Based on what I've heard, science and engineering PhD programs are not immune to what TFA is talking about - overproduction of PhDs. More or less every type of doctorate program is turning out way, way more PhD's than could ever possibly find employment in academia. Industry can at least soak up some of the surplus in science and engineering fields, but I suspect that a lot of those folks are taking positions that could have been filled at the masters or even bachelors level. And your fine arts types - just screwed. There is simply no market for this degree.
Of course, nothing is likely to change - universities need the steady supply of slave labor... er, graduate students to run their labs, do the actual teaching, etc. So they'll take their money, string them along for a while as postdocs, non-tenure track professors, etc... then toss them aside. And the big pile of debt becomes the student's problem. It's a shame, but not likely to change until such time as people wise up about their chances of productive employment after getting one of these degrees.
... is not that they can't operate like a business. It's that Congress won't LET them operate like a business. They're legally prohibited from offering all kinds of services (wouldn't want them competing w/ private industry, dontcha know). They can't close the hundreds of remote rural post offices that operate at a loss. They can't eliminate Saturday service. And really, that's fine - it's a government agency, why should they have to make a profit? But holy jeebus, Congress - make up your mind. You can't prevent the USPS from doing the things they would need to do to get profitable... and simultaneously bitch because they're not profitable. Pick one.
Even further OT, but Amtrak has the same issue. They have to compete with heavily, heavily subsidized federal highways, aren't allowed to discontinue money-losing routes... and get bitched at because they lose money. Well, no shit - of course they lose money under those conditions.
Dude, I think this is right as far as it goes - your average government department, and employees of those departments, do like to do things by the book. But I'm not worrying about my mail being read by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. I'm worried about it being read by the NSA, CIA, or whoever. And THOSE guys don't need an economic incentive. And whatever gov't department that would end up providing the e-mail service would no doubt have written into the "book" that they cough up any citizen's email files to $3_LETTER_AGENCY at any time if said agency suspects him/her of being a terrorist (probable cause? riiiight).
Ultimately, I agree with the GP - pretty much all the ISPs are ALREADY coughing up whatever data the government wants, whenever they ask for it. Not to mention the fact that the NSA is vacuuming up more or less any voice or email conversations they can get their hands on - which is most of them. I'm not happy about the situation, but it is what it is.
Here's a hint: the utility of putting a laser weapon on a ship: not exactly a secret, and hasn't been since, well, lasers were invented. I don't think we're really giving away the farm here.
And it would be very difficult to store enough chaff rounds onboard to do a continuous barrage, especially if you were a small vessel. And current chaff launchers would melt down if you tried to fire them this regularly. And small boats (the intended targets for this thing) mostly don't have room for even the chaff launcher, much less the ammo.
The reactors in question are fitted with earthquake sensors, so as soon as they detect a certain level of ground acceleration, the rods automatically drop in. The trouble is that the reactor is 1) still quite hot, and 2) continues to generate a low level of heat even with the rods fully inserted. Cooling is required for at least a couple of days following a shutdown to get the reactor to a safe state. They were not able to do that because both primary and secondary (diesel generator) power to the cooling pumps failed.
It would pretty effectively poison the local area for a long, long time.
The whole bloody reactor is sitting in a containment vessel designed precisely to prevent large scale radiation leaks.
It was also designed not to overheat, require venting of the steam/hydrogen mix, and have the roof blow off the outer structure. So maybe people can be forgiven for being concerned. Sure, it's important not to overstate the risks here - the containment vessel is almost certainly going to work. But we also shouldn't pretend that people are silly for recognizing the fact that there's SOME risk.
I own several computers - among them is a Macbook Pro. I needed to be able to run a few Windows programs on it, and I just wanted to play around with Ubuntu, so I installed them both (Win 7, Ubuntu 9.10) in virtual machines (VirtualBox FTW!). The process is exactly like installing onto a bare hard disk. Both installations were pretty easy, and both required some amount of time to download and install updates. Neither one required any significant amount of searching for drivers. Maybe the situation would be different installing Windows on a physical box... but I've done that in years past too, and didn't really have any problems there either.
