The question the modern capitalist must ask themselves is a question of priority. What is more important to you, the lives of poor individuals or profits?
That has been answered by law:
- Corporate officials have a duty to run the corporation, within the constraints of the rule of law, to attempt to maximize the value to the stockholders. "Value to the stockholders" is usually financial, though stockholders may decree that other values are to be primary or considered in the mix. (i.e. Hershey's, Google,...).
- The government sets the "constraints of the rule of law" such that coercive harm to individuals is prohibited or penalized and strategies to maximize return also promote, rather than hamper, the general welfare.
So the corporate officers are REQUIRED BY LAW to put the law first and the profit second, considering fallout on others only to the extent that it affects legal constraints and the bottom line (or other desires of the stockholders). If they're causing harm to the "lives of the poor" in a way you think that's improper, one of the following is true:
- They're breaking a law and should be enjoined and prosecuted or sued for damages.
- They made poor decisions, harming the interests of their stockholders, and should be educated or replaced.
- The law needs adjustment.
High punitive damage awards in lawsuits are part of the way the law maps "not harming others" into "maximizing stockholder value".
(BP, for instance, seems about to be remapped rather fiercely, unless the corruption of the current government allows them to buy their way out. That's being reflected in their stock price, especially over the last couple days.)
As for medicine prices, the main problem there is the excessively tight requirements for drug approval by the FDA, where bureaucrats get dinged for letting a drug through that causes some birth defects (i.e. thalidomide) but not for blocking a drug that would otherwise have saved 100,000 a year (i.e. beta blockers for heart attack victims). When the agency was created the congresscritters thought that delaying drugs by more than six months would result in a cost-benefit hit. Now it takes decades and tens to hundreds of million dollars to TRY to bring a drug to market. That price - for the ones that make it to market and the many more that don't - must be paid from the money made on the ones that make it. This prices them out of reach of the third world. Cut those costs and delays and the drug companies would be happy to sell lots of inexpensive stuff. Fast nickels are LOTS better than slow dollars. A few more people would be damaged - and very many more would be helped.
How MUCH sticky rice per how much lime, etc. Or how much purified additive? (Though adding cooked(?) rice, as the Chinese did, would probably end up inexpensive and may also add more strength as it collapses and forms voids, making a concrete foam structure.)
I was about to make a post complaining about the lack of useful information. But you beat me to it AND phrased it brilliantly. Kudos.
How about a law that prohibits these companies from passing on their "mistakes" to the consumers?
When they don't make money from a product or service they don't provide it. (Even if you force them to provide it, do that to enough products/services and the company as a whole dries up and blows away - unless you "bail them out" by - guess what - giving them still more money, which comes from - guess where - the consumers' pocket by way of taxes or inflation.)
It's just another form of price control. Set it too high and you cost the consumer more than a non-regulated market would have cost. Set it too low and the product or service becomes scarce. Your proposal falls into the "set it too low" camp.
You can't have oscillations between massless and massive states. Remember, SR says that time stands still for massless particles.
Not only that but (rest-)massless particles move at the speed of light and particles with rest mass move at some velocity less than that. Converting from one to the other (without interacting with another particle) would violate the conservation of momentum.
Note, however, that temperature in the atmosphere varies with altitude (even without crossing weather system boundaries). This is due to both compression heating/cooling as the molecules move vertically and latent heat of condensation if the air has nontrivial moisture content.
Look up "lapse rate". Wikipedia has a nice article on it.
I'm not sure this is anything new. Map makers include fake streets.
And fake towns out in the middle of nowhere.
This is one of the reasons that you should NEVER trust your GPS navigation system to plot a route through potentially hazardous rural areas. A number of people have been killed by doing this. (James Kim among them.)
GPS nav systems will send you:
- to the fake town (where you expected to get gas),
- to the seasonal town that's only open in, say, the hunting season),
- to the old mining town that's been abandoned for decades,
- down roads that have been abandoned for years, are not maintained or patrolled in the winter (and snowed shut for months at a time), or only suitable for four wheel drive vehicles with an emergency winch or high-lift jack, etc.
