Do you really want to go down that road? The one that leads you to having to weigh you and your carry-on and get charged by its weight when you board? And if you check your bags they get charged by weight as well, making it impossible to know how much the flight costs until you are actually on the plane.
Most people miss the days when they weren't getting charged for every damn thing they do near or on the plane, even if it did mean higher ticket prices up front.
The "I might be unemployed for a year, and I'll need to eat" argument doesn't make much sense to me. MREs aren't cheap (not compared to frugal shopping) especially when you consider you have to re-buy them after 5-10 years, whether you eat them or not. If you're worried about putting food on the table in hard times, it makes more sense to set up a special rainy day savings account that you won't touch except for dire emergencies, like buying food when you're out of a job. If the temptation is too great, you could just withdraw it as a bundle of cash and bury it in the basement.
This also has the advantage of letting you eat fresh vegetables. The only downside is that you might have to pay for gas to get to the grocery store and back if it is not in walking/biking distance and you have no useable public transport. If that's the case, I suggest making larger but less frequent trips, even though it means fewer fresh vegetables.
Also, really really weak. If you have NV Goggles on in a really dark room it might be worth it, but in most circumstances it seems pretty dubious to me.
A 72 hour kit is just common sense, especially for people who live in the snowy midwest (in fact you should really be stocking up for at least a couple of weeks). The full year food storage however seems a bit extreme to me. If you've had some sort of disaster that has lasted for an entire year, it's hard to imagine the circumstances where it would be better by that point. In fact a month of storage would seem to be adequate for an realistic disaster scenario. Either society is back after a few weeks, or it's not coming back.
This isn't about middle eastern "crash planes into buildings" terrorists, they're looking for Timothy McVeigh type terrorists and Michigan Militia types. Basically far right rednecks that are not always completely with it mentally and sometimes go a bit too far.
You forgot to add Meteors, Lightning, Sharks, etc... to that list. The chances of dying to a terrorist attack in the US are vanishingly small, slightly more if your office space is in a national landmark or government facility, but substantially less for everybody else.
If that lady were living in Israel or Helmand Province then I could understand her worry, but she was clearly crazy as you noted.
Ironically, it might be the DRM that publishers insisted on that foils this scheme. If you can prevent people from buying more than one copy of an ebook per device, then a scheme like this would only work if someone had an unlimited number of free devices.
So that sounds like a loss leader alright, but used in exactly the way one would expect. As basically a promotional type deal. Couldn't the publishers do exactly the same thing? Theoretically their costs are lower than Amazon's because they have one fewer levels of middleman to pay.
As I understand it, the books aren't actually "below cost", they're just below what the Publisher charges for their own version of the same ebooks. Amazon can't really afford to sell the books below cost because books are their primary business, especially on the Kindle. You can't make your biggest income source a loss leader for long. This sounds a lot like publishers going "mah profits!!!" because they thought they finally had a way to destroy the secondary market with ebooks and get everybody to pay retail again but then Amazon came along and wrecked their plans by selling below MSRP.
That number sounds really low to me if you include people trafficking in copyrighted files. If you included that, the number would be closer to a googol (by RIAA and MPAA estimates) than a mere $110 billion.
In some ways solving these problems are a waste of time if the Physics says it will never be feasible. We would be solving a big set of problems that won't be problems once we invent Warp Drive. On the other hand, since we have absolutely no idea how to even get started on a Warp Drive today, we might as well solve the problems that we know about.
The problem is that 0.25c is unimaginably fast by human standards, and would require a truly mind boggling amount of energy to achieve for any vessel with enough mass to support people onboard. Even 0.025c is insanely fast (27 million kph), and would require a generational ship or some sort of stasis (and rotating crew) to make the journey. This assumes you solve the problem of what to do about invisible space junk (micrometeorites for instance) colliding with your ship at an equivalent energy much larger than the largest nuclear explosion ever detonated by man.
We're not traveling between the stars without a major revolution in physics.
Not too soon, but it's not impossible to think of a RTG powered ion drive probe that could continuously accelerate out of the solar system and overtake Voyager after a few years
It would be tough on those people, but it seems like they could adapt. If school is only out for 3 weeks, then set up a 3 week camp that meshes with the school year (admittedly this is going to be tricky as there is no fixed end or start dates for different school districts). If the state were smart it would have different counties take their summer vacations at different times to spread the kids out over the summer. If the county is rural and there are lots of farm kids, they could even keep the old system under the assumption that the kids are going to be working on the farm all summer.
You might be surprised how much paint can weigh. On a car the paint adds about 8-10lbs or so. On something like bodyarmor you could easily be looking at a pound or more of extra weight for a relatively scratchproof coat of epoxy. Body armor is already designed with a tradeoff of weight versus protection, so anything that adds weight without adding protection is going to be carefully scrutinized.
