While I agree with much that you said, I have to take objection to suspend-to-disk not being a basic feature.
I can't think of a commercially-sold consumer laptop that resembled a laptop that didn't have this feature - going all the way back to the 1980s (or maybe it was early 90s).
Sure, I guess if you want to get down to it the only basic feature on a computer be that it has RAM, a CPU, and some way of bootstrapping itself, but that makes half of the microwaves out there feature-complete.
Does everybody need suspend-to-disk? No - I don't have it working on my linux box at home. However, I'd never consider that something to be glossed over - if I had a laptop my feelings would be a LOT different.
Under the US constitution when the government takes ownership of something, they have to pay the original owners the fair price of what is being taken over.
The interest on those loans would of course be recouped by the US government, at fair market rates, before giving a dime to the shareholders. Ditto for oversight costs, writeoffs on bad loans, etc.
I think that it is unlikely that my scenario would work out to much benefit of the original shareholders. However, if it did then I don't have a problem with that, as the only way that a complete cleanup of the financial system wouldn't cost too much money is if it weren't all that wrong in the first place. If that were really true, then the shareholders would have done nothing worth being punished over.
The bottom line is that the shareholders would be the first in line to pay for the mess they made. If somehow they don't run out of money, then they're welcome to whatever is left over. In that situation, the taxpayers wouldn't have to pay a dime anyway.
Hey - I'm fine with NASA also doing prototype-scale launches as well.
If they want to explore cutting-edge technologies for launch, that's just great. Let's do them on test rockets first, and probes next. Maybe they eventually go into manned rockets.
However, I agree entirely that there is no need to have NASA operating in a production mode for manned launches as long as commercial options exist.
It is like having a Nobel laureate come up with a new kind of transistor, and then their boss tells them, "that's great - can you go ahead and manufacture 400M of them for sale next year?" When you have a top-notch researcher what is the point in making them grind out product instead of moving on to the next better thing?
How convenient, then, that the people we have the signed agreement with have their own space programs, and we can just pay them to ferry the cargo.
If they cut themselves off at the knees, oh well. I guess they won't be building another joint boondoggle in space with us until the current generation of politicians dies off - which is probably long before we're likely to need to build one anyway.
I say all power to Bolden for doing what he has to to keep his agency going when the Bush and Obama administrations shoved him in a corner.
Uh, Bush and Obama were both elected. Of course, the president alone doesn't run the government, Congress has a role as well.
To the extent that Congress and the President dictate a policy, NASA's job is to fall into line. Period - unless we're talking about the government declaring martial law or something else of similar gravity. Saving your pet project is not cause for disobeying the elected officials.
In any case, as a taxpayer you get a vote, and you're welcome to cast it as you wish. You can also write to anybody you want to in Congress. However, I don't think that the shuttle program was a national priority in the eyes of the MAJORITY of taxpayers, and unfortunately that's how things work in the USA. Trust me, the country would be a whole lot better off if I were dictator, but nobody seems to go for that...
I think that this sort of thing needs to be considered carefully. When you accept help from somebody, you become dependent on them.
Now, if that dependence just goes as far as relying on them to do something that you can source elsewhere reliably maybe for more money, it is just a cost savings.
However, if you depend on somebody to do something that can't be done elsewhere, rather than just figuring out how to do it yourself, you now place yourself in a position of vulnerability.
For business, that is just the cost of doing business. However, it gets trickier where national security is involved.
This is why (ostensibly) US military equipment has to be made from US-made parts. If the US gets into a war with some country, we don't want to find out that they make the control modules for some missile we need, or that they are made in a country that doesn't like the war.
Now, don't get me wrong - the US needs to be a lot more reserved about using force abroad/etc. However, if you're going to go to the trouble to spend all the money on a military, you need to at least make sure that you are able to supply them. Otherwise you might as well save a fortune and not have one at all (or a much smaller one that is more easily supplied).
NASA isn't the air force, but they're getting into that general realm of dual-use technology.
Yup, if saving the economy were the desired outcome you could do it in a way that avoids moral hazard.
Govern eminent domains the banks, and operates them with the sole goal of protecting the economy (profits are an afterthought).
When the government is done, it IPOs the banks.