Latest example from my experience: Friend visiting us in Nevada wanted to visit the Bodie ghost town state park, which is at 8,379 feet in the Seirras. Rather than routing her on paved roads the nav system in her Prius computed a slightly shorter route, mostly on the 4WD, open-part-year, through-the-mountain-pass back road.
... what IS The Drudge Report? Mostly just a news aggregator. Yes, it has broken several unique stories over it's lifetime, but it's MOSTLY just an aggregator.
The same could be said of most news outlets: TV and radio newsrooms, local newspapers, even the big chains (like Newscorp).
If not part of a chain, a local news operation primarily feeds stories from elsewhere and does a little reporting of its own - which OTHER news organizations "aggregate". It would typically subscribe to one or more news agencies - either co-ops (like AP) or news selling operations. Like the internet or open source software, participants in such organizations receive far more than they contribute.
Larger news operations, with multiple outlets, may do a higher percentage of their own reporting. But they still end up either "aggregating" or following up others' "scoops" - and competing on being "firstest with the mostest" and/or on their editing, focus, analysis, or viewpoint/bias.
Right - it is in a bank's best interest to lend their money to as many people as possible, with no verification of whether or not those people will ever be able to pay it back. Because you know, when you steal the bank's money, the bank wins!
The banks borrow the money from the Federal Reserve (which creates it "out of thin air") at very low interest (currently nearly zero - but call it 2% to make some numbers come out nice later). Why do they accept and solicit deposits (on which they pay similarly low interest) at all? Because the Fed will only lend to them in proportion to the money they got elsewhere.
Then they use it to pay off the credit card users' bills - at a discount, due to their contracts with the company. The bank and the credit card company split about 2% of the trasaction - for maybe a month's float on the money. Call it 26%/year. (This money comes out of higher prices at stores that accept credit cards - prices that also apply to customers who use cash or checks, too.)
If the customer doesn't pay the full amount every month they also charge the customer interest on the float. After the teaser rate has expired this might be another 18%. And many will charge it for another month even if he DOES pay in full that month. If the customer was ever late with a payment (for some banks - if he's late on ANY of his OTHER accounts even if the credit card account is paid) they sock him with a penalty and bump his interest rate, perhaps to 26%. That brings the interest rate up to 52% or so. Also there may be annual fees.
So for every thousand bux they borrow at nearly zero interest to fund this operation they make somewhere between $240 and over %500 per year.
With their money doubling every couple years they can afford a pretty hefty amount of losses from fraud and still come out 'way ahead. A surprisingly high percentage of the transactions have to be both fraudulent AND ending up paid for by the bank before it even makes a dent in their bottom line, let alone make the operation a net money-loser.
It's like the early ATMs - where (I hear) a major city bank was willing to accept $10,000/weekend in fraudulent withdrawals due to running in standalone mode (i.e. trusting what the mag stripe said about the account). When it went up to $100,000/weekend it became worth their while to pay for the extra manhours necessary to keep the computers online all weekend.
What I'm more curious about is why there hasn't been (AFAIK) an app that uses an asymmetric public-key encryption method. The solution from TFA takes the combination of the users' keys to generate a password,...
Public key encryption is crunch intensive - even in the good direction. (It's "effectively impossible" in the "bad" direction, which is the whole point.) Too crunch intensive to be practical when encrypting streams, even with current fast processors.
So it's usually used to generate and exchange a "session key" (and perhaps periodically replace it with a new one) for a symmetric cypher that takes less crunch and is "secure enough" if the amount of material it encrypts is limited.
... these apps aren't that useful because the other caller would have to be using the same software for it to work...
From TFA:
Marlinspike says the apps will interface with users' contact lists and other functions on the phone to take the hassle out of making calls and sending texts that can't be eavesdropped by third parties....
RedPhone uses ZRTP, an open source Internet voice cryptography scheme created by Phil Zimmermann, inventor of the widely-used Pretty Good Privacy or PGP encryption.... [Similarly for the SMS system.]
Looks to me like the product uses defacto-standard encrypted communication tools and integrates them with the phonebook to make their use automatic when calling a contact with whom you can have an encrypted conversation.
So it looks to me like your encrypted communications wouldn't be limited to people using the same android app. You could talk to anybody using the same underlying "standard" scheme.
