Because that would also require an installation that may not fit your place? Let's say the front of your house aims north
So, put the cells on the back side of your house? Unless you have a very unusual wedge-shaped roof, it slopes both ways. Being in Seattle might be more of a problem, but realistically, most people don't live in Seattle. Some fairly large percentage of houses could generate at least a couple kW with solar PV.
We are far, far, from being in an unsustainable position with respect to short term debt. The bond markets agree: the US Treasury is borrowing money at some of the lowest rates in history, which would not be the case if we were in debt trouble.
The other thing that chaps my ass about this whole deal is that the Congresscritters bitching loudest about our supposedly massive debt load... just rammed through more giant tax cuts for rich people. And have set up rules stating that in their budget process, they can cut taxes as much as they want without offsetting them with spending cuts. If they were serious about debt, they'd stop doing that. But the only thing they're really interested in is 1) making trouble for Obama, and 2) serving their rich masters.
Then you have to sift through all the stupid "frist p0st" and goatse trolls - it defeats the whole purpose of moderation. What we had before was way more useful.
Even comments made since the new system came out have the same problem - when you go to look at your comment, you're taken to the top of the thread... and have to click through every comment between the top and you. Nuts.
While I like the look of the design, limiting the depth of displayed replies is going to seriously cut down on the discussion factor. I wish they'd fix this.
I was exaggerating - sure, you could do the kind of thing you're talking about, and that really would be useful. But you'd only get results for a few days, and then your probe would blow right past the system. The probe would cost an unimaginable sum of money anyway - why not spend the extra dollars to make it able to decelerate? You'd be able to get a lot more out of it. I just don't think it's worth it to spend so much on a probe that sails right through the target system so quickly.
Somehow I don't think the designers really thought this through (what a surprise). Although it looks nice, there's a lot less utility in this new design.
I noticed that I started getting way, way fewer replies to my comments than normal, and when I went to look for my comments... they were invisible. Not modded down - most were still 2's. But you couldn't see them. Not sure what's going on.
Example: someone just blew up a subway station in Moscow. Where did the bomb come from? Hint: not the moon. Regarding the top and bottom of the gravity well: so? We can already nuke any point on the surface of the earth. Adding the moon to the picture adds a lot of expense, but nothing really in terms of capability.
... that anything you can do (in terms of military effects) from the moon, you can do from the earth, only a hell of a lot cheaper. We can bomb cities from earth already.
Because the GP didn't say that Heinlein and Rand didn't know they were writing fiction. He said that certain READERS didn't know they were writing fiction.
We can already destroy satellites from earth just fine, thanks. And if current ground-based ASAT technology ain't good enough, you could sure develop more capable systems for a lot cheaper than colonizing the freaking moon.
So many posters here have a totally unrealistic view of the costs involved in doing something like this. We're not close to being able to economically recover resources from anywhere in space.
a couple thoughts here. 1) Tritium isn't all that common on the moon either. 2) The market for tritium is very tiny right now, and if you showed up on earth with a giant supply... suffice it to say that prices would promptly drop through the floor. It's expensive because the supply is small relative to the demand... but the demand is still quite small.
Marginal military value of the moon: zero. Consider that we already have at least somewhat effective means of destroying enemy satellites in orbit, and could surely develop more effective ones cheaper than setting up a moon base. We also still have enough nukes to more or less resurface the earth. So as a place from which to launch weapons, you're not getting much bang for the buck here.
The other thing brought up by TFA is the old canard of He3 on the moon. 1) Call me when we figure out how to do something useful with He3. 2) He3 concentrations on the moon are on the order of.01 ppm - meaning you'd have to process a hundred million tons of lunar regolith to get a ton of He3. That wouldn't be cost effective on earth, much less on the moon.
Taken another way, if Intel waited until they could make a 16MHz chip, they would have gone bankrupt, so making the 4.77MHz 8088 was well worth the investment.
