I think he's thinking GPWS - in which case it would tell you to pull up, however the stick would not be shaking.
Bottom line is that there are a bunch of flight situations where the computer will desperately try to save its own life and the post mixed together two of them.
Or, maybe he was in a stall at low altitude, in which case you ignore both the warnings and the stick and hit the ejection lever, or if you don't have one it would be a good time to pray.
Can I buy $500 worth of Google stock and then sue Apple over their anti-Android tactics, since it has an adverse impact on my shares? If the company isn't suing, then Charles is just suing as a shareholder as far as I understand the law. I can understand shareholder suits against the company they own shares in since that is a direct relationship.
I've always wanted to see something similar to this. My vision would be a system where the amount at issue is agreed-upon up-front (or decided as a matter of law). Then based on that amount at issue the court looks at a table and assigns the legal costs available to each party. Both sides bring their choice of attorneys who are not paid a dime by the parties. THE COURT pays them up-front to litigate the case. Once the case is settled THE COURT pays the winner any judgments and compensation for their wasted time. The loser then owes a debt to the government for all of the costs.
In one stroke you control legal costs, eliminate vexatious lawsuits, and get rid of debt collection. The winner gets a check from the treasury and need not be hassled with collections, and the loser is treated like any deadbeat taxpayer if they don't pay up (sheriff sale their house, or whatever).
Lawyers would be viewed as officers of the court (go figure) whose job is to help make clear who is in the right and who is in the wrong.
That's because you didn't see the bill for what that clever letter cost to write.:)
(For all I know it was pro bono. That's the problem with lawyers - they do a good service, but the service they do should not even be necessary most of the time.)
Keep in mind that anybody holding an insurance policy is obligated to make a good faith effort to lessen the impact of a loss. That does not include placing people in harm's way, but if you just abandoned the place without even bothering to grab anything despite having 24 hours to do so, your insurer might choose not to cover the full loss.
If you have a homeowner's policy and a tree smashes your roof the insurance will cover the repair. If three days later it rains and you haven't even bothered to put a tarp over the hole, they might not cover the water damage, even if they would have if it were raining at the moment the tree fell.
Basically you have to treat property as if the loss were your own. If you don't the loss might very well end up being your own.
Now, if the time is not sufficient to save everything, then simply making a good faith effort to save what matters most is all you need to do. Note, I am not a lawyer...
The atmosphere has CO2 and nitrogen which we can readily turn into plants and oxygen (there's your organic materials). There is some quantity of water and carbon dioxide underground. And we can make that shelter out of dirt or metals such as aluminum and steel which we can mine from either the dirt or meteorites (which are very plentiful on Mars).
Ah, so we just need to reduce CO2 and fix N2. If we could do that artificially for any practical amount of money we'd have fixed global warming and would be growing crops in the Sahara.
The only practical way to do those things right now is via plants/algae/etc. And, if you could get those to grow on Mars then all you need to do is seed the planet with them and it would basically terraform itself. If you could do that then it would be a place worth living on (well, assuming you could do something about the low air pressure).
Life support requirements aren't different on Earth either. We still need the same things here that we'd need on Mars. I assume you were trying, once again, to note that you'd a bit more infrastructure to meet such requirements in space or on Mars. Something the rest of us already know.
My point was that the life support / engineering requirements are the same or even less in space than on Mars. So, why live on Mars as opposed to space? Mind you, I don't see the point in living in space either until we are far more advanced.
As to the fragile space colony, it's worth noting that the cave on Earth is a lot more accessible to attack and fallout than the colony is.
To attack a cave you need to know which cave to attack. I doubt in a war that anybody would be targetting random caves, and you'd need to hit one fairly directly to do anything to it. I doubt that anybody is going to be keeping a colony on mars a secret. Caves aren't all that susceptible to fallout assuming you seal the entrance, and fallout is only a serious problem for a few weeks after a nuclear attack. If you're worried about nuclear war, it would be FAR cheaper to stock and seal a cave or dig a hole in your back yard than to establish a colony on Mars.
And on Mars, you have plenty of places to move to and plenty of time to move (on the order of six months for chemical propulsion, perhaps half that, if someone stuck a nuclear warhead on a nuclear propulsion system), if someone really does try to kill you.
Move to where? For starters you'd need heavy lift capability sufficient to evacuate everybody on your colony if you wanted to get into space. Moving on the ground would be easier, but on a place like Mars just keeping a colony functioning would be hard enough even if you didn't have to move it.
