I don't mind competing against a foreign national on even footing. What I don't like is competing against an indentured servant, where they are unable to climb to their level of competence. Back in the 90's I was working with an Iraqi, great guy, engineer in with a bunch of math and programming experience. He was a junior technician making $5 per hour less than I was, it became a sticking point while we (full technicians) were negotiating raises.
I found a way to get him quickly transferred into another position (data reporting), getting him a $3 raise..
Probably bringing up my salary ~$.75 more than if he had stayed; though this may be a dubious guess.
My manager saw the wisdom in being able to hold an indentured servant over our heads, so he hired another H1-B. We found her a transfer in under a month. Since the H1-B fees were coming out of our department the manager didn't try again. I'm pretty sure he would have gone ballistic if he found out that we had done the legwork for the transfers to happen.
There is a problem with the immigration system, but it isn't the immigrant.. I'd love to have a bunch more highly skilled immigrants over here, just not with the existing H1-B system.
I'm feeding the troll.. but what the hell.
I don't want to be accomplice to the shakedown that the CC companies/banks do to the retailers. I've seen it, and it is wrong.
I don't want to have my bank account drained because I wasn't paranoid with my security.
I don't care to have my interest rate adjusted on the whim of the CC company.
I don't want to lose the ability of being anonymous, once qwick-e-mart stops accepting cash in your electronic retail monopoly, your SOL for keeping your anonymity.
I don't want to be at the total mercy of a credit score, without a decent credit score you can't get a debit cart (ok, you can but most agreements are abusive), and getting a CC is going to be expensive. The MasterCard society can really enforce an underclass.
This changes the illicit drug trade, some would argue that tracing the cash in a low cash society will be easier. However this creates a side effect that dealers will need to change to alternate fungible goods, or infiltrate legitimate businesses in order to launder CC drug deals. A junkie will find a way to get a fix, this could have some very unpredictable side effects.
I think that E-pay has a place in society, but not as a total replacement for cash.
Subjecting a prodigy to school just to teach him interpersonal skills sounds like a real waste. 8 hours a day of having things like fractions explained would be horrible.
Get him a mentor, and someone to ensure he can socialize normally.
Public schools are not a good choice for a bright kid, and a horrible thing to inflict on a prodigy.
Even after were losing energy to get oil were still going to be drilling. The utility of oil is it's portability, combined with a very high energy density. The oil is going to get burned, it's just a matter of how fast we do it.
ok-- at some point were just going to synthesize it, so there will be some oil left uncollected.. But they're going to keep digging oil until they reach the synthesis cost.
Tannerite
Large Caliber Rifle
Disposable BBQ, and lots of Charcoal and LOX
Thermite, or magnesium (sparklers/road flares)
Build your own house powered electromagnet
Fill the drive with decongel.
Some quality time with a welding torch
Just take some xanax, nobody is going to spend time to get data of a broken drive, unless there is reason to suspect otherwise.
deep six them in a bathtub filled with epsom salts, wait a few days.
pull the platters, use microwave to generate plasma to burn the drive,(the extra electrons should be nice). Or make molten steel to maim the platters.
I did this back in '03 (ok, I had discrete power, but a diskless boot) there is a project called warewulf that was pretty decent. The pxe boot was a little odd with the hardware at hand, so make sure the MB supports that sort of thing should you go this route.
If you have a small enough data requirement (or fast enough broadband), a web service might be the way to go. Uploading/Downloading terabytes of data is a horrible thing over a low grade connection, and certainly isnt pretty over 100mbps lines.
good luck, you're gonna need it.
Ayn Rand would be so proud.
Luckily, you can step out from under taxes in the USA. Just leave the country, and renounce your citizenship.
Consider Somalia as a destination, as they have a general lack of taxes, and very lax borders.
The government doesn't interfere with your life at all over there.. and medical care is very cheap.
The real problems are complex, with a bunch of strange pitfalls.
Waving hands and spouting a nebulous ideal is only appropriate in a small circle of people who are passing around a bong.
Education: Private schools are expensive, and effective.
Health Care: High End Hospitals, vs a community clinic.
The Legal System: I would freak if I was being represented by a public defender. I'd rather take my chances guilty with a good lawyer, than innocent with a public defender.
Consultants: Hired Brainpower to solve a problem.
Outsourcing: Hiring someone to do a job for you.
Bribery: Often cheaper than needing a good lawyer.
I see these as nearly pure throwing money at a problem, just shy of loading a catapult with gold.
