However, a "perfect market" limits profits to near zero. With no barriers to entry in a business, which is a lot like "neglecting friction", competition will force prices down toward costs.
A 100% markup is only possible if the barriers to entry in the field are high, which they are in this case.
However, the barriers to entry are falling also. Once the OS or Office suite, or whatever are "good enough", the impetus for upgrades evaporate. At that point, competing products have a chance to catch up to the target of "good enough".
Microsoft is suffering from "good enough" now. As are hardware makers. Most people don't use much, if any, more capabiity than was available in computers/software in 2000. Microsoft is dependent on people buying a new computer (and, implied, a new OS and Office suite) every couple of years. This was a workable model until the computers got "good enough", and has been suffering since then.
(which were necessary because of the weight/cargo requirements from the USAF)
No. They were necessary due to budget cuts in the Shuttle.
The Shuttle cannot fly at all without the extra boost, but they could have been built just as easily with liquid fuel boosters. But liquid fuel boosters wouldn't have been "reusable" enough to be justified within the context of a "reusable" vehicle.
And a manned booster (as conceived in early shuttle concepts) was more expensive than Congress was willing to consider.
The shuttle unfortunately, was doomed from the start by the parsimonious behaviour of Congress.
The correct answer was to build twenty-thirty of them, fly them once a week (only once in six months per shuttle), and build a real space station (52 flights per year, and ~25t per flight, for five years is a damn big station, compared to what we'll have). Then let the crew repair the station as needed while we start on the Mars/Venus missions, plus follow-on Lunar missions, Lunar base, etc.
If you own stock in a corporation, and IF the "without personal liability" clause were not part of the definition, then YOU would be liable if the corproration you owned stock in did something actionable.
Corporations were invented to make it possible for businesses to raise more money than they could otherwise - by selling stock. If the stock came with a legal liability, few, if any, outside the corporate headquarters would be tempted to buy stock. After all, buying into a liability you have no control over is a bad thing.
Unforunately, the corporate maagement isn't immune to temptation. So, the personal immunity can be (ab)used to enrich the management at the expense of the owners (shareholders). Hence the SEC and government limitations on corporate behaviour, and civil suits against corporate officers (which are frequently paid for by insurance bought with the owners' money, interestingly enough).
I doubt this will be their first X-Prize flight. This is just their first suborbital.
X-Prize requires two flights quite close together. I expect that after this flight is analyzed, they'll schedule a pair of flights for the X-Prize. Possibly in August or September.
I seem to recall a time where you didn't own the telephone in your house either, but the phone company gave you one with your subscription. Anyone know how&why that model changed?
Why do you suppose we're so excited about N. Korea's nuclear plant? It's because you can use a nuclear power plant to prepare the *key* ingredient of a fission bomb. Nuclear proliferation is generally seen as a bad thing--far worse than "napalm proliferation".
It takes a fairly specialized nuclear reactor to produce plutonium in useful quantities. Power reactors don't. They produce some plutonium, but a typical power reactor could operate for decades before it produced enough plutonium for a bomb.
Which is to say, we are concerned about the NK nuclear reactor because it is designed to produce plutonium in useful quantities.
Note further that fission bombs do not actually require plutonium. Plutonium is just the easiest fissionable to manufacture. Both Uranium and Thorium can be used to make a Bomb - and Thorium doesn't even come under NRC monitoring....
They've also been paying a fee to the government since the reactor was built for the express purpose of financing the waste disposal by the government. Most businesses would disappear if a major cost were suddenly doubled.
Are the solar and wind units you speak of subsidized by the government? If so, their profitability is questionable.
you have not been in europe when chernobyl happened. 300 million people were staying inside for a week, just because one (1) reactor failed.
I wasn't? How odd, I could have sworn that I was. 300,000,000 people stayed inside for a week. But to what extend was it NECESSARY that they do so? Did mail service stop? police stay home? firefighters? No, didn't think so. People were advised to stay inside so as to limit their exposure to contamination to the "allowable" level. If you were exposed to ten times the "allowable" level, you MIGHT notice, if you know what to look for - it's pretty subtle at such low exposure levels.
and nuclear plants will leak radiation despite our best efforts.
And coal plants emit radiation in large amounts by design. Your point is? Even worse, your body is radioactive! Horrors!
chances are that a single catastrophic failure in a nuclear power plant _will_ affect me.
