In that case, amend your constitution to say that it's fine to torture criminals once they've been convicted. If you're going to pretend to have the rule of law, then at least make a token effort to follow your own rules.
There is no such thing as a torture free (pain free) way to take someone's life. (Although you could also argue putting someone in solitary for forty years is also a form of torture).
Many jobs do allow you to forego working for extra vacation days, at a pre-specified rate. So you DO have a specific "value" to your free time, as set by your employer. Even if you may have trouble redeeming it at that rate by someone who is not your employer.
You do however have the opportunity to pick up some consulting jobs, to do side jobs, or perhaps pick up some side projects. But, depending on what you do, YMMV. A lawyer, web designer, or other profession may have no problems picking up a few extra hours on the side, while you may not find this to be possible
Well it is a craft and requires practice. And programming requires practice as well. But it also requires a higher level of intelligence and problem solving. You can be an idiot and so long as you know how to put in bricks, if I say "Build wall here" you could do what you need. I've seen plenty of "programmers" who just lacked any sort of problem solving skills and ran into a wall (pun intended)
Bollocks. Aerospace engineering doesn't have thousands of years of history to fall back on yet we can still build planes that don't blue screen of death out of the sky.
The difference is that, when lives are at stake, people make damned sure things are reliable.
Another example would be engineering of chips. When's the last time you heard of a bug in your CPU creating issues? IIRC the last one was the infamous pentium bug from the 90s.
Transistors on a chip cpu engineering has been around for less time than software, yet they get it right...
Comparing software engineering to regular engineering is an unfair comparison when regular engineering is built upon hundreds, if not thousands, of years of experience.
I'd disagree. Programming is a form of engineering and should be treated with no less respect.
Disagree. How much do you make an hour? Logically if you make more than a builder, it is better to work overtime and pay the builder.
My father was like that. He could spend his entire weekend fixing something that would take a "pro" an hour or two. He made more in an hour or two than a pro made, so logically it made no sense to give up his weekend. But there was a significant entertainment value to him to going to home depot and figuring out how to fix it.
Of course, if you make close to what a builder makes per hour, you may see things differently. But that does not mean that most of the people who go to home depot to fix things themselves are not there for entertainment. If you don't believe me just look at how many riding mowers and tractors the Home Depot sells. There is no need for a person with a normal yard to buy one of those things, if it was really about saving a buck they'd go with the cheaper walking mowers.
The "minimum-wage cubicle farm" culture is the problem. Reading his story, I can pretty much think of someone in my career who filled the shoes of each person mentioned. You know it's funny, if we want to engineer a bridge, or a skyscraper, there is a consistent order and process to putting it together and documenting it. If we want to do that with programming, people just do whatever they want, put some duct tape here and there, and hope it doesn't fall apart. Of course part of that is management generally doesn't want to pay for properly engineered solutions. But it is indeed a problem.
Well that's not completely true. I'm quite sure an intelligent person could learn how to be a bricklayer if they really wanted to. I'm not quite as sure that an uneducated brick layer could learn to code if they really wanted to.
Case in point: how many people who are not in construction go to Home Depot on the weekend as a sort of entertainment. It's interesting to figure out how to build something, and a form of entertainment (and pride) to be able to put something together. How many people can you say that about programming?
Personally? $48,000 is getting off easy. I'd add another order of magnitude onto it.
Well I guess that depends how much money he has. If he's a vigilante version of Bill Gates, even two or three orders of magnitude wouldn't hurt. If he's poor, he may already be bankrupt.
As a google for "BDA" brings up "British Dental Association" maybe you could be a bit more descriptive?
Are you saying the man accidentally was jamming cell traffic?
I guess it could happen. When I was in high school I built a spark gap and jacobs ladder out of a neon sign transformer. When I turned it on for the first time, the radio I was listening to stopped working. If I had one of these in my trunk driving down the interstate it'd probably render cell phones inoperable, AFAIK I knocked out radios within a larger radius.[1]
[1] "knocked out" here is metaphorical. No radios were harmed, i simply was emitting noise on a wide band that overpowered any FM towers, at least close to the source of interference.