The book isn't long at all. None of the underlying concepts are difficult.
However if reading the book a few times is enough for a person to "get" relativity, it would be much more widely understood.
Reading the book and "thinking" that you grok relativity is a much easier task.
I know plenty of people that think they have it down pat.
However there are quite a few time dilation scenarios that will cause a paradox if you don't have the model dead right. The frames of reference are a bitch.
Apple wont quite be the same, and the culture will change.. not a crazy amount, and Apple will be still be making mounds of cash. But it wont be the same Apple, some of the employees will feel it, and some will flee. Most of the evacuees will go to Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon as expected. Though a few will have some cash, and forge off on their own. They'll be the folks that know what they hate about Apple, and know what they love about it.
While I don't expect another assault on the desktop, as Be tried 20 years back, I see an assault on the tablet/cell space in the near future. I see phone apps that are smart enough to silence the ringer at a funeral, that can take into account your schedule and location to know when to act politely. Apple and Google have reasons that prevent this kind of app from existing.
The right applications for a cell phone could cause some interesting changes to the the space Google and Apple are battling in.
When BeOS came out it was impressive (I started on Intel v3.0 (first intel supported version)). I burned some cash getting compatible hardware. The BeOS was amazingly responsive, and was able to do things that windows still doesn't get right. The system was very clean.
I use linux all the time, I'm not a windows fan, but linux ain't right. Cut and paste don't quite work right, sometimes the middle mouse works, sometimes ctrl insrt, sometimes ctrl-v, and sometimes you cant do it without some intermediate window. Yes, I get that this is a Gnome/KDE issue, but the system as a whole isn't working right. The system isn't intuitive.
How many times have you seen some odd error come up, that you wished you could cut and paste into google. But you just can't, It wont let you highlite an error box text. It's sad.
Linux could be so much better, but it needs to be a whole system, not just a bunch of parts that sorta work together.
Now garage enthusiasts are tweaking electric cars, programmers are building full applications that will run on a web page. RTS/Wargames have exploded, Starcraft 2, Warcraft. Music didnt diversify that much in the 80's, the 60's and 70's diversified plenty, but most of it was garbage, same with the 80's. Now that youtube exists, all manner of people can publish total garbage. Music is really diverse today, but you have to wade through the drek. Caprica and BSG were pretty good IMHO.
I'll give you the Formula 1 point.
Elite was an amazing use of hardware, It would be amazing to see what could happen with modern hardware hand coded to squeeze every flop to maximal effectiveness. Though it would be amazingly expensive.
I think I need better convincing of your conjecture, before I consider it feasable.
Dark matter has the same feel to it, but I am not a physicist. And some types of dark matter are observed aka neutrinos.
If free neutrons didn't have such a short decay time, I'd consider that option as well. Without electrons the photon interaction with a neutron seems considerably hindered but again I'm not a physicist.
I'm going to agree, at least partially. I think we do rely too much on drivers to overcome the problem of a very diverse video card system.
This bugs me.
I see no compelling reason for the video manufacturers to postpone a more modern standard for video cards. Video cards have simple compatibility at a ~20 year old standard. It is really depressing to see that when I install an OS, the video is set to some horrible resolution. When I go to download the driver it's a mess, because the site is nearly unusable at the ancient resolution. Creating a card that could have limited functionality (up to 2560X2048 video DX 6/ OpenGL 1.0 capable) with the new equivalent of a "vga" driver seems like a reasonable possibility.
I understand that it would add some minor cost to each video card, but it would make life so much easier.
DirectX and OpenGL are really quite nice, and getting someone who has the skill/sanity to rebuild the graphics is not going to be cheap, and the results will probably look amateureish.
The application fight is not the issue that needs primary attention.
Microsoft is coasting on an interface/ architecture that is "good enough", Linux and Mac are doing the same.
It should be better... Imagine three people playing a game on one machine (three monitors/ mice/keyboards/headsets) , with a fourth playing the same via a thin client, and a fifth playing over the network. This is doable with modern hardware, but the OS isn't there. There are dozens of major architecture problems hobbling "modern" operating systems. Fixing these flaws would be a major advantage to Linux, Mac, or MS.
Tough to notice Skype inbound calls otherwise.
Killing sound system-wide was fine twenty years ago as a reasonable solution.
But ads have been getting sneakier, where they delay before making their sales pitch. I have way too many browsers open to find it quickly.
