The problem isn't the group controlling the system - it's that the group controlling the system has no real teeth. A W3C subcomittee will face the exact same problems.
I'm way more worried about the corrosion of national critical thinking skills and basic science education (which allows this sort of stuff to be written and passively consumed)
Personally, I'm much more worried about people who cling to the unfounded belief that there existed an era where critical thinking skills and science education were any better than today.
That doesn't make sense. Voyager is nuclear powered and still running. Battening down the hatches and using the power plant's heat to keep the rover usable is a simple engineering problem.
Voyager isn't going to be buried in several meters of ice and snow. It's far from a 'simple' engineering problem. Among other things getting rid of the excess heat (from the nuclear power source, as batteries won't cut it) when you don't need it is a significant engineering problem due to the thinness of Mars's atmosphere. Let alone hooking up an encapsulated rover to some form of radiator.
The probe is working on scoops of dirt. It's not like it has to lug back boulders to be useful.
Nobody asked it to lug back boulders. Even moving a few scoops of dirt (enough to usefully analyze) is going to require a fair sized rover. (Not too much smaller than Opportunity itself.) It takes a lot of power to run the arm, and more to move it to any useful distance away, and more yet for all the systems. That means solar panels or a _big_ battery, which means a rover that is big, or heavy, or both.
I'm sorry, I'm just not seeing a good argument against having a mobile component to maximize the usefulness of any lander-based scientific mission we launch.
That's a product of your utterly unfamiliarity with the situation coupled with an utter unwillingness to educate yourself.
And anyone following spaceflight issues has known about this for years. Micheal Collins discusses it in Carrying The Fire (published in 1974), and virtually every astronaut biography and autobiography after the Mercury Seven touches on it.
It always frustrates me how many soi-disant space nuts Slashdot has - and how damm few of them actually bother to get their information from other than the mass media.
I'm a bit curious about the vision requirement. While I understand the need for good vision, what is the need for 20/20? The real work of flying the craft is usually left up to computers, and I'm not sure of what tasks couldn't be performed with adequate vision.
Not really. Much of the [flying] work is mediated by computer, but all of it monitored by people - people who may have to make decisions, or take over from the computer entirely, based on what they see on the displays.
Then you need to consider reactions in emergencies such as evacuating the craft on the pad, or getting the hell away from it quickly once you reach the ground. Then there is operating experiments, reading manuals and checklists, etc... etc...
I'm a bit curious about the vision requirement. While I understand the need for good vision, what is the need for 20/20? The real work of flying the craft is usually left up to computers
Not really. Much of the [flying] work is mediated by computer, but all of it monitored by people - people who may have to make decisions, or take over from the computer entirely, based on what they see on the displays.
We use GPS units to geocache, and accuracy has strangely seemed to have improved over the Summer.
Maybe a WAAS bird might have been activated that covers your area. Or fewer clouds in your area during the summer. Or it's just a perception thing.
The new receiver chipsets have been problematic to use because they couldn't seem to get enough info and used echoed signals often in effort to increase accuracy.
Um, no. (Mostly 'no' because your sentence makes no sense whatsoever.)
Maybe this update will put more downward bandwidth out there to help the new GPS receivers meet their potential.
The new GPS sets met their potential even without this upgrade - because their potential comes mostly from improved antenna and better signal processing. 'More data' has nothing to do with it. (Not to mention that the bird -> handheld bandwidth is unchanged.)
Given that pretty much all our military's high-accuracy munitions depend on GPS for their "smartness", there is almost certainly a redundant control system elsewhere. Possibly with the 1st Mob or the 3rd Herd, which are expeditionary forces so they aren't sitting ducks like an Air Base is.
Probably not with either - as the ground control system is pretty big and delicate [1], pretty power hungry, and requires a fair number of specially trained personell [2] to operate it. It isn't something you are going to do in the back of a Humvee or a Bradley. You'd be hard pressed to do it in much of anything mobile short of the a Tico or a CVN.