Isn't the shuttle such an albatross precisely because reusability is so impractical?
Nope. It's because somebody goofed and they made the wings too big. As I heard it back then (caveat: didn't check it myself):
The shuttle was supposed to be a combined civilian and military vehicle, so the design budgets could be combined and the cost per unit could be brought down by building a bunch of 'em.
Civilian stuff mostly orbits equatorial and near-equatorial, launching eastward to get a boost from the Earth's rotation. This would be launched east from Canaveral, so crashes would be into the Atlantic. A lot of military stuff orbits polar or near polar, and doesn't get the boost. This would be launched south from Vandenberg, so crashes would be into the Pacific.
Without the boost from the Earth's rotation you get a significant reduction in payload capacity. There's a rule of thumb for computing this.
The shuttle lands as a glider. The wings are partly for steering it for cross-track on the way down. The farther the worst-case sideways distance from your orbital track to the landing site is, the bigger the wings you need.
For typical missions the Shuttle doesn't need much cross-range capability: You just wait for the orbit closest to going right over the landing site and go down then. This happens twice per day. You could get away with little stubby wings like the X-15.
But the military wanted to be able to run another mission profile: A polar, pop-up, once-around shot, landing back at the launch site. This would be for things like spying in a war or near-war situation, when you'd want to get the shuttle down with the info right away and also before the enemy could shoot it down. Problem with this is that the earth moves the landing zone out from under the orbit and you need a lot of cross-range capability to do it. So you need big wings.
So they ran a sanity check on whether the polar orbit was still doable with the big, heavy wings needed for this mission. They're heavy, and that weight comes right out of payload, so the payload capacity would be reduced and the cost-per-pound to low orbit raised a bunch. But it looked like the polar orbit could still launch a decent-sized cargo. So they went with the big wings.
But when they'd run the sanity check they'd applied the rule-of-thumb to the CARGO weight. Somebody had forgotten that, since it also ended up in orbit, the orbiter itself, along with the crew and their consumables, WAS ALSO PART OF THE PAYLOAD. So you have to apply the rule of thumb to the TOTAL weight: Payload, orbiter, consumables, reentry fuel, yadda-yadda-yadda.
Once they did the computation right it turns out that the shuttle would only have a couple hundred pounds of payload to polar orbit. No launching spy satellites for you! Oops!
So the military didn't end up using the shuttle (except for a couple equatorial shots testing some gear). They built their own big boosters and went their separate way. The Vandenberg shuttle launch site was demoted to an emergency landing site (so the shuttle could be landed if Canaveral had bad weather and then piggybacked to Canaveral rather than relaunched from Vandenberg). The military didn't buy any craft and the whole cost of construction and operation fell on the civilian projects, raising the cost-per-pound still further.
... they've only got maybe a decade and a bit left on the patent to make as much money as possible... How much more do you think a cure for influenza is worth than a "mildly effective maintenance drug"
Additionally: Curing a diseased person means there's a disease-prone person able to earn money and buy their other products for decades to come - and a doctor who knows they sell stuff that works well.
One way to view the eventual decay of unstable atomic systems (such as beta decay) amounts to a random encounter and reaction with half of a virtual particle-antiparticle pair from the quantum-mechanical vacuum, with that virtual particle annihilating its counterpart within the unstable system and the energy of the annihilation plus that of the instability liberating the other virtual particle of the pair. (This way things like half-lives depend on the randomness of the encounter and the even statistical distribution of the virtual particles in the QM vacuum, so decay doesn't need a hidden-variable "clock" in the unstable system.)
In a true, hard, vacuum the only thing the decaying particle would be encountering would be QM vacuum virtual particle pairs, which (by the standard model) SHOULD be evenly balanced. But these experiments take place in a real accelerator, in a place built out of normal matter. The vacuum is contaminated by small amounts of normal matter - both the odd gas molecules (or their atomic and subatomic fragments thanks to the high-intensity beams) and random cosmic and local radiation - with a very strong bias toward normal matter. It's also "contaminated" by the colliding beams - are the beam densities equal, or is the antiparticle beam a tad weaker?