12. Invisible walls should only be reachable by cheating.
13. The keyboard interface is not a second class citizen, some people aren't keyboard fans, but a half working keyboard system hurts. (supreme commander series).
14. Support switching audio on the fly.. Sometimes the roommate/neighbors/ guests arrive sooner than expected, and the headphones need to be put on/taken off.. no reason to make this a PITA.
15. Handle the windows key.. Hitting it mid game is a game-ender.
16. Make sound adjust easy.. I hate having game music overpowering the skype/vent/teamspeak/steam/xfire/etc audio connection to your friends.
17. Abuse the hardware, When a game lags, but the processor isn't pegged, it's a problem.
18. Allow for mid game entry when appropriate (I'm thinking Magicka).
19. Have a plan for using multiple monitors.
If there is an expectation that email will be handled correctly even if sent to the wrong address, then people get more careless. Companies get more lax in their procedures. The problems frustration equilibrium stays at a higher value. Much like people typing in captcha values for nonsense, it ruins it for everyone.
The OP isn't too far off, 2.6 billion kilometers is a long way. at 1 km/sec it's 80ish years out.
so 100 km/sec is needed. to get it down to a ~10 month range. Though energy increases as the square of the velocity. so it's 10000 times the energy to get helium to that speed, even in big balloons accelerated gently it's going to take a bunch of energy. So 99% of the helium3(after it's left the Uranus gravity well) burning energy (fusion) is lost accelerating it, then you need to catch it. Which will take energy. So with a catch, you cant be spending more than 50% to break even under awesome conditions. A net energy loss might still be fine, as the utility of portable energy makes up for a loss of energy, but it wouldn't make it a viable primary energy source.
Baseline is that you need to have a slow steady transport of material, but this means that the chance for puncture is greatly increased over the years.
The economics of it are the real bugger. As the interest alone on this project before getting your first H3 packet would be horrible. By the time it's economically viable it might well be obsolete.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't mind competing against a foreign national on even footing. What I don't like is competing against an indentured servant, where they are unable to climb to their level of competence. Back in the 90's I was working with an Iraqi, great guy, engineer in with a bunch of math and programming experience. He was a junior technician making $5 per hour less than I was, it became a sticking point while we (full technicians) were negotiating raises.
I found a way to get him quickly transferred into another position (data reporting), getting him a $3 raise..
Probably bringing up my salary ~$.75 more than if he had stayed; though this may be a dubious guess.
My manager saw the wisdom in being able to hold an indentured servant over our heads, so he hired another H1-B. We found her a transfer in under a month. Since the H1-B fees were coming out of our department the manager didn't try again. I'm pretty sure he would have gone ballistic if he found out that we had done the legwork for the transfers to happen.
There is a problem with the immigration system, but it isn't the immigrant.. I'd love to have a bunch more highly skilled immigrants over here, just not with the existing H1-B system.
From the context it's probably this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_algebra
Though if they forced them to pass abstract algebra first, the drop out rate would be really low.
I'm feeding the troll.. but what the hell.
I don't want to be accomplice to the shakedown that the CC companies/banks do to the retailers. I've seen it, and it is wrong.
I don't want to have my bank account drained because I wasn't paranoid with my security.
I don't care to have my interest rate adjusted on the whim of the CC company.
I don't want to lose the ability of being anonymous, once qwick-e-mart stops accepting cash in your electronic retail monopoly, your SOL for keeping your anonymity.
I don't want to be at the total mercy of a credit score, without a decent credit score you can't get a debit cart (ok, you can but most agreements are abusive), and getting a CC is going to be expensive. The MasterCard society can really enforce an underclass.
This changes the illicit drug trade, some would argue that tracing the cash in a low cash society will be easier. However this creates a side effect that dealers will need to change to alternate fungible goods, or infiltrate legitimate businesses in order to launder CC drug deals. A junkie will find a way to get a fix, this could have some very unpredictable side effects.
I think that E-pay has a place in society, but not as a total replacement for cash.
Subjecting a prodigy to school just to teach him interpersonal skills sounds like a real waste. 8 hours a day of having things like fractions explained would be horrible.
Get him a mentor, and someone to ensure he can socialize normally.
Public schools are not a good choice for a bright kid, and a horrible thing to inflict on a prodigy.
Even after were losing energy to get oil were still going to be drilling. The utility of oil is it's portability, combined with a very high energy density. The oil is going to get burned, it's just a matter of how fast we do it. ok-- at some point were just going to synthesize it, so there will be some oil left uncollected.. But they're going to keep digging oil until they reach the synthesis cost.
