to answer a limited series of scientific questions during their very brief lifespan. Also, odds are that of those six, two would have died shortly after landing, three would have died on or about the ninety day limit, and the remaining one would have died during the first winter. (I.E. it's very hard to give an analogy that even remotely conveys how miraculous it is that Spirit and Opportunity are still functioning.)
Of course, you picked an element that is actually pretty plentiful on earth. Instead, pick something that MIGHT suddenly be hard to obtain; Namely a number of the rare earths.
I picked gold because it's a material most are likely to be familiar with. But it really doesn't matter what element you pick - there isn't one single element who terrestrial price isn't a small fraction of what it would cost to haul out of orbit, let alone mine it on the moon. None. Zip. Zero. Nada.
A number of these are already difficult to find and about the best location is in CHina. And china just recently forbid them to be exported. The more rare and the less that they they will allow exporting. That means that a number of these will go up in price. Not, this low price like Gold. MUCH MUCH MUCH higher.
When prices get around a quarter of a million dollars a pound, then lunar mining becomes attractive. Not practical or economical, just worth starting to think about
Of course, at that price - practically anything manufactured with them will be unaffordable.
Sadly, far too many ppl LACK imagination for what can happen.
Ah yes, the penultimate argument - I simply am not imagining hard enough. Well, in that you are utterly and completely wrong, I can imagine just fine. What I don't do is confuse imagination with the real world.
Low-ranking millionaires can already go to the Space Station -- one at a time.
If I need to point out to that visiting a station in LEO where someone else is paying the bills is quite different than visiting a place that is not only more expensive to get to, but you're paying the bills to boot... There is no no sense in continuing this conversation. You haven't the background to be able to comprehend it.
Your statement may prove similar, to Bill Gates' famous predictions regarding 640k memory... How do you know, for the Moon does not have expensive commodities to mine?
Because we know A) the cost of materials on Earth, and B) the cost it takes to get materials back from the Moon. Comparing 'A' to 'B' one discovers that there is not one single material on Earth whose cost 'A' isn't a fraction of its cost 'B'. There could be a cubic mile of gold in LEO (which is an order of magnitude cheaper to get to and from then the Moon), and even if were already broken up into 10kg chunks so that all you have to do is shovel it into your spacecraft... you'd go broke mining it.
We don't have to know what's there when we know that there's no possible substance that can pay its own way.
You are lacking imagination... How about vacation-destination for those, who want to experience five times lower gravity? How about retirement homes for people, too frail to move on their own on Earth -- they may be able to dance on the Moon? Technics may appear exploiting the low gravity for therapies for, say, spine-injuries (such as when a person needs to re-learn, how to walk).
Imagining things is trivially easy. And pretty much meaningless. In the real world, numbers matter - and the numbers say "no way José" The costs of space travel would have to drop by four or five orders of magnitude before any of that becomes barely affordable for Bill Gates and others of his financial stature, and another couple of orders of magnitude before John Q Upperclasspublic can afford it, and yet another couple before Joe Punchclock can even dream of it.
Barring some hitherto unforseen 'killer app' or government investment on the order of the entire national budget for the next couple of decades - that nine to ten orders of magnitude drop simply isn't happening.
My wife, an accountant, comments - "If IT is that screwed up, what makes you think accounting is any better?".
Seriously, you can have your basic annual bookkeeping and taxes straight but still be hopelessly broken in being able to keep track of stuff from further back than the current tax year. (Doubly so if they business has a bookkeeper rather than a real accountant, triply so if they outsource to a bookkeeper or accountant.)
If they don't have the money to pay for licenses, or willingly cheap out and steal them, that makes me suspect that isn't the only place where management is cutting corners. Accountants cost real money, and as they are generally seen as 'support' and costing a company money rather than being a profit center, they're often underfunded and overworked.
The 95% of the technology startups in our town are laughingly underfunded
Having seen a few startups, and read the descriptions of many more, I suspect the opposite is true: 95% of the technology startups have utterly no clue when it comes to budgeting and financial matters, little or business sense or skills, and no interest in learning. 'Underfunding' is a symptom, not a cause.