Perhaps the unperturbed decays are evenly balanced - but decays resulting from encounters with non-virtual particles (or the "polarized vacuum" around them, with the virtual particles having a preferred orientation due to the fields around the non-virtual particles) are biased according to the matter/antimatter type of the particle?
I'd be interested to see whether these hypothetical effects from contamination of the reaction-region vacuum by normal matter have been taken into account.
I think most people have the wrong idea about the "Butterfly Effect." IIRC, the weather scientists were talking about the precision with which they would need to know air movement to make longer term predictions. i.e. the longer the forecast the more digits of precision are needed in your measurement. They were referring to the level of precision and not to butterflies causing a tornado or other such nonsense.
No, they were referring to both.
One of the issues with chaotic systems is that there are regions in the regime where a small perturbation DOES expand without limit and small changes produce large effects. Weather is such a system.
On one hand, it means that current instrumentation can only measure things down to the point where the models track the actual weather for 3 to 5 or so days (depending on conditions) before they diverge into uselessness. On the other it means that there are literally situations where a landing plane makes the difference between a foggy and a clear morning, a contrail grows into a storm system, or a butterfly taking off makes the difference, weeks later, of whether a hurricane hits Cuba or Texas - or even forms at all.
Not EVERY butterfly takeoff creates or destroys the next month's hurricanes. But some do. Go out far enough and the details of the recoil of a molecule can make the difference between El Nino and La Nina.
Which does not necessarily mean that weather doesn't converge into predictable climate. Many chaotic systems still follow a predictable set of tracks.
Its also a reproductive strategy to raise your young and to be a society. If it were a superior strategy then it would win out of its own accord rather than having to eliminate other strategies.
Part of "being a society" is "how the society's members handle those who break the society's rules".
Approximately one percent of any given human population is composed of psychopaths - people who have the conscience equivalent of color-blindness. Most of the law (and religious instruction) is about handling them: Giving an explicit rule set for those who chose to compensate for lack of a conscience by following the rules, giving a schedule of rewards and punishments to encourage those who are in it for themselves to chose the path of enlightened self-interest, and establishing criteria and procedures to remove those who still break the rules from the rest of society - for a time or forever.
So behaviors that say "Hey, you! Out of the gene pool!" to rule-breaking competitors are an integral part of the "superior strategy winning of its own accord". (So are behaviors, such as rape, where an alternative reproductive strategy forcibly seizes the reproductive resources of ITs competitors.)
Why is rape so much worse than murder or attempted murder?
Because, in addition to the harm done to the victim (including the risk of transmission of a fatal disease), it's a successful reproductive strategy. To the extent that a tendency to such behavior is heritable (and in other animals it seems to be), letting people breed by committing rape creates a larger population of people with a tendency to commit rape in the next generation. Execution of convicted rapists would produce a counteracting selection pressure.
Yeah, I had that argument with someone over the weekend. "Why should people on the watch list be allowed to buy guns?", my response "Why should the Attorney General be able to take away my rights with no due process?"
You're hearing about that because there's legislation to that effect being pushed in the congress. HR2401 - the "No Fly, No Buy act..."
Shaw dealt with that in his stories, if I recall them correctly:
Shock randomized the stored light's position and time history, causing the window (or its fragments) to have a constant diffuse glow for its propagation time.
At one point a lab, working on a way to fast-forward, came up with a way to speed the light up on a (few days?) pane into a very quick release. When the effect took hold the flash - not the main one but little bits of it delay-repeated by other pieces of glass in the lab - blinded an interloper who had entered after the main release.
(I think this was as close as he came - in the stories - to addressing the issue of the amount of energy stored and the effects of its sudden release.)
Video camera into a delay loop to a monitor.... Quite unlike looking in a mirror.
Doubly so because people's faces are usually slightly asymmetrical and they're used to seeing them reversed in a mirror. So the image looks subtly wrong to them when it's not swapped left-right.
Portrait photographers know about that and some of them reverse the print if the subject is the customer, so it looks right to him/her and subtly wrong to everybody else. B-)
Slashdot Mirror
The question the modern capitalist must ask themselves is a question of priority. What is more important to you, the lives of poor individuals or profits?