And why would you need to do this when any other currency you might add has capital gains and losses, but you do not need to recognize them on the tax form?
Except land mine areas are concentrated, and do not always cause death. Take a trip to Cambodia, and walk down the street in Phnomh Penh. Every few block you'll see people missing limbs because they stepped on a landmine. If you have even a bit of a human heart, you'll understand that landmines as a method to engage in war are horrific. (Although you could argue ALL of war is horrific, land mines particularly so). They persist many years after the conflict is over, mainly injure the indigenous population (instead of targeting the enemy), and because nobody wants to step on a land mine, if you live in a land mine area you simply declare areas where land mines exist as off limits, rendering large areas completely unusable.
From TFA the technique is already in use with some yogurt. You buy a box of yogurt "balls" that are edible, flavored, and filled with yogurt. When you pack your lunch for school or work you simply grab a ball of yogurt out of the box instead of a yogurt in an individual plastic container. Presumably the box is easier to recycle then the plastic containers.
This is interesting in the sense that it generates LESS waste and the waste it generates is biodegradable. The "container" is something from brown algae so I guess you could just compost the thing, much like an eggshell...
Bollocks. VAT will hit rich harder than the poor. The benefit of a VAT tax is you tax consumption not income. So when a rich guy goes out and buys a 747 and outfits it as a super luxury "sky yacht" he's paying tax on it. Compare this to the current tax situation where a rich guy may not pay proportional taxes on his luxury good. (Buffett famously made the observation that he pays less tax on his luxury Malibu vacation home then most middle income people pay on their family homes)
Of course you don't want the poor, so you help them with the sales tax by making necessity items like milk and diapers tax free. You can additionally provide help like food stamps, or other subsidies. Or, another option is a "tiering" structure for the VAT. Buy a basic car like a 4 cylinder Honda? No tax. Buy a mid level car with a 6 cylinder engine, leather seats, and a sun roof? Tax. Buy a super luxury car like a ferrari? A lot of tax.
In that way you are capturing tax only on the wealthy (or people who are spending on "luxury").
Seems to me they might as well start passing other laws like declaring the blue of the sky is the blue between 450 and 495nm, and no other blue will be considered blue.
Well that's an interesting issue (and quite controversial here as well).
One friend of mine works as a dental assistant, and lives in social housing. She takes home maybe 2000 a month after taxes, maybe less, so if she didn't have social housing she couldn't afford to live in Amsterdam, anywhere.
Another friend of mine works at a bank. He now makes quite a bit of money, but keeps his social housing and basically gets to bank an extra few hundred a month due to his social housing status.
You might read my whole post before commenting, I quote (myself):
Plus "climbers" are envisioned to come in multiple forms and be able to pass each other. You might have a "human transport climber" that ascends at 20km / h but is unable to hold more than a few people and crew and a cargo climber that is bigger but slower.
Maybe I am a bit off on my numbers of height / speed but IANASEE (I am not a space elevator engineer) but it would appear the SEEs have done the number crunching already:)
Low earth orbit is only about 200 km in space. Even if you're talking about a speed of 1 km per day you'll still be able to deliver payloads to LEO within the year. Rockets still exist with their $25k per kg fee for stuff you need in space NOW but the space elevator has the ability to bring things into space at a much cheaper rate (maybe $300 / kg)
Plus "climbers" are envisioned to come in multiple forms and be able to pass each other. You might have a "human transport climber" that ascends at 20km / h but is unable to hold more than a few people and crew and a cargo climber that is bigger but slower.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought the FCC required these things to not emit interference?
In that case, amend your constitution to say that it's fine to torture criminals once they've been convicted. If you're going to pretend to have the rule of law, then at least make a token effort to follow your own rules.
There is no such thing as a torture free (pain free) way to take someone's life. (Although you could also argue putting someone in solitary for forty years is also a form of torture).
Many jobs do allow you to forego working for extra vacation days, at a pre-specified rate. So you DO have a specific "value" to your free time, as set by your employer. Even if you may have trouble redeeming it at that rate by someone who is not your employer.