Bottom line: those folks who think their monitor is the computer and IE is the internet would have trouble with either install. Those with skills more advanced than that probably could handle either install.
... when it's cloudy. My first deployment in the Navy we had a casualty to our Transit system while enroute from Hawaii to Samoa. No problem, we'll just do celestial nav. Except it was cloudy... for days. We had to dead reckon for like 3 days before we got a fix. Luckily we weren't too far off track, but you can get really screwed up.
The US military can't simply "turn off the satellites you're using". For one thing, I'm not sure it's even possible to switch them off. Further, the satellites are not geosynchronous, so they'd have to continually be switching satellites on and off as they rose over your home territory, and that would blind huge swathes of the world (including the US military itself). The only conceivable thing they could do is turn selective availability back on, and that doesn't degrade the position all that much. The DoD has also agreed that they will not use SA anymore because it pisses off the FAA too badly.
I think you can breathe easy with respect to continued use of GPS - denying it to certain parts of the world is such a pain in the ass that I doubt it would ever be done.
Most of these effects don't have anything to do with the position of the equipment involved - it has to do with timing. Keeping power stations all in the same phase is critically dependent on knowing *exactly* what time it is. GPS does that very well.
In a way, I agree with the GP, though - a sense of perspective is warranted. GPS is relatively easy to jam... over a small area. So sure, maybe your local airport will have schedule disruptions, or maybe your local power plant will go offline. Those are indeed bad things. But individual power plants and airports have problems all the time, and life goes on. What's not easy to do is bring down the ENTIRE GPS system. Jammers can screw things up locally, but it's not as if our entire national air traffic system will go on the blink after being attacked by a few soda-can GPS jammers.
We had Omega on a couple of ships I was on, and... it never worked. LORAN was cool if you were close enough to shore, Transit was (usually) good for a couple of fixes a day, but I don't recall ever, ever getting an Omega fix.
There is no particular reason why you couldn't re implement GPS using ground mounted atomic clocks and a bunch of towers. Conveniently, we have an infrastructure of cellphone towers neatly mapping with civilization, also providing coverage to big cities.
This wouldn't be world-wide, though, unless you could convince a bunch of other countries to play along. And that might be a hard sell: countries interested in their own nav systems are already building satellite constellations (GLONASS, Gallileo), or just free-riding on GPS.
Even cheap ass generic soybean oil is way more than a dollar a gallon, to say nothing of the cost of the other ingredients. Some people may be able to get free used oil from their local greasy spoon (it's less available than you think), but that solution simply doesn't scale. There's not enough waste oil coming out of the restaurant business to fuel very many cars.
It's more along the lines of helping confirm the emperor's belief that he was dressed, encouraging him to go on parade, and then pointing out to the crowd that he's naked. It's not like he just pointed out a problem here - he deliberately submitted a bullshit paper for publication, then laughed at the journal for actually publishing it. Not cool.
No way that thing is airtight, and the cracks will be quite difficult to find in a structure of any size. You'd absolutely have to build a pressurized inner building inside the cave.
You're right, doing any kind of construction project on the moon is going to be really hard, partly because the conditions are pretty tough and partly because it's really, really expensive to bring all the tools and equipment you'd need.
But dude, if making a pipeline is going to be hard, why is digging a cave going to be easier? You'd have to design a bunch of construction equipment that didn't rely on diesel engines (no air), and then lift a bunch of them to the moon. Plus you need operators for that stuff, and where do they live in the meantime? How do you do all your civil engineering stuff - studies of the structural strength of the ground, etc - on the moon?
I think that if anything, building a cave from scratch is even harder.
For one thing, there's no practical use whatsoever for He3 at the moment. It's in demand as a feedstock for fusion research, and that's fine, but it certainly is not used for "lots and lots of stuff that makes our modern world possible".
Secondly, there's barely any He3 on the moon - concentrations of.01 ppm in the sunlit areas. Meaning you'd have to mine a hundred million tons of lunar regolith to get a ton of He3. That wouldn't be economically feasible on earth, much less the moon.