That has been answered by law:
- Corporate officials have a duty to run the corporation, within the constraints of the rule of law, to attempt to maximize the value to the stockholders. "Value to the stockholders" is usually financial, though stockholders may decree that other values are to be primary or considered in the mix. (i.e. Hershey's, Google, ...).
- The government sets the "constraints of the rule of law" such that coercive harm to individuals is prohibited or penalized and strategies to maximize return also promote, rather than hamper, the general welfare.
So the corporate officers are REQUIRED BY LAW to put the law first and the profit second, considering fallout on others only to the extent that it affects legal constraints and the bottom line (or other desires of the stockholders). If they're causing harm to the "lives of the poor" in a way you think that's improper, one of the following is true:
- They're breaking a law and should be enjoined and prosecuted or sued for damages.
- They made poor decisions, harming the interests of their stockholders, and should be educated or replaced.
- The law needs adjustment.
High punitive damage awards in lawsuits are part of the way the law maps "not harming others" into "maximizing stockholder value".
(BP, for instance, seems about to be remapped rather fiercely, unless the corruption of the current government allows them to buy their way out. That's being reflected in their stock price, especially over the last couple days.)
As for medicine prices, the main problem there is the excessively tight requirements for drug approval by the FDA, where bureaucrats get dinged for letting a drug through that causes some birth defects (i.e. thalidomide) but not for blocking a drug that would otherwise have saved 100,000 a year (i.e. beta blockers for heart attack victims). When the agency was created the congresscritters thought that delaying drugs by more than six months would result in a cost-benefit hit. Now it takes decades and tens to hundreds of million dollars to TRY to bring a drug to market. That price - for the ones that make it to market and the many more that don't - must be paid from the money made on the ones that make it. This prices them out of reach of the third world. Cut those costs and delays and the drug companies would be happy to sell lots of inexpensive stuff. Fast nickels are LOTS better than slow dollars. A few more people would be damaged - and very many more would be helped.
... and may also add more strength as it collapses and forms voids, making a concrete foam structure
"add more strength" should have read "increase strength to weight ratio and/or toughness".
How MUCH sticky rice per how much lime, etc. Or how much purified additive? (Though adding cooked(?) rice, as the Chinese did, would probably end up inexpensive and may also add more strength as it collapses and forms voids, making a concrete foam structure.)
I was about to make a post complaining about the lack of useful information. But you beat me to it AND phrased it brilliantly. Kudos.
This thing doesn't look at your surfing habits, ...
And how do you know this?
How about a law that prohibits these companies from passing on their "mistakes" to the consumers?
When they don't make money from a product or service they don't provide it. (Even if you force them to provide it, do that to enough products/services and the company as a whole dries up and blows away - unless you "bail them out" by - guess what - giving them still more money, which comes from - guess where - the consumers' pocket by way of taxes or inflation.)
It's just another form of price control. Set it too high and you cost the consumer more than a non-regulated market would have cost. Set it too low and the product or service becomes scarce. Your proposal falls into the "set it too low" camp.
You can't have oscillations between massless and massive states. Remember, SR says that time stands still for massless particles.
Not only that but (rest-)massless particles move at the speed of light and particles with rest mass move at some velocity less than that. Converting from one to the other (without interacting with another particle) would violate the conservation of momentum.
Note, however, that temperature in the atmosphere varies with altitude (even without crossing weather system boundaries). This is due to both compression heating/cooling as the molecules move vertically and latent heat of condensation if the air has nontrivial moisture content.
Look up "lapse rate". Wikipedia has a nice article on it.
I'm not sure this is anything new. Map makers include fake streets.
And fake towns out in the middle of nowhere.
This is one of the reasons that you should NEVER trust your GPS navigation system to plot a route through potentially hazardous rural areas. A number of people have been killed by doing this. (James Kim among them.)
GPS nav systems will send you:
- to the fake town (where you expected to get gas),
- to the seasonal town that's only open in, say, the hunting season),
- to the old mining town that's been abandoned for decades,
- down roads that have been abandoned for years, are not maintained or patrolled in the winter (and snowed shut for months at a time), or only suitable for four wheel drive vehicles with an emergency winch or high-lift jack,
etc.