Someone astroturfed it. Windfarms are awesome, I look at them and realize that we might be able to kick fossil fuel down a notch.
http://kanewj.com/wbc/ I really wish they had to pay taxes as a business.
Just don't use your own bathtub.. trust me.
Other alternatives.....
Tannerite
Large Caliber Rifle
Disposable BBQ, and lots of Charcoal and LOX
Thermite, or magnesium (sparklers/road flares)
Build your own house powered electromagnet
Fill the drive with decongel.
Some quality time with a welding torch
Just take some xanax, nobody is going to spend time to get data of a broken drive, unless there is reason to suspect otherwise.
deep six them in a bathtub filled with epsom salts, wait a few days.
pull the platters, use microwave to generate plasma to burn the drive,(the extra electrons should be nice). Or make molten steel to maim the platters.
I did this back in '03 (ok, I had discrete power, but a diskless boot) there is a project called warewulf that was pretty decent. The pxe boot was a little odd with the hardware at hand, so make sure the MB supports that sort of thing should you go this route. If you have a small enough data requirement (or fast enough broadband), a web service might be the way to go. Uploading/Downloading terabytes of data is a horrible thing over a low grade connection, and certainly isnt pretty over 100mbps lines. good luck, you're gonna need it.
Ayn Rand would be so proud.
Luckily, you can step out from under taxes in the USA. Just leave the country, and renounce your citizenship.
Consider Somalia as a destination, as they have a general lack of taxes, and very lax borders. The government doesn't interfere with your life at all over there.. and medical care is very cheap.
The real problems are complex, with a bunch of strange pitfalls.
Waving hands and spouting a nebulous ideal is only appropriate in a small circle of people who are passing around a bong.
Education: Private schools are expensive, and effective.
Health Care: High End Hospitals, vs a community clinic.
The Legal System: I would freak if I was being represented by a public defender. I'd rather take my chances guilty with a good lawyer, than innocent with a public defender.
Consultants: Hired Brainpower to solve a problem.
Outsourcing: Hiring someone to do a job for you.
Bribery: Often cheaper than needing a good lawyer.
I see these as nearly pure throwing money at a problem, just shy of loading a catapult with gold.
The book isn't long at all. None of the underlying concepts are difficult. However if reading the book a few times is enough for a person to "get" relativity, it would be much more widely understood.
Reading the book and "thinking" that you grok relativity is a much easier task.
I know plenty of people that think they have it down pat. However there are quite a few time dilation scenarios that will cause a paradox if you don't have the model dead right. The frames of reference are a bitch.
Apple wont quite be the same, and the culture will change.. not a crazy amount, and Apple will be still be making mounds of cash. But it wont be the same Apple, some of the employees will feel it, and some will flee. Most of the evacuees will go to Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon as expected. Though a few will have some cash, and forge off on their own. They'll be the folks that know what they hate about Apple, and know what they love about it.
While I don't expect another assault on the desktop, as Be tried 20 years back, I see an assault on the tablet/cell space in the near future. I see phone apps that are smart enough to silence the ringer at a funeral, that can take into account your schedule and location to know when to act politely. Apple and Google have reasons that prevent this kind of app from existing.
The right applications for a cell phone could cause some interesting changes to the the space Google and Apple are battling in.
When BeOS came out it was impressive (I started on Intel v3.0 (first intel supported version)). I burned some cash getting compatible hardware. The BeOS was amazingly responsive, and was able to do things that windows still doesn't get right. The system was very clean.
I use linux all the time, I'm not a windows fan, but linux ain't right. Cut and paste don't quite work right, sometimes the middle mouse works, sometimes ctrl insrt, sometimes ctrl-v, and sometimes you cant do it without some intermediate window. Yes, I get that this is a Gnome/KDE issue, but the system as a whole isn't working right. The system isn't intuitive.
How many times have you seen some odd error come up, that you wished you could cut and paste into google. But you just can't, It wont let you highlite an error box text. It's sad.
Linux could be so much better, but it needs to be a whole system, not just a bunch of parts that sorta work together.
Now garage enthusiasts are tweaking electric cars, programmers are building full applications that will run on a web page. RTS/Wargames have exploded, Starcraft 2, Warcraft. Music didnt diversify that much in the 80's, the 60's and 70's diversified plenty, but most of it was garbage, same with the 80's. Now that youtube exists, all manner of people can publish total garbage. Music is really diverse today, but you have to wade through the drek. Caprica and BSG were pretty good IMHO.