I started this post with the idea that I would make a joke similar to what RMS says about piracy requiring guns and ships but when I stopped to think about the words pirate and piracy, it really is odd that they're used when software is executed outside the limits of a license.
RMS obviously believe in the Big Lie principle - repeat a lie often enough and loudly enough, and people start to treat it as truth. (Hint: Use of the word piracy for violating copyright goes back centuries.)
It's totally reasonable in the face of ridiculous license terms to want to get past all that and just use the software. That's why we've gone from no product keys to product keys to activation and now to automatic auditing like Windows Genuine Advantage.
No, we've gone that route because of people like yourself who mistakenly believe that it's OK to break the law because they don't like the law.
Presumably all DVD readers made for the next 1000 years will be backward compatible. Have you tried to read an 8-inch floppy disk lately? And they're only three decades old!
The nice thing about he optical disc form factor is that it decouples the encoding and retrieval technology from the moving parts involves in loading, unloading, and spinning the disc.
The read/write head moves too - otherwise you wouldn't be able to read anything but the small portion of the disk directly above the read/write head. The form factor and details are different - but with the exception of 'flying' the head, the basic mechanical operations of an optical drive are exactly the same as a magnetic disk drive.
It's very easy to support additional optical media formats by simply including another kind of laser in the read head.
For certain handwaving values of 'simply', sure. In reality, as a given standard recedes ever further from the bleeding edge manufacturers are going to be increasingly unwilling to increase the cost and complexity of the read (or read/write) head in order to support formats fewer and fewer people use.
If he wasn't a family member, why the hell were you fixing it for free and/or not discussing/explaining the solution?
Even if he was a family member, why the hell did was he just dictating a solution without discussion/explanation?
Based on the rest his comment - the answer is obvious, he's a jackass convinced he knows better than anyone else and with serious problems relating to other human beings.
I find it sad an disturbing that both the OP, and many of the posters, only want to force the family to do one thing or another so he doesn't have to deal with them anymore.
I spent many hours patiently fixing my dad-in-laws computer when he'd managed, somehow, to mess it up again. Didn't bother me much as it gave me a chance to visit with him and mom.
They're both gone now - and I'd give much to hear the phone ring and Dad say "son, I've managed to mess it up again, why don't you come over and fix it, and then we'll have dinner and catch the ball game".
How vulnerable is it? Face it, most SCADA systems are windows based. If you need more of a hint than that you are in pretty strong denial.
If that's your only 'evidence' of problems, then you are pretty clueless and just parroting the party line. Yes, Windows is vulnerable and can be unstable - that does not mean that any given Windows machine has been cracked and/or is constantly crashing. I'll give and grant that it takes more effort to do so than it should, but it isn't impossible to run a Windows system that is both secure and stable - especially if it's air gapped and comfiguration controlled.
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That may be true of California, but it's not universally true across the entire country. Buy something in Washington that you'll be taking back to another state and you don't pay Washington taxes at all.
Um, I don't know where you've been - but the states love the idea of being able to tax Amazon and other internet retailers. They want to tax goods shipped to their state and and force Amazon to collect the revenue for them, but are currently unable to do so because of the Federal ban on doing so.
Actually, there are. Not so much military type secrets, but trade secrets and proprietary processes. Rocketry is still very much an art, as everyone from Armadillo to SpaceX is discovering. We haven't had that many design generations, and total flight experience is pretty low overall.
That's what the urban legend would have you believe - but it's utterly false. The difference in reliability between American and Russian vehicles is statistically insignificant. (And the Soyuz capsule in particular has the questionable tendency to break just enough to ride the ragged edge between survival and loss of crew...)
Well, it does really boil down to politics. NASA is willing to team with China because the Administration is bullish on China. NASA is unwilling to team with Russia because Congress doesn't want to because of Russia's violation of various technology transfer treaties. (Congress is currently making noises about not renewing or canceling the special dispensation that allows NASA astronauts to fly on Soyuz.)
