Even if the offshore drilling is allowed it will be many years before we see any benefit from it (assuming that prices actually go down)
This is unclear. If major oil producing countries (like Saudia Arabia and Venezuela) are slowing their production now to keep oil in the ground because they expect the price of oil will rise (or at least stay at current high levels for a while), the possibility of a future price decrease because of additional US production may cause them to pump more oil NOW and sell it at the higher current price, which ironically will reduce the current price.
On the other hand, Saudi Aramco and PDVSA might just be screwed-up government run agencies and that's why their production is dropping, which is another theory....
Because the article says Rep. John Shadegg (R-Ariz..) is a 7337 hax0r:
"Republicans can thank Shadegg for turning on the microphones the first time. Apparently, the fiesty Arizona conservative started typing random codes into the chamber's public address system and accidentally typed the correct code, allowing Republicans brief access to the microphone before it was turned off again."
The kids growing up in this country are hammered with the message that to be rich and successful you need to either be a movie/rock star, sports star, lawyer, or doctor. The engineering field is suffering an uphill battle to continue to attract young people to the field.
Business Administration and Management $112,127 Psychology $75,610 Elementary Education $53,100 (there is no split out for Elementary Education in the salaries, but Elementary has higher initial salaries than Secondary) Biology $143,402 Nursing $74,443 Education $53,100 English $78,159 (assumes you can get a job...) Communication $81,023 Computer Science $109,393 Political Science $114,366
No engineering is on the "top 10 list" of majors, but 10-year-out salaries for Engineering (in general) is $120,330.
If you re-ran the 2007 budget using the "accrual" method of accounting that corporations must use, the "official" deficit of $163 billion balloons to over $2.4 trillion dollars -- FOR 2007 ALONE!
Indeed, if the US Federal government was a private corporation, it would be considered "insolvent," but on the other hand they have guns and can take as much in taxes from us as they want, which a private corporation can't do (even the oil companies:)
to summarize: only 21.6% went to the protection of the U.S. whereas well over 60% went to social programs
That's only the Federal side, this site tracks spending by Federal, State, and Local govenments.
Actual FY2007 defense spending was $655 billion, on government spending (at all levels) of $4.9 trillion, or 13.4% of spending by all US governments.
Of course, I'd still prefer defense spending to be less, but clearly the biggest outlays of US governments are Pensions (mainly Social Security), Health Care, and Education, in that order.
But yes, unpatentable drugs are a real big problem. One of the drugs used to effective treat depression, a Reverse Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitor called Manerix is not available for sale in the U.S. because the company that bought the U.S. rights tried to use it to treat dementia, for which it does not work. By the time the trials failed, the patent was too close to running out to run the paperwork for using it to treat depression, for which it does work. Consequently, it is a safe, effective, drug, with nobody in the U.S. to sponsor it to get through the approval process.
The same thing happened to Domperidone, a drug used widely outside the United States for treatment of gastroparesis. It was proven safe in FDA trials, but was not found effective because it did not improve gastric emptying. As it turns out, it did a great job of reducing the disabling nausea of gastroparesis, but at this point no company wants to pay to take it back through FDA testing process again.
Software may be exceptional because it is unique as a product in that it has close to zero variable costs
It is similar to prescription drugs. Marginal cost to produce is small after a huge sunk cost R&D. Also, like drugs, software are unique products, not commodities. Avid Media Composer and Apple Final Cut Pro are both "non-linear video editors", but someone trained on Avid would need new training to run on FCP. On the other hand, oil is oil is oil (with small chemical differences) depending on whether you drill for it in Saudi Arabia or Texas.
if prices correlate poorly (or not at all) to costs, that means the industry in question is not competitive
You are assuming everyone pays the same price. Price discrimination was the "normal" method of operation (through "haggling") until modern mass production made the costs of haggling more than the increase in producer surplus through haggling. Infact, price discrimination is interesting because if people with high demand pay more, it may enable more people with low demand to purchase the product at all (at a lower price) than with fixed-prices (which definitely applies to "The West" subsidizing drug sales to the rest of the world).
A supply/demand curve is a combination of how all the individuals in your market value a product. If I value Windows at $300 and the price is $400, I will be one less person demanding it. If I value Windows at $500 and the price is $400, I will be one more person demanding it.
