It's been looked at many times by the USN over the years, and it doesn't work all that well. Large hangar spaces reduce the density of the submarine, making it difficult to design and ballast and trim system that will allow safe operation of the submarine. They are also extraordinarily dangerous if they flood. The USN canceled the Regulus SSGN's (that would have followed Halibut) once Polaris proved practical partially because of concerns over this. The large hatches required are difficult to make pressure resistant and water tight, and tend to vulnerable to shock loading (read: depth charges). Etc... etc...
Not to mention the multiple problems with the airplanes themselves.
I then put two and two together and got five, because I realised that the disagreement arose because the interviewer did not expect the operating temperature range of the hardware to exceed more than about 25 degrees C - which made sense if it was for use in sea water.
It only makes sense if one mistakenly believes sea water never exceeds 'about' 25 degrees C.
Oh BTW, Tesla Motors is also planning on a 'family' type car in the $50k range soon if I remember one of their press releases correctly. Thats getting pretty close to the sweet spot for people to buy into electric car technology. As the price of oil and gasoline keeps going up, it will make more and more sense to buy a slightly more expensive car that you can fill up the charge on for a measly 12 cents.
For the average American, 'slightly more expensive' means down around the $20-25k range - petroleum will have to increase vastly in price before anything close to $50k represents the sweet spot.
It's this attitude that will kill most of the major car companies in the end. Smaller companies are starting to compete and they are willing to simply make a profit off the sale of the car itself and not depend on parts.
And eventually those small companies will make the same discovery that the big companies made - simply living off the profits of the sales is pretty much nothing but an inefficient road to bankruptcy. There's a reason why every company (inside and outside the auto industry) that can offers model years, parts, or service contract. The only other road to survival is to offer absolute best-of-breed with a large profit margin - and that doesn't work outside of niche or near monopoly markets.
The larger car companies are dinosaurs that are loosing the ability to compete since they are locked into an obsolete business model.
You state that as if it is a fact, which it is not. It is an opinion, one founded on either a lack of understanding of business and economics, a blind hatred of big companies, or some combination of both.
Mercury doesn't get as much interest as Venus because it is very, very hard to get to and has an extremely hostile orbital environment once you get there. Venus gets less attention than Mars because it very hard to get there, has a hostile orbital environment and very difficult to learn anything once you do because of the cloud cover.
Mars, by comparison, is merely hard to get to, has a relatively benign orbital environment, and has a transparent atmosphere.
While your reasoning seems sound, it fails in real life.
While your anecdote is amusing, it fails in real life. The topic under discussion is controlling beef cattle on the open range, not summoning milk cattle to a fixed point.
to generate wealth out of thin air and making everyone dependent on everyone else's well-being is the entire foundation of our economic system
Uhh, no. It's just the foundation of the stock market. Our economy could get along just fine without any stock market at all. Private investment would do the job just fine, without being nearly as susceptible to fraud.
Here's a free clue for you - the stock marker is private investment.
In deep water submersibles the occupied portion is a sphere to best resist pressure. The rest of the craft is filled with water at ambient pressure. The drawing in the article shows this one to follow that pattern. Your first comment is refuted.
My first comment was referring to the sphere at the front, jackass. Not to mention that just having a sphere isn't enough - it has to be exceedingly strong. There doesn't seem to be enough room up front for a sphere of sufficient thickness.
The Trieste was a tethered bathyscape. It went down on a cable and back up again.
An untethered deep submersible with ability to survey an area could find many useful things on the sea floor
True. But the areas capable of being mined in the foreseeable future are trivially within the capability of current vehicles. Assuming of course that methane's market price increases enough to make it worth the immense expense of deep sea mining - four or five orders of magnitude might make it worth it. That is, if it's not cheaper to use the power from non hydrocarbon power sources to directly synthesize any hydrocarbon material we need. Which they probably will by that point as they become economic long before hydrocarbon fuels reach that price range.
Why do you think a new undersea vehicle will not have a similar effect on ocean exploration?
Had you read my comment and engaged that pile of putrid mush you use for a brain, you'll note I addressed that point in my original message.
The intent was for the vehicle to be capable of travel to the very bottom of the ocean -- the Mariana Trench, more than 11,000 meters beneath the surface.
The vehicle, as shown, wouldn't seem to be capable of more than a fraction of that - the pressure hull seems far, far too thin.
It would have dramatically, dramatically opened the oceans for exploration. It would have been a game changer
Um - how exactly? Globally we have plenty of capability to reach all but the deepest portion of the oceans, and beyond archeology, a little geology, and exploring a few famous wrecks... There hasn't been all that much demand.