The basic technology for the Chinese program did originally come from Russia, but they've gone considerably beyond that now. However, real the problem is that China doesn't actually appear to be interested in much more than the "Potemkin village" program they currently have. They spend just enough and fly just enough and try just enough that they appear to have a space program (a modern hallmark of a 'Great Nation', as battlewagons were back before WWII) but no more. Sure, China produces a lot of press releases and Brave Pronunciations Of Grand Goals In Space... But there doesn't seem to ever be much in the way of actual progress. (Though it does keep columnists and bloggers busy pandering to the easily excitable demographic.)
In real terms, I.E. if PV cells produce a large fraction of electrical power demand, yes - 25 years is short lived. (Not to mention that 'guarantee' is pretty much meaningless as all manufacturers 'guarantees' are. They're betting nobody keeps track and files claims.)
Science education is one of NASA's missions after all. Education seems like a fine use of my money.
And the panels have a finite (and not too lengthy) life span, meaning you not only need to mine, you need to keep mining just to run in place.
Well, which I'd rather have depends on the kind and level of radioactivity. 100 tons of Alpha emitter is a hell of a lot safer to handle than (for example) 2 tons of neutron or Beta emitters.
I.E. what matters is the number of Curie's present, not the raw weight of the material.
Given the morbid fascination the geek world often has with retro computing, it's not something I'd ground rule myself.
Well, it's made the crudest sort of low level mapping cheap in the same way McDonald's has made the crudest sort of cooking cheap. A friend of mine works for a local public utility, their mapping department has actually grown larger over the past decade because of the increased need for IT support and the unchanged need for GIS professionals, cartographers, and engineers.
At least with regards to how the public (incorrectly) believes that spy satellites work. Real spy satellites work in the UV and IR bands as well as visible light. They also revisit areas of interest on a regular basis and are in orbits designed to maintain a constant sun angle for each visit.
It is not in any way in the public interest for a single company to control all 'orphaned' books past, present, and future. It is very much against the public interest for this to be done without the authors consent. It is incredibly not in the public interest for this to happen by default in violation of the current laws because of a boneheaded decision by a stupid judge.
Which is exactly the point WRT books and Google scanning them - it is not only against the law, Google is trying to rig it so that nobody but them can do it. Anyone in the future who tries is not only violating copyright law, they'll also be violating Google's court awarded monopoly.
For those that can't be bothered to read TFA: They are looking into banning the addition of caffeine to alcoholic drinks. They have said nothing about banning the use of coffee as an ingredient.
Because, as I very carefully spelled out in the first part of the message - there isn't any point. These rovers can't reach but a very small portion of Mars and can only answer a limited set of scientific questions.
The end of the arm is a cluster of scientific instruments, not a bucket like your excavator. Not only can it not pick up anything, using it to push rocks/soils around or to lift the vehicle risks damaging or destroying the very instruments that are the rovers reason for being. It's akin to sticking your head into a grinder to save the tip of your little finger.
Why should there be six more wandering around? Their landing systems only allow them to reach a very small proportion of the Martian surface and they are only designed to answer a limited series of scientific questions during their very brief lifespan. Also, odds are that of those six, two would have died shortly after landing, three would have died on or about the ninety day limit, and the remaining one would have died during the first winter. (I.E. it's very hard to give an analogy that even remotely conveys how miraculous it is that Spirit and Opportunity are still functioning.)
The prices to mine the moon remain astronomical no matter what China does. So you can stow you fear mongering. It's disconnected from the real world.
Insofar as 'imagination' goes, same deal. Fear mongering and smoke blowing disconnected from reality.
I picked gold because it's a material most are likely to be familiar with. But it really doesn't matter what element you pick - there isn't one single element who terrestrial price isn't a small fraction of what it would cost to haul out of orbit, let alone mine it on the moon. None. Zip. Zero. Nada.
When prices get around a quarter of a million dollars a pound, then lunar mining becomes attractive. Not practical or economical, just worth starting to think about
Of course, at that price - practically anything manufactured with them will be unaffordable.
Ah yes, the penultimate argument - I simply am not imagining hard enough. Well, in that you are utterly and completely wrong, I can imagine just fine. What I don't do is confuse imagination with the real world.
