Depends on your definition of "essentially.":) It is only truly zero if the object is the only one in the universe, or it is in orbit around the only other object in the universe, or if it is at a mutual lagrange point for every other object in the universe (which pretty much only happens with fairly exotic and non-stable situations for any more than three bodies).
But yes, mass is the intrinsic property.:) Well, assuming the Higgs field is completely uniform, or whatever it is that gives things mass - I wouldn't be too sure of anything considering we can't account for most of the mass of the universe.
Yup, and if found innocent they'd countersue for defamation and slander. You can't just go around accusing people of committing a crime without proof.
Can you prove to me that you didn't beat your wife this morning? How about we find a third party and have them set up cameras and monitor you 24x7 at home for a few weeks just to be sure?
You can't go around accusing people without proof and expect them to jump through hoops to prove their innocence.
He's talking about header files. The GPL is a license - it lets you do things that you couldn't otherwise do. Copying header files is something you can do with or without a license, as they define an interface, and tend to be trivial. Both of these are grounds for fair use.
Well, Blackduck does not have any obligation to prove that their work was original, any more than you have an obligation to prove to me right now that you didn't speed on the way to work this morning or beat your wife last night.
If Red Hat has some kind of evidence to the contrary they could sue in court, and then sue discovery to find out for sure. However, a court wouldn't even entertain discovery unless they could show some kind of evidence to suggest that something had been misappropriated.
The FAQ merely requires an "appropriate" copyright notice.
You can remove somebody's name from a copyright notice if they give you explicit permission to do so. If they license the source to you under the GPL, then they did exactly that. If you don't want somebody to remove your name from the copyright notice, then don't tell them they're allowed to do it!
Yup. In fact, one of the citations in it quoted some ruling that answering a question in part, but leaving out the parts that you know are likely to lead to qualification, is EXACTLY the sort of thing that constitutes serious juror misconduct.
Well, the GPL gives you the right to modify anything as long as you license it under the GPL and include the license, and that would include the copyright notices. Otherwise we'd have a problem with something like the BSD advertising clause.
Now, if they didn't release their code under the GPL then that is a problem. You could sue them for re-using your code if they didn't release it under the GPL (and it wasn't fair use).
Well, there are still only so many of those - there are a LOT more commercial airliners out there than F35s. Plus, I'm sure the military is doing eveyrthing they can to hang onto the pilots they have right now since they're being kept busy blowing things up all the time.
What is hard is being trained to handle all the things that can go wrong, and doing it at a level of proficiency where you can land 10,000 times in storms and not have a single engine strike.
For all the programmers on slashdot - writing a script to get a computer to do exactly one thing once is WAY different than writing a robust piece of software that can handle many different situations and any kind of input (including hostile input).
Hani probably couldn't even set up the autopilot to fly an ILS approach, which actually isn't that hard to do. If your only goal is to crash a plane into something that isn't terribly hard to accomplish - it takes all that fancy equipment to PREVENT that from happening.
Well, the cost of doing things right doesn't go away simply because you don't have the pilots. I'm all for automation, but the airline cost-cutting problem applies to things like maintenance as well.
But I do agree that automation could be the long-term solution here. For the short term, regulation of pilot training/hours/etc is what we have to go on.
I don't even have so much as a license, but I'm a flight simulation enthusiast and I could see spending money on flying once the kids are out on their own. Flying is expensive, period. If you want to fly professionally you're going to outlay a lot of money on your own much as is the case with college. Once you start flying professionally you're going to be making fairly low incomes (far less than in STEM) for a fairly long time. Sure, eventually if you're at the top of your profession you could end up flying the NYC-Tokyo route and make $150k/yr, but you're going to be living in either an aluminum cabin or hotel for about 70% of the time and see the family a day or two per week at most (oh, right after getting off an international flight - how up for family time are you after flying halfway around the world?).
The reality, though, is that for much of your career you're going to be sharing hotel rooms and basically crashing for sleep in between a bazillion little flights, where the pressure is there to take off no matter what. If you're only paid for time from door open to close, and on a walkaround you see something wrong with the plane, what is the temptation to just ignore it vs go home without getting paid a dime?
My sense is that pilots really do get into it due to the love of flying more than anything else.
The whole industry needs a lot of reform. Safety rules aren't going to put anybody out of business - they apply equally to every carrier as long as they're enforced.
So which standard are you going to measure against?