You do however have the opportunity to pick up some consulting jobs, to do side jobs, or perhaps pick up some side projects. But, depending on what you do, YMMV. A lawyer, web designer, or other profession may have no problems picking up a few extra hours on the side, while you may not find this to be possible
Well it is a craft and requires practice. And programming requires practice as well. But it also requires a higher level of intelligence and problem solving. You can be an idiot and so long as you know how to put in bricks, if I say "Build wall here" you could do what you need. I've seen plenty of "programmers" who just lacked any sort of problem solving skills and ran into a wall (pun intended)
Bollocks. Aerospace engineering doesn't have thousands of years of history to fall back on yet we can still build planes that don't blue screen of death out of the sky.
The difference is that, when lives are at stake, people make damned sure things are reliable.
Another example would be engineering of chips. When's the last time you heard of a bug in your CPU creating issues? IIRC the last one was the infamous pentium bug from the 90s.
Transistors on a chip cpu engineering has been around for less time than software, yet they get it right...
Comparing software engineering to regular engineering is an unfair comparison when regular engineering is built upon hundreds, if not thousands, of years of experience.
I'd disagree. Programming is a form of engineering and should be treated with no less respect.
Disagree. How much do you make an hour? Logically if you make more than a builder, it is better to work overtime and pay the builder.
My father was like that. He could spend his entire weekend fixing something that would take a "pro" an hour or two. He made more in an hour or two than a pro made, so logically it made no sense to give up his weekend. But there was a significant entertainment value to him to going to home depot and figuring out how to fix it.
Of course, if you make close to what a builder makes per hour, you may see things differently. But that does not mean that most of the people who go to home depot to fix things themselves are not there for entertainment. If you don't believe me just look at how many riding mowers and tractors the Home Depot sells. There is no need for a person with a normal yard to buy one of those things, if it was really about saving a buck they'd go with the cheaper walking mowers.
The "minimum-wage cubicle farm" culture is the problem. Reading his story, I can pretty much think of someone in my career who filled the shoes of each person mentioned. You know it's funny, if we want to engineer a bridge, or a skyscraper, there is a consistent order and process to putting it together and documenting it. If we want to do that with programming, people just do whatever they want, put some duct tape here and there, and hope it doesn't fall apart. Of course part of that is management generally doesn't want to pay for properly engineered solutions. But it is indeed a problem.
Well that's not completely true. I'm quite sure an intelligent person could learn how to be a bricklayer if they really wanted to. I'm not quite as sure that an uneducated brick layer could learn to code if they really wanted to.
Although that's not to say a highly intelligent individual might not decide to become a bricklayer instead of a programmer.
Case in point: how many people who are not in construction go to Home Depot on the weekend as a sort of entertainment. It's interesting to figure out how to build something, and a form of entertainment (and pride) to be able to put something together. How many people can you say that about programming?
Personally? $48,000 is getting off easy. I'd add another order of magnitude onto it.
Well I guess that depends how much money he has. If he's a vigilante version of Bill Gates, even two or three orders of magnitude wouldn't hurt. If he's poor, he may already be bankrupt.
As a google for "BDA" brings up "British Dental Association" maybe you could be a bit more descriptive?
Are you saying the man accidentally was jamming cell traffic?
I guess it could happen. When I was in high school I built a spark gap and jacobs ladder out of a neon sign transformer. When I turned it on for the first time, the radio I was listening to stopped working. If I had one of these in my trunk driving down the interstate it'd probably render cell phones inoperable, AFAIK I knocked out radios within a larger radius.[1]
[1] "knocked out" here is metaphorical. No radios were harmed, i simply was emitting noise on a wide band that overpowered any FM towers, at least close to the source of interference.
And why would you need to do this when any other currency you might add has capital gains and losses, but you do not need to recognize them on the tax form?
Except land mine areas are concentrated, and do not always cause death. Take a trip to Cambodia, and walk down the street in Phnomh Penh. Every few block you'll see people missing limbs because they stepped on a landmine. If you have even a bit of a human heart, you'll understand that landmines as a method to engage in war are horrific. (Although you could argue ALL of war is horrific, land mines particularly so). They persist many years after the conflict is over, mainly injure the indigenous population (instead of targeting the enemy), and because nobody wants to step on a land mine, if you live in a land mine area you simply declare areas where land mines exist as off limits, rendering large areas completely unusable.