That being said, the current generation of GPS birds are designed to operate autonomously for (IIRC) at least a month, though it will be some years before the entire constellation is upgraded to that standard. This implies the existence of a 'cold' backup somewhere else.
Insofar grandparents concern about 'high energy nukes' goes... He's pretty much out to lunch. The GPS constellation isn't as vulnerable to EMP/radiation effects as 'normal' LEO birds are because a) they are designed to be resistant to EMP, and b) the GPS constellation isn't inside the inner Van Allen belt like the birds wrecked by Starfish. You are pretty much in the situation of having to, even with nukes, take out each bird individually. (Sometimes they are close enough that you might be able to get 3-4, but the constellation is redundant enough that this won't take the system down.) So you are talking a pretty expensive and hard to hide endeavor, and being unable to take down enough of the cluster in a short enough timeframe to hamper US operations... before your own country is a glass parking lot.
I know many Slashdotters may have a hard time believing this - but they did actually think this stuff through when they designed the system.
[1] It's not just computers, but communications systems, precise clocks, etc... etc...
[2] Not just the techs that maintain the hardware above but the analysts that work with the incoming data to generate the corrections.
I don't need a tracking system because I don't carry my laptop around with me everywhere. When I do carry it on travel, it's in a backpack that doesn't look like a laptop bag.
I've been the victim of a stolen vehicle before... and I know police really don't give a diddly squat about stolen vehicles. Sure, paperwork will be filed but that's all they do. When a stolen vehicle is recovered it's almost always recovered due to happenstance.
Pardon my language but; precisely what the fuck do you expect them to do? Drop what they are doing and check the license plate of every car in town that matches your cars make, model, and color? Send your hourly updates and hold daily press conferences? They filed the paperwork (ensuring your information gets in the right database [1]) because that was pretty much all they can do. Grow the fuck up - your car is important to you, but the world doesn't revolve around you.
[1] So if the license plate is ever run it shows up - which happens more often than you might think. With today's 'wired' police cars they can get the info back in seconds.
Ladies and Gentlemen, while I'm sure there is more that meets the eye to this video that shows a very disgusting display of police domination, we still have a Constitutional guarantee of our freedom of speech.
Indeed we do have such a Constitutional guarantee. But that right does not include the right to hijack someone else's venue for your own purposed nor to be an asshat and disrupt proceedings not your own.
It is because men and women before us stepped up to the podiums throughout history to cry out against government, and political individuals. This is why this country is great. But now it appears that to speak out is a crime by the very act of opening your mouth. This is just wrong.
What is making this country ungreat is people who confuse freedom to speak (which is protected) with some assumed right to be an asshat on someone elses dime (which is not, and should not be, protected).
What the heck do you think academic freedom is supposed to be about anyway?
It's not freedom to be heard and/or given an audience. It's not freedom to hijack someone elses venue for your own purposed. It's not freedom to be an asshat and disrupt proceedings not your own.
You expect undergrads to be immature. They are growing their minds.
Actually, until the last few decades the exact opposite was true - college students were expected to be more mature than others their age. College students were held to a higher standard than adolescents in the same way that adolescents were held to higher standards than children.
This country has gone quite insane, I'm sure.
Indeed it has. When people can excuse asshattery as 'freedom' and immature behavior as 'growth' with a straight face, something has gone very wrong.
He didn't force them to pull him from the microphone. There was no need for the police to be involved at all. Time was, when people behaved in an unacceptable but not criminal manner, old-fashioned techniques like social opprobrium were brought to bear, rather than police officers and tasers.
Time was, social approbium would have brought results. These are not those times. In a society where folks wear t-shirts to the mall with obscenties on them, social opprobium is pretty much useless - because the majority of the people have already decided they'll do what they please and the heck with what people think.
Before anyone even brings this up, the reason they usually do for-profit instead of not-for-profit is there is a crapload more bureaucracy associated with a not-for-profit and they'll end up spending a lot of money dealing with it.