The one that will get the bureau of weights and measures to put a sticker on your measuring device. The choice of standard isn't nearly as important as the consistent application of it.
When I drive by a gas station I don't have to worry about what kind of gallons or liters were used to define the standard - I KNOW that the gas station with the cheapest price posted has the cheapest actual price, and that the pumps will dispense the amount I'm paying for. If a gas station wanted to be snarky and define a gallon as something other than the legal standard then they'd be fined out the wazoo the next time the local inspector stopped by, and their corporate brand would be trashed by the press.
So, if ATT wants to play games, then they can deal with the resulting regulation. It would be in their own interest to just pick something reasonable and publish it so that people can compare. I don't care if my hard drive is labeled in terabytes or tibibytes - as long as the labeling indicates which and is accurate.
You're missing the point. Network data is digital - you can measure EXACTLY how many bits are being sent to the modem, which I'd consider the point of demarcation since the consumer loses all control at that point. If their count doesn't match up, then what's to stop your electric company from saying that they use a proprietary definition of "kilowatt"?
The answer of course is the bureau of weights and measures, and the solution for ISPs who want to play games is to introduce them to a level of bureaucracy such that they'll be wondering how they ever let it happen.
Agree. If you sell something it should be in a defined unit of measure, and it should be calibrated such that any errors are in the favor of the consumer. That's where the whole baker's dozen thing came from - bakers would include an extra piece of bread to ensure that any errors in their measurements would be more than compensated for. Back in those days if an inspector did a surprise scale test and you came up short you'd lose your hand, so bakers were eager to ensure they were in spec.
I don't care what the unit of measure is, as long as it is defined. That said, it would be nice if we could actually all be metric - I was just shopping for phone cases and it is REALLY annoying when the phone dimensions are in mm and the case dimensions are in inches.
The cost of life-saving medicines comes from the fact that to know that they are life saving medicines you need to have thousands of people take the pills for a year or two and give them a barrage of tests to see if they get better, or for that matter worse. Oh, and you have to do that on dozens of experimental compounds to find one that works, because most don't. Oh, and you have to bribe, err compensate, the doctors for all those patients or they won't even mention to them that the experimental treatment is available - that's where most of the money goes.
There really aren't any secrets involved, or at least there aren't supposed to be for the compounds that actually make it onto the market. Things are secret before they're sold, but little is secret after. They're just patented.
Very little of the cost comes from "pure research."
A software analogy - view what the pharmaceutical companies do like software QA for something like an aircraft. QA is boring, and doesn't generate ANY neat features. It adds fairly little to the software at all, except for the one thing that matters most - assurance that it works. No company brags about its QA team, but if you're making something like an aircraft you can bet that it is a HUGE source of expense, because if it isn't then your legal bills will be even more expensive. That's why a GPS for your car costs $100, and a GPS for a plane costs $5000. If your GPS malfunctions while driving through fog you get frustrated and bang the dashboard. If your GPS malfunctions while you're landing a plane in fog you crash into a building.
That said, there is no reason you couldn't do full drug development funded by taxes. Just have the government obtain the patents, do end-to-end development, and once the compound is demonstrated to be safe license it out for free to domestic manufacturers, or to those in countries that reciprocate, or for local use only in countries that are poor - this encourages other nations to do likewise. If it makes sense you could even outsource the work to existing pharmaceutical companies - but no IP rights get transferred, just fee for service. That is a win/win - companies can use this work to level their workloads at no risk.
Some people say government R&D won't work, and if it doesn't nothing is lost but some tax dollars, because private industry is still left intact. If it does work, then private industry has to demonstrate value above the new cheap drugs for insurers to pay for them. The costs of government R&D can be compared to the costs of just having the government provide assistance for buying pills from private companies and that will either justify expansion or reduction of the program. With the two models in competition everybody wins.
People complain about the cost of drugs, but I think that in truth not a great deal can be done about the cost of drugs (other than breakthrough advances, which do come, but it really tends to be a wash as finding better and better treatments is more expensive). I think the real issue though isn't the cost, but who pays for it. The problem with just using patents to recover costs through pill pricing is that it is very regressive. The main fixes for that are some kind of financial assistance program, and the public sector R&D model. Both have pros and cons, and that's why I'd like to see both tried out and compared in practice. Let's not argue rhetoric - let's see how they work. It isn't like we're not spending tens of billions of dollars on this stuff already. If spending a few billion dollars has the potential to fix the whole drug cost crisis let's do it - and even if it doesn't work out chances are we'll at least get some real science accomplished for that money.