Quoting from the article:
"In 1960, the U.S. Navy sent a bathyscaphe, the 'Trieste,' down to the bottom," said Karen Hawkes, Graham's wife. "That was essentially a big underwater balloon. No one has been back since. No one has a submersible capable of diving to 36,000 feet - except this one."
Mostly because there isn't any real value in visiting the truly deep ocean - the view is not really all that impressive. Imagine being in a dry side canyon of the Grand Canyon on a cloudy night... with only a glo-stick for illumination. That's what it is like being down in the truly deep.
"This is an ocean planet," Hawkes said. "The U.S. declared a 200-mile exclusive economic zone, which actually doubled the sovereign territory of the nation. It's like there's suddenly a whole continent full of unexplored territory, and it's ready for a Lewis and Clark expedition."
I don't know where he's been... But the ocean bottoms have been in the process of intense exploration and mapping for several decades now.
then I won't notice a thing. I am lower middle class, barely making ends meet. I usually get a refund at tax time, but not much. I've never come anywhere NEAR the FDIC cap in my bank account, and even if my bank went under, big deal. I'd be out less than 200 bucks. But the FDIC would cover it, so no loss.
That's you. Me? I have about thirty times what you have in the bank (thanks to an inheritance), plus my IRA. My wife has an IRA, plus her current 401(k), plus an older 401(k). Other than the money from her Dad's estate - we're pretty solidly middle middle class.
I'm mostly a house husband, so no biggie directly on me. On the other hand, my wife is the CFO for a motorcycle dealer... If the credit markets crash, they can't get the float loans they need to stock the floor anymore. *WHAM* 75 people are out of work. That's 75 people who can't meet their mortgage payment. Or their car payments. Or buy food. Etc... Etc..
Multiply that by thousands, or tens of thousands of small businesses across the USA and you have a pretty big economic hit.
Other than that, big deal. 700 billion dollars that I basically receive no real benefit from
If you don't think not having the economy melt down isn't a benefit to you - you, quite frankly, live in a fucking dream world. I don't know where you work, but I don't know of any company that can long survive if it's customers stop showing up on the doorstep. You think things are bad now, wait until you don't have a job.
If you cede search and search advertising, you might as well ditch every sense of innovation and technology that the company has. And he did that. I mean, honestly, what else is there at Yahoo in terms of technology? Nothing, we become nothing more than AOL, a content provider.
I don't know where you've been, but Yahoo! has been primarily a content provider, a portal, for years now. You sound like you are still living in 1999.
Maybe you should read the summary? "The original funding organization Mellon Foundation approved a grant to redevelop the four year project from scratch in Java. The grant was awarded to a Bulgarian company"
So, when you're searching on current events? That would seem to be a tautology
Huh? That doesn't make any sense, methinks you left something out.
Now think of all the times it doesn't matter and you might want to rethink your "wouldn't bother at all" stance.
That's just it - I can't think of many times when it doesn't matter how old the page is. The world is a moving target - and splitting my searches between two engines is a waste of my time for very little return.
What if I want to read more about the new characters in this season of Heroes? What if I want to learn tips and tricks for Spore? Or the latest expansion of Sims 2? Or the latest Issue of City of Heroes?
Etc... Etc...
Re:Subtle political trolling
on
Google, Circa 2001
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The submitted article contains a subtle dig at Barack Obama, implying that he is unsuitable for the executive office because a primitive version of Google's PageRank algorithm only had 771 results.
Oversensitive much?
I wonder how many results that same algorithm had for Theodore Roosevelt, 7 years before he became President? Few predicted his meteoric rise!
The same is true on many (most?) Presidential candidates. Just to take a few examples from the last few decades...
In 1970 Jimmy Carter was a newly elected governor - and absolutely unknown on the national scene. (Slashdotters of a certain age will recall "Jimmy Who?".)
In 1973, Ronald Reagan was still governor of California and barely known on the national scene except as a former movie cowboy.
In 1981 G.H.W. Bush was viewed as largely a party hack, and a forgettable one at that.
In 1986 Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas - and totally unknown at the national level...
In 1993, G.W. Bush was Governor of Texas, and known only marginally on the national scene because of his father...
It links in to what I have argued previously - fork search engines. A bleeding edge "just spidered" version for those who want to chase up-to-the-minute things - and a "stable" time-lag version that would defeat the point of spam (if a blog/link spamming campaign has to wait for a couple of years to get their search results in to the stable engine results then they are less likely to bother).
And as a user interested in what is available today - as opposed to what was available a couple of years ago, I won't bother at all.
Slashdot back in those days was virtually all about science, tech, and geekery. Politics rarely reared it's ugly head except when the issue in question related to technology.