You should have been modded -5 Bullshitter who doesn't know what he is talking about. Bureaucracy comes from within the organization, not from whether it is for profit, non profit, or not for profit. The latter two require a bit more paperwork - but the amount of paperwork is invariant with the size of the organization. If said organization has a modern accounting system (read: any enterprise grade system post 1972 or so), then the additional paperwork is mostly a matter of printing a few extra reports and mailing them off.
In the old world, this was a 'good' deal, as without the muscle of the record companies promoting you, your act was going to continue to play bars and night clubs instead of stadiums.
In the new world to date - that still seems to be how it works.
In the new world, there's the internet, and you can do quite well for yourself keeping your mechanical rights and performing less.
If the record store stopped charging so much, they'd sell a lot more copies, and probably be able to make a much larger profit in the end.
Actually, they'd sell a lot fewer 'extra' copies than you might think - because the demand for music is largely inelastic. You could give away free copies of Britney's latest offering with breakfast cereal, and more than a few folks would simply toss it in the trash. Ditto for Nine Inch Nails.
No matter how cheap it is, you can't make more people like it.
Going indie is not just more trendy, it's more profitable, once you've already got that mega-media marketing machine convincing 100,000 people they need to buy your (mediocre) music.
And that's the key that many wannabees and slashdotters just don't get. Whether viral, guerilla, or corporate mega-blitz; it's marketing that makes the money. You could be Jenny Lind reborn - but if nobody has ever heard of you, you'll regard ramen as a rare feast even if you do make 90% profit on the 17 albums you've sold to friends and family. (And do all the printing and packaging yourself to avoid incurring additional overhead.)
At least this way he can take the "It's actually my intellectual property" defense to the US Copyright Office if he gets thrown into court.
Odds are - it isn't his intellectual property, much depends on the contracts he signed. Even if it is his intellectual property, he certainly licensed it to the record company for distribution - which means back to the contracts to see who has what rights.
I think the issue is that they continue to charge full or near-full price for music which was produced (and whose one-off production costs were likely wholly paid off) years ago. I'm no expert on such things, but I would have thought every instance of these older NIN CDs which are sold now is pure profit (bar the minor production cost the GP cited),
Sure - if the record company, the distributor, and the retail seller had no ongoing costs... then the sale of each CD would be pure profit. But all three of those do have ongoing business costs - and if it weren't for the high profit margins on the 'backlist', they wouldn't be in business at all. Neither the landlord, nor the tax man, nor the janitor cares whether you are selling the latest hip hop pop sensation - or the Glenn Miller Orchestra. They want their money, in full, when the check is due. And none of them vary their rate with the age of the material being sold.
This is Publishing Economics 101, your backlist pays for the production of current material and operating costs, and keeps the profit margin in the black. Many small/indie labels end up in a financial crunch either because they have too small a backlist (if at all) or they spend the money they earned in the first flush unwisely. (Or they were one trick ponies in the first place.) This is also why really old material is rarely republished. Despite extremely high profit margins, sales are too slow to recoup what minimal costs they do incur. (Publishing is much like flipping a house - if it isn't moving, you are losing money.)
My pulled out my ass $0.10 tried to account for what you mentioned. The actual disk is $0.01 to produce in large volumes. Cases are similar in large volumes. The other $0.08 is what I figure the cost of production, distribution, and promotion are amortized over the number of disks made. I might be off. It might be $0.80 per disk when other costs are included, sold at 2.60 to the distributor, sold for 8.00 to the retail chain then sold as $24-$45 to the end customer. Still a bit much of a mark up all around.
Yeah, to someone sitting in his parent's basement that sure sounds like a lot of markup, especially in the retail chain. Try running a retail establishment sometimes and learn the difference between gross income and net income - and that markup starts looking awfully small.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem isn't the group controlling the system - it's that the group controlling the system has no real teeth. A W3C subcomittee will face the exact same problems.
Personally, I'm much more worried about people who cling to the unfounded belief that there existed an era where critical thinking skills and science education were any better than today.