Price discrimination requires segmentation of the market. In "haggling" you are segmenting by individual. However in the case of prescription drugs, software, and electronic hardware, markets are often segmented by country. Sometimes government-applied trade barriers encourage this segmentation through tariffs, regulation, etc.
You certainly could have competition within these market segments while maintaining price discrimination between the market segments.
Most of the time, the sens/reps really actually want to do the right thing, the same way you do.
Actually I'd argue most of the time, sens/reps want to SEEM to do what "the people" want, but actually they aren't willing to torpedo the economy. They tend to have more extensive education and business experience than the average voter.
See Obama and NAFTA as an example. Inside his head he is unwilling to start a stupid trade war with Canada and Mexico, but would like to seem like the is "anti-globalization" in his external rhetoric.
The advantage of a representative democratic system is that you get fairly bright representatives (with the IQ and rhetorical skill to manipulate the people), but if the power goes to their head and they do truly stupid things the masses (see Mao as someone who had two majorly bad ideas and starved tens of millions) the voters can still vote them out of office. On the other hand, it is rare that a true idiot is elected by the people (on average, of course) while "the people may" be majority behind idiotic ideas.
During launch, SpaceX will use the extensive range safety, tracking and telemetry services provided by the Reagan Test Site (RTS) at the United States Army Kwajalein Atoll (USAKA) in the Central Pacific. The next launch window opens 29 July and runs through 6 August, followed by one from 29 August to 5 September.
The Falcon 1 will carry the Trailblazer satellite for the Jumpstart Program of the Department of Defense's Operationally Responsive Space Office (ORS). Additional secondary payloads include an adapter system developed by the government of Malaysia that holds two small NASA satellites.
Rockets are expensive now, because they're not mass produce; but they could eventually be cheaper for transport.
There have been plenty of ICBMs built...
Let's consider an antipode capable ICBM (range: 12,000 km). One of the smaller ones is the three-stage solid Minuteman III , weighing in at 35,400 kg (I suspect most of that is solid fuel), and delivering 3 Mk 12 RVs, about 400 kg payload total.
I suspect you'd be hard-pressed to design better than that.
The "flyaway" cost of Minuteman III is about $5 million (which isn't too bad for a military device!), perhaps we could drop that to $1 million in the private sector, then it is just $2,500 per kg to antipode.
This is on the order of 100 times more expensive than flying...
The publics works projects in the great depression did not cure the depression, however government military spending did help bring us out of the depression
There are many economists now who believe that many anti-depression regulations actually worsened the depression, turning a short-term asset bubble burst recession of a few years into a ten-year fiasco.
It is hard to say that WWII itself helped the US economy (certainly the command economy of the military did fine), but it was the elimination of New Deal-era red tape during WWII that allowed for a rapid return of the consumer economy after the war, combined with the fact that our major trading competitors were laid waste and themselves took 10 years to recover from the physical devastation of the war.
As a parallel to the US during WWII, consider the post-war USSR that made plenty of good tanks, missiles, and jets, but never a good car, home computer, etc. During WWII, the US home front had rationing, etc., you can't say it was a great consumer economy until the WWII was over.
With the rise of the Internet, however, there are ever fewer physical packages to be transported, and maybe no company would be willing to pay thousands extra for just a few hours less of delivery time.
Even physical "critical parts" can be produced locally rapidly by emailing a file and using a 3D computer controlled machining device.
To pay for a rocket, it would have to be a very rare material. Like plutonium - of course, we already have rockets ready to deliver those in 90 minutes or less!
If everything that's a "social nuisance" and that causes problems is going to be a crime, there's not a lot left we'll be able to do. Just about EVERYTHING is a nuisance to someone.
Moreover, drug use is a smaller social nuisance than artificially inflated illegal drug prices funding violent gangs that terrorize entire cities, or for that matter funds Al Quaeda and FARC.
This article claims that A study of the gender wage gap conducted by economist June O' Neill, former director of the Congressional Budget Office, found that women earn 98 percent of what men do when controlled for experience, education, and number of years on the job..
Of course, women are now graduating college at higher rates than men. There was a recent study mentioned in the New York Times which claims that in US urban areas, women 21-30 earned more on average than men (as high as 120% in Dallas), although nationwide women in that age range only made 89% of men. The suspicion is that urban areas are attracting more college and higher educated women.
At the same time, I've seen a couple of industries that are notable anti-female, so while things are getting better in general, things still have a long way to go.
I don't understand why they're trying to shape it after a dragonfly- There are more efficient ways of getting around the air than flapping wings.