When all is done there is a reckoning, and the IPO and operational profits minus all government expenditures associated with the bailout is paid out to the original shareholders, as the fair market value of the bank. In the likely event that the government doesn't fully recoup its costs, the original shareholders receive nothing. Of course, bondholders/etc get priority on the proceeds (after Uncle Sam).
Such an arrangement would probably still cost taxpayers money, but far less than just bailing out the banks. Plus, bankers would NOT be lining up for government handouts under such an arrangement.
Except that NASA is paid for by taxpayers, and answers to the taxpayers via their elected representatives.
If the head of NASA wants to quit and work elsewhere that is his right. If every employee of NASA decides to emigrate to China, that is their right as well (though they are still bound to maintain confidentiality).
However, for the head of NASA to spend tax dollars on something that the elected leadership has instructed them not to do is insubordination.
NASA isn't a private company, and it doesn't have the luxury of dictating what its priorities are.
Imagine if the UK National Health System decided that doctors aren't being paid enough so they're going to start charging a fee to get priority service? As long as they're accepting government paychecks, they have to do what their supervisors tell them to.
Don't like your boss - then quit or be your own boss. However, you can't accept money from somebody and then tell them that they have no right to dictate your actions.
Oh, don't worry - this will be completely open to anybody - that pays for QA testing of anything they release. As long as ubuntu pays $10k per repository change they'll get to keep their certification and use the internet. As long as you don't use anything that isn't either in the repo or sold in a box, you can even get some use out of your $30/month ISP bill.
For MS that is no big deal - they'll pay $10k per patch Tuesday and start EOLing every OS they make after three years. Oh, and you'll be paying full retail every three years too, because no doubt pirated copies of windows will fail to validate and get issued a cert.
Even RHEL would have trouble keeping up with such a system...
Absolutely, and in a field where this is a concern I'd be buying new PCs every six months if the performance gains outpaced the depreciation (and the overhead and learning curve from all the switching around).
My point is that the decision to buy PCs should be a rational one based on ROI. Pay-me-now-or-pay-me-later isn't a bad thing if the amounts in now or later are the same (which in time-adjusted money is less in the future).
Thanks - NPV calcs drive me insane at work, and sometimes they can be really distorted (usually due to artificial constraints on what doesn't get included to support the latest management fad). However, ultimately they make sense...
Oh, I agree that many of the founding fathers didn't WANT slavery to be the law of the land.
However, they did INTEND for it to be the law of the land (or, rather, delegated to the states) for the reasons that you explained. You can't argue that they didn't understand what the constitution said when they signed it.
I do agree with your feelings on amendments. I'm all for saying the founders got it wrong - let's just vote on it the way we're supposed to and not do it by executive privilege or whatever.
Well, lets think about the purpose of these broadcasts.
Who needs to know the position of an aircraft? Well, that would be the controllers, and any other aircraft in maybe a 10-mile radius.
If you encrypt the broadcast, then for those other aircraft to get position updates they'd need to either share a key, or get updates from ground control. The latter would be useless in uncontrolled airspace - so no collision-detection over the oceans/etc, unless we have satellites relaying all this info. The latter also uses a LOT more bandwidth, as for every broadcast there are now a bunch of rebroadcasts.
So, shared keys are probably the only practical solution. You could just use one master key for everything, which will get leaked and defeat the purpose of the whole thing. Or, you could use session keys that periodically change, and relay those keys around (encrypted) to those that have a need to know. That probably would get messy, but it is possible.
However, is it really worth all that trouble to obscure the location of an aircraft? Anybody with radar will find the aircraft. Anybody with a schedule will be able to tell the general vicinity of any particular aircraft, and ATC communications are in the clear so you can listen to those as well and get route updates.
Now, if we were talking about Air Force 1 or something like that, I can see where you wouldn't want somebody to be able to target that one particular aircraft. However, that is best solved by not having them broadcast their position at all (or radiate any more than needed in general, and then only encrypted). Separation could be achieved by just giving them a clear lane in the sky and not bothering to track where they are in it except in a general way (obviously primary radar will have it when there is coverage).
However, why would terrorists otherwise target particular planes? As others pointed out, if you just want to hit any plane and you have a MANPAD then you just need to situate yourself along a departure/arrival route and wait for somebody to come along. Actually, in this situation you could easily tell which plane is which by listening to a radio - aircraft on final approach/etc are in heavy communication and are cleared individually. The only time they're in a big mix is when they're cruising, and to hit an airliner on cruise you'd need a launcher the size of a truck/tank.