Voyager isn't going to be buried in several meters of ice and snow. It's far from a 'simple' engineering problem. Among other things getting rid of the excess heat (from the nuclear power source, as batteries won't cut it) when you don't need it is a significant engineering problem due to the thinness of Mars's atmosphere. Let alone hooking up an encapsulated rover to some form of radiator.
Nobody asked it to lug back boulders. Even moving a few scoops of dirt (enough to usefully analyze) is going to require a fair sized rover. (Not too much smaller than Opportunity itself.) It takes a lot of power to run the arm, and more to move it to any useful distance away, and more yet for all the systems. That means solar panels or a _big_ battery, which means a rover that is big, or heavy, or both.
That's a product of your utterly unfamiliarity with the situation coupled with an utter unwillingness to educate yourself.
No, just someone intolerant of the increasing amount of whiny five year olds masquerading as adults.
And anyone following spaceflight issues has known about this for years. Micheal Collins discusses it in Carrying The Fire (published in 1974), and virtually every astronaut biography and autobiography after the Mercury Seven touches on it.
It always frustrates me how many soi-disant space nuts Slashdot has - and how damm few of them actually bother to get their information from other than the mass media.
Not really. Much of the [flying] work is mediated by computer, but all of it monitored by people - people who may have to make decisions, or take over from the computer entirely, based on what they see on the displays.
Then you need to consider reactions in emergencies such as evacuating the craft on the pad, or getting the hell away from it quickly once you reach the ground. Then there is operating experiments, reading manuals and checklists, etc... etc...
Not really. Much of the [flying] work is mediated by computer, but all of it monitored by people - people who may have to make decisions, or take over from the computer entirely, based on what they see on the displays.
Maybe a WAAS bird might have been activated that covers your area. Or fewer clouds in your area during the summer. Or it's just a perception thing.
Um, no. (Mostly 'no' because your sentence makes no sense whatsoever.)
The new GPS sets met their potential even without this upgrade - because their potential comes mostly from improved antenna and better signal processing. 'More data' has nothing to do with it. (Not to mention that the bird -> handheld bandwidth is unchanged.)
Probably not with either - as the ground control system is pretty big and delicate [1], pretty power hungry, and requires a fair number of specially trained personell [2] to operate it. It isn't something you are going to do in the back of a Humvee or a Bradley. You'd be hard pressed to do it in much of anything mobile short of the a Tico or a CVN.
That being said, the current generation of GPS birds are designed to operate autonomously for (IIRC) at least a month, though it will be some years before the entire constellation is upgraded to that standard. This implies the existence of a 'cold' backup somewhere else.
Insofar grandparents concern about 'high energy nukes' goes... He's pretty much out to lunch. The GPS constellation isn't as vulnerable to EMP/radiation effects as 'normal' LEO birds are because a) they are designed to be resistant to EMP, and b) the GPS constellation isn't inside the inner Van Allen belt like the birds wrecked by Starfish. You are pretty much in the situation of having to, even with nukes, take out each bird individually. (Sometimes they are close enough that you might be able to get 3-4, but the constellation is redundant enough that this won't take the system down.) So you are talking a pretty expensive and hard to hide endeavor, and being unable to take down enough of the cluster in a short enough timeframe to hamper US operations... before your own country is a glass parking lot.
I know many Slashdotters may have a hard time believing this - but they did actually think this stuff through when they designed the system.
[1] It's not just computers, but communications systems, precise clocks, etc... etc...
[2] Not just the techs that maintain the hardware above but the analysts that work with the incoming data to generate the corrections.
There isn't anything man-made in orbit dense enough and large enough to make this kind of hole. (ISS is big, but it's not very dense.)
I don't need a tracking system because I don't carry my laptop around with me everywhere. When I do carry it on travel, it's in a backpack that doesn't look like a laptop bag.