Affect you? well, I suppose that seeing it in the news will cause you to panic. It is unlikely that it will endanger you, unless you are in the habit of camping out inside a reactor building.
Interestingly, you mentioned airplanes. Did you know that airline pilots typically suffer higher occupational radiation exposure than nuclear power plant workers?
All the wonders of a Victorian age steam turbine, apart from the enormous amounts of high tech safety equipment and the expensive materials required to keep it safe. Radiation would turn the usual high temp-high pressure tubing into something with holes resembling swiss cheese in a few years, so some exotic materials need to be used - and replaced every now and again.
And yet, when I was in the Navy many yers ago, the reactor in the boat I was on was older than I was. And didn't leak.
Actually, the biggest danger to our steam generators wasn't the radioactive water in the primary loop, it was the water in the secondary loop.
Yes, we did make the primary loop out of "some exotic material" - it used much less iron, and much more nickel than is traditional for metal structures. But it was designed to last for far longer than the life of the reactor....
Also, Rockets I refered to haven't too much realation to the rockets you mention. The tanks you mention aren't the same as those I meantioned.
Possibly not. But Zizka's War Wagons were, to all intents and purposes, the first "tanks". They accomplished the same things Mother did in 1917 - they kept men alive and functioning in the killing grounds.
Dpn't tell me a Gunpowder rocket is entirly the same as a V2 rocket.
No, a V2 is a much later development, based on a fire-engine's pump. But it accomplished the same objective as the chinese war rockets - it scared the crap out of the people down-range, without hurting them too much (though the "not hurting" part was unintentional in both cases). Note that most modern war rockets are more similar to the chinese rockets (solid fuel is the way to go for war rockets) than to the V2.
Actually it's not completely trivial what happens to common glass under heavy radiation. You have to dilute the radioactive stuff so that the glass doesn't melt or break down into reactive components.
You're talking about radiation levels comparable to the interior of an operating reactor. Radioactive wastes are pretty much by definition not that radioactive - if they were, they wouldn't be wastes, they'd be a power source.
if by "some remote spot in the ocean", you mean a subduction zone, that's fine with me. Grinding it into the earth's mantle is acceptably far away. Note that I would prefer reprocessing the stuff. Throwing away valuable radioactives is not the ideal choice. It's almost as bad as throwing away coal-tar....
With H2-O2 rocket, sending 1 ton toward a lunar impact would require ~1 ton of reaction mass.
Earth orbit to solar impacr ~24km/s.
With H2-O2 rocket, sending 1 ton toward a solar impact would require ~240 tons of reaction mass.
Note that in both cases, we are starting from LEO.
You are assuming that all destinations require similar delta-V to reach. This is true if you consider places people might want to go - not that much difference between Moon, Mars, Venus. Not too much more for outer planets, if you're willing to take a while to get there. But...
It is easier to shape orbit to alphacent than to our own sun (~8kps vs ~24kps).
couldn't we launch it into space and then take it into a farther orbit around the sun and let it deteriate for a while then liek a slingshot effect but opposite, pass it by another planet slowing it down? I've heard of satalites using the gravity of other planets to increase or decrease speeds in order to stay on thier planned course. Maybe that might be something to think about.
Whyever would we want to toss that into the sun? The radioactives alone are too valuable to throw away, much less do so in a spectacularly expensive way.
However i am a little bit worried about sending stuff into the sun, after all it is a controled explosion ( at least that how they explained it back in high school) and what if we cause it to goe out of control?
The sun is not a "controlled" nuclear explosion. Nothing "controlled" about it. It is "stable" (relatively), and "continuous", but not controlled. That said, solar energy output is approximately equal to converting 4,000,000 tons of matter to energy every second. The amount of radioactive waste we are talking about (even if it were all fissionables - it's not even mostly) is tiny compared to that energy output. To give you a reference, the entire nuclear arsenal of the world's nuclear powers, detonated at once, might approach a ton or two of matter converted to energy in output.
It's not expecially scary (unless you're the kind of idiot who confuses nuclear bomb with nuclear power), whether you mess it up or not. And it's hard to mess up. So hard that the hundred-odd reactors (not counting Navy reactors, of course - there are another 100-odd of them)in the USA can account for one minor release of contamination in 30 years or so.
Coal and oil are too valuable to burn. Same with natural gas, though it is the best of the lot.
