Or it can work to protect your job. I cant say I dont understand at all the disgust against unions (I do know, its mostly lies and its mostly thanks to Reagan republicans and democrats who where swindled and then swindled their kids into listening to the bullshit) but what I do know is IT workers, training their Indian and Asian replacements in the US WOULD NOT BE HAPPENING if unions where present.
Oh yeah? Tell that to all the unionized mill workers in the South. Oh, wait, you can't... The mills were all closed and the work sent overseas decades ago. OK, lets try all those unionized steel workers in the Rust Belt. Oh, wait... Their mills are gone too...
The bullshit of which you speak is firmly packed between your ears.
The auto industry has been under strain of a huge retired population and unable to shed the load as the demand for large high profit vehicles has dwindled.
Huh? I know slashdotters are generally a callous lot... but this takes the cake. Let the auto companies off the hook for their mismanagement of the pension funds and kick all the retirees to the curb? Christ almighty that's fucking cold.
And nothing is more likely to provoke a political revolution of the likes you've never seen - there's a lot of boomers rounding the corner into retirement and almost all of them are relying on the pension benefits and obligations you want to give companies license to not pay.
Basically, when we ran the numbers for nuclear war beyond a single missile, we realized the resulting nuclear winter would result in all Canadian forces and almost all of the population dying within months, and stopped wasting time on nuclear weapons
An interesting claim since the Canadians stopped 'wasting time' on nuclear weapons in the 60's, and nuclear winter wasn't even discussed as a theory until the 1980's, and since it takes far more than one missile to instigate nuclear winter...
Basically, being in Vancouver BC at the time, you knew you had at least 10 nukes coming down, and even if intercepted, the EMP blast would take out all commercial systems and the radiation and fire storms would destroy all urban centers beyond useful measure.
As they say, what 'everyone knows' is usually false.
Tesla was a Slashdotter in that he did his thing without buying into the conventional wisdom of the time.
Oh, Slashdotters have their conventional wisdom and groupthink too... Just because it doesn't match the mainstream doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
It's unfortunate that someone with so much to offer is now regarded as a marginal creator of useless technology.
Mostly due to the tireless efforts of generation of cranks who've spent their time wallowing in the more marginal of his creations and the more extraordinary of his unproven claims. Tesla's reputation is a victim of his success.
For example, while traveling in the South, I discovered that my use of sarcasm was frequently either taken at face value, or misinterpreted as me just being an asshole. For instance, saying something like "nice weather today" (when it clearly is not) is an icebreaker that works across socioeconomic lines in a place like MA. However, [in my experience] in the South, uttering something so baldly wrong often earns you the you-are-an-idiot look.
Much depends on your tone - I'm from the South and can say "nice weather today" (when it's clearly not) and have it be accepted as sarcasm, but then I know how (and more importantly when and to who) to deliver the line. Just because it you can make it work across socioeconomic boundaries in one culture, doesn't mean you can make it work across cultural boundaries in a different culture. Southern icebreakers don't tend to use sarcasm, and sarcasm verges on being bad manners - and bad manners are acceptable only in certain specific circumstances and *decidely* offensive when coming from a stranger. You got a 'you-are-an-idiot' look because you (wrongly) presumed to use a familiarity you weren't entitled to.
If you want to do any deep-space maneuvers, you have to carry all that liquid propellant (be it LO2/LH2 or LO2/RP-1, for the rocketry equivalent of a gas guzzler (specific impulse of 200-500 s), instead of carrying a small amount of high-efficiency propellant with a specific impulse of up to 10000 s.
The actual tradeoff goes something more like this:
a) Large lightweight tanks, large amount of fuel, nearly no [electrical] power supply, medium to light weight engine. Total weight declines significantly across the life of the system. (Weight is dominated by propellant.)
b) Small lightweight tanks, small amount of fuel, a very large and very heavy power supply, lightweight engine. Total weight does not change significantly across the life of the system. (Weight is dominated by the power supply.)
Ion engine proponents like to pretend the power supply problem doesn't exist.
