The only other factor that I can think of are land cost and maintenance costs. I'd assume you'd still want a large area of land, just in case the system should go off course, so that one might not be a significant difference, so that just leaves us with maintenance -- how much effort is it to keep a similarly producing land-based system, vs. keeping an eye on the satellite and keeping a smaller ground-based receiver going?
The US Government sets policies through money -- normally, in the form of tax incentives; if you do (x), we won't take the money back from you for doing it.
So yes, they're giving Tesla money -- but it's much closer to the current practices of tax law, but much less open-ended.
The government could've put out a grant with specifications to develop the cars for fleet vehicles, and then allowed them to sell it to the public (more like the original Hummer), or they could've used earmarks to find a way to fund the company without any money ever being given back.
So yes, the government is giving them money -- but it's still not a bailout. And there's probably a dozen or more other ways that the government could've given them money that wouldn't have been a bailout, but just a form of financial incentive for working on the project that the administration thinks is to the public's advantage. (or, to whoever's getting kickbacks, if you want to be cynical about it)
I was on the GW solar car team more than 10 years ago -- we could do 60mph back then, so I'm not impressed, either.
The important factors included: how much sun is there are the time, are you willing to drain the batteries, and are we going uphill?
If you've got good sun, don't have a screwed up array like we did in the '95 Sunrayce, and are willing to drain your batteries, it's easy to go over 60mph. And if you're going downhill, it's even easier.
Of course, that year they decided to put the finish line at the top of a mountain, and we had mostly clouds for the last few days, so just about everyone showed poorly overall.
You lack the parts? Pillage the dead transformers. There is a PRETTY good chance you can take 2 or 3 dead ones and have 1 working in under 24 hours
You're assuming that they're going to fail in random ways. What's being described is that every one of them fails in exactly the same way -- which means you can't cobble together a single working one from multiple failed ones.
You're right in that things likely won't fail nearly as badly as they make it out to be -- I know the power companies have the ability to do rolling brownouts, as we used to regularly have them when I lived in DC... it's only a small step to rolling backouts like you describe after that.
What is going to happen is that people are going to have a horrible jolt to their comfort levels. We'll move from TV to battery powered radios, and have to give up our dependance on pre-made frozen meals. Other than the medical issues described, it's not going to kill us unless we refuse to adapt. We'll probably lose more to riots and looting than directly caused reasons.
ACE might have a better ground network (let's face it, it's easier to talk to as it's at L1), but STEREO-Behind can see areas of the sun that aren't visible from any other solar-observing mission. It's also remote sensing (ie, telescopes), so it doesn't have to wait until it gets hit by an event. (at which point, we're looking at the last 1M miles of a 93M mile trip)
There's also instruments that have proven space-weather benefits on SOHO, but that's even older than ACE. I'm not going to say that ACE isn't the most important satellite in NOAA's eyes for predicting space weather (and some of their space weather folks have even mentioned that they might have to put up a similar satellite when ACE finally fails), but saying it's the only warning system discounts all of the other solar-observing missions used for space weather forecasting.
I've been pushed hard on projects before -- and been told that documentation wasn't a priority, that getting the code out was. (I had a sign on my wall that said 'Documentation is Phase 2', a direct quote from my manager).
Now, "Josh" seems like he has some personality issues, sure, but don't bitch about the documentation thing. If anything, I find that documentation can be harmful (if it's not kept updated as the code is), and that it's often best when it's written by someone _other_ than the coder who already knows everything (so they don't bother documenting all of the 'obvious' stuff that's only really obvious to them).
If this "Josh" were worth the cost of 4+ "normal" programmers, assign someone extra to follow behind his commits and document what's going on. The lack of documentation is a company problem, not just one programmer's.
Unfortunately, most of the folks on here are probably too young to get the reference, so, here's some text from the original boxes:
(Space Quest) Star date: A long, long time ago (sounds familiar, huh?) in a galaxy just around the corner... You are the janitor on the Spaceship Arcada. Your mission! To scrub dirty floors, to replace burned-out light bulbs and to clean out latrines. To boldly go where no man has swept the floor!