The relevant question is not "what would shock the founders" -- hell, a country where you can't keep slaves anymore would be a shock to many of them.
Well, the Constitution did have to be amended to ban slavery. Don't get me wrong - I hate slavery with a passion, but it was the law of the land, and the founders clearly intended for it to be the law of the land.
When you think about it, individuals owning guns has always been fairly well-correlated with freedom.
Feudalism was very oppressive, and its power derived from the expense of equipping soldiers. An effective military force required a horse (a specialized breed not useful for farming/etc), and all kinds of armor and gear. It also required a squad of support personnel for every knight (to maintain all that gear, and carry it around - it isn't like the knight hiked across Europe in plate and they didn't ride war horses around either).
When guns came out, it changed everything. Now a poor man could be issued a relatively inexpensive musket and they were as powerful as anything the enemy could field short of a siege weapon. The siege weapons themselves weren't all that expensive either - you didn't need many of them and they didn't require feeding like war horses/etc, and they didn't have to be built to fit a particular man like armor. Nobody needed armor, since armor was useless anyway. Guns democratized warfare, and the nobility vanished.
In theory modern weapons carry this even further, except that nobody is allowed to own inexpensive but effective weapons like RPGs/etc. So, power is becoming more concentrated among those who are allowed to own weapons. On the other hand, when needed anybody who controls the police could quickly equip at least a 3rd-world grade army inexpensively.
Now, the flip side to all of this is that more powerful weapons also greatly increase the amount of damage a single nutcase can do to the rest of society. In the middle ages a guy with a sword couldn't really do more than slash up a few people at church or something before being overcome. Even a guy with a barrel of black powder could only do so much since there wasn't anything big to blow up that wasn't also made to withstand siege. Today, just about anybody can get their hands on enough armament to wreak quite a bit of havoc - to the point where now nuclear proliferation is becoming a big concern.
I'm not sure what the solution is - to some extent the genie is out of the bottle. However, I'm not convinced that giving every redneck a howitzer and a MANPAD is going to make things better. Certainly that would make me think twice about flying...
And anybody who knows ANYTHING about money knows that these people did exactly the right thing, except for not having money set aside to cover situations like this.
Let's assume all those computers were 12 years old. Let's assume you'd advocate a 4-year upgrade cycle. They skipped 2 upgrade cycles, and got caught having to do the 3rd one all at once.
Let's assume an upgrade costs $1k - after all, you wanted them to keep their software current as well and that costs money too. For each of those PCs they saved $1k 8 years ago, and $1k 4 years ago.
Let's assume that the business makes a 5% return on capital (if they just put their money in a mutual fund they could make that much - so this is a VERY conservative figure). Plugging that into a TVM calculator tells me that they saved $2692 per PC in TODAY's money deferring those upgrades. Unless they spent more than $2692 per PC as a result of the delay, they saved money.
If your upgrades are more expensive, or if you upgrade more often than 4 years, then the savings is even higher. If the business could have taken advantage of an opportunity by sinking some of that money into capital then they'd make out even better, compared to just having shiny PCs.
Now, the only issue that might apply is that they ended up having a catastrophic failure and suffered downtime, which has a cost of its own. The solution to that isn't to keep upgrading computers under the hope that this will prevent breakdowns (it won't - it just reduces their frequency) - it is to have continuity plans (redundant hardware, backups, etc).
The bottom line is that a PC is capital for a business. It has a return on investment, like any other capital investment. Money spent on that PC is not available to spend on other things. You should spend money on the PC if it has a good ROI, and it is the best investment option available.
If I ran a business I wouldn't be upgrading my PCs all the time either. I'd upgrade them as often as serves a business purpose. If a shiny new PC will make me more productive I'd buy it that afternoon. If it won't, then the money goes into the bank for when I need to replace it. I'd anticipate failures and plan for them.
Or, are you talking about the past? Sure, 15 years ago we didn't have 16-bit color, raw digital images, or any of that stuff. Can it be done? Of course. Is that the current state of the craft - no.
This is like arguing that the features in Blender are irrelevant because in 1982 you didn't need digital rendering software to make an animated movie. Of course you didn't - and you still don't. However, if you want something like the subject of this article, then you need it.
You can always settle for less, and in many cases this is a better use of resources. However, appealing to the past isn't the way to win this argument...