The obvious difference being that Intel could actually sell the 8088 and recoup some investment. This project is so huge that it would be like leaping straight from the transistor to a huge supercomputer. And you can't sell the supercomputer.
I have to say that while this kind of thing is interesting to think about, the amount of scientific bang for the buck is laughably small. The expense of building this thing would be beyond staggering, and what you'd end up with is some closeup pictures of Barnard's star. Nice, but...
Why the hell couldn't they build in the capability to slow the damn thing down? If you could go into orbit around the star you might have something worth doing.
Per TFA - we'd have to mine the atmosphere of Jupiter for 20 years to accumulate sufficient He3, then send this very, very expensive ship on a one-way trip, which will take 50 more years... and it's going to fly through the system at 10% of the speed of light? Why the hell would anyone bother? I mean, holy crap - the whole thing is pretty far-fetched anyway, so why not ask for the pony: the ability to freaking slow down before you get to Barnard's Star? Then maybe you could do some useful science.
The comments section of your own account... the top level still looks fine: you see a list of your comments with their scores and number of replies. But when you try to click one of your comments, you get... a link to some other comment. I use this section of Slashdot all the time to see who's responded to my comments and possibly reply. That no longer seems to be possible, which is a major downer.
Two-year degrees mean so little that I would ignore them and test the applicant thoroughly.
Not so. I hire a lot of ex-military guys who are technical experts in various weapon systems. I'm way more likely to hire the guy with 20 years experience and the AA than an equivalent person without the degree. Why? One of the things we do a lot: write analysis. The guy with the AA, if nothing else, wrote a bunch of papers for his English 101 class that some community college prof approved of. The guy with the HS diploma didn't. So the AA guy is much more likely to be able to write up his findings without being an embarrassment to the company.
Dude, seriously. This state of affairs has been going on since, what 1950? In any case, not nearly long enough to have any evolutionary effect. If we continue going about our social and economic organization unchanged for tens of thousands of years, then we might have issues. But that seems pretty fantastically unlikely.
I'm a hiring manager in an engineering firm - my experience is that "these kids today" are mostly just fine. While I've hired a few that have been sub-par, by and large they've been hard-working, smart, good employees. Reports of the decline and fall of western civilization are greatly exaggerated.
I don't think this is completely true - there are still plenty of skilled labor jobs that effectively can't be outsourced. The guy/gal who comes to do your plumbing, electrical work, HVAC, etc... it's not like they can send your house to Pakistan to get fixed, so the repair person pretty much has to be local.
But yeah, I agree with your larger point - the middle class is getting hollowed out as at least manufacturing skilled labor is going away. And don't think you're safe if you're a "knowledge worker" - capitalism is working on replacing you too. Initiatives such as ISO 9000, CMMi, etc? The object of the game there is to vacuum knowledge out of your brain and into procedures that the company owns - and can get any trained monkey off the street to do for less than you. These programs are nothing more than efforts to turn engineering work from a craft done by skilled workers into an assembly line process that can be done by anyone. I don't know if they'll succeed, but they're trying.
- 90% of the US income tax is still paid by the top 10%. i.e. 3% of the burden per million wealthy persons.
Classic right wing move there - to act as if income tax is all there is. Here's another one for you: 90% of the payroll taxes (Social Security, Medicare) are paid by poor and middle class people, as are the vast majority of sales and excise taxes. The net result is that the total tax burden on rich people is not very much different for the rich than it is for the masses. And the rich, of course, don't miss the money that much.
... but I am a hiring manager. I almost always build into requisitions words to the effect of "degree or equivalent experience" - most of our positions could go either way. Sometimes we're hiring for positions where you really, no kidding, need to have a degree, but not very often. Because our work is engineering/analysis, even our technician types have to write a lot, so an associates degree would give you a leg up there - it gives me confidence that you've actually been able to write a paper that an English prof accepted.