When your wife finds out you spent $5 on a perfect diamond that was made in a lab instead of by the Earths natural and loving embrace, you will find out how loving and warm your couch is...
If your wife is shallow enough to care about the price of a diamond instead of the fact that you thought enough to buy her one
Except that if a diamond only costs $5, the notional wife isn't going to value it beyond being a gift from you in the first place. A diamond [currently] has value because it's expensive and represents a sacrifice. A $5 diamond is no different than a cheap prize from a carnival game - a heartfelt gift, but ultimately disposable.
The popular press delights in stories of the "Rogue $PERSON, scorned by $POWERS_THAT_BE, shows them what's what through hard work, dedication, a little luck, and a heartwarming moral" flavor. Sometimes, things like this actually happen; often, simple professional disagreements, differences of opinion, the usual testing and discarding of hypotheses, etc. have to be bludgeoned into this mold.
The popular press? Hell, Slashdot publishes these kinds of stories on a daily basis - nothing [it seems] excites a Slashdotter more than $UNDERDOG against $BIGDOG.
The story under discussion here is only notable because somebody actually noticed.
As long as the two party system is entrenched at the state level, the majority of states are unlikely to change the situation in favor of third parties.
but what you describe isn't a flaw in the spec - but a flaw in the implementation. If third parties ran themselves with a half a lick of sense and as if they were actually serious, we wouldn't have two entrenched parties within a couple of election cycles. But so long as third parties continue to run nonviable candidates on nonviable platforms and only for the top offices, they'll continue to remain marginal.
So the President Elect in the short time he has to assemble a staff and plan for transition (among the many things he has to do) must instead get someone to develop and test his own custom Javascript on his own site.
Yeah, because it is so complicated and time consuming to order his IT guys to make it happen. He might have to spend what, a whole minute? Two?
But they keep trying not because there is a conspiracy to keep Obama's birth a secret
If there's not a conspiracy - then why can't a birth certificate be produced?
but these people will never accept that he was elected President no matter the proof
Some of us won't accept it because we question whether the constitutional requirement that he be a natural born US citizen is met. If that requirement cannot be unequivocally shown to be met - then it does not matter whether he was elected or not, because the election is null and void because he was not eligible to be elected. Some of the people who I know who were loudest about Bush's violations of the Constitution are now some of the loudest in trying to shout down questions about Obama's birth certificate.
Which disgusts me because it doesn't matter if your last name is Bush, or Obama - you don't get to ignore the parts of the Constitution you don't like.
I read it thoroughly - and there's no support for the claim that SpaceX is revolutionizing the launch business. Their assembly method is only different in semantics from that used by the Usual Suspects.
Wait, what? Appointing people with actual skills other than being in the good-ol'-boy network is an illusion of change, but appointing people from the good-ol'-boy network is actual change?
The DOE was one of the few things Carter did right. Several issues have been solved that wouldn't of without this kind of organization.
But, I note you don't actually cite any.
Besides, do you really want the military building their own nuclear weapons and reactors? As it is now they have to ask the DOE if they can have one, or any. They're all owned by the DOE and the DOE can just say no if they feel like it.
Except we didn't need to create a DOE to supervise the military - as the ERDA and the NRC (both carved out of what had been the AEC) already existed and fulfilled those functions as the AEC had for decades.
Ordering a book or video card works well with 2D representations, or even just a text description. But that doesn't mean that 3D isn't useful for other things.
As a woodworker, it would be very nice to see an accurate 3D representation of a board I was buying over the net or to be able to actually 'walk around' larger tools to get a sense of their layout. Or to see, in 3D, the pattern created by a router bit. Etc... Etc...
RTFA! It is alleged that the student violated the policy. However, reading the policy, there is a clause that specifically permits bulk emailing communications regarding changes to university policies of procedures. There is room to interpret that as permission to bulk email about the changed academic calendar.
Except her email wasn't an [informative] communication about the changes, it was a [personal and political] protest against the changes. As other have pointed out, the former is specifically permitted, the latter specifically forbidden.