...thus invalidating the certificates owned by those two companies and any drivers signed by them...only in those cases where CRLs are checked. I wouldn't be surprised if quite a few systems would remain vulnerable almost indefinitely due to the fact that not everything checks these.
Agreed. Resetting the game anytime a bank messes up is what causes them to be so brazen in the first place.
To sell a stock you should be required to own it. To place an order to buy a stock you should be required to put money in escrow. If you place an order, whether via API or voice or whatever, your money or stocks in escrow get traded if the order finds a match - period. If the exchange messes up, sure, go ahead and reset the game (not the trader's fault). If the trader messes up, well, maybe think twice before giving a computer the password to your account.
If you did these simple things, half of the market games would just disappear overnight, and with it most of the systematic risks that do nothing for the economy but which keep people nearing retirement up late at night.
I'd go a step further and say that by bailing out the company that wrote the lousy algorithm, we now increase the risks that others will be willing to take in writing their computer algorithms.
If the company allows a computer to trade on its behalf, and it sells Google for 10 cents to anybody willing to buy it, then that's just too bad for them. Maybe then companies will:
1. Check their code more carefully before turning it loose on the market. 2. Rethink whether having robots doing all their trades is really a good move to the degree that it is happening.
I agree - the people who posted 10 cent bids or whatever weren't "gaming the system." They put in legitimate offers to buy a stock at a price, and some idiot decided to actually take their offer. If I offer to buy your car for a nickel and you shake my hands, then I can't complain when it turns out to be worth less, and you can't complain if it turns out to be worth more, unless somebody actively misrepresented what was being traded. When the item under trade is a share in a company on an exchange, there can't be misrepresentation unless an insider is involved.
Talk about moral hazard - reversing trades because some idiot wrote a computer program to sell tons of stock at any price whatsoever!
What they should have done is left all those trades alone. Nobody would have lost anything unless they were taking any BID at any price on any stock with any valuation.
What the regulators did sends a clear message - make your computer algorithms more aggressive so that stuff happens even more! If you make money with your aggressive algorithm, you keep it! If you accidentally introduce a bug, then we'll just give you your money back.
Imagine I write a program that goes around ebay looking for undervalued stuff and buys it. Now, suppose that my program finds a plastic toy porche and bids $80k on it, and I win the auction. Should I be able to back out of the trade entirely? The solution isn't to punish people merely for placing BIDs that idiots are willing to fill - it is to not give computer programs the ability to spend money unless you are prepared to face the consequences.
Nope, definitely close to $2. The marginal cost of pharmaceuticals is very low. The problem is that the fixed costs are very high, which means that unless a drug sells for at least hundreds of millions of dollars per year it isn't worth targeting. Of course, lots of drugs end up making less and still are on the market, but that is usually because somebody was hoping to make more off of them but it didn't work out for some reason, and once most of the costs are sunk it is worth it to at least make back some of the money.
Unfortunately, drugs cost a lot of money to develop, and that is why they cost a lot under patents. Countries that control prices just leach off of the R&D expenditures of countries that do not.
And yes, I do realize that evil pharma companies spend more on advertising than R&D. I don't like it, but the cost of drugs wouldn't go down if they didn't (in fact, if their volumes dropped due to less utilization the prices would probably rise - though with less utilization total money spent on the drug would go down, and healthcare costs would go up or down in accordance with whatever the true impact of the drug is on healthcare costs). They probably spend gobs on executive compensation too, and good luck changing that...
And yes, I realize that lots of drugs are invented by European companies despite price controls. The American consumers still are the ones paying for it, since those European companies make 80% of their profits in the US.
WikiLeaks is an interesting organization, but they aren't an army.
Ironically enough, they also don't think the US Army should be able to present a "united front" and leak their documents anytime they can. If transparency is good for everybody else, then it is good for WikiLeaks...
This is probably a bit of both, since if the ship were unmanned it probably would be a lot easier to design it to just run at full throttle the whole time. If it didn't have big wings and a windshield maybe air resistance wouldn't be a problem.
I do agree that stress and acceleration impacts all aspects of the spacecraft, and not just the crew.
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While I agree with much that you said, I have to take objection to suspend-to-disk not being a basic feature.
I can't think of a commercially-sold consumer laptop that resembled a laptop that didn't have this feature - going all the way back to the 1980s (or maybe it was early 90s).