(Space Quest 2) Once again, you, Roger Wilco, sanitation engineer and involuntary hero, must don your sanitary space mittens and prepare for the onslaught of evil that Vohal has prepared. A chose not for the queasy or fainthearted. And if you can stomach that... Get ready for the Granddaddy of Gross. The Emperor of Evil. The First Name in Nastiness, Sludge Vohaul himself! With nothing to protect you but your wits and your wet mop, you haven't got a chance!
(Space Quest 4) May the farce be with you! Get ready for a trek through time with everybody's favorite intergalactic sanitation engineer and freelance here, Roger Wilco!
(Space Quest 5) He's lean, he's mean and he's out to clean. Roger Wilcon, the universe's favorite janitor, has bamboozled his way through the StarCon Space Academy and taken command of his own starship. Granted she's only a beat-up garbage scow, but hey, it beats sleeping in the broom closet.... It's up to Roger to save the universe from the mutant menace, hart his nemesis Captain Quirk, and woo the woman of his dreams or he'll be - Gone with the Trash!
(Space Quest 6) In space, no one can hear you clean! Fight grime and battle evil adversaries with Roger Wilco, janitor turned space adventurer, as he joins forces with video games, TV and sci-fi movies, past and present
Tivo is horrible at managing conflicting shows. You have to go in and manually handle every last little detail or you end up with:
I've recorded a re-run of a show for you, rather than the first-run show that you entered after other one. I never mentioned the conflict because they didn't when you first entered them.
That show you like switched time slots, and rather than recording the broadcast show at 9pm, and the cable show at the 1am west-coast showing, I decided to record the cable show and drop the broadcast show entirely. Of course, you won't realize that I did this until weeks later.
We're going to run Lost over by 2 minutes this season, just to make sure that people with DVRs don't get to see the ending!
As you've learned that you can set your DVR over by two minutes, we've decided to show two Lost episodes back to back so it'll refuse to record the second episode because of a scheduling conflict by two minutes. (okay, Tivo fixed this one, I admit)
And my all time favorite, for which there's no solution other than telling it a set channel and time:
I've decided to record a half hour of dead air, because I recorded channel 979 rather than 22, even though you've already told me you don't actually have channel 979 (WMPT, a PBS station, I think.)
And I have no plans on switching to a multi-tuner DVR, as I'd have to give up my DVD burning capabilities. I've thought about switching from satellite just so I didn't get told every other day that some channel has moved, but I'm not willing to give my money to Verizon or Comcast after incidents in the past.
And I particularly hate Fox for their Futurama timeslot that resulted in my recording 20 minutes of a sports game week after week, but the Friday timeslot isn't the kiss of death -- if I remember correctly, that's where X-Files was, 12 years ago.
In that case, I'd fail. (and I'm even a town commissioner).
I have no landline, and my cell phone's area code is from another state -- when I moved to the area, I was at my dad's house when I called to move my cell phone's area, and they asked me where I was, and I told them, and they assigned me a phone number in Virginia.. I explained that no, I wanted a DC or Maryland phone number, and they told me that if I wanted to pick my number, they'd charge me some obnoxious amount. (well, it seemed obnoxious at the time, but as a one time thing, it'd have saved me 8 years of confusion).
Oh... and my phone doesn't support SMS, either, as I refuse to get a cell phone that takes more than 10 sec from when I power it on 'til when I can make a call
I also know of people with FX'd lines (foreign exchange -- their house phone number is Baltimore, when it's 50 miles away), and with number portability, I have no idea if the limits that you have a 'local' phone number are still there.
...
Of course, I have no idea how 'local' the board is. The audience might be tens of thousands of people, or it might be a few hundred. Some mechanisms won't scale well (drop off a letter at the town hall, or at Bill's house), and you have to balance letting the wrong people in with rejecting people who really should have accounts.
In his particular case, his website was fighting against states and municipalities that were trying to claim copyright on their laws and restrict their distribution, and he had previously had done similar work with data from both the SEC and US Patent Office:
You can get more by suing individually, but then you'd likely have to front the cost of a lawyer.
So, although the potential return is less for you in a class action suit, the risk is lower too, as you have almost no cost in joining.