The problem with what you suggest is who is going to pay for it? Finding neat new molecules/ideas is interesting and exciting, so academics tend to be interested in this and the NIH tends to fund it. Figuring out if those new molecules/ideas actually work or if they cause cancer is boring and expensive, so that doesn't get funded, except by corporations who of course patent them. Actually, more often the model is that the universities that come up with them patent them and sell them to corporations to help defray their own costs (they don't get much for them, because 95% of the time they don't work out).
The only way anybody would actually come up with a big drug and share it with the world is if the world pays for it in advance - sight unseen. I'm all for finding ways to make that happen, but right now we don't fund organizations like the NIH to do this sort of work.
Drug R&D is kind of like selling sealed packs of baseball cards. You can either leave them sealed and get a moderate amount for them, or break them open and get much less, or a LOT more. At the stage where the government stops doing R&D they're like a sealed package, and when the corporations are done they're opened up. Of course, they don't actually sell the ones that aren't worth anything, because nobody would buy them.
And who paid to figure out if taxol worked and was safe? And how much did that cost? And how many other compounds did that company pay for clinical trials on which didn't pan out? The profits for taxol had to cover all of that.
Taxol is a rare example of when government research actually led to a useful drug. Most compounds discovered in government labs turn out to not work, but of course you don't spend $5/pill for the products that don't work, so you're less likely to complain about those. The companies who develop them certainly spend money on them though.
I'm all for having some end-to-end government R&D with the resulting compounds freely licensed to manufacturers in any country that reciprocates, but don't think that it will be any less expensive in the end then what we're paying for pills today. The main difference would be that the costs are borne by taxpayers rather than patients, which has the benefit of being more progressive.
Government does some of the most important drug research there is. However, it also turns out to be some of the least expensive. There are still tons of expenses to be recouped once compounds are licensed or developed by a pharmaceutical company - and somebody has to pay for them. Most drugs lose money, and a few drugs make TONS of money. The industry has been pretty stagnant for a decade, so you can't just look at the one side of things.
Only L4 and L5 are stable in the way you suggest. The other ones are not - you need to make corrections to maintain position, though they are small compared to the kind of continuous thrust you'd need to keep a constant relative position elsewhere in the system.
What benefit is there from sticking the optical telescope on the moon? There isn't any kind of interferometry going on as far as I can tell, so it wouldn't really do anything the hubble couldn't do. Plus, then you don't have lunar dust to deal with (not sure how much of that lands falls - obviously no atmosphere but anytime a meteor hits the moon it would kick some up). Maybe a radio telescope would benefit from shielding from the Earth, but I don't see why you couldn't just stick one in orbit (the reflectors could be paper thin there).
As far as angles of viewing go - I don't see why you couldn't build that on the Earth any differently than on the Moon.
No, but perhaps those a few million generations removed from us might - and the moon won't do them any good either.
No harm in working out how to get off the planet, but that gets cheaper the longer we wait, and if you want to actually lift the entire population of the planet to go someplace else you'll need space elevators all over the place anyway.
And I doubt it makes sense to settle on any planet or moon unless it can sustain life without life support, or at least with less life support. Why build another colony at the bottom of some other gravity well which makes it vulnerable to all the same stuff that threatens the earth? If you build a colony in space, then if something bad is going to happen you just move it. Sure, you're just one seal away from everybody perishing, but the same is true on the moon.
Tend to agree. Or, if there are parts that are just too bulky to withstand launch you could assemble them in LEO, and then drop the whole thing onto the moon (descending on rockets is pretty gentle).
A relay satellite could be used for communication, or you could stick some microwave relay stations on the surface, though with the moon being so small I'm not sure that you'd get much horizon which would mean more stations.
Luck is definitely a factor. The true self-made millionaires do earn their money, but for every one of them there were 50 others who were just as smart and hard-working and creative, but who lost it all. We just hear about the ones who made it.
Can you be dumb and be a self-made millionaire? Of course not! Is being as smart/creative/entrepreneurial as Zuckerberg or Gates or Brin likely to make you a millionaire? No.
If you want to be a self-made millionaire, you have to start out by being really smart/good, and then be really lucky as well. Sure, you don't have to be as lucky as if your strategy is to just buy lottery tickets, but your odds are still poor. And your strategy is certainly going to involve being bankrolled by other people's money.