Latest example from my experience: Friend visiting us in Nevada wanted to visit the Bodie ghost town state park, which is at 8,379 feet in the Seirras. Rather than routing her on paved roads the nav system in her Prius computed a slightly shorter route, mostly on the 4WD, open-part-year, through-the-mountain-pass back road.
... what IS The Drudge Report? Mostly just a news aggregator. Yes, it has broken several unique stories over it's lifetime, but it's MOSTLY just an aggregator.
The same could be said of most news outlets: TV and radio newsrooms, local newspapers, even the big chains (like Newscorp).
If not part of a chain, a local news operation primarily feeds stories from elsewhere and does a little reporting of its own - which OTHER news organizations "aggregate". It would typically subscribe to one or more news agencies - either co-ops (like AP) or news selling operations. Like the internet or open source software, participants in such organizations receive far more than they contribute.
Larger news operations, with multiple outlets, may do a higher percentage of their own reporting. But they still end up either "aggregating" or following up others' "scoops" - and competing on being "firstest with the mostest" and/or on their editing, focus, analysis, or viewpoint/bias.
So for every thousand bux they borrow at nearly zero interest to fund this operation they make somewhere between $240 and over %500 per year.
Typo: Make that $500.
Right - it is in a bank's best interest to lend their money to as many people as possible, with no verification of whether or not those people will ever be able to pay it back. Because you know, when you steal the bank's money, the bank wins!
The banks borrow the money from the Federal Reserve (which creates it "out of thin air") at very low interest (currently nearly zero - but call it 2% to make some numbers come out nice later). Why do they accept and solicit deposits (on which they pay similarly low interest) at all? Because the Fed will only lend to them in proportion to the money they got elsewhere.
Then they use it to pay off the credit card users' bills - at a discount, due to their contracts with the company. The bank and the credit card company split about 2% of the trasaction - for maybe a month's float on the money. Call it 26%/year. (This money comes out of higher prices at stores that accept credit cards - prices that also apply to customers who use cash or checks, too.)
If the customer doesn't pay the full amount every month they also charge the customer interest on the float. After the teaser rate has expired this might be another 18%. And many will charge it for another month even if he DOES pay in full that month. If the customer was ever late with a payment (for some banks - if he's late on ANY of his OTHER accounts even if the credit card account is paid) they sock him with a penalty and bump his interest rate, perhaps to 26%. That brings the interest rate up to 52% or so. Also there may be annual fees.
So for every thousand bux they borrow at nearly zero interest to fund this operation they make somewhere between $240 and over %500 per year.
With their money doubling every couple years they can afford a pretty hefty amount of losses from fraud and still come out 'way ahead. A surprisingly high percentage of the transactions have to be both fraudulent AND ending up paid for by the bank before it even makes a dent in their bottom line, let alone make the operation a net money-loser.
It's like the early ATMs - where (I hear) a major city bank was willing to accept $10,000/weekend in fraudulent withdrawals due to running in standalone mode (i.e. trusting what the mag stripe said about the account). When it went up to $100,000/weekend it became worth their while to pay for the extra manhours necessary to keep the computers online all weekend.
Skype provides encrypted calls and SMS for how many years now?
But it's closed source and runs through an infrastructure that is subject to government pressure for disclosure.
What I'm more curious about is why there hasn't been (AFAIK) an app that uses an asymmetric public-key encryption method. The solution from TFA takes the combination of the users' keys to generate a password, ...
Public key encryption is crunch intensive - even in the good direction. (It's "effectively impossible" in the "bad" direction, which is the whole point.) Too crunch intensive to be practical when encrypting streams, even with current fast processors.
So it's usually used to generate and exchange a "session key" (and perhaps periodically replace it with a new one) for a symmetric cypher that takes less crunch and is "secure enough" if the amount of material it encrypts is limited.
... these apps aren't that useful because the other caller would have to be using the same software for it to work ...
From TFA:
Looks to me like the product uses defacto-standard encrypted communication tools and integrates them with the phonebook to make their use automatic when calling a contact with whom you can have an encrypted conversation.
So it looks to me like your encrypted communications wouldn't be limited to people using the same android app. You could talk to anybody using the same underlying "standard" scheme.
Isn't the shuttle such an albatross precisely because reusability is so impractical?