Flapping wings can be more efficient at low Reynolds number configurations, like small insects or micro UAVs.
Evolution, of course, already worked out the Reynolds number configurations for soaring, near-fixed wing flight (large birds of prey) versus mostly flapping flight (flies).
If real this violates the honour system and makes it impossible for a university to enact a honour system
And is there any scientific evidence that the "honor system" works or is it really pseudo-scientific-philosophical BS?
On the other hand, the free market works, and anything which interferes with the ability of on-line education to be effective (such as laws against webcamming you while taking an exam) is just going to hurt humanity by cutting off reliable on-line education.
As posted elsewhere, it is difficult to divide a project up that is really pretty linear. Instead, you should try to do more jobs at once. Encode four videos at once.
This is possible, but you might end up being hard drive I/O limited before you are CPU limited (depending on video resolution and codec type). But assuming you are not...
With any long-GOP codec, you could split your movie into GOPs and encode one GOP on a core at a time. Or just split the video into four segments and encode each segment on a core.
A more brain-dead way is to split the screen into four quadrants, compress each, and join them up. This is less efficient compression (no motion vectors over the quadrant boundaries), but it is a way to parallelize live encoding.
Try a Powered Parachute - no license to fly a single-seater, and they can be had for a little over $5000. With an airspeed of 30 MPH, you will easily outpace most rush hour LA freeways:)
And then, there are some of us who believe that, even if you had the originals and were fluent in the original language, you'd still have to read under inspiration from God to get a full and perfect understanding of the text.
We can't even seem to agree on what "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" means, and that's in the original English!
Slashdot Mirror
Even if the offshore drilling is allowed it will be many years before we see any benefit from it (assuming that prices actually go down)
This is unclear. If major oil producing countries (like Saudia Arabia and Venezuela) are slowing their production now to keep oil in the ground because they expect the price of oil will rise (or at least stay at current high levels for a while), the possibility of a future price decrease because of additional US production may cause them to pump more oil NOW and sell it at the higher current price, which ironically will reduce the current price.
On the other hand, Saudi Aramco and PDVSA might just be screwed-up government run agencies and that's why their production is dropping, which is another theory....
News for Nerds... er, ok.. how is this?
Because the article says Rep. John Shadegg (R-Ariz..) is a 7337 hax0r:
"Republicans can thank Shadegg for turning on the microphones the first time. Apparently, the fiesty Arizona conservative started typing random codes into the chamber's public address system and accidentally typed the correct code, allowing Republicans brief access to the microphone before it was turned off again."
It isn't water, it is water ICE. This is no big surprise, it has long been suspected that there is plenty of water ice on the Martian poles.
What would be a surprise would be liquid water, even if it only exists deep below the surface (given the current atmospheric pressure).
Life of any kind would be a real find, even if it is frozen bacteria, even if it is 8 million years old.
The kids growing up in this country are hammered with the message that to be rich and successful you need to either be a movie/rock star, sports star, lawyer, or doctor. The engineering field is suffering an uphill battle to continue to attract young people to the field.
According to the Princeton Review, these are the most popular US college majors as of 2006 and their average salary out 10 years:
Business Administration and Management $112,127
Psychology $75,610
Elementary Education $53,100 (there is no split out for Elementary Education in the salaries, but Elementary has higher initial salaries than Secondary)
Biology $143,402
Nursing $74,443
Education $53,100
English $78,159 (assumes you can get a job...)
Communication $81,023
Computer Science $109,393
Political Science $114,366
No engineering is on the "top 10 list" of majors, but 10-year-out salaries for Engineering (in general) is $120,330.
If you re-ran the 2007 budget using the "accrual" method of accounting that corporations must use, the "official" deficit of $163 billion balloons to over $2.4 trillion dollars -- FOR 2007 ALONE!
Indeed, if the US Federal government was a private corporation, it would be considered "insolvent," but on the other hand they have guns and can take as much in taxes from us as they want, which a private corporation can't do (even the oil companies :)
to summarize: only 21.6% went to the protection of the U.S. whereas well over 60% went to social programs
That's only the Federal side, this site tracks spending by Federal, State, and Local govenments.
Actual FY2007 defense spending was $655 billion, on government spending (at all levels) of $4.9 trillion, or 13.4% of spending by all US governments.