Which is why we'd have to change from "garbage" collection to "compost heap collection"
Composting requires things like exposure to air, sun, and turning. Output is soil.
From TFA the technique is already in use with some yogurt. You buy a box of yogurt "balls" that are edible, flavored, and filled with yogurt. When you pack your lunch for school or work you simply grab a ball of yogurt out of the box instead of a yogurt in an individual plastic container. Presumably the box is easier to recycle then the plastic containers.
This is interesting in the sense that it generates LESS waste and the waste it generates is biodegradable. The "container" is something from brown algae so I guess you could just compost the thing, much like an eggshell...
Actually it depends on how you institute the VAT.
It is true if you institute the ability for companies to be exempt from VAT, you defeat the purpose of the VAT.
However, in Europe companies typically get charged VAT as well as consumers...
Bollocks. VAT will hit rich harder than the poor. The benefit of a VAT tax is you tax consumption not income. So when a rich guy goes out and buys a 747 and outfits it as a super luxury "sky yacht" he's paying tax on it. Compare this to the current tax situation where a rich guy may not pay proportional taxes on his luxury good. (Buffett famously made the observation that he pays less tax on his luxury Malibu vacation home then most middle income people pay on their family homes)
Of course you don't want the poor, so you help them with the sales tax by making necessity items like milk and diapers tax free. You can additionally provide help like food stamps, or other subsidies. Or, another option is a "tiering" structure for the VAT. Buy a basic car like a 4 cylinder Honda? No tax. Buy a mid level car with a 6 cylinder engine, leather seats, and a sun roof? Tax. Buy a super luxury car like a ferrari? A lot of tax.
In that way you are capturing tax only on the wealthy (or people who are spending on "luxury").
(Not trolling here but curious)
Why?
So I get that when you get closer to c you need exponentially more energy to accelerate.
But what if we just got to 0.25c. That's only 2,000 years to destination, and totally doable I would guess
Yeah but why?
Seems to me they might as well start passing other laws like declaring the blue of the sky is the blue between 450 and 495nm, and no other blue will be considered blue.
Why would they even need to pass such a law?
Good luck with that
Well that's an interesting issue (and quite controversial here as well).
One friend of mine works as a dental assistant, and lives in social housing. She takes home maybe 2000 a month after taxes, maybe less, so if she didn't have social housing she couldn't afford to live in Amsterdam, anywhere.
Another friend of mine works at a bank. He now makes quite a bit of money, but keeps his social housing and basically gets to bank an extra few hundred a month due to his social housing status.
You might read my whole post before commenting, I quote (myself):
Plus "climbers" are envisioned to come in multiple forms and be able to pass each other. You might have a "human transport climber" that ascends at 20km / h but is unable to hold more than a few people and crew and a cargo climber that is bigger but slower.
Maybe I am a bit off on my numbers of height / speed but IANASEE (I am not a space elevator engineer) but it would appear the SEEs have done the number crunching already :)
Low earth orbit is only about 200 km in space. Even if you're talking about a speed of 1 km per day you'll still be able to deliver payloads to LEO within the year. Rockets still exist with their $25k per kg fee for stuff you need in space NOW but the space elevator has the ability to bring things into space at a much cheaper rate (maybe $300 / kg)
Plus "climbers" are envisioned to come in multiple forms and be able to pass each other. You might have a "human transport climber" that ascends at 20km / h but is unable to hold more than a few people and crew and a cargo climber that is bigger but slower.
Wikipedia, as always, is a good starting point:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
Lifetime is not an issue.
Just look at the Empire State Building. 80 years old and nobody's going to demolish it. Or the flatiron building. 115 years old, no problems there.
Construction can be done in such a way that an arcology can last. That's not an issue.
I'm more likely to ask WHY? Given if things with climate change do go downhill it could be our last resort but why do it if it's not necessary?