While you are still working, your income is a price to your employer.
Bzzzt wrong. Dangerously wrong. Wages are sticky to the low side. If you're lucky enough to get "cost of living" increases these rarely cover the real increase in the cost of living. Have you been missing all the complaints in the past decade about how prices have been going up since the 1990's and wages have stayed essentially the same and even DECLINED in some areas?
Many people have no understanding, period. Few people realize that the % symbol indicates an exponential function. Then all sorts of allegedly smart people like politicians, economists and even finance people go around tut tutting about "low" growth rates, etc, when these are in the 5% or so range. Heck even 2% inflation scares the beejezus out of me, but (even if it were the real figure) seems perfectly acceptable to others. Even 2% is still an exponential function. In 35 years you had better be prepared to have double the amount of income you think you needed today - just to tread water. And you'll need much more than that, because the 2% is hilariously not real.
Your impression that only pure capitalism exists and nothing else is false. The world is full of shades of gray. There is a set where profit can be achieved without destroying a) the environment b) the worker force c) the brand. When you realize that "maximum profit" usually means offloading hidden economic costs onto someone else (which usually comes back to bite you in the ass anyway), it becomes possible to accept less than maximum profit as a goal. Very few people who build successful businesses do it ONLY for the money.
Look at Wal Mart. Absolute lowest price in everything - so low they put everyone out of business. Paid their employees as little as possible with as few benefits as possible. Even then, they get into financial trouble. Well what are you going to do when Wal Mart came to your town, put everyone out of business and then leaves town taking the few remaining jobs with it? Success story?
set short term money/earning goals that were so aggressive that they burned long-term good-will to reach them.
Story of any major corporation, be it a software manufacturer (fuck you, it's our computer now you're just the user), a fast food chain (let's replace all our ingredients with cheaper stuff and the customer will never know the difference), a consumer goods company (let's make the cheapest possible product we can in China who cares if it falls apart/doesn't remove stains/poisons pets - we have brand recognition and market share baby), clothing manufacturers (let's make clothes in Bangladesh that are so badly made they literally fall apart after two washes, and charge premium prices) and I could go on. It's the story of the world.
Some visionary busts his ass building a leading company in the business, and then he gets sick and dies and his kids fuck it up, or he sells it and some CEO fixes things for a record profit in a few quarters when his stock options become vested and who cares if it all comes crashing down the moment he cashes out and leaves the company, etc. It's a symptom of capitalism, really. Screw the customer for as much as you can, screw the employees as much as you can, grab the cash and to hell with anyone else. Actual success requires more than this.
In which case I will put it to you differently: Hydrogen gas is currently priced around $1/kg = $2/1000 mole = $0.002/mole. Excluding the cost of collecting, compressing and bottling your gas (let's say you can pay for all that with the oxygen you sell - since you also get oxygen) - it will take you 158 years to pay back $1 per "typical sample". I am sure these cost more that $1 to make. Therefore while academically interesting, these are not and will probably never be industrially/economically viable. I don't think "scaling up" will help.
because there is a serious crime that needs investigation?
What crime? The crime is over. The perpetrator is dead. This is nothing but a fishing expedition - which is absolutely contrary to law. You are supposed to know what you're looking for before you ask a judge for a warrant. That's how police work is supposed to be. We're slipping back a few hundred years and saying "oh he's supposed to a bad person, let's keep going through his stuff until we find something that will incriminate him". If we slip any more backwards than that, then accusation should be enough to condemn you, or even better, you get to fight it out and obviously God will pick the winner because if you lose the fight and die, obviously you were guilty.
Best part will be when someone manages to insert malware into one of the ads and pwns every single Windows 10 box. And someone at Microsoft will say "oops, we're sorry. Well we'll refund you the price of the OS OH WAIT THAT'S RIGHT IT WAS FREE so sorry.
Gravity has a time component because it's an acceleration. If you're moving close to the speed of light (I mean this was the point, right?), you are going to be very far away before gravity (even the sun's gravity) has any chance to act on you. The other problem with being further away - you're further out of the gravitational field. Divided by r SQUARED, remember? So exactly how were you going to use this "force"?
Not to mention the fact that you are allowed two and only two directions: Faster than the Earth (which will get you to the outer planets and eventually out of the solar system) and slower than the Earth (which will get you to the inner planets and eventually into the Sun). Now, if you're going to go really fast (the fraction of the speed of light that has been mentioned), the Earth will not have moved much around the sun before you need to slow down again. Oops. If you were counting on some weird trigonometry with the Earth in a special position on the other side of its orbit, er, well, that's not going to happen in a day or so.