I think that's the summary of your contribution to the thread here. Sure, you don't get it. I think we figured that out already. The problem with Earth-side locations is that they are subject to Earth-side regulation and such. The Sahara is partitioned up between a bunch of countries. If you want to live there, you are beholden to the laws and powers of those countries.
Ah, you want to live on Mars, that place where anybody can stake a claim and be magically free from all the politics that happen on Earth. Never mind that you'd need one of those pesky governments to build your colony in the first place - I'm sure they'll be happy to let the colonists just do whatever they want to free of interference after spending a few trillion dollars putting them there. And, if you somehow strike out and build your own little hut in the middle of the dirt, I'm sure nobody will show up with a gun and try to take it from you.
You'd get further moving to Rhode Island and voting in Libertarians or something. If you want to be free of government interference the last thing you want to be doing is asking for a few trillion dollars in Federal funding to build a colony on Mars.
Yup, and I expect that the end result of this is that I as an AMD CPU owner will have to watch all my hypervisor code get a little slower so that Intel doesn't have to do a recall on their equipment.
Perhaps it would be a bit much to ask anybody implementing it a patch to make it configurable for those building on AMD...
This is one big reason why Mars is such a popular target for colonization. All the materials needed for Earth life and a technological civilization are present.
Define materials needed for Earth life...
There isn't any O2 in the atmosphere, there isn't much of an atmosphere at all, though they do have dust storms so forget making your shelter out of aluminum foil like you can in space. Sure, there is lots of dirt, though that dirt contains no organic material needed to sustain plant life/etc.
It seems to me that in general the life support requirements on Mars aren't any better than what you'd need in the middle of space. You'd need to meticulously recycle everything, as there would be no renewal except from Earth resupply (which won't be available if the Earth is wiped out or whatever the doomsday scenario is - and for the biggest doomsday scenario of all (nuclear war) I'd rather be on the Earth where at least I can try to live in a cave than on a fragile space colony whose exact coordinates are well known to those firing the missiles).
I have no doubts that the essentials for life could be manufactured on Mars if you were determined enough, but they could probably be manufactured in space more easily. Power is also more readily available in space. Resupply ships can just dock, and they don't need to re-enter an atmosphere while carrying lots of cargo.
I just don't get the point of going to Mars. It isn't practical, and there isn't really anything there that you won't find in any number of places that are easier to get to, starting with those already on Earth.
This is pretty typical Stephenson. Actually, I'd go a step further and call it pretty typical science fiction.
The whole idea is to take an interesting concept and explore it using a story as a medium. Stephenson has a tendency to weave a bit too much lecture hall into his stories, like extended periods of librarian dialogue or reminiscing about the polycosmic nature of consciousness on the mountainside. However, I can appreciate that his novels actually explore interesting ideas, whether or not they have true basis in reality.
If all you want is James Bond, well, then watch James Bond.:)
It helps that the background is a LOT darker than any place you'll find a car. Spotting even minute amounts of energy against a dark background is something man has been perfecting for MANY years. Just marvel at the ability of a simple photomultiplier. It can detect single photons with a substantial efficiency (tens of percent). The key is to get rid of all noise, and there isn't much of that in deep space.
While clearly the V1 transmitter is extremely low power, there is one very minor flaw in your analogy.
I suspect that the power measurement for the V1 transmitter is OUTPUT power, at the desired frequency, and it is highly directional. The power measurement on the brake light bulb is INPUT power, and it is barely directional. Much of the power of that bulb is radiated as infrared, outside of human vision. If you output 20W of light in the visible range with the gain of the V1 antenna I wouldn't be surprised if it would burn through wood at that distance. The high-gain antenna on V1 is the equivalent of a bit more than a 1MW omnidirectional source.
When the Higher Ed bubble bursts, it's gonna be something to see. If it's anything like the housing or tech bubbles in scale, expect a lot of schools to shut their doors... and many of them will be longstanding colleges you'd think immune.
I'm not sure about this.
Don't get me wrong - I agree with virtually everything else you've written. However, why would the bubble collapse affect colleges? I'd expect it to impact the colleges about as much as the mortgage bubble affected banking executives.
Who lost out on the mortgage bubble? If you owned a home you lost out since it got devalued. If you loaned somebody money for a home you lost out since they won't pay you back $400k for a house that is only worth $300k. If you build homes then you might be fine, as long as you didn't own any of them, though you might be less busy now.
With education taxpayers and students fork over money to colleges, who disperse it mostly to administrators, but also to professors and staff who do real work. After this is done you end up with a student who has an education, and a loan to repay to the taxpayers. Right now that education is already of low value - we just haven't gotten to the point that new applicants have realized it. I'm not quite sure how the loans are getting repaid now (parents most likely), but I expect an eventual crisis there. The college is like the home builder - they were paid in advance and don't have any personal risk in the situation.