I agree with your assessment of their stated problem, but I'd like to know where they got that idea in the first place. Launching directly from the space elevator has never (in my understanding) been part of the concept. Instead, cargo (+ people) is offloaded at a station and is moved into a shuttle. The shuttle detaches from the station and then applies a thrust vector to move away.
The shuttle (in your example) launches directly from the station - which means it is subject to the perturbations described in the article. Which means it needs more fuel in order to deliver its cargo to the proper orbit. Which means your throughput efficiency goes down, because now you have to spend upmass on fuel rather than deliverables.
Nobody said this would be easy (quite the opposite), and nobody is claiming we're even close to being "there" yet.
Huh? Where have you been the last twenty odd years? Space Elevator proponents have been explaining how easy (conceptually and practically) an elevator will be for a couple of decades now, though the more intelligent among them have always grudgingly admitted that materials would be the key bottleneck. But the discovery of carbon nanotubes converted most of them to the see-no-problem fanboi side of the fence.
Look, have you any idea of the number of launches required to prepare, by tiny increments, for the eventual (and still debated, snicker) moon landing?
Yeah, actually I do. (Somewhere around a dozen.) But you are comparing apples and oranges - because while a lunar landing can be prepared for incrementally, you can't build a space elevator in the same fashion. One up, all the way to completion - because an incomplete elevator not only is useless, but unstable.
Even with thrusters, it's bound to be a better long-term solution than rockets. Especially using ion drives, you could hard-wire the fuel supply from down below, so to speak, and so not need to haul that mass, too.
If you don't haul mass up, your ion drives aren't doing any driving. They need fuel too, not just power.
Slashdot Mirror
Lets just say this simply - you don't have a fucking clue what you are talking about.
Oh yeah? Tell that to all the unionized mill workers in the South. Oh, wait, you can't... The mills were all closed and the work sent overseas decades ago. OK, lets try all those unionized steel workers in the Rust Belt. Oh, wait... Their mills are gone too...
The bullshit of which you speak is firmly packed between your ears.
Huh? I know slashdotters are generally a callous lot... but this takes the cake. Let the auto companies off the hook for their mismanagement of the pension funds and kick all the retirees to the curb? Christ almighty that's fucking cold.
And nothing is more likely to provoke a political revolution of the likes you've never seen - there's a lot of boomers rounding the corner into retirement and almost all of them are relying on the pension benefits and obligations you want to give companies license to not pay.
I did think before critiquing, after all I've only been study nuclear warfare issues for nearly thirty years.
What I didn't do is confuse sophomoric handwaving and fear mongering with actual thought and knowledge.
An interesting claim since the Canadians stopped 'wasting time' on nuclear weapons in the 60's, and nuclear winter wasn't even discussed as a theory until the 1980's, and since it takes far more than one missile to instigate nuclear winter...
As they say, what 'everyone knows' is usually false.
Real science is rarely as glamorous as the media makes it out to be, let alone as glamorous as many Slashdotters would like it to be.
This is why attempts to make $SCIENCE_TOPIC [fun|interesting|relevant] invariably fail.
Oh, Slashdotters have their conventional wisdom and groupthink too... Just because it doesn't match the mainstream doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Mostly due to the tireless efforts of generation of cranks who've spent their time wallowing in the more marginal of his creations and the more extraordinary of his unproven claims. Tesla's reputation is a victim of his success.
Much depends on your tone - I'm from the South and can say "nice weather today" (when it's clearly not) and have it be accepted as sarcasm, but then I know how (and more importantly when and to who) to deliver the line. Just because it you can make it work across socioeconomic boundaries in one culture, doesn't mean you can make it work across cultural boundaries in a different culture. Southern icebreakers don't tend to use sarcasm, and sarcasm verges on being bad manners - and bad manners are acceptable only in certain specific circumstances and *decidely* offensive when coming from a stranger. You got a 'you-are-an-idiot' look because you (wrongly) presumed to use a familiarity you weren't entitled to.
The actual tradeoff goes something more like this:
a) Large lightweight tanks, large amount of fuel, nearly no [electrical] power supply, medium to light weight engine. Total weight declines significantly across the life of the system. (Weight is dominated by propellant.)
b) Small lightweight tanks, small amount of fuel, a very large and very heavy power supply, lightweight engine. Total weight does not change significantly across the life of the system. (Weight is dominated by the power supply.)