Yup. I read an interesting article somewhere on "strategic default," or perhaps it was on Frontline. A strategic default is when you have the means to pay off a loan, but choose not to. In terms of the mortgage crisis it means that you just stop paying your mortgage, drag out the foreclosure process as much as you can, and then let the bank take the loss when they seize your under-water home. I don't know the details but it might involve having to do something to avoid having assets that can be seized, particularly if you think you have to go through bankruptcy.
Strategic default certainly has consequences - you aren't getting another mortgage for 7 years for sure, and you're going to lose the home (unless you can convince the bank to rent it back to you, which chances are they're aren't going to be too happy about or even interested in).
However, if you have a $400k mortgage on a $250k loan, then walking away means avoiding paying $150k in principal plus all the interest. If you drag it out you might get to live a year or two rent-free, which on a loan that size might be $100k in payments. Oh, that interest will get tacked on to the princpal, but you weren't getting a dime from the sale of the house anyway. Then you just rent for the next 7 years, and while renting tends to be more expensive than buying it isn't $250k more expensive, which is how much you're saving.
Now, most normal people would argue that this is immoral, but the whole point of the article was that this was the sort of decision businesses make all the time. Their reputations are worth something, and paying the loan costs something, and not paying it costs something. You just throw all those numbers into a spreadsheet, and if the number is green you make the next payment, and if not, you get your manager to approve it and then you stop. Companies will destroy a century's worth of hard-earned reputation if some NPV calculation tells them to do it, because that is what they teach you in business school. Ethics have nothing to do with any of this - the company signed a contract because they figured it would make them money, and if something goes wrong they just do whatever loses them the least money. The bank that loaned them the money did the same calculation - it isn't like they make loans because they love new families and want to see them succeed - they ran the numbers and they figured they'd make more money loaning them money than not, otherwise the nice new couple could live in their parent's basement.
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Depends on your definition of "essentially." :) It is only truly zero if the object is the only one in the universe, or it is in orbit around the only other object in the universe, or if it is at a mutual lagrange point for every other object in the universe (which pretty much only happens with fairly exotic and non-stable situations for any more than three bodies).
But yes, mass is the intrinsic property. :) Well, assuming the Higgs field is completely uniform, or whatever it is that gives things mass - I wouldn't be too sure of anything considering we can't account for most of the mass of the universe.
It usually is pretty cheap if you do the paperwork yourself. You just need to have a charter/bylaws/etc - which you can usually copy/paste.
Always best to ensure IP is legally owned by a company of some sort - then when somebody wants to run off with things you have legal recourse.
Yup, and if found innocent they'd countersue for defamation and slander. You can't just go around accusing people of committing a crime without proof.
Can you prove to me that you didn't beat your wife this morning? How about we find a third party and have them set up cameras and monitor you 24x7 at home for a few weeks just to be sure?
You can't go around accusing people without proof and expect them to jump through hoops to prove their innocence.
He's talking about header files. The GPL is a license - it lets you do things that you couldn't otherwise do. Copying header files is something you can do with or without a license, as they define an interface, and tend to be trivial. Both of these are grounds for fair use.
Well, Blackduck does not have any obligation to prove that their work was original, any more than you have an obligation to prove to me right now that you didn't speed on the way to work this morning or beat your wife last night.
If Red Hat has some kind of evidence to the contrary they could sue in court, and then sue discovery to find out for sure. However, a court wouldn't even entertain discovery unless they could show some kind of evidence to suggest that something had been misappropriated.
Sure, but my point is that it doesn't matter how you define the standard, AS LONG AS YOU DEFINE THE STANDARD.
And go ahead and explain for me what the metric unit for data is (and more importantly, how it is defined). :) (Ducks.)
The FAQ merely requires an "appropriate" copyright notice.
You can remove somebody's name from a copyright notice if they give you explicit permission to do so. If they license the source to you under the GPL, then they did exactly that. If you don't want somebody to remove your name from the copyright notice, then don't tell them they're allowed to do it!
Yup. In fact, one of the citations in it quoted some ruling that answering a question in part, but leaving out the parts that you know are likely to lead to qualification, is EXACTLY the sort of thing that constitutes serious juror misconduct.
Well, the GPL gives you the right to modify anything as long as you license it under the GPL and include the license, and that would include the copyright notices. Otherwise we'd have a problem with something like the BSD advertising clause.