Solar power. The atmosphere doesn't, practically speaking, impede the sun that much. It's certainly true that you could generate solar power on earth, much, much more cheaply - being as how doing so on the moon requires you to lift your solar panels 250,000 miles straight up (at tens of thousands of dollars/kg). It's also true that we don't have any use for solar power on the moon at the moment, so you'd have to invest more money to beam the power back.
Limitless material resources. Dude, the moon is mostly made of silicates - you know, the same stuff the earth is made of. Why would we want to spend uncounted billions of dollars to dig up rocks that have practically no economic value?
Environmental impact. Sure, you don't have to worry about polluting the environment, and that is a savings. But you do have to bring earth's environment with you - oxygen, water, food, etc; or alternatively, the equipment needed to produce those items. You wiped out your savings many times over right there.
The GP is correct - there's nothing economically worthwhile to do on the moon. Maybe it's worthwhile for scientific purposes, but that's a case that is tough to make if you're talking about colonization.
I know you were joking, but for those people who don't get it - there is no dark side of the moon. There's a FAR side of the moon, but the sun rises and sets there just as it does on the near side.
Practically all the for-profits are tech schools - if you're getting a "bullshit Bachelor of Arts degree", you're not getting at, say, DeVry. What you're really saying here is that you don't think BAs are worth the money. And you may well be right about that. But you ought to compare apples to apples: is a degree from a for profit tech school a better value than, say, a degree from Texas A&M? Given the fact that many of these for-profits have been accused of actively ripping off their students (not just providing a legitimate education of dubious value, but actually stealing their money), I think that's a hard case to make.
In all reality both are doing business for profit, the only difference is where the profit comes from and how they can adjust the expenditures at the end of the day. That non-profit that charged you $90,000 for a bullshit Bachelor of Arts degree sure as hell didn't do it for the warm and fuzzy feeling they get.
Only if you redefine the word "profit" to mean something that it, well, doesn't. For-profit organizations have investors/owners, who have put money into the organization and expect to be taking out something of value at some point, either in the form of dividends or increased capital value. Non-profits are organized as quasi-government agencies or as foundations of some sort. There are no investors or owners - just contributors, and there's no profit to be taken out. That doesn't mean that non-profits don't try to increase their revenue - of course they do. Either for the noble goal of increasing the quality and quantity of service they provide, or the less noble one of growing someone's empire, but either way, yes - they want to take in more money. That doesn't doesn't make them equivalent to a for-profit organization.
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Based on what I've heard, science and engineering PhD programs are not immune to what TFA is talking about - overproduction of PhDs. More or less every type of doctorate program is turning out way, way more PhD's than could ever possibly find employment in academia. Industry can at least soak up some of the surplus in science and engineering fields, but I suspect that a lot of those folks are taking positions that could have been filled at the masters or even bachelors level. And your fine arts types - just screwed. There is simply no market for this degree.
Of course, nothing is likely to change - universities need the steady supply of slave labor... er, graduate students to run their labs, do the actual teaching, etc. So they'll take their money, string them along for a while as postdocs, non-tenure track professors, etc... then toss them aside. And the big pile of debt becomes the student's problem. It's a shame, but not likely to change until such time as people wise up about their chances of productive employment after getting one of these degrees.
... is not that they can't operate like a business. It's that Congress won't LET them operate like a business. They're legally prohibited from offering all kinds of services (wouldn't want them competing w/ private industry, dontcha know). They can't close the hundreds of remote rural post offices that operate at a loss. They can't eliminate Saturday service. And really, that's fine - it's a government agency, why should they have to make a profit? But holy jeebus, Congress - make up your mind. You can't prevent the USPS from doing the things they would need to do to get profitable... and simultaneously bitch because they're not profitable. Pick one.
Even further OT, but Amtrak has the same issue. They have to compete with heavily, heavily subsidized federal highways, aren't allowed to discontinue money-losing routes... and get bitched at because they lose money. Well, no shit - of course they lose money under those conditions.