Sure, a drop in demand would impact the colleges. Hopefully it will lead to a reigning-in of costs. We'll never get rid of the top few ranks of leaches at the top, but perhaps we'll have fewer assistant senior associate vice provosts and such.
What I'm wondering is what the trigger will be. Will taxpayers finally balk at guaranteeing loans for people who can't repay them? Will parents suddenly realize that spending $200k just so you aren't ashamed to admit that you didn't send your kid to college is dumb?
At work I have to talk to a bunch of interns, and I was just thinking about what I'd say if asked about how to get a job. I can't remember the last time any department at my company I am familiar with actually hired somebody out of college - it probably has been almost a decade now. I'm amazed we still even have an intern program.
I imagine he'd feel differently if his peer was just that much more intelligent, or posessed some particular talent/skill that he did not. However, the only difference seems to be a different career choice.
Also, if you can't find a job at all, then chances are you aren't going to have a reasonable standard of life.
The reason nobody is studying STEM is that it requires a lot of talent to begin with, a great deal of dedication, and in the end leads to not all that much compensation. Why bother?
That makes a powerful argument in favor of open source. Could drop all the older SSE versions if only all programs could be easily recompiled.
If the CPU can convert x86 instructions to RISC, why couldn't that be done in software?
I can use software (qemu) to convert ARM opcodes into x86 and simulate a 400MHz Smartphone on my 3GHz quad-core desktop. Said smartphone takes about 5 minutes to boot (just try out the Android SDK sometime).
Sure, it can be done. You can also implement a quad-core i7 using a sendmail configuration file. However, it isn't going to perform as well as dedicated hardware that is HIGHLY optimized to the task.
Yup. In the US it sounds like about 1 out of every 3 dollars in profit made is made by the financial services sector. That is a sector that basically does nothing but move money from point A to point B - they're the middle-men of the economy.
Don't get me wrong, efficient allocation of capital is valuable. However, can it really be said to be efficient if it consumes a full third of the entire US economy?
So, I've yet to hear a reason for colonizing Mars in the first place. Doing so is EXTREMELY expensive so it should be a means to an end, and not an end in itself.
About the only real reason I've heard for colonizing Mars is having people living outside the Earth in case something goes wrong with the Earth. However, that has no value at all unless these people can live completely independently of resupply from Earth, and if you want those people to live on Mars then there has to be some reason for them to be living there as opposed to someplace else, like in the middle of space.
About the only reason I can think of putting a survival colony on Mars is because Mars is a lush green world full of life and thus it is very stable and not at risk of having everybody die because a seal breaks somewhere on your space station, and since Mars is a big planet the atmosphere won't just effuse away since gravity does the job of containment for us.
However, that isn't the reality today, and won't be the reality for a long time. Unless we plan on making that a reality we might as well put any survival colonies out in space where they are easier to reach and construct. I'm not really sure why anybody would want to spend so much money on a survival colony anyway. If people were all that concerned about preserving their DNA for centuries they'd be having a lot more kids than they do today.
Yup, somewhere at home I have a box of pencils and a box of toothpicks. Neither cost me much, and neither is what I'd call a growth market. And yet, I'm sure somebody is making good money selling each of them.
If you need venture capital then these aren't products you should go after, but if you want to stay alive, there is no reason to give them up.
So, right now I can't see why anybody would want to live on Mars. It is kind of like living in the middle of the Sahara, but less hospitable, and I don't see people signing up to live there on their own dime.
If I did want to colonize mars, landing people there would be the LAST thing I did, and chances are it would be a century or two before getting to that. First give them someplace to live. You might be able to build a base on Mars, but that wouldn't give you anything you wouldn't get cheaper by just building a base out in space. If you really want to have some advantage from living on the surface of a planet then you'll probably want to terraform it first.
So, if you want to get people living on Mars I'd first spend a few decades on blue-sky R&D into terraforming, and then start sending robots carrying nanomachines or bacteria or whatever to do the work. Then send robots to build basic habitations (assuming that the terraforming isn't such that you can just live out on the prairie hunting buffalo).
And what benefit does that provide to anybody? In particular, to those who aren't living there (though it isn't at all clear to me what benefits those living their obtain either).
If I asked the US government to build me a house in the next town over for a few trillion dollars, I suspect I'd have to have a reason better than "so I can live there" if I wanted to gain any traction.