Now, if they didn't release their code under the GPL then that is a problem. You could sue them for re-using your code if they didn't release it under the GPL (and it wasn't fair use).
Well, there are still only so many of those - there are a LOT more commercial airliners out there than F35s. Plus, I'm sure the military is doing eveyrthing they can to hang onto the pilots they have right now since they're being kept busy blowing things up all the time.
Flying a plane isn't hard per se.
What is hard is being trained to handle all the things that can go wrong, and doing it at a level of proficiency where you can land 10,000 times in storms and not have a single engine strike.
For all the programmers on slashdot - writing a script to get a computer to do exactly one thing once is WAY different than writing a robust piece of software that can handle many different situations and any kind of input (including hostile input).
Hani probably couldn't even set up the autopilot to fly an ILS approach, which actually isn't that hard to do. If your only goal is to crash a plane into something that isn't terribly hard to accomplish - it takes all that fancy equipment to PREVENT that from happening.
Well, the cost of doing things right doesn't go away simply because you don't have the pilots. I'm all for automation, but the airline cost-cutting problem applies to things like maintenance as well.
But I do agree that automation could be the long-term solution here. For the short term, regulation of pilot training/hours/etc is what we have to go on.
I don't even have so much as a license, but I'm a flight simulation enthusiast and I could see spending money on flying once the kids are out on their own. Flying is expensive, period. If you want to fly professionally you're going to outlay a lot of money on your own much as is the case with college. Once you start flying professionally you're going to be making fairly low incomes (far less than in STEM) for a fairly long time. Sure, eventually if you're at the top of your profession you could end up flying the NYC-Tokyo route and make $150k/yr, but you're going to be living in either an aluminum cabin or hotel for about 70% of the time and see the family a day or two per week at most (oh, right after getting off an international flight - how up for family time are you after flying halfway around the world?).
The reality, though, is that for much of your career you're going to be sharing hotel rooms and basically crashing for sleep in between a bazillion little flights, where the pressure is there to take off no matter what. If you're only paid for time from door open to close, and on a walkaround you see something wrong with the plane, what is the temptation to just ignore it vs go home without getting paid a dime?
My sense is that pilots really do get into it due to the love of flying more than anything else.
The whole industry needs a lot of reform. Safety rules aren't going to put anybody out of business - they apply equally to every carrier as long as they're enforced.
So which standard are you going to measure against?
The one that will get the bureau of weights and measures to put a sticker on your measuring device. The choice of standard isn't nearly as important as the consistent application of it.
When I drive by a gas station I don't have to worry about what kind of gallons or liters were used to define the standard - I KNOW that the gas station with the cheapest price posted has the cheapest actual price, and that the pumps will dispense the amount I'm paying for. If a gas station wanted to be snarky and define a gallon as something other than the legal standard then they'd be fined out the wazoo the next time the local inspector stopped by, and their corporate brand would be trashed by the press.
So, if ATT wants to play games, then they can deal with the resulting regulation. It would be in their own interest to just pick something reasonable and publish it so that people can compare. I don't care if my hard drive is labeled in terabytes or tibibytes - as long as the labeling indicates which and is accurate.
You're missing the point. Network data is digital - you can measure EXACTLY how many bits are being sent to the modem, which I'd consider the point of demarcation since the consumer loses all control at that point. If their count doesn't match up, then what's to stop your electric company from saying that they use a proprietary definition of "kilowatt"?
The answer of course is the bureau of weights and measures, and the solution for ISPs who want to play games is to introduce them to a level of bureaucracy such that they'll be wondering how they ever let it happen.
Agree. If you sell something it should be in a defined unit of measure, and it should be calibrated such that any errors are in the favor of the consumer. That's where the whole baker's dozen thing came from - bakers would include an extra piece of bread to ensure that any errors in their measurements would be more than compensated for. Back in those days if an inspector did a surprise scale test and you came up short you'd lose your hand, so bakers were eager to ensure they were in spec.
I don't care what the unit of measure is, as long as it is defined. That said, it would be nice if we could actually all be metric - I was just shopping for phone cases and it is REALLY annoying when the phone dimensions are in mm and the case dimensions are in inches.