Solar, wind, wave, etc? Wonderful ideas, really. Has anyone ever done an analysis of the pollution involved in all phases of the implementation of any of these? To include climactic effects resulting from extracting energy from wind/wave/etc?
Traditionally, it was called were-guild (literally "man-price"). It was the fine you payed for killing someone, or maiming them, which fine theoretically meant that you wouldn't be outlawed, nor be pursued by the deceased's family.
Didn't always work that way, of course. But most societies that used the concept got along well enough, so it can be said to be "successful".
The idea fell into disrepute when governments became strong enough that they could reasonably expect to restrict "free-lance killing" (governments did not always have a monopoly on legal killing, though most of them have wanted one pretty much forever).
It's just you. In the nineteenth century, there were places where you'd be hanged for stealing a horse. But not necessarily hanged for killing a man.
"I've seen quite a few men who needed killing, I've never seen a horse that needed stealing" -- Judge Roy Bean
To a certain extent, you are seeing an "inflation" in sentencing because the deterence value of law depends on both the certainty of punishment, and the severity of same. The government is not, at the present time, able to affect the "certainty of punishment" variable, so they try to increase the deterence by monkeying with the "severity of punishment".
Interestingly enough, it has been shown that certainty of punishment has considerably more deterence value than severity of punishment. Increasing severity of punishment tends to lead to the "may as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb" train of thought. That is, if all crimes have high punishments, might as well do something SERIOUS as something trivial.
t's very clear that the author is wrong. For example, we may pay a dollar to avoid a one-in-ten-million chance in being killed. However, if someone offers me $10 million dollars to be killed, I wouldn't take it
Bad parallel. A better would be: if you'd pay $1 to avoid a one-in-ten-million chance of death, would you pay $10,000,000 to avoid certain death? Assuming you had $10,000,000, of course.
Or, would you let someone pay you a dollar if you would push a button, the button having a one-in-ten-million chance of setting off an explosion that would kill you? If so, that MIGHT imply that you'd take $10,000,000 to press a button that is a sure death.
Or not. Hard to say how anyone's mind works, besides mine.
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Everyone has a "right to profit".
However, a "perfect market" limits profits to near zero. With no barriers to entry in a business, which is a lot like "neglecting friction", competition will force prices down toward costs.
A 100% markup is only possible if the barriers to entry in the field are high, which they are in this case.
However, the barriers to entry are falling also. Once the OS or Office suite, or whatever are "good enough", the impetus for upgrades evaporate. At that point, competing products have a chance to catch up to the target of "good enough".
Microsoft is suffering from "good enough" now. As are hardware makers. Most people don't use much, if any, more capabiity than was available in computers/software in 2000. Microsoft is dependent on people buying a new computer (and, implied, a new OS and Office suite) every couple of years. This was a workable model until the computers got "good enough", and has been suffering since then.
Same here. No man-rated vehicle should use an engine that cannot be shut down at command. Hybrid I could live with, solid is right out.
(which were necessary because of the weight/cargo requirements from the USAF)
No. They were necessary due to budget cuts in the Shuttle.
The Shuttle cannot fly at all without the extra boost, but they could have been built just as easily with liquid fuel boosters. But liquid fuel boosters wouldn't have been "reusable" enough to be justified within the context of a "reusable" vehicle.
And a manned booster (as conceived in early shuttle concepts) was more expensive than Congress was willing to consider.
The shuttle unfortunately, was doomed from the start by the parsimonious behaviour of Congress.
The correct answer was to build twenty-thirty of them, fly them once a week (only once in six months per shuttle), and build a real space station (52 flights per year, and ~25t per flight, for five years is a damn big station, compared to what we'll have). Then let the crew repair the station as needed while we start on the Mars/Venus missions, plus follow-on Lunar missions, Lunar base, etc.
I don't think so. We haven't done that for a very long time.
I'm not sure we've ever done that, frankly.
If you own stock in a corporation, and IF the "without personal liability" clause were not part of the definition, then YOU would be liable if the corproration you owned stock in did something actionable.
Corporations were invented to make it possible for businesses to raise more money than they could otherwise - by selling stock. If the stock came with a legal liability, few, if any, outside the corporate headquarters would be tempted to buy stock. After all, buying into a liability you have no control over is a bad thing.
Unforunately, the corporate maagement isn't immune to temptation. So, the personal immunity can be (ab)used to enrich the management at the expense of the owners (shareholders). Hence the SEC and government limitations on corporate behaviour, and civil suits against corporate officers (which are frequently paid for by insurance bought with the owners' money, interestingly enough).