Sure, I guess if you want to get down to it the only basic feature on a computer be that it has RAM, a CPU, and some way of bootstrapping itself, but that makes half of the microwaves out there feature-complete.
Does everybody need suspend-to-disk? No - I don't have it working on my linux box at home. However, I'd never consider that something to be glossed over - if I had a laptop my feelings would be a LOT different.
Under the US constitution when the government takes ownership of something, they have to pay the original owners the fair price of what is being taken over.
The interest on those loans would of course be recouped by the US government, at fair market rates, before giving a dime to the shareholders. Ditto for oversight costs, writeoffs on bad loans, etc.
I think that it is unlikely that my scenario would work out to much benefit of the original shareholders. However, if it did then I don't have a problem with that, as the only way that a complete cleanup of the financial system wouldn't cost too much money is if it weren't all that wrong in the first place. If that were really true, then the shareholders would have done nothing worth being punished over.
The bottom line is that the shareholders would be the first in line to pay for the mess they made. If somehow they don't run out of money, then they're welcome to whatever is left over. In that situation, the taxpayers wouldn't have to pay a dime anyway.
Hey - I'm fine with NASA also doing prototype-scale launches as well.
If they want to explore cutting-edge technologies for launch, that's just great. Let's do them on test rockets first, and probes next. Maybe they eventually go into manned rockets.
However, I agree entirely that there is no need to have NASA operating in a production mode for manned launches as long as commercial options exist.
It is like having a Nobel laureate come up with a new kind of transistor, and then their boss tells them, "that's great - can you go ahead and manufacture 400M of them for sale next year?" When you have a top-notch researcher what is the point in making them grind out product instead of moving on to the next better thing?
How convenient, then, that the people we have the signed agreement with have their own space programs, and we can just pay them to ferry the cargo.
If they cut themselves off at the knees, oh well. I guess they won't be building another joint boondoggle in space with us until the current generation of politicians dies off - which is probably long before we're likely to need to build one anyway.
I say all power to Bolden for doing what he has to to keep his agency going when the Bush and Obama administrations shoved him in a corner.
Uh, Bush and Obama were both elected. Of course, the president alone doesn't run the government, Congress has a role as well.
To the extent that Congress and the President dictate a policy, NASA's job is to fall into line. Period - unless we're talking about the government declaring martial law or something else of similar gravity. Saving your pet project is not cause for disobeying the elected officials.
In any case, as a taxpayer you get a vote, and you're welcome to cast it as you wish. You can also write to anybody you want to in Congress. However, I don't think that the shuttle program was a national priority in the eyes of the MAJORITY of taxpayers, and unfortunately that's how things work in the USA. Trust me, the country would be a whole lot better off if I were dictator, but nobody seems to go for that...
Ok, bad example. Suppose they decided to stop treating grandmothers until they got a pay raise?
Bottom line is that the people accepting paychecks don't get to make the rules.
I think that this sort of thing needs to be considered carefully. When you accept help from somebody, you become dependent on them.
Now, if that dependence just goes as far as relying on them to do something that you can source elsewhere reliably maybe for more money, it is just a cost savings.
However, if you depend on somebody to do something that can't be done elsewhere, rather than just figuring out how to do it yourself, you now place yourself in a position of vulnerability.
For business, that is just the cost of doing business. However, it gets trickier where national security is involved.
This is why (ostensibly) US military equipment has to be made from US-made parts. If the US gets into a war with some country, we don't want to find out that they make the control modules for some missile we need, or that they are made in a country that doesn't like the war.
Now, don't get me wrong - the US needs to be a lot more reserved about using force abroad/etc. However, if you're going to go to the trouble to spend all the money on a military, you need to at least make sure that you are able to supply them. Otherwise you might as well save a fortune and not have one at all (or a much smaller one that is more easily supplied).
NASA isn't the air force, but they're getting into that general realm of dual-use technology.
Yup, if saving the economy were the desired outcome you could do it in a way that avoids moral hazard.
Govern eminent domains the banks, and operates them with the sole goal of protecting the economy (profits are an afterthought).
When the government is done, it IPOs the banks.
When all is done there is a reckoning, and the IPO and operational profits minus all government expenditures associated with the bailout is paid out to the original shareholders, as the fair market value of the bank. In the likely event that the government doesn't fully recoup its costs, the original shareholders receive nothing. Of course, bondholders/etc get priority on the proceeds (after Uncle Sam).