Of course, I'd still prefer defense spending to be less, but clearly the biggest outlays of US governments are Pensions (mainly Social Security), Health Care, and Education, in that order.
But yes, unpatentable drugs are a real big problem. One of the drugs used to effective treat depression, a Reverse Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitor called Manerix is not available for sale in the U.S. because the company that bought the U.S. rights tried to use it to treat dementia, for which it does not work. By the time the trials failed, the patent was too close to running out to run the paperwork for using it to treat depression, for which it does work. Consequently, it is a safe, effective, drug, with nobody in the U.S. to sponsor it to get through the approval process.
The same thing happened to Domperidone, a drug used widely outside the United States for treatment of gastroparesis. It was proven safe in FDA trials, but was not found effective because it did not improve gastric emptying. As it turns out, it did a great job of reducing the disabling nausea of gastroparesis, but at this point no company wants to pay to take it back through FDA testing process again.
Why not just go for the strap-on helicopter instead of bothering with the ducted fans?
Software may be exceptional because it is unique as a product in that it has close to zero variable costs
It is similar to prescription drugs. Marginal cost to produce is small after a huge sunk cost R&D. Also, like drugs, software are unique products, not commodities. Avid Media Composer and Apple Final Cut Pro are both "non-linear video editors", but someone trained on Avid would need new training to run on FCP. On the other hand, oil is oil is oil (with small chemical differences) depending on whether you drill for it in Saudi Arabia or Texas.
if prices correlate poorly (or not at all) to costs, that means the industry in question is not competitive
You are assuming everyone pays the same price. Price discrimination was the "normal" method of operation (through "haggling") until modern mass production made the costs of haggling more than the increase in producer surplus through haggling. Infact, price discrimination is interesting because if people with high demand pay more, it may enable more people with low demand to purchase the product at all (at a lower price) than with fixed-prices (which definitely applies to "The West" subsidizing drug sales to the rest of the world).
A supply/demand curve is a combination of how all the individuals in your market value a product. If I value Windows at $300 and the price is $400, I will be one less person demanding it. If I value Windows at $500 and the price is $400, I will be one more person demanding it.
Price discrimination requires segmentation of the market. In "haggling" you are segmenting by individual. However in the case of prescription drugs, software, and electronic hardware, markets are often segmented by country. Sometimes government-applied trade barriers encourage this segmentation through tariffs, regulation, etc.
You certainly could have competition within these market segments while maintaining price discrimination between the market segments.
Most of the time, the sens/reps really actually want to do the right thing, the same way you do.
Actually I'd argue most of the time, sens/reps want to SEEM to do what "the people" want, but actually they aren't willing to torpedo the economy. They tend to have more extensive education and business experience than the average voter.
See Obama and NAFTA as an example. Inside his head he is unwilling to start a stupid trade war with Canada and Mexico, but would like to seem like the is "anti-globalization" in his external rhetoric.
The advantage of a representative democratic system is that you get fairly bright representatives (with the IQ and rhetorical skill to manipulate the people), but if the power goes to their head and they do truly stupid things the masses (see Mao as someone who had two majorly bad ideas and starved tens of millions) the voters can still vote them out of office. On the other hand, it is rare that a true idiot is elected by the people (on average, of course) while "the people may" be majority behind idiotic ideas.
From SpaceX:
During launch, SpaceX will use the extensive range safety, tracking and telemetry services provided by the Reagan Test Site (RTS) at the United States Army Kwajalein Atoll (USAKA) in the Central Pacific. The next launch window opens 29 July and runs through 6 August, followed by one from 29 August to 5 September.
The Falcon 1 will carry the Trailblazer satellite for the Jumpstart Program of the Department of Defense's Operationally Responsive Space Office (ORS). Additional secondary payloads include an adapter system developed by the government of Malaysia that holds two small NASA satellites.
Rockets are expensive now, because they're not mass produce; but they could eventually be cheaper for transport.
There have been plenty of ICBMs built...
Let's consider an antipode capable ICBM (range: 12,000 km). One of the smaller ones is the three-stage solid Minuteman III , weighing in at 35,400 kg (I suspect most of that is solid fuel), and delivering 3 Mk 12 RVs, about 400 kg payload total.
I suspect you'd be hard-pressed to design better than that.
The "flyaway" cost of Minuteman III is about $5 million (which isn't too bad for a military device!), perhaps we could drop that to $1 million in the private sector, then it is just $2,500 per kg to antipode.