Of course you could go slower and loop around planets, etc, before you get your magical "set-up" that allows you to shine your beam at the sail ship. Then you'll find that although you partially correct one velocity component, you've added even more to the ones that say "away from the sun". It's a tangent thing, you know? You can only make a bigger circle from inside a smaller circle...
Only way this would work would be to have some laser at your destination waiting to slow you down. And THEN we can get into details about how much acceleration your craft can stand and for how long. Anything biological is out, for starters...
He would be thinly laminated to the rear wall of such a spacecraft long before it even got very far from Earth. 0c to 0.3c in 3 days requires g-forces that are incompatible with life. Assuming constant acceleration we're only talking 115g's here... for 3 days.
Er.... ok I'll bite. What's the other component, apart from wind, that keeps a sailboat on course? I'll give you a hint - racing yachts and modern sailboats have something called a keel. I DARE you to try to sail your "light sail" against the "wind" in space. What are you going to push against? Physics fail.
At 0.3c you are not entering orbit. At best Martian gravity will put a slight kink in your trajectory but at that speed it's either hit the planet or miss it completely.
Too bad you won't be able to find it online because Kanye West is gonna sue TBP to oblivion. Just as soon as he finds an address to serve the summons...
Yeah but don't tell the press that - then they wouldn't be able to run with "zOMG RADIASHUN!" stories. If I was a bad guy wanting to do some harm I'd probably have more success stealing a cobalt-60 core from a linear accelerator and instead of building a bomb with it, leaving it in a wall somewhere in a busy train station or something...
Slashdot Mirror
While you are still working, your income is a price to your employer.
Bzzzt wrong. Dangerously wrong. Wages are sticky to the low side. If you're lucky enough to get "cost of living" increases these rarely cover the real increase in the cost of living. Have you been missing all the complaints in the past decade about how prices have been going up since the 1990's and wages have stayed essentially the same and even DECLINED in some areas?
Many people have no understanding, period. Few people realize that the % symbol indicates an exponential function. Then all sorts of allegedly smart people like politicians, economists and even finance people go around tut tutting about "low" growth rates, etc, when these are in the 5% or so range. Heck even 2% inflation scares the beejezus out of me, but (even if it were the real figure) seems perfectly acceptable to others. Even 2% is still an exponential function. In 35 years you had better be prepared to have double the amount of income you think you needed today - just to tread water. And you'll need much more than that, because the 2% is hilariously not real.
What I wonder is how the dear professor intends to teach statistics without referring to the many statistical formulae which are written in - algebra.
Your impression that only pure capitalism exists and nothing else is false. The world is full of shades of gray. There is a set where profit can be achieved without destroying a) the environment b) the worker force c) the brand. When you realize that "maximum profit" usually means offloading hidden economic costs onto someone else (which usually comes back to bite you in the ass anyway), it becomes possible to accept less than maximum profit as a goal. Very few people who build successful businesses do it ONLY for the money.
Look at Wal Mart. Absolute lowest price in everything - so low they put everyone out of business. Paid their employees as little as possible with as few benefits as possible. Even then, they get into financial trouble. Well what are you going to do when Wal Mart came to your town, put everyone out of business and then leaves town taking the few remaining jobs with it? Success story?
set short term money/earning goals that were so aggressive that they burned long-term good-will to reach them.
Story of any major corporation, be it a software manufacturer (fuck you, it's our computer now you're just the user), a fast food chain (let's replace all our ingredients with cheaper stuff and the customer will never know the difference), a consumer goods company (let's make the cheapest possible product we can in China who cares if it falls apart/doesn't remove stains/poisons pets - we have brand recognition and market share baby), clothing manufacturers (let's make clothes in Bangladesh that are so badly made they literally fall apart after two washes, and charge premium prices) and I could go on. It's the story of the world.
Some visionary busts his ass building a leading company in the business, and then he gets sick and dies and his kids fuck it up, or he sells it and some CEO fixes things for a record profit in a few quarters when his stock options become vested and who cares if it all comes crashing down the moment he cashes out and leaves the company, etc. It's a symptom of capitalism, really. Screw the customer for as much as you can, screw the employees as much as you can, grab the cash and to hell with anyone else. Actual success requires more than this.