/laugh I don't argue whether it is a truism or not. I'm just quoting Heinlein correctly.
Note that SS1 does not use solid a fuel rocket - it uses a hybrid rocket, with both solid and liquid fuel.
I doubt this will be their first X-Prize flight. This is just their first suborbital.
X-Prize requires two flights quite close together. I expect that after this flight is analyzed, they'll schedule a pair of flights for the X-Prize. Possibly in August or September.
To be 100% correct, it is free-fall.
Gravity at 100km is ~0.97g - hardly "microgravity"
"May you love as long as you live, and live as long as you wish." (Minerva, Time Enough for Love)
Should be: "May you love as long as you live, and live as long as you love."
I seem to recall a time where you didn't own the telephone in your house either, but the phone company gave you one with your subscription. Anyone know how&why that model changed?
Antitrust action against AT&T
Why do you suppose we're so excited about N. Korea's nuclear plant? It's because you can use a nuclear power plant to prepare the *key* ingredient of a fission bomb. Nuclear proliferation is generally seen as a bad thing--far worse than "napalm proliferation".
It takes a fairly specialized nuclear reactor to produce plutonium in useful quantities. Power reactors don't. They produce some plutonium, but a typical power reactor could operate for decades before it produced enough plutonium for a bomb.
Which is to say, we are concerned about the NK nuclear reactor because it is designed to produce plutonium in useful quantities.
Note further that fission bombs do not actually require plutonium. Plutonium is just the easiest fissionable to manufacture. Both Uranium and Thorium can be used to make a Bomb - and Thorium doesn't even come under NRC monitoring....
Are the solar and wind units you speak of subsidized by the government? If so, their profitability is questionable.
you have not been in europe when chernobyl happened. 300 million people were staying inside for a week, just because one (1) reactor failed.
I wasn't? How odd, I could have sworn that I was. 300,000,000 people stayed inside for a week. But to what extend was it NECESSARY that they do so? Did mail service stop? police stay home? firefighters? No, didn't think so. People were advised to stay inside so as to limit their exposure to contamination to the "allowable" level. If you were exposed to ten times the "allowable" level, you MIGHT notice, if you know what to look for - it's pretty subtle at such low exposure levels.
and nuclear plants will leak radiation despite our best efforts.
And coal plants emit radiation in large amounts by design. Your point is? Even worse, your body is radioactive! Horrors!
chances are that a single catastrophic failure in a nuclear power plant _will_ affect me.
Affect you? well, I suppose that seeing it in the news will cause you to panic. It is unlikely that it will endanger you, unless you are in the habit of camping out inside a reactor building.
Interestingly, you mentioned airplanes. Did you know that airline pilots typically suffer higher occupational radiation exposure than nuclear power plant workers?
All the wonders of a Victorian age steam turbine, apart from the enormous amounts of high tech safety equipment and the expensive materials required to keep it safe. Radiation would turn the usual high temp-high pressure tubing into something with holes resembling swiss cheese in a few years, so some exotic materials need to be used - and replaced every now and again.
And yet, when I was in the Navy many yers ago, the reactor in the boat I was on was older than I was. And didn't leak.
Actually, the biggest danger to our steam generators wasn't the radioactive water in the primary loop, it was the water in the secondary loop.
Yes, we did make the primary loop out of "some exotic material" - it used much less iron, and much more nickel than is traditional for metal structures. But it was designed to last for far longer than the life of the reactor....
Also, Rockets I refered to haven't too much realation to the rockets you mention. The tanks you mention aren't the same as those I meantioned.
Possibly not. But Zizka's War Wagons were, to all intents and purposes, the first "tanks". They accomplished the same things Mother did in 1917 - they kept men alive and functioning in the killing grounds.
Dpn't tell me a Gunpowder rocket is entirly the same as a V2 rocket.
No, a V2 is a much later development, based on a fire-engine's pump. But it accomplished the same objective as the chinese war rockets - it scared the crap out of the people down-range, without hurting them too much (though the "not hurting" part was unintentional in both cases). Note that most modern war rockets are more similar to the chinese rockets (solid fuel is the way to go for war rockets) than to the V2.
Actually it's not completely trivial what happens to common glass under heavy radiation. You have to dilute the radioactive stuff so that the glass doesn't melt or break down into reactive components.