Ion engine proponents like to pretend the power supply problem doesn't exist.
Except that if a diamond only costs $5, the notional wife isn't going to value it beyond being a gift from you in the first place. A diamond [currently] has value because it's expensive and represents a sacrifice. A $5 diamond is no different than a cheap prize from a carnival game - a heartfelt gift, but ultimately disposable.
The popular press? Hell, Slashdot publishes these kinds of stories on a daily basis - nothing [it seems] excites a Slashdotter more than $UNDERDOG against $BIGDOG.
The story under discussion here is only notable because somebody actually noticed.
but what you describe isn't a flaw in the spec - but a flaw in the implementation. If third parties ran themselves with a half a lick of sense and as if they were actually serious, we wouldn't have two entrenched parties within a couple of election cycles. But so long as third parties continue to run nonviable candidates on nonviable platforms and only for the top offices, they'll continue to remain marginal.
Its not the electoral college that's the problem.
Yeah, because it is so complicated and time consuming to order his IT guys to make it happen. He might have to spend what, a whole minute? Two?
The sets "generally uninformed" and "tech savvy" are in no way mutually incompatible. In fact, there's a great deal of overlap.
If there's not a conspiracy - then why can't a birth certificate be produced?
Some of us won't accept it because we question whether the constitutional requirement that he be a natural born US citizen is met. If that requirement cannot be unequivocally shown to be met - then it does not matter whether he was elected or not, because the election is null and void because he was not eligible to be elected. Some of the people who I know who were loudest about Bush's violations of the Constitution are now some of the loudest in trying to shout down questions about Obama's birth certificate.
Which disgusts me because it doesn't matter if your last name is Bush, or Obama - you don't get to ignore the parts of the Constitution you don't like.
Yeah, I do know what I'm talking about.
I read it thoroughly - and there's no support for the claim that SpaceX is revolutionizing the launch business. Their assembly method is only different in semantics from that used by the Usual Suspects.
Wait, what? Appointing people with actual skills other than being in the good-ol'-boy network is an illusion of change, but appointing people from the good-ol'-boy network is actual change?
I'm confused.
But, I note you don't actually cite any.
Except we didn't need to create a DOE to supervise the military - as the ERDA and the NRC (both carved out of what had been the AEC) already existed and fulfilled those functions as the AEC had for decades.
It's much likely that they do get this 'internet' thing - but that building a case and following due process takes time.
Ordering a book or video card works well with 2D representations, or even just a text description. But that doesn't mean that 3D isn't useful for other things.
As a woodworker, it would be very nice to see an accurate 3D representation of a board I was buying over the net or to be able to actually 'walk around' larger tools to get a sense of their layout. Or to see, in 3D, the pattern created by a router bit. Etc... Etc...
Except her email wasn't an [informative] communication about the changes, it was a [personal and political] protest against the changes. As other have pointed out, the former is specifically permitted, the latter specifically forbidden.
Which of course doesn't change the fact that your original assertion was wrong.
The shuttle (in your example) launches directly from the station - which means it is subject to the perturbations described in the article. Which means it needs more fuel in order to deliver its cargo to the proper orbit. Which means your throughput efficiency goes down, because now you have to spend upmass on fuel rather than deliverables.
Huh? Where have you been the last twenty odd years? Space Elevator proponents have been explaining how easy (conceptually and practically) an elevator will be for a couple of decades now, though the more intelligent among them have always grudgingly admitted that materials would be the key bottleneck. But the discovery of carbon nanotubes converted most of them to the see-no-problem fanboi side of the fence.
Yeah, actually I do. (Somewhere around a dozen.) But you are comparing apples and oranges - because while a lunar landing can be prepared for incrementally, you can't build a space elevator in the same fashion. One up, all the way to completion - because an incomplete elevator not only is useless, but unstable.
If you don't haul mass up, your ion drives aren't doing any driving. They need fuel too, not just power.