(But it does annoy me when the result is a coupon whose face value is only useful if you actually wanted to buy a new product. The ones who probably win the most in these cases are the lawyers who take a percentage of the whole... and I'm guessing they're not paid in coupons)
Let's stop right there. There are no general lessons to be had from the LHC. It's an exception, not the rule.
First: 99.9% of scientists are not working at LHC, or any other billion dollar, world-unique facility. They are working in ordinary labs, with ordinary equipment that's identical or similar to equipment in hundreds of other labs around the world.
There are two types of science. What you're referring to is called 'Little Science' (not to be derogatory), but it's the type of thing that a small lab can do, with a reasonable amount of funding. And then there's what we call "Big Science" like the LHC, Hubble Space Telecope, Arecibo Observatory, Large Synoptic Space Telescope, etc.
Second: Primary data, actual measurement results, are already kept, as a rule.
I wish. Well, okay, it might be kept, but the question is by who, and have they put it somewhere that people can analyze it?
I was at the AGU last year, and there was someone from a solar observatory that I wasn't familiar with. As I do work for the Virtual Solar Observatory, I asked them if we could put up a web service to connect their repository to our federated search. They told me there was no repository for the observatory -- the data walks out the door with whoever the observer was.
Then there's the issue of trying to to tell from the published research exactly what the original data was. But then, I've been harping on the need for data citation for years now... it's an issue that's starting to get noticed.
Third: The vast majority of experiments are never ever reproduced to begin with. You're lucky enough to get cited, really. Most papers don't even get cited apart from by those who wrote them.
For the type of data that I deal with, none of it is technically reproducible, because it's observations, not experiments. And that's precisely why it's important to save the data.
Fourth: Very little science is done by re-interpreting existing results. That only applies to the unique cases where the actual experiment can't be reproduced easily.
In your field, maybe. But we have folks who try to design systems to predict when events are going to happen and need training data. Others do long-term statistical analysis with years or decades of data at a time. Still others find a strange feature that hadn't previously been identified as important (eg, coronal dimmings) and want to go back through all of the data to try to identify other occurrences.
I blame the concept of "fair journalism" in which each side of the story gets an equal amount of coverage.
So, if it's 1 vs. 100 on an issue... they both get an equal number of column-inches, it doesn't matter how absolutely stupid one side of the issue might be.
Which is why this makes sense for off-road vehicles, such as military hummers.
But I agree that poor road maintenance is not just a suck on fuel efficiency, but results in increased costs on the upkeep of vehicles as a whole. (and it takes energy to make and ship those new sway-bar struts that I had to have replaced because of hitting too many bumps)
The article linked to showed the size comparison for the James Webb Space Telescope, and its spectral range vs. Hubble (further into IR, but also further into the visible spectrum)
You're forgetting that the premise of Dark Angel was human-animal chimeras.
I'm guessing if they looked anything like the actors/actresses in that show (eg, Jessica Alba), they'd be a little more accepted. Unfortunately, the show also had their earlier 'failures', which were a little less human looking, and might qualify in the uncanny valley / furries area.
If you've ever wanted something FORTRAN-ish, but with matrices, see GDL.
They're trying to make an open source interpreter that can take IDL scripts directly. Unfortunately, I don't know if it can open up IDL save files, due to various threats from lawyers.
There's also PDL, which deals with large data cubes in Perl.
From what I remember, in the late 1980s/early 1990s they'd give you 10% over the difference in price. (so if it was $100 less somewhere else, they've give you a $110 refund).
By the time I saw my first Best Buy in the DC area (mid 1990's), they had stopped doing it.
They also used to be one of the few places that actually made good on their extended warranty -- if you had to bring it in 3 times for service, you got a replacement (either same or equivalent model).
Oh well... yet another memory of my childhood gone (Service Merchandise, Erol's, etc.)
I remember my old boss would, whenever a temporary disaster seemed likely (hurricanes or elections, mostly), stock up on three basics: ammunition, whiskey, and cigarettes. The ammo makes some sense, as it can be used both for defense and, at least in theory, hunting. Alcohol has at least some use recreationally, medically, and as a trade good. Given that he didn't smoke, the cigarettes were purely for trade. Not saying that's a good plan, but it is an interesting one.