I'll give you the Formula 1 point.
Elite was an amazing use of hardware, It would be amazing to see what could happen with modern hardware hand coded to squeeze every flop to maximal effectiveness. Though it would be amazingly expensive.
I think I need better convincing of your conjecture, before I consider it feasable.
Dark matter has the same feel to it, but I am not a physicist. And some types of dark matter are observed aka neutrinos. If free neutrons didn't have such a short decay time, I'd consider that option as well. Without electrons the photon interaction with a neutron seems considerably hindered but again I'm not a physicist.
I'm going to agree, at least partially. I think we do rely too much on drivers to overcome the problem of a very diverse video card system.
This bugs me.
I see no compelling reason for the video manufacturers to postpone a more modern standard for video cards. Video cards have simple compatibility at a ~20 year old standard. It is really depressing to see that when I install an OS, the video is set to some horrible resolution. When I go to download the driver it's a mess, because the site is nearly unusable at the ancient resolution. Creating a card that could have limited functionality (up to 2560X2048 video DX 6/ OpenGL 1.0 capable) with the new equivalent of a "vga" driver seems like a reasonable possibility.
I understand that it would add some minor cost to each video card, but it would make life so much easier.
DirectX and OpenGL are really quite nice, and getting someone who has the skill/sanity to rebuild the graphics is not going to be cheap, and the results will probably look amateureish.
The application fight is not the issue that needs primary attention.
Microsoft is coasting on an interface/ architecture that is "good enough", Linux and Mac are doing the same.
It should be better... Imagine three people playing a game on one machine (three monitors/ mice/keyboards/headsets) , with a fourth playing the same via a thin client, and a fifth playing over the network. This is doable with modern hardware, but the OS isn't there. There are dozens of major architecture problems hobbling "modern" operating systems. Fixing these flaws would be a major advantage to Linux, Mac, or MS.
Storm
it doesn't show when I'm watching a movie.
Tough to notice Skype inbound calls otherwise.
Killing sound system-wide was fine twenty years ago as a reasonable solution.
But ads have been getting sneakier, where they delay before making their sales pitch. I have way too many browsers open to find it quickly.
12. Invisible walls should only be reachable by cheating. 13. The keyboard interface is not a second class citizen, some people aren't keyboard fans, but a half working keyboard system hurts. (supreme commander series). 14. Support switching audio on the fly.. Sometimes the roommate/neighbors/ guests arrive sooner than expected, and the headphones need to be put on/taken off.. no reason to make this a PITA. 15. Handle the windows key.. Hitting it mid game is a game-ender. 16. Make sound adjust easy.. I hate having game music overpowering the skype/vent/teamspeak/steam/xfire/etc audio connection to your friends. 17. Abuse the hardware, When a game lags, but the processor isn't pegged, it's a problem. 18. Allow for mid game entry when appropriate (I'm thinking Magicka). 19. Have a plan for using multiple monitors.
If there is an expectation that email will be handled correctly even if sent to the wrong address, then people get more careless. Companies get more lax in their procedures. The problems frustration equilibrium stays at a higher value. Much like people typing in captcha values for nonsense, it ruins it for everyone.
The OP isn't too far off, 2.6 billion kilometers is a long way. at 1 km/sec it's 80ish years out. so 100 km/sec is needed. to get it down to a ~10 month range. Though energy increases as the square of the velocity. so it's 10000 times the energy to get helium to that speed, even in big balloons accelerated gently it's going to take a bunch of energy. So 99% of the helium3(after it's left the Uranus gravity well) burning energy (fusion) is lost accelerating it, then you need to catch it. Which will take energy. So with a catch, you cant be spending more than 50% to break even under awesome conditions. A net energy loss might still be fine, as the utility of portable energy makes up for a loss of energy, but it wouldn't make it a viable primary energy source.
Baseline is that you need to have a slow steady transport of material, but this means that the chance for puncture is greatly increased over the years. The economics of it are the real bugger. As the interest alone on this project before getting your first H3 packet would be horrible. By the time it's economically viable it might well be obsolete.
http://www.labplanet.com/cellular-bioengineering-decongel-20l-w-lg-app-tool-kt-1101-0020-k02.html $868 for 20 liters+ toolkit. so ~$43/liter not cheap, but not unreasonable. For its worth I'd call it a bargain.
.joke
He who loves a one-eyed-girl thinks that one eyed girls
are beautiful.