If I need to point out to that visiting a station in LEO where someone else is paying the bills is quite different than visiting a place that is not only more expensive to get to, but you're paying the bills to boot... There is no no sense in continuing this conversation. You haven't the background to be able to comprehend it.
Because we know A) the cost of materials on Earth, and B) the cost it takes to get materials back from the Moon. Comparing 'A' to 'B' one discovers that there is not one single material on Earth whose cost 'A' isn't a fraction of its cost 'B'. There could be a cubic mile of gold in LEO (which is an order of magnitude cheaper to get to and from then the Moon), and even if were already broken up into 10kg chunks so that all you have to do is shovel it into your spacecraft... you'd go broke mining it.
We don't have to know what's there when we know that there's no possible substance that can pay its own way.
Imagining things is trivially easy. And pretty much meaningless. In the real world, numbers matter - and the numbers say "no way José" The costs of space travel would have to drop by four or five orders of magnitude before any of that becomes barely affordable for Bill Gates and others of his financial stature, and another couple of orders of magnitude before John Q Upperclasspublic can afford it, and yet another couple before Joe Punchclock can even dream of it.
Barring some hitherto unforseen 'killer app' or government investment on the order of the entire national budget for the next couple of decades - that nine to ten orders of magnitude drop simply isn't happening.
[Sigh] Though that page repeats the (completely false) urban legend that Blueback was used in The Hunt for Red October...
There's also the Submarine Museums page from the USN, which links not only to submarines on display, but to other museums with submarine exhibits.
My wife, an accountant, comments - "If IT is that screwed up, what makes you think accounting is any better?".
Seriously, you can have your basic annual bookkeeping and taxes straight but still be hopelessly broken in being able to keep track of stuff from further back than the current tax year. (Doubly so if they business has a bookkeeper rather than a real accountant, triply so if they outsource to a bookkeeper or accountant.)
If they don't have the money to pay for licenses, or willingly cheap out and steal them, that makes me suspect that isn't the only place where management is cutting corners. Accountants cost real money, and as they are generally seen as 'support' and costing a company money rather than being a profit center, they're often underfunded and overworked.
Having seen a few startups, and read the descriptions of many more, I suspect the opposite is true: 95% of the technology startups have utterly no clue when it comes to budgeting and financial matters, little or business sense or skills, and no interest in learning. 'Underfunding' is a symptom, not a cause.
RMS obviously believe in the Big Lie principle - repeat a lie often enough and loudly enough, and people start to treat it as truth. (Hint: Use of the word piracy for violating copyright goes back centuries.)
No, we've gone that route because of people like yourself who mistakenly believe that it's OK to break the law because they don't like the law.
The read/write head moves too - otherwise you wouldn't be able to read anything but the small portion of the disk directly above the read/write head. The form factor and details are different - but with the exception of 'flying' the head, the basic mechanical operations of an optical drive are exactly the same as a magnetic disk drive.
For certain handwaving values of 'simply', sure. In reality, as a given standard recedes ever further from the bleeding edge manufacturers are going to be increasingly unwilling to increase the cost and complexity of the read (or read/write) head in order to support formats fewer and fewer people use.
Even if he was a family member, why the hell did was he just dictating a solution without discussion/explanation?
Based on the rest his comment - the answer is obvious, he's a jackass convinced he knows better than anyone else and with serious problems relating to other human beings.
I find it sad an disturbing that both the OP, and many of the posters, only want to force the family to do one thing or another so he doesn't have to deal with them anymore.
I spent many hours patiently fixing my dad-in-laws computer when he'd managed, somehow, to mess it up again. Didn't bother me much as it gave me a chance to visit with him and mom.
They're both gone now - and I'd give much to hear the phone ring and Dad say "son, I've managed to mess it up again, why don't you come over and fix it, and then we'll have dinner and catch the ball game".
If that's your only 'evidence' of problems, then you are pretty clueless and just parroting the party line. Yes, Windows is vulnerable and can be unstable - that does not mean that any given Windows machine has been cracked and/or is constantly crashing. I'll give and grant that it takes more effort to do so than it should, but it isn't impossible to run a Windows system that is both secure and stable - especially if it's air gapped and comfiguration controlled.