And how many of those drugs were tested on an animal before going into a person? Even more importantly, before those drugs were discovered how many attemped drugs were tested in an animal and found to be unsafe before the safe version was tested in humans?
For every drug out there chemists tried to make thousands of drugs that never really worked out for one reason or another. Most of those were discarded on the basis of animal testing. If you didn't test on animals, then you'd have to do thousands of additional human trials (at MUCH higher expense), with less reliable results, and with numerous people injured in the process.
If you want to find out how toxic a drug is with animal testing you just give more and more of it to animals until a bunch of them die. To do the same with people you just have to test with a level you think will work, and see how many die over the next few years. The problem is that people die all the time anyway, so you need to test lots of people to get decent statistics. There are only so many sick people to test, and if the symptoms don't show up for a decade good luck finding it before millions of people have taken it. With animals you can test as much as you need to with as high a dose as it takes to cause problems.
Yeah, but this is a robotic mission that gives good results now, compared to a hypothetical manned mission that costs 100X as much this year and every year for the next 50 years, and gives perhaps better results 50 years from now, assuming the crew doesn't die on the way.
That's a hypothetically manned mission. I was refering to missions that had people on them not an activity that spends money for 50 years and might have people going to Mars at the end of the period. You know, much like the present day, even to the money spent.
Well, the nature of research is that you have to spend the money BEFORE you find out if you're actually able to achieve the desired result. Good luck finding somebody willing to run a mission to Mars for an X-prize payable only after success.
We could probably send 10 probes every launch window for a fraction of the cost of a manned mission. Surely they can't all have fatal flaws?
And what would we do with them that would justify not having a manned presence? People keep forgetting how little we do with probes these days. It only looks like a lot because it's been 40 years since the last manned mission to another body in the Solar System.
Also, it's worth noting that we're not really sending out a lot of probes. Sure, we're spending a lot of money. But we're just not getting much for the money.
Well, if the science isn't worth it, then don't send the probes either. What would you do with people on mars?
The fact is that going to Mars with robots or people is expensive. Doing it with people is just mind-bogglingly expensive. The only reason it makes sense to send people is if there is some objective to accomplish on Mars where sending people is more cost-effective than sending a probe. I can't really think of any scenario where that is the case. If the research isn't worth the cost of a probe, then it certainly isn't worth the cost of a manned operation.
All true, and I wish we could rid drug companies of these parasites running the show...
However, I know somebody who has benefitted tremendously from Victoza. I think it is also an example of why we shouldn't be so afraid of "me-too" drugs - in this case Victoza is only somewhat better than Byetta, but somebody I know could not tolerate Byetta yet did great on Victoza.
While expensive, for the first time my friend was able to get their A1Cs down to around 7 from above 10, and considering they've already spent a few hundred thousand dollars in surgeries the medication is only going to end up saving the insurer money...
Drug companies actually do really good stuff, and on the whole are a big benefit to society. If we could just change the model around how they operate so that the scumbags weren't running the show...
Actually Big Pharma used to be much worse (though it was more like little Pharma back then) - peddling snake oil and such. Then it got much better and really peaked at the very end of the 90s.
The problem was that they ran into a wall where newer products were just not better enough to continue with the cost increases, and that created difficulty maintaining the kinds of profits the MBAs wanted, so the games started.
Oh sure, there have been problems throughout that time, but the scientists used to have a lot more influence over the organization when they were making discoveries.
The real problem is that the bar keeps getting set higher, and rightly so. We need big changes in how we treat disease before we'll really get past that, and there has been a lot more innovation in more recent years. We just haven't actually seen any of it work out yet.
Definitely the case. I was faced with potentially having to buy an assistive device for somebody and it was the same story.
The issue is that insurance won't pay a dime unless it is FDA approved, and the FDA won't approve it unless it has been demonstrated to actually result in better outcomes in a clinical trial. So, an application that might cost a few thousand dollars to develop ends up costing hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop.
Oh, and the FDA won't approve it if it is a general-purpose device. So, even if it comes on an iPad or Mac or whatever you'll find everything locked down and all the general functionality disabled. Wouldn't want people using their find-a-shape software to compose emails or facebook posts or anything like that - it was intended to talk like a robot and by golly that is what you're going to use it for!
In the end it just wasn't worth it in the particular case I was looking at - there just wasn't much benefit. If there was I'd have been sorely tempted to just clone the hard drive on the thing - it was a 5-year-old macbook.
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I think he's thinking GPWS - in which case it would tell you to pull up, however the stick would not be shaking.