In which case I will put it to you differently: Hydrogen gas is currently priced around $1/kg = $2/1000 mole = $0.002/mole. Excluding the cost of collecting, compressing and bottling your gas (let's say you can pay for all that with the oxygen you sell - since you also get oxygen) - it will take you 158 years to pay back $1 per "typical sample". I am sure these cost more that $1 to make. Therefore while academically interesting, these are not and will probably never be industrially/economically viable. I don't think "scaling up" will help.
and a typical sample contains about 600 trillion nanorods.
That sounds like a lot, but Avogadro's number is still way, way bigger than that. How many decades before this produces 1 mole (2g) of hydrogen gas?
because there is a serious crime that needs investigation?
What crime? The crime is over. The perpetrator is dead. This is nothing but a fishing expedition - which is absolutely contrary to law. You are supposed to know what you're looking for before you ask a judge for a warrant. That's how police work is supposed to be. We're slipping back a few hundred years and saying "oh he's supposed to a bad person, let's keep going through his stuff until we find something that will incriminate him". If we slip any more backwards than that, then accusation should be enough to condemn you, or even better, you get to fight it out and obviously God will pick the winner because if you lose the fight and die, obviously you were guilty.
Best part will be when someone manages to insert malware into one of the ads and pwns every single Windows 10 box. And someone at Microsoft will say "oops, we're sorry. Well we'll refund you the price of the OS OH WAIT THAT'S RIGHT IT WAS FREE so sorry.
Gravity doesn't work that way.
Gravity has a time component because it's an acceleration. If you're moving close to the speed of light (I mean this was the point, right?), you are going to be very far away before gravity (even the sun's gravity) has any chance to act on you. The other problem with being further away - you're further out of the gravitational field. Divided by r SQUARED, remember? So exactly how were you going to use this "force"?
Not to mention the fact that you are allowed two and only two directions: Faster than the Earth (which will get you to the outer planets and eventually out of the solar system) and slower than the Earth (which will get you to the inner planets and eventually into the Sun). Now, if you're going to go really fast (the fraction of the speed of light that has been mentioned), the Earth will not have moved much around the sun before you need to slow down again. Oops. If you were counting on some weird trigonometry with the Earth in a special position on the other side of its orbit, er, well, that's not going to happen in a day or so.
Of course you could go slower and loop around planets, etc, before you get your magical "set-up" that allows you to shine your beam at the sail ship. Then you'll find that although you partially correct one velocity component, you've added even more to the ones that say "away from the sun". It's a tangent thing, you know? You can only make a bigger circle from inside a smaller circle...
Only way this would work would be to have some laser at your destination waiting to slow you down. And THEN we can get into details about how much acceleration your craft can stand and for how long. Anything biological is out, for starters...
Lubin supposes that the system could propel crafts to an "unheard of" 30 percent the speed of light.
He would be thinly laminated to the rear wall of such a spacecraft long before it even got very far from Earth. 0c to 0.3c in 3 days requires g-forces that are incompatible with life. Assuming constant acceleration we're only talking 115g's here... for 3 days.
Er.... ok I'll bite. What's the other component, apart from wind, that keeps a sailboat on course? I'll give you a hint - racing yachts and modern sailboats have something called a keel. I DARE you to try to sail your "light sail" against the "wind" in space. What are you going to push against? Physics fail.
At 0.3c you are not entering orbit. At best Martian gravity will put a slight kink in your trajectory but at that speed it's either hit the planet or miss it completely.
Well you could then spend 3 years aerobraking - can't get too deep into that Martian atmosphere at 0.3c so it's going to take a while...
Lasers would get me to Mars faster than I would click on a Forbes link.
According to quantum theory the answer is both yes and no.
translate programs compiled to the various S-languages directly into microcode and execute the microcode.
What could possibly go wrong, in today's connected era. LOL.
I doubt it will be used in court considering the owner of the phone is dead.
Welcome to the New World Order.
Too bad you won't be able to find it online because Kanye West is gonna sue TBP to oblivion. Just as soon as he finds an address to serve the summons...
I may be poor, but at least I have more money than Kanye West.
Don't you have an appointment with the police in Belize to deal with? Something about you being a suspect in a murder?
Take your meds.
Yeah but don't tell the press that - then they wouldn't be able to run with "zOMG RADIASHUN!" stories. If I was a bad guy wanting to do some harm I'd probably have more success stealing a cobalt-60 core from a linear accelerator and instead of building a bomb with it, leaving it in a wall somewhere in a busy train station or something...