The cost of life-saving medicines comes from the fact that to know that they are life saving medicines you need to have thousands of people take the pills for a year or two and give them a barrage of tests to see if they get better, or for that matter worse. Oh, and you have to do that on dozens of experimental compounds to find one that works, because most don't. Oh, and you have to bribe, err compensate, the doctors for all those patients or they won't even mention to them that the experimental treatment is available - that's where most of the money goes.
There really aren't any secrets involved, or at least there aren't supposed to be for the compounds that actually make it onto the market. Things are secret before they're sold, but little is secret after. They're just patented.
Very little of the cost comes from "pure research."
A software analogy - view what the pharmaceutical companies do like software QA for something like an aircraft. QA is boring, and doesn't generate ANY neat features. It adds fairly little to the software at all, except for the one thing that matters most - assurance that it works. No company brags about its QA team, but if you're making something like an aircraft you can bet that it is a HUGE source of expense, because if it isn't then your legal bills will be even more expensive. That's why a GPS for your car costs $100, and a GPS for a plane costs $5000. If your GPS malfunctions while driving through fog you get frustrated and bang the dashboard. If your GPS malfunctions while you're landing a plane in fog you crash into a building.
That said, there is no reason you couldn't do full drug development funded by taxes. Just have the government obtain the patents, do end-to-end development, and once the compound is demonstrated to be safe license it out for free to domestic manufacturers, or to those in countries that reciprocate, or for local use only in countries that are poor - this encourages other nations to do likewise. If it makes sense you could even outsource the work to existing pharmaceutical companies - but no IP rights get transferred, just fee for service. That is a win/win - companies can use this work to level their workloads at no risk.
Some people say government R&D won't work, and if it doesn't nothing is lost but some tax dollars, because private industry is still left intact. If it does work, then private industry has to demonstrate value above the new cheap drugs for insurers to pay for them. The costs of government R&D can be compared to the costs of just having the government provide assistance for buying pills from private companies and that will either justify expansion or reduction of the program. With the two models in competition everybody wins.
People complain about the cost of drugs, but I think that in truth not a great deal can be done about the cost of drugs (other than breakthrough advances, which do come, but it really tends to be a wash as finding better and better treatments is more expensive). I think the real issue though isn't the cost, but who pays for it. The problem with just using patents to recover costs through pill pricing is that it is very regressive. The main fixes for that are some kind of financial assistance program, and the public sector R&D model. Both have pros and cons, and that's why I'd like to see both tried out and compared in practice. Let's not argue rhetoric - let's see how they work. It isn't like we're not spending tens of billions of dollars on this stuff already. If spending a few billion dollars has the potential to fix the whole drug cost crisis let's do it - and even if it doesn't work out chances are we'll at least get some real science accomplished for that money.
The problem with what you suggest is who is going to pay for it? Finding neat new molecules/ideas is interesting and exciting, so academics tend to be interested in this and the NIH tends to fund it. Figuring out if those new molecules/ideas actually work or if they cause cancer is boring and expensive, so that doesn't get funded, except by corporations who of course patent them. Actually, more often the model is that the universities that come up with them patent them and sell them to corporations to help defray their own costs (they don't get much for them, because 95% of the time they don't work out).
The only way anybody would actually come up with a big drug and share it with the world is if the world pays for it in advance - sight unseen. I'm all for finding ways to make that happen, but right now we don't fund organizations like the NIH to do this sort of work.
Drug R&D is kind of like selling sealed packs of baseball cards. You can either leave them sealed and get a moderate amount for them, or break them open and get much less, or a LOT more. At the stage where the government stops doing R&D they're like a sealed package, and when the corporations are done they're opened up. Of course, they don't actually sell the ones that aren't worth anything, because nobody would buy them.
And who paid to figure out if taxol worked and was safe? And how much did that cost? And how many other compounds did that company pay for clinical trials on which didn't pan out? The profits for taxol had to cover all of that.
Taxol is a rare example of when government research actually led to a useful drug. Most compounds discovered in government labs turn out to not work, but of course you don't spend $5/pill for the products that don't work, so you're less likely to complain about those. The companies who develop them certainly spend money on them though.
I'm all for having some end-to-end government R&D with the resulting compounds freely licensed to manufacturers in any country that reciprocates, but don't think that it will be any less expensive in the end then what we're paying for pills today. The main difference would be that the costs are borne by taxpayers rather than patients, which has the benefit of being more progressive.