Dude, I think this is right as far as it goes - your average government department, and employees of those departments, do like to do things by the book. But I'm not worrying about my mail being read by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. I'm worried about it being read by the NSA, CIA, or whoever. And THOSE guys don't need an economic incentive. And whatever gov't department that would end up providing the e-mail service would no doubt have written into the "book" that they cough up any citizen's email files to $3_LETTER_AGENCY at any time if said agency suspects him/her of being a terrorist (probable cause? riiiight).
Ultimately, I agree with the GP - pretty much all the ISPs are ALREADY coughing up whatever data the government wants, whenever they ask for it. Not to mention the fact that the NSA is vacuuming up more or less any voice or email conversations they can get their hands on - which is most of them. I'm not happy about the situation, but it is what it is.
Here's a hint: the utility of putting a laser weapon on a ship: not exactly a secret, and hasn't been since, well, lasers were invented. I don't think we're really giving away the farm here.
And it would be very difficult to store enough chaff rounds onboard to do a continuous barrage, especially if you were a small vessel. And current chaff launchers would melt down if you tried to fire them this regularly. And small boats (the intended targets for this thing) mostly don't have room for even the chaff launcher, much less the ammo.
Chaff is not a practical countermeasure to this.
The reactors in question are fitted with earthquake sensors, so as soon as they detect a certain level of ground acceleration, the rods automatically drop in. The trouble is that the reactor is 1) still quite hot, and 2) continues to generate a low level of heat even with the rods fully inserted. Cooling is required for at least a couple of days following a shutdown to get the reactor to a safe state. They were not able to do that because both primary and secondary (diesel generator) power to the cooling pumps failed.
It would pretty effectively poison the local area for a long, long time.
It was also designed not to overheat, require venting of the steam/hydrogen mix, and have the roof blow off the outer structure. So maybe people can be forgiven for being concerned. Sure, it's important not to overstate the risks here - the containment vessel is almost certainly going to work. But we also shouldn't pretend that people are silly for recognizing the fact that there's SOME risk.
We could, you know, stop giving rich people giant tax breaks and we wouldn't have this deficit problem.
You're right, this game is easy to play!
I own several computers - among them is a Macbook Pro. I needed to be able to run a few Windows programs on it, and I just wanted to play around with Ubuntu, so I installed them both (Win 7, Ubuntu 9.10) in virtual machines (VirtualBox FTW!). The process is exactly like installing onto a bare hard disk. Both installations were pretty easy, and both required some amount of time to download and install updates. Neither one required any significant amount of searching for drivers. Maybe the situation would be different installing Windows on a physical box... but I've done that in years past too, and didn't really have any problems there either.
Bottom line: those folks who think their monitor is the computer and IE is the internet would have trouble with either install. Those with skills more advanced than that probably could handle either install.
... when it's cloudy. My first deployment in the Navy we had a casualty to our Transit system while enroute from Hawaii to Samoa. No problem, we'll just do celestial nav. Except it was cloudy... for days. We had to dead reckon for like 3 days before we got a fix. Luckily we weren't too far off track, but you can get really screwed up.
Polaris had an inertial nav system that was initialized by a star fix. I believe some of the Russian ICBMs worked the same way.
That must be why we've never had a train collision in the age of signals! Dude, seriously. Signals are not that great of a way to prevent collisions.
The US military can't simply "turn off the satellites you're using". For one thing, I'm not sure it's even possible to switch them off. Further, the satellites are not geosynchronous, so they'd have to continually be switching satellites on and off as they rose over your home territory, and that would blind huge swathes of the world (including the US military itself). The only conceivable thing they could do is turn selective availability back on, and that doesn't degrade the position all that much. The DoD has also agreed that they will not use SA anymore because it pisses off the FAA too badly.
I think you can breathe easy with respect to continued use of GPS - denying it to certain parts of the world is such a pain in the ass that I doubt it would ever be done.
Most of these effects don't have anything to do with the position of the equipment involved - it has to do with timing. Keeping power stations all in the same phase is critically dependent on knowing *exactly* what time it is. GPS does that very well.