Quite a bit different actually.
Re:Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac HOLY CRAP
on
Google, Circa 2001
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
As they say, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
You can also find in books from the 1970's dire predictions that by the year 2000 the world will have been all but destroyed by: running out of oil, running out of food, running out of $SOME_OTHER_RESOURCE, overpopulation, nuclear war, the Rapture, etc.. etc.. All of which are notable of course for not having happened.
What part of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution does Congress not understand? The current situation is a "redress of grievances" to the average citizen.
Then it's the 'average citizens' problem for being an ignorant idiot, a petition is a formal legal document and process - not a casual email. Before taking Congress to task for not understanding the Constitution, maybe you should do so first.
Caeful on that, though - I'm a vet, and while there are lots of 'non bullet catcher' jobs, there are some caveats:
Sounds like you had a bad experience - but you shouldn't generalize from yours to everyone's.
God save you if you don't have good Staff NCOs - and you might not, especially if these SNCOs find out you just joined 'for the benefits'.
For good reason - the vast majority of the folks 'just in it for the benefits' seek to do the minimum possible, which makes life harder for everyone else. Though in my service we didn't see many of those, and almost all of 'em washed out (failed to earn their submarine dolphins).
I trimmed my reply to the rest of your rant, because I can summarize it simply: While there is some truth to what you say, there's also a great deal of exaggeration.
I've had several employers tell me to my face, and in rejection letters, that my 'professional background' isn't what they're looking for
Given that your professional background consists of working in a call center, and that you probably aren't applying for call center positions... I mean, you can't see the mismatch here?
In fact, a few have even told me that they decided against hiring me simply because I've worked in tech support at a call center for the last two years.
Unless I were facing an extreme shortage of applicants... I'd agree with them.
For some reason it seems a lot of employers will completely overlook my degree in computer engineering, the fact that I can show them several personal projects that I've worked on, and that I can show them that I clearly possess the skills they are looking for.
But what you can't show them is any experience, nor can you show them any initiative - having simply stuck with the same very low level job.
Had I discussed the Soyuz, you'd have a fucking point. But I didn't, did I? Learn to read you fucking moron.
And then, once you've learned read, try reading your own reference and examining the success and failure rate before you spout off 'facts' your little pea brain lacks the capability of understanding.
Slashdot Mirror
It's been looked at many times by the USN over the years, and it doesn't work all that well. Large hangar spaces reduce the density of the submarine, making it difficult to design and ballast and trim system that will allow safe operation of the submarine. They are also extraordinarily dangerous if they flood. The USN canceled the Regulus SSGN's (that would have followed Halibut) once Polaris proved practical partially because of concerns over this. The large hatches required are difficult to make pressure resistant and water tight, and tend to vulnerable to shock loading (read: depth charges). Etc... etc...
Not to mention the multiple problems with the airplanes themselves.
It only makes sense if one mistakenly believes sea water never exceeds 'about' 25 degrees C.
For the average American, 'slightly more expensive' means down around the $20-25k range - petroleum will have to increase vastly in price before anything close to $50k represents the sweet spot.
And eventually those small companies will make the same discovery that the big companies made - simply living off the profits of the sales is pretty much nothing but an inefficient road to bankruptcy. There's a reason why every company (inside and outside the auto industry) that can offers model years, parts, or service contract. The only other road to survival is to offer absolute best-of-breed with a large profit margin - and that doesn't work outside of niche or near monopoly markets.
You state that as if it is a fact, which it is not. It is an opinion, one founded on either a lack of understanding of business and economics, a blind hatred of big companies, or some combination of both.
Mercury doesn't get as much interest as Venus because it is very, very hard to get to and has an extremely hostile orbital environment once you get there. Venus gets less attention than Mars because it very hard to get there, has a hostile orbital environment and very difficult to learn anything once you do because of the cloud cover.
Mars, by comparison, is merely hard to get to, has a relatively benign orbital environment, and has a transparent atmosphere.
While your anecdote is amusing, it fails in real life. The topic under discussion is controlling beef cattle on the open range, not summoning milk cattle to a fixed point.
You confuse "privately held" with "private investment". The two aren't the same.
Here's a free clue for you - the stock marker is private investment.
My first comment was referring to the sphere at the front, jackass. Not to mention that just having a sphere isn't enough - it has to be exceedingly strong. There doesn't seem to be enough room up front for a sphere of sufficient thickness.
Try again you ignorant fuck. Bathyspheres are tethered. Bathyscaphes are free diving.