By definition, the fact that rural areas don't have many people living in them means that those places barely affect the statistics at all - they're expressed in connections per person rather than connections per unit area. If the US was doing well in our densely populated urban areas, we'd be doing well overall - because that would dominate the statistics. But in fact we're not doing well there either.
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So, put the cells on the back side of your house? Unless you have a very unusual wedge-shaped roof, it slopes both ways. Being in Seattle might be more of a problem, but realistically, most people don't live in Seattle. Some fairly large percentage of houses could generate at least a couple kW with solar PV.
We are far, far, from being in an unsustainable position with respect to short term debt. The bond markets agree: the US Treasury is borrowing money at some of the lowest rates in history, which would not be the case if we were in debt trouble.
The other thing that chaps my ass about this whole deal is that the Congresscritters bitching loudest about our supposedly massive debt load... just rammed through more giant tax cuts for rich people. And have set up rules stating that in their budget process, they can cut taxes as much as they want without offsetting them with spending cuts. If they were serious about debt, they'd stop doing that. But the only thing they're really interested in is 1) making trouble for Obama, and 2) serving their rich masters.
Then you have to sift through all the stupid "frist p0st" and goatse trolls - it defeats the whole purpose of moderation. What we had before was way more useful.
Even comments made since the new system came out have the same problem - when you go to look at your comment, you're taken to the top of the thread... and have to click through every comment between the top and you. Nuts.
While I like the look of the design, limiting the depth of displayed replies is going to seriously cut down on the discussion factor. I wish they'd fix this.
I was exaggerating - sure, you could do the kind of thing you're talking about, and that really would be useful. But you'd only get results for a few days, and then your probe would blow right past the system. The probe would cost an unimaginable sum of money anyway - why not spend the extra dollars to make it able to decelerate? You'd be able to get a lot more out of it. I just don't think it's worth it to spend so much on a probe that sails right through the target system so quickly.
Somehow I don't think the designers really thought this through (what a surprise). Although it looks nice, there's a lot less utility in this new design.
I noticed that I started getting way, way fewer replies to my comments than normal, and when I went to look for my comments... they were invisible. Not modded down - most were still 2's. But you couldn't see them. Not sure what's going on.
Example: someone just blew up a subway station in Moscow. Where did the bomb come from? Hint: not the moon. Regarding the top and bottom of the gravity well: so? We can already nuke any point on the surface of the earth. Adding the moon to the picture adds a lot of expense, but nothing really in terms of capability.
... that anything you can do (in terms of military effects) from the moon, you can do from the earth, only a hell of a lot cheaper. We can bomb cities from earth already.
Because the GP didn't say that Heinlein and Rand didn't know they were writing fiction. He said that certain READERS didn't know they were writing fiction.
We can already destroy satellites from earth just fine, thanks. And if current ground-based ASAT technology ain't good enough, you could sure develop more capable systems for a lot cheaper than colonizing the freaking moon.
So many posters here have a totally unrealistic view of the costs involved in doing something like this. We're not close to being able to economically recover resources from anywhere in space.
a couple thoughts here. 1) Tritium isn't all that common on the moon either. 2) The market for tritium is very tiny right now, and if you showed up on earth with a giant supply... suffice it to say that prices would promptly drop through the floor. It's expensive because the supply is small relative to the demand... but the demand is still quite small.
Marginal military value of the moon: zero. Consider that we already have at least somewhat effective means of destroying enemy satellites in orbit, and could surely develop more effective ones cheaper than setting up a moon base. We also still have enough nukes to more or less resurface the earth. So as a place from which to launch weapons, you're not getting much bang for the buck here.
The other thing brought up by TFA is the old canard of He3 on the moon. 1) Call me when we figure out how to do something useful with He3. 2) He3 concentrations on the moon are on the order of .01 ppm - meaning you'd have to process a hundred million tons of lunar regolith to get a ton of He3. That wouldn't be cost effective on earth, much less on the moon.