This is on the order of 100 times more expensive than flying...
The publics works projects in the great depression did not cure the depression, however government military spending did help bring us out of the depression
There are many economists now who believe that many anti-depression regulations actually worsened the depression, turning a short-term asset bubble burst recession of a few years into a ten-year fiasco.
It is hard to say that WWII itself helped the US economy (certainly the command economy of the military did fine), but it was the elimination of New Deal-era red tape during WWII that allowed for a rapid return of the consumer economy after the war, combined with the fact that our major trading competitors were laid waste and themselves took 10 years to recover from the physical devastation of the war.
As a parallel to the US during WWII, consider the post-war USSR that made plenty of good tanks, missiles, and jets, but never a good car, home computer, etc. During WWII, the US home front had rationing, etc., you can't say it was a great consumer economy until the WWII was over.
With the rise of the Internet, however, there are ever fewer physical packages to be transported, and maybe no company would be willing to pay thousands extra for just a few hours less of delivery time.
Even physical "critical parts" can be produced locally rapidly by emailing a file and using a 3D computer controlled machining device.
To pay for a rocket, it would have to be a very rare material. Like plutonium - of course, we already have rockets ready to deliver those in 90 minutes or less!
If everything that's a "social nuisance" and that causes problems is going to be a crime, there's not a lot left we'll be able to do. Just about EVERYTHING is a nuisance to someone.
Moreover, drug use is a smaller social nuisance than artificially inflated illegal drug prices funding violent gangs that terrorize entire cities, or for that matter funds Al Quaeda and FARC.
This article claims that A study of the gender wage gap conducted by economist June O' Neill, former director of the Congressional Budget Office, found that women earn 98 percent of what men do when controlled for experience, education, and number of years on the job..
Of course, women are now graduating college at higher rates than men. There was a recent study mentioned in the New York Times which claims that in US urban areas, women 21-30 earned more on average than men (as high as 120% in Dallas), although nationwide women in that age range only made 89% of men. The suspicion is that urban areas are attracting more college and higher educated women.
At the same time, I've seen a couple of industries that are notable anti-female, so while things are getting better in general, things still have a long way to go.
Guess that since Java has held the "slow" torch for long enough, it's time to pass it on to Python, Ruby, and all the other interpreted languages.
It's not Ruby that's the problem, its the Rails....
One major issue with RoboCars is that any effective implementation of them will require substantial changes to our current infrastructure.
I seem to drive fine with two cameras (eyes). Who needs LIDAR?
I don't understand why they're trying to shape it after a dragonfly- There are more efficient ways of getting around the air than flapping wings.
Flapping wings can be more efficient at low Reynolds number configurations, like small insects or micro UAVs.
Evolution, of course, already worked out the Reynolds number configurations for soaring, near-fixed wing flight (large birds of prey) versus mostly flapping flight (flies).
The Delfly Micro calls itself the "smallest flying ornithopter carrying a camera".
If real this violates the honour system and makes it impossible for a university to enact a honour system
And is there any scientific evidence that the "honor system" works or is it really pseudo-scientific-philosophical BS?
On the other hand, the free market works, and anything which interferes with the ability of on-line education to be effective (such as laws against webcamming you while taking an exam) is just going to hurt humanity by cutting off reliable on-line education.
As posted elsewhere, it is difficult to divide a project up that is really pretty linear. Instead, you should try to do more jobs at once. Encode four videos at once.
This is possible, but you might end up being hard drive I/O limited before you are CPU limited (depending on video resolution and codec type). But assuming you are not...
With any long-GOP codec, you could split your movie into GOPs and encode one GOP on a core at a time. Or just split the video into four segments and encode each segment on a core.
A more brain-dead way is to split the screen into four quadrants, compress each, and join them up. This is less efficient compression (no motion vectors over the quadrant boundaries), but it is a way to parallelize live encoding.
where is my flying car?
Try a Powered Parachute - no license to fly a single-seater, and they can be had for a little over $5000. With an airspeed of 30 MPH, you will easily outpace most rush hour LA freeways :)
And then, there are some of us who believe that, even if you had the originals and were fluent in the original language, you'd still have to read under inspiration from God to get a full and perfect understanding of the text.
We can't even seem to agree on what "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" means, and that's in the original English!
The main problem is: chemical rockets suck.
Nuclear thermal rockets are the only way we can expect to efficiently become a space faring people. The problem is that there are some risks...