Bottom line is that there are a bunch of flight situations where the computer will desperately try to save its own life and the post mixed together two of them.
Or, maybe he was in a stall at low altitude, in which case you ignore both the warnings and the stick and hit the ejection lever, or if you don't have one it would be a good time to pray.
What is his standing then?
Can I buy $500 worth of Google stock and then sue Apple over their anti-Android tactics, since it has an adverse impact on my shares? If the company isn't suing, then Charles is just suing as a shareholder as far as I understand the law. I can understand shareholder suits against the company they own shares in since that is a direct relationship.
I've always wanted to see something similar to this. My vision would be a system where the amount at issue is agreed-upon up-front (or decided as a matter of law). Then based on that amount at issue the court looks at a table and assigns the legal costs available to each party. Both sides bring their choice of attorneys who are not paid a dime by the parties. THE COURT pays them up-front to litigate the case. Once the case is settled THE COURT pays the winner any judgments and compensation for their wasted time. The loser then owes a debt to the government for all of the costs.
In one stroke you control legal costs, eliminate vexatious lawsuits, and get rid of debt collection. The winner gets a check from the treasury and need not be hassled with collections, and the loser is treated like any deadbeat taxpayer if they don't pay up (sheriff sale their house, or whatever).
Lawyers would be viewed as officers of the court (go figure) whose job is to help make clear who is in the right and who is in the wrong.
That's because you didn't see the bill for what that clever letter cost to write. :)
(For all I know it was pro bono. That's the problem with lawyers - they do a good service, but the service they do should not even be necessary most of the time.)
Keep in mind that anybody holding an insurance policy is obligated to make a good faith effort to lessen the impact of a loss. That does not include placing people in harm's way, but if you just abandoned the place without even bothering to grab anything despite having 24 hours to do so, your insurer might choose not to cover the full loss.
If you have a homeowner's policy and a tree smashes your roof the insurance will cover the repair. If three days later it rains and you haven't even bothered to put a tarp over the hole, they might not cover the water damage, even if they would have if it were raining at the moment the tree fell.
Basically you have to treat property as if the loss were your own. If you don't the loss might very well end up being your own.
Now, if the time is not sufficient to save everything, then simply making a good faith effort to save what matters most is all you need to do. Note, I am not a lawyer...
The atmosphere has CO2 and nitrogen which we can readily turn into plants and oxygen (there's your organic materials). There is some quantity of water and carbon dioxide underground. And we can make that shelter out of dirt or metals such as aluminum and steel which we can mine from either the dirt or meteorites (which are very plentiful on Mars).
Ah, so we just need to reduce CO2 and fix N2. If we could do that artificially for any practical amount of money we'd have fixed global warming and would be growing crops in the Sahara.
The only practical way to do those things right now is via plants/algae/etc. And, if you could get those to grow on Mars then all you need to do is seed the planet with them and it would basically terraform itself. If you could do that then it would be a place worth living on (well, assuming you could do something about the low air pressure).
Life support requirements aren't different on Earth either. We still need the same things here that we'd need on Mars. I assume you were trying, once again, to note that you'd a bit more infrastructure to meet such requirements in space or on Mars. Something the rest of us already know.
My point was that the life support / engineering requirements are the same or even less in space than on Mars. So, why live on Mars as opposed to space? Mind you, I don't see the point in living in space either until we are far more advanced.
As to the fragile space colony, it's worth noting that the cave on Earth is a lot more accessible to attack and fallout than the colony is.
To attack a cave you need to know which cave to attack. I doubt in a war that anybody would be targetting random caves, and you'd need to hit one fairly directly to do anything to it. I doubt that anybody is going to be keeping a colony on mars a secret. Caves aren't all that susceptible to fallout assuming you seal the entrance, and fallout is only a serious problem for a few weeks after a nuclear attack. If you're worried about nuclear war, it would be FAR cheaper to stock and seal a cave or dig a hole in your back yard than to establish a colony on Mars.
And on Mars, you have plenty of places to move to and plenty of time to move (on the order of six months for chemical propulsion, perhaps half that, if someone stuck a nuclear warhead on a nuclear propulsion system), if someone really does try to kill you.
Move to where? For starters you'd need heavy lift capability sufficient to evacuate everybody on your colony if you wanted to get into space. Moving on the ground would be easier, but on a place like Mars just keeping a colony functioning would be hard enough even if you didn't have to move it.
I think that's the summary of your contribution to the thread here. Sure, you don't get it. I think we figured that out already. The problem with Earth-side locations is that they are subject to Earth-side regulation and such. The Sahara is partitioned up between a bunch of countries. If you want to live there, you are beholden to the laws and powers of those countries.