Pardon my language but; precisely what the fuck do you expect them to do? Drop what they are doing and check the license plate of every car in town that matches your cars make, model, and color? Send your hourly updates and hold daily press conferences? They filed the paperwork (ensuring your information gets in the right database [1]) because that was pretty much all they can do. Grow the fuck up - your car is important to you, but the world doesn't revolve around you.
[1] So if the license plate is ever run it shows up - which happens more often than you might think. With today's 'wired' police cars they can get the info back in seconds.
Indeed we do have such a Constitutional guarantee. But that right does not include the right to hijack someone else's venue for your own purposed nor to be an asshat and disrupt proceedings not your own.
What is making this country ungreat is people who confuse freedom to speak (which is protected) with some assumed right to be an asshat on someone elses dime (which is not, and should not be, protected).
It's not freedom to be heard and/or given an audience. It's not freedom to hijack someone elses venue for your own purposed. It's not freedom to be an asshat and disrupt proceedings not your own.
Actually, until the last few decades the exact opposite was true - college students were expected to be more mature than others their age. College students were held to a higher standard than adolescents in the same way that adolescents were held to higher standards than children.
Indeed it has. When people can excuse asshattery as 'freedom' and immature behavior as 'growth' with a straight face, something has gone very wrong.
Time was, social approbium would have brought results. These are not those times. In a society where folks wear t-shirts to the mall with obscenties on them, social opprobium is pretty much useless - because the majority of the people have already decided they'll do what they please and the heck with what people think.
Yet.
You should have been modded -5 Bullshitter who doesn't know what he is talking about. Bureaucracy comes from within the organization, not from whether it is for profit, non profit, or not for profit. The latter two require a bit more paperwork - but the amount of paperwork is invariant with the size of the organization. If said organization has a modern accounting system (read: any enterprise grade system post 1972 or so), then the additional paperwork is mostly a matter of printing a few extra reports and mailing them off.
That's the theory.
In the new world to date - that still seems to be how it works.
That's the theory.
Actually, they'd sell a lot fewer 'extra' copies than you might think - because the demand for music is largely inelastic. You could give away free copies of Britney's latest offering with breakfast cereal, and more than a few folks would simply toss it in the trash. Ditto for Nine Inch Nails.
No matter how cheap it is, you can't make more people like it.
And that's the key that many wannabees and slashdotters just don't get. Whether viral, guerilla, or corporate mega-blitz; it's marketing that makes the money. You could be Jenny Lind reborn - but if nobody has ever heard of you, you'll regard ramen as a rare feast even if you do make 90% profit on the 17 albums you've sold to friends and family. (And do all the printing and packaging yourself to avoid incurring additional overhead.)
Odds are - it isn't his intellectual property, much depends on the contracts he signed. Even if it is his intellectual property, he certainly licensed it to the record company for distribution - which means back to the contracts to see who has what rights.
Sure - if the record company, the distributor, and the retail seller had no ongoing costs... then the sale of each CD would be pure profit. But all three of those do have ongoing business costs - and if it weren't for the high profit margins on the 'backlist', they wouldn't be in business at all. Neither the landlord, nor the tax man, nor the janitor cares whether you are selling the latest hip hop pop sensation - or the Glenn Miller Orchestra. They want their money, in full, when the check is due. And none of them vary their rate with the age of the material being sold.
This is Publishing Economics 101, your backlist pays for the production of current material and operating costs, and keeps the profit margin in the black. Many small/indie labels end up in a financial crunch either because they have too small a backlist (if at all) or they spend the money they earned in the first flush unwisely. (Or they were one trick ponies in the first place.) This is also why really old material is rarely republished. Despite extremely high profit margins, sales are too slow to recoup what minimal costs they do incur. (Publishing is much like flipping a house - if it isn't moving, you are losing money.)
Yeah, to someone sitting in his parent's basement that sure sounds like a lot of markup, especially in the retail chain. Try running a retail establishment sometimes and learn the difference between gross income and net income - and that markup starts looking awfully small.
It's very easy to give stuff away - once you've already made your pile.