And salt -- if you're planning for anything long-term (ie, months to years), it's necessary for survival and a useful trade good.
As for food preparations, look for books published in Utah -- the Mormons have their disaster preparedness down. Important thing to consider if you're trying to do it right -- eat from your stored food, so it gets rotated -- it shouldn't just be something that you store for 4 years, then have to replace. It also makes sure you're storing food that you know how to prepare, and are sure you don't have intolerance/allergies to.
There was a period when it was common to see 1/3 to 1/2 of the stories on the front page from Roland, and the stories linking to brief summaries on his own blog rather than to the original article. I can only assume it was a comment on that period.
Hmm... let's see... pirated software, where even having it is proof that it's pirated, as it's not released yet. And yesterday's news on WGA convictions.
(and once again, this is ILLEGAL, so you're at your own risk on this one)
If all of your critical utilities are on the same leg (110V), you can get away with just stripping down a couple of standard power cables (as every geek seems to have a pile of them around), and connect it to a circuit on that leg. If you want to play it safe, shut off EVERY circuit breaker in the house, and connect the suicide plug (I'm not kidding, that's really what the double-ended cord is called), to the circuit that you want to power up. Check it with a circuit tester if you have one -- reversed polarity can do nasty things to electrical gear.
Also make sure that the generator is outside, but isolated from the ground, or it'll (1) fill the house with carbon monoxide and kill you or (2) have a different ground and keep tripping itself off.
Slashdot Mirror
The only other factor that I can think of are land cost and maintenance costs. I'd assume you'd still want a large area of land, just in case the system should go off course, so that one might not be a significant difference, so that just leaves us with maintenance -- how much effort is it to keep a similarly producing land-based system, vs. keeping an eye on the satellite and keeping a smaller ground-based receiver going?
The US Government sets policies through money -- normally, in the form of tax incentives; if you do (x), we won't take the money back from you for doing it.
So yes, they're giving Tesla money -- but it's much closer to the current practices of tax law, but much less open-ended.
The government could've put out a grant with specifications to develop the cars for fleet vehicles, and then allowed them to sell it to the public (more like the original Hummer), or they could've used earmarks to find a way to fund the company without any money ever being given back.
So yes, the government is giving them money -- but it's still not a bailout. And there's probably a dozen or more other ways that the government could've given them money that wouldn't have been a bailout, but just a form of financial incentive for working on the project that the administration thinks is to the public's advantage. (or, to whoever's getting kickbacks, if you want to be cynical about it)
after all, there's over 300 years worth of data on sunspot counts:
http://sidc.oma.be/sunspot-data/
Pick your own interval for analysis.
Kickass -- we can finally play RoboSport in real life!
I was on the GW solar car team more than 10 years ago -- we could do 60mph back then, so I'm not impressed, either.
The important factors included: how much sun is there are the time, are you willing to drain the batteries, and are we going uphill?
If you've got good sun, don't have a screwed up array like we did in the '95 Sunrayce, and are willing to drain your batteries, it's easy to go over 60mph. And if you're going downhill, it's even easier.
Of course, that year they decided to put the finish line at the top of a mountain, and we had mostly clouds for the last few days, so just about everyone showed poorly overall.
You're assuming that they're going to fail in random ways. What's being described is that every one of them fails in exactly the same way -- which means you can't cobble together a single working one from multiple failed ones.
You're right in that things likely won't fail nearly as badly as they make it out to be -- I know the power companies have the ability to do rolling brownouts, as we used to regularly have them when I lived in DC ... it's only a small step to rolling backouts like you describe after that.
What is going to happen is that people are going to have a horrible jolt to their comfort levels. We'll move from TV to battery powered radios, and have to give up our dependance on pre-made frozen meals. Other than the medical issues described, it's not going to kill us unless we refuse to adapt. We'll probably lose more to riots and looting than directly caused reasons.
That's just flat out wrong.