I guess you could cover it in a thin layer of epoxy after painting (adding weight), but yeah moisture control is going to be a problem in that situation from the sound of it.
Are month long summer camps common? I've never heard of one, and all of the camps I went to as a child were week long affairs. By the end of the week I was generally ready to go home too.
That seems like a long time to send your child somewhere. When they get back are they shipped off to a boarding school?
The real issue is: Will the Russian government be willing (and able!) to sink the billions of dollars worth of rubles into this project over the 20 or so years it will need? The 2020 date is crazy, this is a new frontier, 20 years is more likely, and only if there is full an continued support from the government.
People already balked at the price of a Concorde ticket, getting them to pay even more for a Hypersonic Scramjet (and lets face it, the laws of physics are going to be harsh to your fuel prices) is probably not a sound business plan. 10 hour flights are annoying, but not $5000 annoying.
Also, they would have to eliminate urban blight and make the city a reasonable place to raise a child. Of course trying to do that means you have to kick out all of the people living there currently, because they won't be able to afford your new utopia. That's called gentrification, and it's one of the things that will get you angry protesters outside your doors in no time.
Living in a crappy inner city neighborhood is fine when you're single, but there is a reason good people move out when they want to have kids, and one of the biggest factors is the schools. Inner city schools are almost always terrible and the only good option for people who want their kids to succeed in something other than running drugs is expensive private schools. The idea of fixing the inner city schools to make them good enough for your kids is crazy too, so don't try to float it. Many people have tried to fix those schools, all have failed. It's extremely difficult to break the cycle of failure, especially if the source of the failure comes from outside the school (kids from poor broken families with no discipline causing constant problems in the classroom).
Losing weight is a little more difficult now than it was in the 80s, because the car has to be able to absorb the impact of a 4 ton SUV going 65 miles an hour without killing the occupants now. 80s econoboxes tended to turn into metal pancakes in the same situation. Improved aerodynamics will help, especially at the highway speed test, but you can't make a car as light today as you could in the 80s, at least not without using expensive exotic materials.
I think you might be a bit fuzzy on the concept of "legal". Laws don't have some magical enforcement mechanism that immediately hits you if you break the law in even the tiniest way, but that doesn't make breaking them any less illegal.
Slashdot Mirror
So the reason it's iPad only is because Apple did the legwork with the FCC to get it okayed? I guess I'm fine with that.
Do you really want to go down that road? The one that leads you to having to weigh you and your carry-on and get charged by its weight when you board? And if you check your bags they get charged by weight as well, making it impossible to know how much the flight costs until you are actually on the plane.
Most people miss the days when they weren't getting charged for every damn thing they do near or on the plane, even if it did mean higher ticket prices up front.
The "I might be unemployed for a year, and I'll need to eat" argument doesn't make much sense to me. MREs aren't cheap (not compared to frugal shopping) especially when you consider you have to re-buy them after 5-10 years, whether you eat them or not. If you're worried about putting food on the table in hard times, it makes more sense to set up a special rainy day savings account that you won't touch except for dire emergencies, like buying food when you're out of a job. If the temptation is too great, you could just withdraw it as a bundle of cash and bury it in the basement.
This also has the advantage of letting you eat fresh vegetables. The only downside is that you might have to pay for gas to get to the grocery store and back if it is not in walking/biking distance and you have no useable public transport. If that's the case, I suggest making larger but less frequent trips, even though it means fewer fresh vegetables.
Also, really really weak. If you have NV Goggles on in a really dark room it might be worth it, but in most circumstances it seems pretty dubious to me.
A 72 hour kit is just common sense, especially for people who live in the snowy midwest (in fact you should really be stocking up for at least a couple of weeks). The full year food storage however seems a bit extreme to me. If you've had some sort of disaster that has lasted for an entire year, it's hard to imagine the circumstances where it would be better by that point. In fact a month of storage would seem to be adequate for an realistic disaster scenario. Either society is back after a few weeks, or it's not coming back.
This isn't about middle eastern "crash planes into buildings" terrorists, they're looking for Timothy McVeigh type terrorists and Michigan Militia types. Basically far right rednecks that are not always completely with it mentally and sometimes go a bit too far.
You forgot to add Meteors, Lightning, Sharks, etc... to that list. The chances of dying to a terrorist attack in the US are vanishingly small, slightly more if your office space is in a national landmark or government facility, but substantially less for everybody else.
If that lady were living in Israel or Helmand Province then I could understand her worry, but she was clearly crazy as you noted.
Also, the publisher might be forced to send some of those profits back to the original author on each sale, which would be a big problem.
Ironically, it might be the DRM that publishers insisted on that foils this scheme. If you can prevent people from buying more than one copy of an ebook per device, then a scheme like this would only work if someone had an unlimited number of free devices.