The obvious difference being that Intel could actually sell the 8088 and recoup some investment. This project is so huge that it would be like leaping straight from the transistor to a huge supercomputer. And you can't sell the supercomputer.
I have to say that while this kind of thing is interesting to think about, the amount of scientific bang for the buck is laughably small. The expense of building this thing would be beyond staggering, and what you'd end up with is some closeup pictures of Barnard's star. Nice, but...
Why the hell couldn't they build in the capability to slow the damn thing down? If you could go into orbit around the star you might have something worth doing.
Per TFA - we'd have to mine the atmosphere of Jupiter for 20 years to accumulate sufficient He3, then send this very, very expensive ship on a one-way trip, which will take 50 more years... and it's going to fly through the system at 10% of the speed of light? Why the hell would anyone bother? I mean, holy crap - the whole thing is pretty far-fetched anyway, so why not ask for the pony: the ability to freaking slow down before you get to Barnard's Star? Then maybe you could do some useful science.
The comments section of your own account... the top level still looks fine: you see a list of your comments with their scores and number of replies. But when you try to click one of your comments, you get... a link to some other comment. I use this section of Slashdot all the time to see who's responded to my comments and possibly reply. That no longer seems to be possible, which is a major downer.
I do really like the new look, though.
Not so. I hire a lot of ex-military guys who are technical experts in various weapon systems. I'm way more likely to hire the guy with 20 years experience and the AA than an equivalent person without the degree. Why? One of the things we do a lot: write analysis. The guy with the AA, if nothing else, wrote a bunch of papers for his English 101 class that some community college prof approved of. The guy with the HS diploma didn't. So the AA guy is much more likely to be able to write up his findings without being an embarrassment to the company.
Dude, seriously. This state of affairs has been going on since, what 1950? In any case, not nearly long enough to have any evolutionary effect. If we continue going about our social and economic organization unchanged for tens of thousands of years, then we might have issues. But that seems pretty fantastically unlikely.
I'm a hiring manager in an engineering firm - my experience is that "these kids today" are mostly just fine. While I've hired a few that have been sub-par, by and large they've been hard-working, smart, good employees. Reports of the decline and fall of western civilization are greatly exaggerated.
I don't think this is completely true - there are still plenty of skilled labor jobs that effectively can't be outsourced. The guy/gal who comes to do your plumbing, electrical work, HVAC, etc... it's not like they can send your house to Pakistan to get fixed, so the repair person pretty much has to be local.
But yeah, I agree with your larger point - the middle class is getting hollowed out as at least manufacturing skilled labor is going away. And don't think you're safe if you're a "knowledge worker" - capitalism is working on replacing you too. Initiatives such as ISO 9000, CMMi, etc? The object of the game there is to vacuum knowledge out of your brain and into procedures that the company owns - and can get any trained monkey off the street to do for less than you. These programs are nothing more than efforts to turn engineering work from a craft done by skilled workers into an assembly line process that can be done by anyone. I don't know if they'll succeed, but they're trying.
Classic right wing move there - to act as if income tax is all there is. Here's another one for you: 90% of the payroll taxes (Social Security, Medicare) are paid by poor and middle class people, as are the vast majority of sales and excise taxes. The net result is that the total tax burden on rich people is not very much different for the rich than it is for the masses. And the rich, of course, don't miss the money that much.
... but I am a hiring manager. I almost always build into requisitions words to the effect of "degree or equivalent experience" - most of our positions could go either way. Sometimes we're hiring for positions where you really, no kidding, need to have a degree, but not very often. Because our work is engineering/analysis, even our technician types have to write a lot, so an associates degree would give you a leg up there - it gives me confidence that you've actually been able to write a paper that an English prof accepted.
Food for thought.
By definition, the fact that rural areas don't have many people living in them means that those places barely affect the statistics at all - they're expressed in connections per person rather than connections per unit area. If the US was doing well in our densely populated urban areas, we'd be doing well overall - because that would dominate the statistics. But in fact we're not doing well there either.