Ah, you want to live on Mars, that place where anybody can stake a claim and be magically free from all the politics that happen on Earth. Never mind that you'd need one of those pesky governments to build your colony in the first place - I'm sure they'll be happy to let the colonists just do whatever they want to free of interference after spending a few trillion dollars putting them there. And, if you somehow strike out and build your own little hut in the middle of the dirt, I'm sure nobody will show up with a gun and try to take it from you.
You'd get further moving to Rhode Island and voting in Libertarians or something. If you want to be free of government interference the last thing you want to be doing is asking for a few trillion dollars in Federal funding to build a colony on Mars.
In any case, nobody i
Yup, and I expect that the end result of this is that I as an AMD CPU owner will have to watch all my hypervisor code get a little slower so that Intel doesn't have to do a recall on their equipment.
Perhaps it would be a bit much to ask anybody implementing it a patch to make it configurable for those building on AMD...
This is one big reason why Mars is such a popular target for colonization. All the materials needed for Earth life and a technological civilization are present.
Define materials needed for Earth life...
There isn't any O2 in the atmosphere, there isn't much of an atmosphere at all, though they do have dust storms so forget making your shelter out of aluminum foil like you can in space. Sure, there is lots of dirt, though that dirt contains no organic material needed to sustain plant life/etc.
It seems to me that in general the life support requirements on Mars aren't any better than what you'd need in the middle of space. You'd need to meticulously recycle everything, as there would be no renewal except from Earth resupply (which won't be available if the Earth is wiped out or whatever the doomsday scenario is - and for the biggest doomsday scenario of all (nuclear war) I'd rather be on the Earth where at least I can try to live in a cave than on a fragile space colony whose exact coordinates are well known to those firing the missiles).
I have no doubts that the essentials for life could be manufactured on Mars if you were determined enough, but they could probably be manufactured in space more easily. Power is also more readily available in space. Resupply ships can just dock, and they don't need to re-enter an atmosphere while carrying lots of cargo.
I just don't get the point of going to Mars. It isn't practical, and there isn't really anything there that you won't find in any number of places that are easier to get to, starting with those already on Earth.
This is pretty typical Stephenson. Actually, I'd go a step further and call it pretty typical science fiction.
The whole idea is to take an interesting concept and explore it using a story as a medium. Stephenson has a tendency to weave a bit too much lecture hall into his stories, like extended periods of librarian dialogue or reminiscing about the polycosmic nature of consciousness on the mountainside. However, I can appreciate that his novels actually explore interesting ideas, whether or not they have true basis in reality.
If all you want is James Bond, well, then watch James Bond. :)
It helps that the background is a LOT darker than any place you'll find a car. Spotting even minute amounts of energy against a dark background is something man has been perfecting for MANY years. Just marvel at the ability of a simple photomultiplier. It can detect single photons with a substantial efficiency (tens of percent). The key is to get rid of all noise, and there isn't much of that in deep space.
While clearly the V1 transmitter is extremely low power, there is one very minor flaw in your analogy.
I suspect that the power measurement for the V1 transmitter is OUTPUT power, at the desired frequency, and it is highly directional. The power measurement on the brake light bulb is INPUT power, and it is barely directional. Much of the power of that bulb is radiated as infrared, outside of human vision. If you output 20W of light in the visible range with the gain of the V1 antenna I wouldn't be surprised if it would burn through wood at that distance. The high-gain antenna on V1 is the equivalent of a bit more than a 1MW omnidirectional source.
When the Higher Ed bubble bursts, it's gonna be something to see. If it's anything like the housing or tech bubbles in scale, expect a lot of schools to shut their doors... and many of them will be longstanding colleges you'd think immune.
I'm not sure about this.
Don't get me wrong - I agree with virtually everything else you've written. However, why would the bubble collapse affect colleges? I'd expect it to impact the colleges about as much as the mortgage bubble affected banking executives.
Who lost out on the mortgage bubble? If you owned a home you lost out since it got devalued. If you loaned somebody money for a home you lost out since they won't pay you back $400k for a house that is only worth $300k. If you build homes then you might be fine, as long as you didn't own any of them, though you might be less busy now.
With education taxpayers and students fork over money to colleges, who disperse it mostly to administrators, but also to professors and staff who do real work. After this is done you end up with a student who has an education, and a loan to repay to the taxpayers. Right now that education is already of low value - we just haven't gotten to the point that new applicants have realized it. I'm not quite sure how the loans are getting repaid now (parents most likely), but I expect an eventual crisis there. The college is like the home builder - they were paid in advance and don't have any personal risk in the situation.