So that sounds like a loss leader alright, but used in exactly the way one would expect. As basically a promotional type deal. Couldn't the publishers do exactly the same thing? Theoretically their costs are lower than Amazon's because they have one fewer levels of middleman to pay.
As I understand it, the books aren't actually "below cost", they're just below what the Publisher charges for their own version of the same ebooks. Amazon can't really afford to sell the books below cost because books are their primary business, especially on the Kindle. You can't make your biggest income source a loss leader for long. This sounds a lot like publishers going "mah profits!!!" because they thought they finally had a way to destroy the secondary market with ebooks and get everybody to pay retail again but then Amazon came along and wrecked their plans by selling below MSRP.
That number sounds really low to me if you include people trafficking in copyrighted files. If you included that, the number would be closer to a googol (by RIAA and MPAA estimates) than a mere $110 billion.
In some ways solving these problems are a waste of time if the Physics says it will never be feasible. We would be solving a big set of problems that won't be problems once we invent Warp Drive. On the other hand, since we have absolutely no idea how to even get started on a Warp Drive today, we might as well solve the problems that we know about.
The problem is that 0.25c is unimaginably fast by human standards, and would require a truly mind boggling amount of energy to achieve for any vessel with enough mass to support people onboard. Even 0.025c is insanely fast (27 million kph), and would require a generational ship or some sort of stasis (and rotating crew) to make the journey. This assumes you solve the problem of what to do about invisible space junk (micrometeorites for instance) colliding with your ship at an equivalent energy much larger than the largest nuclear explosion ever detonated by man.
We're not traveling between the stars without a major revolution in physics.
Not too soon, but it's not impossible to think of a RTG powered ion drive probe that could continuously accelerate out of the solar system and overtake Voyager after a few years
Cash isn't going away anytime soon.
It would be tough on those people, but it seems like they could adapt. If school is only out for 3 weeks, then set up a 3 week camp that meshes with the school year (admittedly this is going to be tricky as there is no fixed end or start dates for different school districts). If the state were smart it would have different counties take their summer vacations at different times to spread the kids out over the summer. If the county is rural and there are lots of farm kids, they could even keep the old system under the assumption that the kids are going to be working on the farm all summer.
You might be surprised how much paint can weigh. On a car the paint adds about 8-10lbs or so. On something like bodyarmor you could easily be looking at a pound or more of extra weight for a relatively scratchproof coat of epoxy. Body armor is already designed with a tradeoff of weight versus protection, so anything that adds weight without adding protection is going to be carefully scrutinized.
I guess you could cover it in a thin layer of epoxy after painting (adding weight), but yeah moisture control is going to be a problem in that situation from the sound of it.
Are month long summer camps common? I've never heard of one, and all of the camps I went to as a child were week long affairs. By the end of the week I was generally ready to go home too.
That seems like a long time to send your child somewhere. When they get back are they shipped off to a boarding school?
The real issue is: Will the Russian government be willing (and able!) to sink the billions of dollars worth of rubles into this project over the 20 or so years it will need? The 2020 date is crazy, this is a new frontier, 20 years is more likely, and only if there is full an continued support from the government.
People already balked at the price of a Concorde ticket, getting them to pay even more for a Hypersonic Scramjet (and lets face it, the laws of physics are going to be harsh to your fuel prices) is probably not a sound business plan. 10 hour flights are annoying, but not $5000 annoying.
Also, they would have to eliminate urban blight and make the city a reasonable place to raise a child. Of course trying to do that means you have to kick out all of the people living there currently, because they won't be able to afford your new utopia. That's called gentrification, and it's one of the things that will get you angry protesters outside your doors in no time.
Living in a crappy inner city neighborhood is fine when you're single, but there is a reason good people move out when they want to have kids, and one of the biggest factors is the schools. Inner city schools are almost always terrible and the only good option for people who want their kids to succeed in something other than running drugs is expensive private schools. The idea of fixing the inner city schools to make them good enough for your kids is crazy too, so don't try to float it. Many people have tried to fix those schools, all have failed. It's extremely difficult to break the cycle of failure, especially if the source of the failure comes from outside the school (kids from poor broken families with no discipline causing constant problems in the classroom).
Losing weight is a little more difficult now than it was in the 80s, because the car has to be able to absorb the impact of a 4 ton SUV going 65 miles an hour without killing the occupants now. 80s econoboxes tended to turn into metal pancakes in the same situation. Improved aerodynamics will help, especially at the highway speed test, but you can't make a car as light today as you could in the 80s, at least not without using expensive exotic materials.
I think you might be a bit fuzzy on the concept of "legal". Laws don't have some magical enforcement mechanism that immediately hits you if you break the law in even the tiniest way, but that doesn't make breaking them any less illegal.