Such an arrangement would probably still cost taxpayers money, but far less than just bailing out the banks. Plus, bankers would NOT be lining up for government handouts under such an arrangement.
Except that NASA is paid for by taxpayers, and answers to the taxpayers via their elected representatives.
If the head of NASA wants to quit and work elsewhere that is his right. If every employee of NASA decides to emigrate to China, that is their right as well (though they are still bound to maintain confidentiality).
However, for the head of NASA to spend tax dollars on something that the elected leadership has instructed them not to do is insubordination.
NASA isn't a private company, and it doesn't have the luxury of dictating what its priorities are.
Imagine if the UK National Health System decided that doctors aren't being paid enough so they're going to start charging a fee to get priority service? As long as they're accepting government paychecks, they have to do what their supervisors tell them to.
Don't like your boss - then quit or be your own boss. However, you can't accept money from somebody and then tell them that they have no right to dictate your actions.
Oh, don't worry - this will be completely open to anybody - that pays for QA testing of anything they release. As long as ubuntu pays $10k per repository change they'll get to keep their certification and use the internet. As long as you don't use anything that isn't either in the repo or sold in a box, you can even get some use out of your $30/month ISP bill.
For MS that is no big deal - they'll pay $10k per patch Tuesday and start EOLing every OS they make after three years. Oh, and you'll be paying full retail every three years too, because no doubt pirated copies of windows will fail to validate and get issued a cert.
Even RHEL would have trouble keeping up with such a system...
Yes, and I wouldn't use any of them if I couldn't choose to modify them at will - and get myself kicked off the internet in the process...
Nothing against distros - they're wonderful. But, the whole idea of FOSS is that the computer OWNER gets to choose what to run.
Absolutely, and in a field where this is a concern I'd be buying new PCs every six months if the performance gains outpaced the depreciation (and the overhead and learning curve from all the switching around).
My point is that the decision to buy PCs should be a rational one based on ROI. Pay-me-now-or-pay-me-later isn't a bad thing if the amounts in now or later are the same (which in time-adjusted money is less in the future).
Thanks - NPV calcs drive me insane at work, and sometimes they can be really distorted (usually due to artificial constraints on what doesn't get included to support the latest management fad). However, ultimately they make sense...
Oh, I agree that many of the founding fathers didn't WANT slavery to be the law of the land.
However, they did INTEND for it to be the law of the land (or, rather, delegated to the states) for the reasons that you explained. You can't argue that they didn't understand what the constitution said when they signed it.
I do agree with your feelings on amendments. I'm all for saying the founders got it wrong - let's just vote on it the way we're supposed to and not do it by executive privilege or whatever.
Well, lets think about the purpose of these broadcasts.
Who needs to know the position of an aircraft? Well, that would be the controllers, and any other aircraft in maybe a 10-mile radius.
If you encrypt the broadcast, then for those other aircraft to get position updates they'd need to either share a key, or get updates from ground control. The latter would be useless in uncontrolled airspace - so no collision-detection over the oceans/etc, unless we have satellites relaying all this info. The latter also uses a LOT more bandwidth, as for every broadcast there are now a bunch of rebroadcasts.
So, shared keys are probably the only practical solution. You could just use one master key for everything, which will get leaked and defeat the purpose of the whole thing. Or, you could use session keys that periodically change, and relay those keys around (encrypted) to those that have a need to know. That probably would get messy, but it is possible.
However, is it really worth all that trouble to obscure the location of an aircraft? Anybody with radar will find the aircraft. Anybody with a schedule will be able to tell the general vicinity of any particular aircraft, and ATC communications are in the clear so you can listen to those as well and get route updates.
Now, if we were talking about Air Force 1 or something like that, I can see where you wouldn't want somebody to be able to target that one particular aircraft. However, that is best solved by not having them broadcast their position at all (or radiate any more than needed in general, and then only encrypted). Separation could be achieved by just giving them a clear lane in the sky and not bothering to track where they are in it except in a general way (obviously primary radar will have it when there is coverage).
However, why would terrorists otherwise target particular planes? As others pointed out, if you just want to hit any plane and you have a MANPAD then you just need to situate yourself along a departure/arrival route and wait for somebody to come along. Actually, in this situation you could easily tell which plane is which by listening to a radio - aircraft on final approach/etc are in heavy communication and are cleared individually. The only time they're in a big mix is when they're cruising, and to hit an airliner on cruise you'd need a launcher the size of a truck/tank.