Sure, a drop in demand would impact the colleges. Hopefully it will lead to a reigning-in of costs. We'll never get rid of the top few ranks of leaches at the top, but perhaps we'll have fewer assistant senior associate vice provosts and such.
What I'm wondering is what the trigger will be. Will taxpayers finally balk at guaranteeing loans for people who can't repay them? Will parents suddenly realize that spending $200k just so you aren't ashamed to admit that you didn't send your kid to college is dumb?
At work I have to talk to a bunch of interns, and I was just thinking about what I'd say if asked about how to get a job. I can't remember the last time any department at my company I am familiar with actually hired somebody out of college - it probably has been almost a decade now. I'm amazed we still even have an intern program.
I imagine he'd feel differently if his peer was just that much more intelligent, or posessed some particular talent/skill that he did not. However, the only difference seems to be a different career choice.
Also, if you can't find a job at all, then chances are you aren't going to have a reasonable standard of life.
The reason nobody is studying STEM is that it requires a lot of talent to begin with, a great deal of dedication, and in the end leads to not all that much compensation. Why bother?
That makes a powerful argument in favor of open source. Could drop all the older SSE versions if only all programs could be easily recompiled.
If the CPU can convert x86 instructions to RISC, why couldn't that be done in software?
I can use software (qemu) to convert ARM opcodes into x86 and simulate a 400MHz Smartphone on my 3GHz quad-core desktop. Said smartphone takes about 5 minutes to boot (just try out the Android SDK sometime).
Sure, it can be done. You can also implement a quad-core i7 using a sendmail configuration file. However, it isn't going to perform as well as dedicated hardware that is HIGHLY optimized to the task.
Yup. In the US it sounds like about 1 out of every 3 dollars in profit made is made by the financial services sector. That is a sector that basically does nothing but move money from point A to point B - they're the middle-men of the economy.
Don't get me wrong, efficient allocation of capital is valuable. However, can it really be said to be efficient if it consumes a full third of the entire US economy?
So, I've yet to hear a reason for colonizing Mars in the first place. Doing so is EXTREMELY expensive so it should be a means to an end, and not an end in itself.
About the only real reason I've heard for colonizing Mars is having people living outside the Earth in case something goes wrong with the Earth. However, that has no value at all unless these people can live completely independently of resupply from Earth, and if you want those people to live on Mars then there has to be some reason for them to be living there as opposed to someplace else, like in the middle of space.
About the only reason I can think of putting a survival colony on Mars is because Mars is a lush green world full of life and thus it is very stable and not at risk of having everybody die because a seal breaks somewhere on your space station, and since Mars is a big planet the atmosphere won't just effuse away since gravity does the job of containment for us.
However, that isn't the reality today, and won't be the reality for a long time. Unless we plan on making that a reality we might as well put any survival colonies out in space where they are easier to reach and construct. I'm not really sure why anybody would want to spend so much money on a survival colony anyway. If people were all that concerned about preserving their DNA for centuries they'd be having a lot more kids than they do today.
Yup, on the desktop I'm willing to go with Linux despite the software selection issues because of the freedom it gives me.
Why would I give that up on my phone in favor of a platform with LESS software selection?
Yup, somewhere at home I have a box of pencils and a box of toothpicks. Neither cost me much, and neither is what I'd call a growth market. And yet, I'm sure somebody is making good money selling each of them.
If you need venture capital then these aren't products you should go after, but if you want to stay alive, there is no reason to give them up.
So, right now I can't see why anybody would want to live on Mars. It is kind of like living in the middle of the Sahara, but less hospitable, and I don't see people signing up to live there on their own dime.
If I did want to colonize mars, landing people there would be the LAST thing I did, and chances are it would be a century or two before getting to that. First give them someplace to live. You might be able to build a base on Mars, but that wouldn't give you anything you wouldn't get cheaper by just building a base out in space. If you really want to have some advantage from living on the surface of a planet then you'll probably want to terraform it first.
So, if you want to get people living on Mars I'd first spend a few decades on blue-sky R&D into terraforming, and then start sending robots carrying nanomachines or bacteria or whatever to do the work. Then send robots to build basic habitations (assuming that the terraforming isn't such that you can just live out on the prairie hunting buffalo).
And what benefit does that provide to anybody? In particular, to those who aren't living there (though it isn't at all clear to me what benefits those living their obtain either).