Nope. It's because somebody goofed and they made the wings too big. As I heard it back then (caveat: didn't check it myself):
The shuttle was supposed to be a combined civilian and military vehicle, so the design budgets could be combined and the cost per unit could be brought down by building a bunch of 'em.
Civilian stuff mostly orbits equatorial and near-equatorial, launching eastward to get a boost from the Earth's rotation. This would be launched east from Canaveral, so crashes would be into the Atlantic. A lot of military stuff orbits polar or near polar, and doesn't get the boost. This would be launched south from Vandenberg, so crashes would be into the Pacific.
Without the boost from the Earth's rotation you get a significant reduction in payload capacity. There's a rule of thumb for computing this.
The shuttle lands as a glider. The wings are partly for steering it for cross-track on the way down. The farther the worst-case sideways distance from your orbital track to the landing site is, the bigger the wings you need.
For typical missions the Shuttle doesn't need much cross-range capability: You just wait for the orbit closest to going right over the landing site and go down then. This happens twice per day. You could get away with little stubby wings like the X-15.
But the military wanted to be able to run another mission profile: A polar, pop-up, once-around shot, landing back at the launch site. This would be for things like spying in a war or near-war situation, when you'd want to get the shuttle down with the info right away and also before the enemy could shoot it down. Problem with this is that the earth moves the landing zone out from under the orbit and you need a lot of cross-range capability to do it. So you need big wings.
So they ran a sanity check on whether the polar orbit was still doable with the big, heavy wings needed for this mission. They're heavy, and that weight comes right out of payload, so the payload capacity would be reduced and the cost-per-pound to low orbit raised a bunch. But it looked like the polar orbit could still launch a decent-sized cargo. So they went with the big wings.
But when they'd run the sanity check they'd applied the rule-of-thumb to the CARGO weight. Somebody had forgotten that, since it also ended up in orbit, the orbiter itself, along with the crew and their consumables, WAS ALSO PART OF THE PAYLOAD. So you have to apply the rule of thumb to the TOTAL weight: Payload, orbiter, consumables, reentry fuel, yadda-yadda-yadda.
Once they did the computation right it turns out that the shuttle would only have a couple hundred pounds of payload to polar orbit. No launching spy satellites for you! Oops!
So the military didn't end up using the shuttle (except for a couple equatorial shots testing some gear). They built their own big boosters and went their separate way. The Vandenberg shuttle launch site was demoted to an emergency landing site (so the shuttle could be landed if Canaveral had bad weather and then piggybacked to Canaveral rather than relaunched from Vandenberg). The military didn't buy any craft and the whole cost of construction and operation fell on the civilian projects, raising the cost-per-pound still further.
... they've only got maybe a decade and a bit left on the patent to make as much money as possible ... How much more do you think a cure for influenza is worth than a "mildly effective maintenance drug"
Additionally: Curing a diseased person means there's a disease-prone person able to earn money and buy their other products for decades to come - and a doctor who knows they sell stuff that works well.
As I understand it (and IANAPhysicist):
One way to view the eventual decay of unstable atomic systems (such as beta decay) amounts to a random encounter and reaction with half of a virtual particle-antiparticle pair from the quantum-mechanical vacuum, with that virtual particle annihilating its counterpart within the unstable system and the energy of the annihilation plus that of the instability liberating the other virtual particle of the pair. (This way things like half-lives depend on the randomness of the encounter and the even statistical distribution of the virtual particles in the QM vacuum, so decay doesn't need a hidden-variable "clock" in the unstable system.)
In a true, hard, vacuum the only thing the decaying particle would be encountering would be QM vacuum virtual particle pairs, which (by the standard model) SHOULD be evenly balanced. But these experiments take place in a real accelerator, in a place built out of normal matter. The vacuum is contaminated by small amounts of normal matter - both the odd gas molecules (or their atomic and subatomic fragments thanks to the high-intensity beams) and random cosmic and local radiation - with a very strong bias toward normal matter. It's also "contaminated" by the colliding beams - are the beam densities equal, or is the antiparticle beam a tad weaker?