True. But the areas capable of being mined in the foreseeable future are trivially within the capability of current vehicles. Assuming of course that methane's market price increases enough to make it worth the immense expense of deep sea mining - four or five orders of magnitude might make it worth it. That is, if it's not cheaper to use the power from non hydrocarbon power sources to directly synthesize any hydrocarbon material we need. Which they probably will by that point as they become economic long before hydrocarbon fuels reach that price range.
Had you read my comment and engaged that pile of putrid mush you use for a brain, you'll note I addressed that point in my original message.
Color me skeptical... Quoting from the summary;
The vehicle, as shown, wouldn't seem to be capable of more than a fraction of that - the pressure hull seems far, far too thin.
Um - how exactly? Globally we have plenty of capability to reach all but the deepest portion of the oceans, and beyond archeology, a little geology, and exploring a few famous wrecks... There hasn't been all that much demand.
Quoting from the article:
Mostly because there isn't any real value in visiting the truly deep ocean - the view is not really all that impressive. Imagine being in a dry side canyon of the Grand Canyon on a cloudy night... with only a glo-stick for illumination. That's what it is like being down in the truly deep.
I don't know where he's been... But the ocean bottoms have been in the process of intense exploration and mapping for several decades now.
That's you. Me? I have about thirty times what you have in the bank (thanks to an inheritance), plus my IRA. My wife has an IRA, plus her current 401(k), plus an older 401(k). Other than the money from her Dad's estate - we're pretty solidly middle middle class.
I'm mostly a house husband, so no biggie directly on me. On the other hand, my wife is the CFO for a motorcycle dealer... If the credit markets crash, they can't get the float loans they need to stock the floor anymore. *WHAM* 75 people are out of work. That's 75 people who can't meet their mortgage payment. Or their car payments. Or buy food. Etc... Etc..
Multiply that by thousands, or tens of thousands of small businesses across the USA and you have a pretty big economic hit.
If you don't think not having the economy melt down isn't a benefit to you - you, quite frankly, live in a fucking dream world. I don't know where you work, but I don't know of any company that can long survive if it's customers stop showing up on the doorstep. You think things are bad now, wait until you don't have a job.
I don't know where you've been, but Yahoo! has been primarily a content provider, a portal, for years now. You sound like you are still living in 1999.
Maybe you should read the summary? "The original funding organization Mellon Foundation approved a grant to redevelop the four year project from scratch in Java. The grant was awarded to a Bulgarian company"
Mostly from pandering to other peoples political beliefs and indulging in scaremongering himself.
Huh? That doesn't make any sense, methinks you left something out.
That's just it - I can't think of many times when it doesn't matter how old the page is. The world is a moving target - and splitting my searches between two engines is a waste of my time for very little return.
Frequently, yes.
What if I want to read more about the new characters in this season of Heroes? What if I want to learn tips and tricks for Spore? Or the latest expansion of Sims 2? Or the latest Issue of City of Heroes?
Etc... Etc...
Oversensitive much?
The same is true on many (most?) Presidential candidates. Just to take a few examples from the last few decades...
And as a user interested in what is available today - as opposed to what was available a couple of years ago, I won't bother at all.
Slashdot back in those days was virtually all about science, tech, and geekery. Politics rarely reared it's ugly head except when the issue in question related to technology.
Quite a bit different actually.
As they say, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
You can also find in books from the 1970's dire predictions that by the year 2000 the world will have been all but destroyed by: running out of oil, running out of food, running out of $SOME_OTHER_RESOURCE, overpopulation, nuclear war, the Rapture, etc.. etc.. All of which are notable of course for not having happened.
Then it's the 'average citizens' problem for being an ignorant idiot, a petition is a formal legal document and process - not a casual email. Before taking Congress to task for not understanding the Constitution, maybe you should do so first.
One cannot remember that which did not happen.
Sounds like you had a bad experience - but you shouldn't generalize from yours to everyone's.
For good reason - the vast majority of the folks 'just in it for the benefits' seek to do the minimum possible, which makes life harder for everyone else. Though in my service we didn't see many of those, and almost all of 'em washed out (failed to earn their submarine dolphins).
I trimmed my reply to the rest of your rant, because I can summarize it simply: While there is some truth to what you say, there's also a great deal of exaggeration.
Given that your professional background consists of working in a call center, and that you probably aren't applying for call center positions... I mean, you can't see the mismatch here?
Unless I were facing an extreme shortage of applicants... I'd agree with them.
But what you can't show them is any experience, nor can you show them any initiative - having simply stuck with the same very low level job.
Had I discussed the Soyuz, you'd have a fucking point. But I didn't, did I? Learn to read you fucking moron.
And then, once you've learned read, try reading your own reference and examining the success and failure rate before you spout off 'facts' your little pea brain lacks the capability of understanding.