If I asked the US government to build me a house in the next town over for a few trillion dollars, I suspect I'd have to have a reason better than "so I can live there" if I wanted to gain any traction.
And how many of those drugs were tested on an animal before going into a person? Even more importantly, before those drugs were discovered how many attemped drugs were tested in an animal and found to be unsafe before the safe version was tested in humans?
For every drug out there chemists tried to make thousands of drugs that never really worked out for one reason or another. Most of those were discarded on the basis of animal testing. If you didn't test on animals, then you'd have to do thousands of additional human trials (at MUCH higher expense), with less reliable results, and with numerous people injured in the process.
If you want to find out how toxic a drug is with animal testing you just give more and more of it to animals until a bunch of them die. To do the same with people you just have to test with a level you think will work, and see how many die over the next few years. The problem is that people die all the time anyway, so you need to test lots of people to get decent statistics. There are only so many sick people to test, and if the symptoms don't show up for a decade good luck finding it before millions of people have taken it. With animals you can test as much as you need to with as high a dose as it takes to cause problems.
Yeah, but this is a robotic mission that gives good results now, compared to a hypothetical manned mission that costs 100X as much this year and every year for the next 50 years, and gives perhaps better results 50 years from now, assuming the crew doesn't die on the way.
That's a hypothetically manned mission. I was refering to missions that had people on them not an activity that spends money for 50 years and might have people going to Mars at the end of the period. You know, much like the present day, even to the money spent.
Well, the nature of research is that you have to spend the money BEFORE you find out if you're actually able to achieve the desired result. Good luck finding somebody willing to run a mission to Mars for an X-prize payable only after success.
We could probably send 10 probes every launch window for a fraction of the cost of a manned mission. Surely they can't all have fatal flaws?
And what would we do with them that would justify not having a manned presence? People keep forgetting how little we do with probes these days. It only looks like a lot because it's been 40 years since the last manned mission to another body in the Solar System.
Also, it's worth noting that we're not really sending out a lot of probes. Sure, we're spending a lot of money. But we're just not getting much for the money.
Well, if the science isn't worth it, then don't send the probes either. What would you do with people on mars?
The fact is that going to Mars with robots or people is expensive. Doing it with people is just mind-bogglingly expensive. The only reason it makes sense to send people is if there is some objective to accomplish on Mars where sending people is more cost-effective than sending a probe. I can't really think of any scenario where that is the case. If the research isn't worth the cost of a probe, then it certainly isn't worth the cost of a manned operation.
All true, and I wish we could rid drug companies of these parasites running the show...
However, I know somebody who has benefitted tremendously from Victoza. I think it is also an example of why we shouldn't be so afraid of "me-too" drugs - in this case Victoza is only somewhat better than Byetta, but somebody I know could not tolerate Byetta yet did great on Victoza.
While expensive, for the first time my friend was able to get their A1Cs down to around 7 from above 10, and considering they've already spent a few hundred thousand dollars in surgeries the medication is only going to end up saving the insurer money...
Drug companies actually do really good stuff, and on the whole are a big benefit to society. If we could just change the model around how they operate so that the scumbags weren't running the show...
Actually Big Pharma used to be much worse (though it was more like little Pharma back then) - peddling snake oil and such. Then it got much better and really peaked at the very end of the 90s.
The problem was that they ran into a wall where newer products were just not better enough to continue with the cost increases, and that created difficulty maintaining the kinds of profits the MBAs wanted, so the games started.
Oh sure, there have been problems throughout that time, but the scientists used to have a lot more influence over the organization when they were making discoveries.
The real problem is that the bar keeps getting set higher, and rightly so. We need big changes in how we treat disease before we'll really get past that, and there has been a lot more innovation in more recent years. We just haven't actually seen any of it work out yet.
Definitely the case. I was faced with potentially having to buy an assistive device for somebody and it was the same story.
The issue is that insurance won't pay a dime unless it is FDA approved, and the FDA won't approve it unless it has been demonstrated to actually result in better outcomes in a clinical trial. So, an application that might cost a few thousand dollars to develop ends up costing hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop.
Oh, and the FDA won't approve it if it is a general-purpose device. So, even if it comes on an iPad or Mac or whatever you'll find everything locked down and all the general functionality disabled. Wouldn't want people using their find-a-shape software to compose emails or facebook posts or anything like that - it was intended to talk like a robot and by golly that is what you're going to use it for!
In the end it just wasn't worth it in the particular case I was looking at - there just wasn't much benefit. If there was I'd have been sorely tempted to just clone the hard drive on the thing - it was a 5-year-old macbook.