ACE might have a better ground network (let's face it, it's easier to talk to as it's at L1), but STEREO-Behind can see areas of the sun that aren't visible from any other solar-observing mission. It's also remote sensing (ie, telescopes), so it doesn't have to wait until it gets hit by an event. (at which point, we're looking at the last 1M miles of a 93M mile trip)
There's also instruments that have proven space-weather benefits on SOHO, but that's even older than ACE. I'm not going to say that ACE isn't the most important satellite in NOAA's eyes for predicting space weather (and some of their space weather folks have even mentioned that they might have to put up a similar satellite when ACE finally fails), but saying it's the only warning system discounts all of the other solar-observing missions used for space weather forecasting.
I've been pushed hard on projects before -- and been told that documentation wasn't a priority, that getting the code out was. (I had a sign on my wall that said 'Documentation is Phase 2', a direct quote from my manager).
Now, "Josh" seems like he has some personality issues, sure, but don't bitch about the documentation thing. If anything, I find that documentation can be harmful (if it's not kept updated as the code is), and that it's often best when it's written by someone _other_ than the coder who already knows everything (so they don't bother documenting all of the 'obvious' stuff that's only really obvious to them).
If this "Josh" were worth the cost of 4+ "normal" programmers, assign someone extra to follow behind his commits and document what's going on. The lack of documentation is a company problem, not just one programmer's.
Unfortunately, most of the folks on here are probably too young to get the reference, so, here's some text from the original boxes:
Tivo is horrible at managing conflicting shows. You have to go in and manually handle every last little detail or you end up with:
And my all time favorite, for which there's no solution other than telling it a set channel and time:
And I have no plans on switching to a multi-tuner DVR, as I'd have to give up my DVD burning capabilities. I've thought about switching from satellite just so I didn't get told every other day that some channel has moved, but I'm not willing to give my money to Verizon or Comcast after incidents in the past.
And I particularly hate Fox for their Futurama timeslot that resulted in my recording 20 minutes of a sports game week after week, but the Friday timeslot isn't the kiss of death -- if I remember correctly, that's where X-Files was, 12 years ago.
In that case, I'd fail. (and I'm even a town commissioner).
I have no landline, and my cell phone's area code is from another state -- when I moved to the area, I was at my dad's house when I called to move my cell phone's area, and they asked me where I was, and I told them, and they assigned me a phone number in Virginia.. I explained that no, I wanted a DC or Maryland phone number, and they told me that if I wanted to pick my number, they'd charge me some obnoxious amount. (well, it seemed obnoxious at the time, but as a one time thing, it'd have saved me 8 years of confusion).
Oh ... and my phone doesn't support SMS, either, as I refuse to get a cell phone that takes more than 10 sec from when I power it on 'til when I can make a call
I also know of people with FX'd lines (foreign exchange -- their house phone number is Baltimore, when it's 50 miles away), and with number portability, I have no idea if the limits that you have a 'local' phone number are still there.
...
Of course, I have no idea how 'local' the board is. The audience might be tens of thousands of people, or it might be a few hundred. Some mechanisms won't scale well (drop off a letter at the town hall, or at Bill's house), and you have to balance letting the wrong people in with rejecting people who really should have accounts.
In his particular case, his website was fighting against states and municipalities that were trying to claim copyright on their laws and restrict their distribution, and he had previously had done similar work with data from both the SEC and US Patent Office:
Tech activist takes on governments over 'copyrighted' laws
Patent office slammed for not posting data
So yes, I'm guessing that his website might give him some suitable experience for this position.
You can get more by suing individually, but then you'd likely have to front the cost of a lawyer.
So, although the potential return is less for you in a class action suit, the risk is lower too, as you have almost no cost in joining.
(But it does annoy me when the result is a coupon whose face value is only useful if you actually wanted to buy a new product. The ones who probably win the most in these cases are the lawyers who take a percentage of the whole ... and I'm guessing they're not paid in coupons)
There are two types of science. What you're referring to is called 'Little Science' (not to be derogatory), but it's the type of thing that a small lab can do, with a reasonable amount of funding. And then there's what we call "Big Science" like the LHC, Hubble Space Telecope, Arecibo Observatory, Large Synoptic Space Telescope, etc.
I wish. Well, okay, it might be kept, but the question is by who, and have they put it somewhere that people can analyze it?