You're talking about radiation levels comparable to the interior of an operating reactor. Radioactive wastes are pretty much by definition not that radioactive - if they were, they wouldn't be wastes, they'd be a power source.
if by "some remote spot in the ocean", you mean a subduction zone, that's fine with me. Grinding it into the earth's mantle is acceptably far away. Note that I would prefer reprocessing the stuff. Throwing away valuable radioactives is not the ideal choice. It's almost as bad as throwing away coal-tar....
Also true. And exactly the point. Nuclear power plants require much less fuel, and produce much less waste, than a chemical plant.
Earth orbit to lunar impact ~3km/s.
With H2-O2 rocket, sending 1 ton toward a lunar impact would require ~1 ton of reaction mass.
Earth orbit to solar impacr ~24km/s.
With H2-O2 rocket, sending 1 ton toward a solar impact would require ~240 tons of reaction mass.
Note that in both cases, we are starting from LEO.
You are assuming that all destinations require similar delta-V to reach. This is true if you consider places people might want to go - not that much difference between Moon, Mars, Venus. Not too much more for outer planets, if you're willing to take a while to get there. But...
It is easier to shape orbit to alphacent than to our own sun (~8kps vs ~24kps).
couldn't we launch it into space and then take it into a farther orbit around the sun and let it deteriate for a while then liek a slingshot effect but opposite, pass it by another planet slowing it down? I've heard of satalites using the gravity of other planets to increase or decrease speeds in order to stay on thier planned course. Maybe that might be something to think about.
Whyever would we want to toss that into the sun? The radioactives alone are too valuable to throw away, much less do so in a spectacularly expensive way.
However i am a little bit worried about sending stuff into the sun, after all it is a controled explosion ( at least that how they explained it back in high school) and what if we cause it to goe out of control?
The sun is not a "controlled" nuclear explosion. Nothing "controlled" about it. It is "stable" (relatively), and "continuous", but not controlled. That said, solar energy output is approximately equal to converting 4,000,000 tons of matter to energy every second. The amount of radioactive waste we are talking about (even if it were all fissionables - it's not even mostly) is tiny compared to that energy output. To give you a reference, the entire nuclear arsenal of the world's nuclear powers, detonated at once, might approach a ton or two of matter converted to energy in output.
I like nuclear power.
It's not expecially scary (unless you're the kind of idiot who confuses nuclear bomb with nuclear power), whether you mess it up or not. And it's hard to mess up. So hard that the hundred-odd reactors (not counting Navy reactors, of course - there are another 100-odd of them)in the USA can account for one minor release of contamination in 30 years or so.
Coal and oil are too valuable to burn. Same with natural gas, though it is the best of the lot.
Solar, wind, wave, etc? Wonderful ideas, really. Has anyone ever done an analysis of the pollution involved in all phases of the implementation of any of these? To include climactic effects resulting from extracting energy from wind/wave/etc?
Didn't always work that way, of course. But most societies that used the concept got along well enough, so it can be said to be "successful".
The idea fell into disrepute when governments became strong enough that they could reasonably expect to restrict "free-lance killing" (governments did not always have a monopoly on legal killing, though most of them have wanted one pretty much forever).
It's just you. In the nineteenth century, there were places where you'd be hanged for stealing a horse. But not necessarily hanged for killing a man.
"I've seen quite a few men who needed killing, I've never seen a horse that needed stealing" -- Judge Roy Bean
To a certain extent, you are seeing an "inflation" in sentencing because the deterence value of law depends on both the certainty of punishment, and the severity of same. The government is not, at the present time, able to affect the "certainty of punishment" variable, so they try to increase the deterence by monkeying with the "severity of punishment".
Interestingly enough, it has been shown that certainty of punishment has considerably more deterence value than severity of punishment. Increasing severity of punishment tends to lead to the "may as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb" train of thought. That is, if all crimes have high punishments, might as well do something SERIOUS as something trivial.
Bad parallel. A better would be: if you'd pay $1 to avoid a one-in-ten-million chance of death, would you pay $10,000,000 to avoid certain death? Assuming you had $10,000,000, of course.
Or, would you let someone pay you a dollar if you would push a button, the button having a one-in-ten-million chance of setting off an explosion that would kill you? If so, that MIGHT imply that you'd take $10,000,000 to press a button that is a sure death.
Or not. Hard to say how anyone's mind works, besides mine.