Perhaps the unperturbed decays are evenly balanced - but decays resulting from encounters with non-virtual particles (or the "polarized vacuum" around them, with the virtual particles having a preferred orientation due to the fields around the non-virtual particles) are biased according to the matter/antimatter type of the particle?
I'd be interested to see whether these hypothetical effects from contamination of the reaction-region vacuum by normal matter have been taken into account.
... boiling water and turning it into a gas won't open a portal to a parallel universe. (If it were that easy, you think I'd still be here?)
Well, that depends.
Maybe this IS the best of all possible worlds. B-)
I think most people have the wrong idea about the "Butterfly Effect." IIRC, the weather scientists were talking about the precision with which they would need to know air movement to make longer term predictions. i.e. the longer the forecast the more digits of precision are needed in your measurement. They were referring to the level of precision and not to butterflies causing a tornado or other such nonsense.
No, they were referring to both.
One of the issues with chaotic systems is that there are regions in the regime where a small perturbation DOES expand without limit and small changes produce large effects. Weather is such a system.
On one hand, it means that current instrumentation can only measure things down to the point where the models track the actual weather for 3 to 5 or so days (depending on conditions) before they diverge into uselessness. On the other it means that there are literally situations where a landing plane makes the difference between a foggy and a clear morning, a contrail grows into a storm system, or a butterfly taking off makes the difference, weeks later, of whether a hurricane hits Cuba or Texas - or even forms at all.
Not EVERY butterfly takeoff creates or destroys the next month's hurricanes. But some do. Go out far enough and the details of the recoil of a molecule can make the difference between El Nino and La Nina.
Which does not necessarily mean that weather doesn't converge into predictable climate. Many chaotic systems still follow a predictable set of tracks.
Or Mothra vs. Godzilla.
Its also a reproductive strategy to raise your young and to be a society. If it were a superior strategy then it would win out of its own accord rather than having to eliminate other strategies.
Part of "being a society" is "how the society's members handle those who break the society's rules".
Approximately one percent of any given human population is composed of psychopaths - people who have the conscience equivalent of color-blindness. Most of the law (and religious instruction) is about handling them: Giving an explicit rule set for those who chose to compensate for lack of a conscience by following the rules, giving a schedule of rewards and punishments to encourage those who are in it for themselves to chose the path of enlightened self-interest, and establishing criteria and procedures to remove those who still break the rules from the rest of society - for a time or forever.
So behaviors that say "Hey, you! Out of the gene pool!" to rule-breaking competitors are an integral part of the "superior strategy winning of its own accord". (So are behaviors, such as rape, where an alternative reproductive strategy forcibly seizes the reproductive resources of ITs competitors.)
Why is rape so much worse than murder or attempted murder?
Because, in addition to the harm done to the victim (including the risk of transmission of a fatal disease), it's a successful reproductive strategy. To the extent that a tendency to such behavior is heritable (and in other animals it seems to be), letting people breed by committing rape creates a larger population of people with a tendency to commit rape in the next generation. Execution of convicted rapists would produce a counteracting selection pressure.
Yeah, I had that argument with someone over the weekend. "Why should people on the watch list be allowed to buy guns?", my response "Why should the Attorney General be able to take away my rights with no due process?"
You're hearing about that because there's legislation to that effect being pushed in the congress. HR2401 - the "No Fly, No Buy act ..."
Shaw dealt with that in his stories, if I recall them correctly:
Shock randomized the stored light's position and time history, causing the window (or its fragments) to have a constant diffuse glow for its propagation time.
At one point a lab, working on a way to fast-forward, came up with a way to speed the light up on a (few days?) pane into a very quick release. When the effect took hold the flash - not the main one but little bits of it delay-repeated by other pieces of glass in the lab - blinded an interloper who had entered after the main release.
(I think this was as close as he came - in the stories - to addressing the issue of the amount of energy stored and the effects of its sudden release.)
Video camera into a delay loop to a monitor. ... Quite unlike looking in a mirror.
Doubly so because people's faces are usually slightly asymmetrical and they're used to seeing them reversed in a mirror. So the image looks subtly wrong to them when it's not swapped left-right.
Portrait photographers know about that and some of them reverse the print if the subject is the customer, so it looks right to him/her and subtly wrong to everybody else. B-)