In a way, I agree with the GP, though - a sense of perspective is warranted. GPS is relatively easy to jam... over a small area. So sure, maybe your local airport will have schedule disruptions, or maybe your local power plant will go offline. Those are indeed bad things. But individual power plants and airports have problems all the time, and life goes on. What's not easy to do is bring down the ENTIRE GPS system. Jammers can screw things up locally, but it's not as if our entire national air traffic system will go on the blink after being attacked by a few soda-can GPS jammers.
We had Omega on a couple of ships I was on, and... it never worked. LORAN was cool if you were close enough to shore, Transit was (usually) good for a couple of fixes a day, but I don't recall ever, ever getting an Omega fix.
This wouldn't be world-wide, though, unless you could convince a bunch of other countries to play along. And that might be a hard sell: countries interested in their own nav systems are already building satellite constellations (GLONASS, Gallileo), or just free-riding on GPS.
Being as how they're the ones who would now have a huge market for what's currently considered a waste product...
... how many Chinese restaurants are there in your town? And how many drivers?
There's just not enough used vegetable oil out there to even put a dent in our fuel consumption.
Even cheap ass generic soybean oil is way more than a dollar a gallon, to say nothing of the cost of the other ingredients. Some people may be able to get free used oil from their local greasy spoon (it's less available than you think), but that solution simply doesn't scale. There's not enough waste oil coming out of the restaurant business to fuel very many cars.
It's more along the lines of helping confirm the emperor's belief that he was dressed, encouraging him to go on parade, and then pointing out to the crowd that he's naked. It's not like he just pointed out a problem here - he deliberately submitted a bullshit paper for publication, then laughed at the journal for actually publishing it. Not cool.
No way that thing is airtight, and the cracks will be quite difficult to find in a structure of any size. You'd absolutely have to build a pressurized inner building inside the cave.
You're right, doing any kind of construction project on the moon is going to be really hard, partly because the conditions are pretty tough and partly because it's really, really expensive to bring all the tools and equipment you'd need.
But dude, if making a pipeline is going to be hard, why is digging a cave going to be easier? You'd have to design a bunch of construction equipment that didn't rely on diesel engines (no air), and then lift a bunch of them to the moon. Plus you need operators for that stuff, and where do they live in the meantime? How do you do all your civil engineering stuff - studies of the structural strength of the ground, etc - on the moon?
I think that if anything, building a cave from scratch is even harder.
For one thing, there's no practical use whatsoever for He3 at the moment. It's in demand as a feedstock for fusion research, and that's fine, but it certainly is not used for "lots and lots of stuff that makes our modern world possible".
Secondly, there's barely any He3 on the moon - concentrations of .01 ppm in the sunlit areas. Meaning you'd have to mine a hundred million tons of lunar regolith to get a ton of He3. That wouldn't be economically feasible on earth, much less the moon.
Here we go again.
The GP is correct - there's nothing economically worthwhile to do on the moon. Maybe it's worthwhile for scientific purposes, but that's a case that is tough to make if you're talking about colonization.
I know you were joking, but for those people who don't get it - there is no dark side of the moon. There's a FAR side of the moon, but the sun rises and sets there just as it does on the near side.
Practically all the for-profits are tech schools - if you're getting a "bullshit Bachelor of Arts degree", you're not getting at, say, DeVry. What you're really saying here is that you don't think BAs are worth the money. And you may well be right about that. But you ought to compare apples to apples: is a degree from a for profit tech school a better value than, say, a degree from Texas A&M? Given the fact that many of these for-profits have been accused of actively ripping off their students (not just providing a legitimate education of dubious value, but actually stealing their money), I think that's a hard case to make.
Only if you redefine the word "profit" to mean something that it, well, doesn't. For-profit organizations have investors/owners, who have put money into the organization and expect to be taking out something of value at some point, either in the form of dividends or increased capital value. Non-profits are organized as quasi-government agencies or as foundations of some sort. There are no investors or owners - just contributors, and there's no profit to be taken out. That doesn't mean that non-profits don't try to increase their revenue - of course they do. Either for the noble goal of increasing the quality and quantity of service they provide, or the less noble one of growing someone's empire, but either way, yes - they want to take in more money. That doesn't doesn't make them equivalent to a for-profit organization.