The relevant question is not "what would shock the founders" -- hell, a country where you can't keep slaves anymore would be a shock to many of them.
Well, the Constitution did have to be amended to ban slavery. Don't get me wrong - I hate slavery with a passion, but it was the law of the land, and the founders clearly intended for it to be the law of the land.
When you think about it, individuals owning guns has always been fairly well-correlated with freedom.
Feudalism was very oppressive, and its power derived from the expense of equipping soldiers. An effective military force required a horse (a specialized breed not useful for farming/etc), and all kinds of armor and gear. It also required a squad of support personnel for every knight (to maintain all that gear, and carry it around - it isn't like the knight hiked across Europe in plate and they didn't ride war horses around either).
When guns came out, it changed everything. Now a poor man could be issued a relatively inexpensive musket and they were as powerful as anything the enemy could field short of a siege weapon. The siege weapons themselves weren't all that expensive either - you didn't need many of them and they didn't require feeding like war horses/etc, and they didn't have to be built to fit a particular man like armor. Nobody needed armor, since armor was useless anyway. Guns democratized warfare, and the nobility vanished.
In theory modern weapons carry this even further, except that nobody is allowed to own inexpensive but effective weapons like RPGs/etc. So, power is becoming more concentrated among those who are allowed to own weapons. On the other hand, when needed anybody who controls the police could quickly equip at least a 3rd-world grade army inexpensively.
Now, the flip side to all of this is that more powerful weapons also greatly increase the amount of damage a single nutcase can do to the rest of society. In the middle ages a guy with a sword couldn't really do more than slash up a few people at church or something before being overcome. Even a guy with a barrel of black powder could only do so much since there wasn't anything big to blow up that wasn't also made to withstand siege. Today, just about anybody can get their hands on enough armament to wreak quite a bit of havoc - to the point where now nuclear proliferation is becoming a big concern.
I'm not sure what the solution is - to some extent the genie is out of the bottle. However, I'm not convinced that giving every redneck a howitzer and a MANPAD is going to make things better. Certainly that would make me think twice about flying...
And anybody who knows ANYTHING about money knows that these people did exactly the right thing, except for not having money set aside to cover situations like this.
Let's assume all those computers were 12 years old. Let's assume you'd advocate a 4-year upgrade cycle. They skipped 2 upgrade cycles, and got caught having to do the 3rd one all at once.
Let's assume an upgrade costs $1k - after all, you wanted them to keep their software current as well and that costs money too. For each of those PCs they saved $1k 8 years ago, and $1k 4 years ago.
Let's assume that the business makes a 5% return on capital (if they just put their money in a mutual fund they could make that much - so this is a VERY conservative figure). Plugging that into a TVM calculator tells me that they saved $2692 per PC in TODAY's money deferring those upgrades. Unless they spent more than $2692 per PC as a result of the delay, they saved money.
If your upgrades are more expensive, or if you upgrade more often than 4 years, then the savings is even higher. If the business could have taken advantage of an opportunity by sinking some of that money into capital then they'd make out even better, compared to just having shiny PCs.
Now, the only issue that might apply is that they ended up having a catastrophic failure and suffered downtime, which has a cost of its own. The solution to that isn't to keep upgrading computers under the hope that this will prevent breakdowns (it won't - it just reduces their frequency) - it is to have continuity plans (redundant hardware, backups, etc).
The bottom line is that a PC is capital for a business. It has a return on investment, like any other capital investment. Money spent on that PC is not available to spend on other things. You should spend money on the PC if it has a good ROI, and it is the best investment option available.
If I ran a business I wouldn't be upgrading my PCs all the time either. I'd upgrade them as often as serves a business purpose. If a shiny new PC will make me more productive I'd buy it that afternoon. If it won't, then the money goes into the bank for when I need to replace it. I'd anticipate failures and plan for them.
Uh, Photoshop supports all the stuff he listed.
Or, are you talking about the past? Sure, 15 years ago we didn't have 16-bit color, raw digital images, or any of that stuff. Can it be done? Of course. Is that the current state of the craft - no.