Government does some of the most important drug research there is. However, it also turns out to be some of the least expensive. There are still tons of expenses to be recouped once compounds are licensed or developed by a pharmaceutical company - and somebody has to pay for them. Most drugs lose money, and a few drugs make TONS of money. The industry has been pretty stagnant for a decade, so you can't just look at the one side of things.
Only L4 and L5 are stable in the way you suggest. The other ones are not - you need to make corrections to maintain position, though they are small compared to the kind of continuous thrust you'd need to keep a constant relative position elsewhere in the system.
What benefit is there from sticking the optical telescope on the moon? There isn't any kind of interferometry going on as far as I can tell, so it wouldn't really do anything the hubble couldn't do. Plus, then you don't have lunar dust to deal with (not sure how much of that lands falls - obviously no atmosphere but anytime a meteor hits the moon it would kick some up). Maybe a radio telescope would benefit from shielding from the Earth, but I don't see why you couldn't just stick one in orbit (the reflectors could be paper thin there).
As far as angles of viewing go - I don't see why you couldn't build that on the Earth any differently than on the Moon.
No, but perhaps those a few million generations removed from us might - and the moon won't do them any good either.
No harm in working out how to get off the planet, but that gets cheaper the longer we wait, and if you want to actually lift the entire population of the planet to go someplace else you'll need space elevators all over the place anyway.
And I doubt it makes sense to settle on any planet or moon unless it can sustain life without life support, or at least with less life support. Why build another colony at the bottom of some other gravity well which makes it vulnerable to all the same stuff that threatens the earth? If you build a colony in space, then if something bad is going to happen you just move it. Sure, you're just one seal away from everybody perishing, but the same is true on the moon.
Tend to agree. Or, if there are parts that are just too bulky to withstand launch you could assemble them in LEO, and then drop the whole thing onto the moon (descending on rockets is pretty gentle).
A relay satellite could be used for communication, or you could stick some microwave relay stations on the surface, though with the moon being so small I'm not sure that you'd get much horizon which would mean more stations.
Luck is definitely a factor. The true self-made millionaires do earn their money, but for every one of them there were 50 others who were just as smart and hard-working and creative, but who lost it all. We just hear about the ones who made it.
Can you be dumb and be a self-made millionaire? Of course not!
Is being as smart/creative/entrepreneurial as Zuckerberg or Gates or Brin likely to make you a millionaire? No.
If you want to be a self-made millionaire, you have to start out by being really smart/good, and then be really lucky as well. Sure, you don't have to be as lucky as if your strategy is to just buy lottery tickets, but your odds are still poor. And your strategy is certainly going to involve being bankrolled by other people's money.
Yup. I read an interesting article somewhere on "strategic default," or perhaps it was on Frontline. A strategic default is when you have the means to pay off a loan, but choose not to. In terms of the mortgage crisis it means that you just stop paying your mortgage, drag out the foreclosure process as much as you can, and then let the bank take the loss when they seize your under-water home. I don't know the details but it might involve having to do something to avoid having assets that can be seized, particularly if you think you have to go through bankruptcy.
Strategic default certainly has consequences - you aren't getting another mortgage for 7 years for sure, and you're going to lose the home (unless you can convince the bank to rent it back to you, which chances are they're aren't going to be too happy about or even interested in).
However, if you have a $400k mortgage on a $250k loan, then walking away means avoiding paying $150k in principal plus all the interest. If you drag it out you might get to live a year or two rent-free, which on a loan that size might be $100k in payments. Oh, that interest will get tacked on to the princpal, but you weren't getting a dime from the sale of the house anyway. Then you just rent for the next 7 years, and while renting tends to be more expensive than buying it isn't $250k more expensive, which is how much you're saving.
Now, most normal people would argue that this is immoral, but the whole point of the article was that this was the sort of decision businesses make all the time. Their reputations are worth something, and paying the loan costs something, and not paying it costs something. You just throw all those numbers into a spreadsheet, and if the number is green you make the next payment, and if not, you get your manager to approve it and then you stop. Companies will destroy a century's worth of hard-earned reputation if some NPV calculation tells them to do it, because that is what they teach you in business school. Ethics have nothing to do with any of this - the company signed a contract because they figured it would make them money, and if something goes wrong they just do whatever loses them the least money. The bank that loaned them the money did the same calculation - it isn't like they make loans because they love new families and want to see them succeed - they ran the numbers and they figured they'd make more money loaning them money than not, otherwise the nice new couple could live in their parent's basement.