I was at the AGU last year, and there was someone from a solar observatory that I wasn't familiar with. As I do work for the Virtual Solar Observatory, I asked them if we could put up a web service to connect their repository to our federated search. They told me there was no repository for the observatory -- the data walks out the door with whoever the observer was.
Then there's the issue of trying to to tell from the published research exactly what the original data was. But then, I've been harping on the need for data citation for years now ... it's an issue that's starting to get noticed.
For the type of data that I deal with, none of it is technically reproducible, because it's observations, not experiments. And that's precisely why it's important to save the data.
In your field, maybe. But we have folks who try to design systems to predict when events are going to happen and need training data. Others do long-term statistical analysis with years or decades of data at a time. Still others find a strange feature that hadn't previously been identified as important (eg, coronal dimmings) and want to go back through all of the data to try to identify other occurrences.
I blame the concept of "fair journalism" in which each side of the story gets an equal amount of coverage.
So, if it's 1 vs. 100 on an issue ... they both get an equal number of column-inches, it doesn't matter how absolutely stupid one side of the issue might be.
Which is why this makes sense for off-road vehicles, such as military hummers.
But I agree that poor road maintenance is not just a suck on fuel efficiency, but results in increased costs on the upkeep of vehicles as a whole. (and it takes energy to make and ship those new sway-bar struts that I had to have replaced because of hitting too many bumps)
There aren't any plans?
The article linked to showed the size comparison for the James Webb Space Telescope, and its spectral range vs. Hubble (further into IR, but also further into the visible spectrum)
If it's in infrared, then it's NOT a Hubble replacement, it's a Spitzer replacement.
You're forgetting that the premise of Dark Angel was human-animal chimeras.
I'm guessing if they looked anything like the actors/actresses in that show (eg, Jessica Alba), they'd be a little more accepted. Unfortunately, the show also had their earlier 'failures', which were a little less human looking, and might qualify in the uncanny valley / furries area.
If you've ever wanted something FORTRAN-ish, but with matrices, see GDL.
They're trying to make an open source interpreter that can take IDL scripts directly. Unfortunately, I don't know if it can open up IDL save files, due to various threats from lawyers.
There's also PDL, which deals with large data cubes in Perl.
From what I remember, in the late 1980s/early 1990s they'd give you 10% over the difference in price. (so if it was $100 less somewhere else, they've give you a $110 refund).
By the time I saw my first Best Buy in the DC area (mid 1990's), they had stopped doing it.
They also used to be one of the few places that actually made good on their extended warranty -- if you had to bring it in 3 times for service, you got a replacement (either same or equivalent model).
Oh well ... yet another memory of my childhood gone (Service Merchandise, Erol's, etc.)
And salt -- if you're planning for anything long-term (ie, months to years), it's necessary for survival and a useful trade good.
As for food preparations, look for books published in Utah -- the Mormons have their disaster preparedness down. Important thing to consider if you're trying to do it right -- eat from your stored food, so it gets rotated -- it shouldn't just be something that you store for 4 years, then have to replace. It also makes sure you're storing food that you know how to prepare, and are sure you don't have intolerance/allergies to.
There was a period when it was common to see 1/3 to 1/2 of the stories on the front page from Roland, and the stories linking to brief summaries on his own blog rather than to the original article. I can only assume it was a comment on that period.
Hmm... let's see ... pirated software, where even having it is proof that it's pirated, as it's not released yet. And yesterday's news on WGA convictions.
That's not hypocrisy -- that's a trojan horse.
(and once again, this is ILLEGAL, so you're at your own risk on this one)
If all of your critical utilities are on the same leg (110V), you can get away with just stripping down a couple of standard power cables (as every geek seems to have a pile of them around), and connect it to a circuit on that leg. If you want to play it safe, shut off EVERY circuit breaker in the house, and connect the suicide plug (I'm not kidding, that's really what the double-ended cord is called), to the circuit that you want to power up. Check it with a circuit tester if you have one -- reversed polarity can do nasty things to electrical gear.
Also make sure that the generator is outside, but isolated from the ground, or it'll (1) fill the house with carbon monoxide and kill you or (2) have a different ground and keep tripping itself off.
and you can also see Popular Mechanics's take on the situation