This is like arguing that the features in Blender are irrelevant because in 1982 you didn't need digital rendering software to make an animated movie. Of course you didn't - and you still don't. However, if you want something like the subject of this article, then you need it.
You can always settle for less, and in many cases this is a better use of resources. However, appealing to the past isn't the way to win this argument...
...thus invalidating the certificates owned by those two companies and any drivers signed by them ...only in those cases where CRLs are checked. I wouldn't be surprised if quite a few systems would remain vulnerable almost indefinitely due to the fact that not everything checks these.
Agreed. Resetting the game anytime a bank messes up is what causes them to be so brazen in the first place.
To sell a stock you should be required to own it. To place an order to buy a stock you should be required to put money in escrow. If you place an order, whether via API or voice or whatever, your money or stocks in escrow get traded if the order finds a match - period. If the exchange messes up, sure, go ahead and reset the game (not the trader's fault). If the trader messes up, well, maybe think twice before giving a computer the password to your account.
If you did these simple things, half of the market games would just disappear overnight, and with it most of the systematic risks that do nothing for the economy but which keep people nearing retirement up late at night.
I'd go a step further and say that by bailing out the company that wrote the lousy algorithm, we now increase the risks that others will be willing to take in writing their computer algorithms.
If the company allows a computer to trade on its behalf, and it sells Google for 10 cents to anybody willing to buy it, then that's just too bad for them. Maybe then companies will:
1. Check their code more carefully before turning it loose on the market.
2. Rethink whether having robots doing all their trades is really a good move to the degree that it is happening.
I agree - the people who posted 10 cent bids or whatever weren't "gaming the system." They put in legitimate offers to buy a stock at a price, and some idiot decided to actually take their offer. If I offer to buy your car for a nickel and you shake my hands, then I can't complain when it turns out to be worth less, and you can't complain if it turns out to be worth more, unless somebody actively misrepresented what was being traded. When the item under trade is a share in a company on an exchange, there can't be misrepresentation unless an insider is involved.
Talk about moral hazard - reversing trades because some idiot wrote a computer program to sell tons of stock at any price whatsoever!
What they should have done is left all those trades alone. Nobody would have lost anything unless they were taking any BID at any price on any stock with any valuation.
What the regulators did sends a clear message - make your computer algorithms more aggressive so that stuff happens even more! If you make money with your aggressive algorithm, you keep it! If you accidentally introduce a bug, then we'll just give you your money back.
Imagine I write a program that goes around ebay looking for undervalued stuff and buys it. Now, suppose that my program finds a plastic toy porche and bids $80k on it, and I win the auction. Should I be able to back out of the trade entirely? The solution isn't to punish people merely for placing BIDs that idiots are willing to fill - it is to not give computer programs the ability to spend money unless you are prepared to face the consequences.
Nope, definitely close to $2. The marginal cost of pharmaceuticals is very low. The problem is that the fixed costs are very high, which means that unless a drug sells for at least hundreds of millions of dollars per year it isn't worth targeting. Of course, lots of drugs end up making less and still are on the market, but that is usually because somebody was hoping to make more off of them but it didn't work out for some reason, and once most of the costs are sunk it is worth it to at least make back some of the money.
Unfortunately, drugs cost a lot of money to develop, and that is why they cost a lot under patents. Countries that control prices just leach off of the R&D expenditures of countries that do not.
And yes, I do realize that evil pharma companies spend more on advertising than R&D. I don't like it, but the cost of drugs wouldn't go down if they didn't (in fact, if their volumes dropped due to less utilization the prices would probably rise - though with less utilization total money spent on the drug would go down, and healthcare costs would go up or down in accordance with whatever the true impact of the drug is on healthcare costs). They probably spend gobs on executive compensation too, and good luck changing that...
And yes, I realize that lots of drugs are invented by European companies despite price controls. The American consumers still are the ones paying for it, since those European companies make 80% of their profits in the US.
WikiLeaks is an interesting organization, but they aren't an army.
Ironically enough, they also don't think the US Army should be able to present a "united front" and leak their documents anytime they can. If transparency is good for everybody else, then it is good for WikiLeaks...
This is probably a bit of both, since if the ship were unmanned it probably would be a lot easier to design it to just run at full throttle the whole time. If it didn't have big wings and a windshield maybe air resistance wouldn't be a problem.
I do agree that stress and acceleration impacts all aspects of the spacecraft, and not just the crew.