I don't know about this specific deal, but I do know about several artifact deals like this, and generally you never own it. You just have a semi-perpetual lease. The lease voids and you must return the artifact unless certain conditions are met, like the artifact must be generally accessible to the public, must be indoors in a climate controlled environment, must be maintained by professional conservators (not the janitor or handyman), must submit an annual report meeting the satisfaction of some military historical/conservation office, etc. Often there are restrictions on control by for-profit companies, and restrictions on commercial advertising, especially if the focus of the advertising is the artifact or there is any insinuation of government approval of the advertiser. And then there are the insurance requirements.
You're not going to be allowed to part the thing out on ebay for fundraising, without really weird special permission. Maybe, if one of the tires goes flat, you could get permission from congress to chop it up, attach sq cm pieces to wood plaques, and sell the plaques, maybe, and it would help if you gave relevant congressmen some free samples.
I've seen strange word drift with other "ownership" words, the word "owning" means nothing anymore. The majority of the people whom claim they "own" a house are actually renting from the bank via a mortgage. For a good laugh, if you think you "own" your land, try not paying rent (aka property tax) to your local govt for a couple years, and see who really owns "your" land. Then there are the people that say "I built my home" merely meaning they purchased it from the builder as opposed to purchasing from a real estate agent. In some parts of the country, "an apartment" is a rental and in other parts "an apartment" is what most people call a condo, "buying an apartment" is an oxymoron because by definition an apartment is a place you rent. Some places call a condo a "home", in other areas only a free standing single family shack is called a "home".
Same deal with the shuttles. You're not "buying a shuttle" you're getting a "free" lease with a thousand special conditions, and only paying for delivery. The govt will repossess, at your expense, if you try to do something unapproved with the artifact, or something they'll repossess just because they feel like it.
If I was that rich, I'll *ride* the chops and I'll certainly never miss the opportunity of having my own space shuttle on my back yard. Don't you too?
filthy rich guy implies a trophy wife.
trophy wife is probably incompatible with our preferred decor.
Even a typical standard issue wife is borderline incompatible with my typical guy collection of ham radio gear, metalworking tools, electronics stuff, and computer parts. More, or higher class, versions of the same stuff would be even less wife approved. I may feel a full size professional grade SMD hot air rework station with a shelf full of accessories would be a vast improvement over my old traditional soldering station, but most female "interior decorator wannabes" would disagree. This coming from a guy whom thought interior decorating meant using an empty spray painted cable-reel for a bedside table and didn't own a non-folding dining room set until mid 2000.
Couldn't you just form an symbiotic relationship with algae or photoplankton, allowing them to live inside you for protection in return for using them for energy? Aren't there already animals that do this?
Thats very roughly the deal we have with the bacteria in our guts. If we were transparent, we could make the same deal with algae. Maybe if we swallowed a lot of flashlights?
Well, the problem would be that you then would also be very hot.
Not so bad for someone dying of hypothermia. Titanic sinks, skinny people instantly croak, fat ones could swim around at least until they dehydrate in a couple days?
I wonder how much fat I'd burn per hour to keep warm if I literally went swimming with the penguins?
I'm guessing it would be comparable to continuously heating up a large water heater using heating oil... maybe a couple pounds per hour?
Owning an in dash car mp3 player since roughly the millenium, which only really understands 8.3 filenames, I've gotten pretty handy at renaming downloaded audiobook mp3 files...
No. A couple watts is what you use to burn things. A couple of milliwatts would suffice for this application.
I don't know about that... A couple mW focused on a tiny little spot looks pretty bright. Smeared across a couple square feet, not so good. To see what I'm saying, look at a nice bright laserpointer on a screen, then shine the laser thru a lens to smear a big splotch across the screen.
If it magically the big area was as bright as the small spot, then you could shine upon a couple solar panels, use one panel to power the laser, and sell the power from the other panels. Perpetual motion/power, sort of.
I would imagine a mW laser would light up an entire room about as well as any other mW class light source...
I didn't see any mention in the article - will it have this horrible weakness that CRTs had?
Well, the HV supply for my old CRTs is a couple watts, my LCD backlight displays are a couple watts, I'm guessing this thing will require a couple watt laser for equal brightness. So if the scanning mirror jams in one spot, a couple dozen focused watts will burn a hole clean thru the screen, not just discolor the phosphor. That'll be exciting.
They have no copyright on the information so what good does the watermark do?
Hey Shaitand buddy old pal, I bought a copy of todays top sekret govt conspiracy du jour, its really interesting, I think you'd like it, and you being my buddy, let me print you a copy for when we meet down at the pub this evening for beers, OK?... later, at the pub...
Sorry Shaitand buddy old pal, I tried printing a copy for you this afternoon, and my darn credit card info shows up in light gray across each page, isn't that weird? I'd love to give ya a copy buddy old pal, but, thats my credit card, man...
Now that slows down a serious.PDF script kiddie for about two minutes, but the average journalist type would be totally mystified and stopped.
Somehow the Bt toxin makes its way through the bug's digestive system to kill it. Why is it so unbelievable that some of the toxin makes it through a human's digestive system?
broad-spectrum herbicide tolerant species should be allowed ever: this is giving the farmer instructions to completely soak the countryside with lethal chemicals (and who is to say the rats were sick because of the GMO or the herbicide?)
Oh, theres a much worse outcome. Some folks have the strange idea that genes can only change in a lab... Imagine a crossbred weed that is literally unkillable. Or the nations entire corn crop, instead of being unable to process one specific herbicide which is sort of good, is now unable to adsorb phosphate or nitrogen fertilizers which is sort of bad.
How would the unencumbered "free market" handle a problem like this? Especially since none of us who eat corn are actually direct customers of Monsanto's GM corn?
In a free market, you wouldn't have patents, trademarks, copyrights, so I highly doubt the genitive case of "Monsanto's GM corn".
Also without the federal govt collecting our income taxes, skimming off quite a percentage for salaries and corruption, and then distributing money to politically connected corn farmers, I really don't think we'd be growing much corn.
Finally, if we had a free market, that would imply informed consumers making intelligent choices, so I think we'd simply not buy the bad stuff.
If the above is "not possible", which I believe, then I guess a free market is not possible, so we need to have the govt control it and regulate the hell out of it, in my opinion, just like health care.
I think the majority of "high prevalence of corn in processed foods" is HFCS - does this contain significant fractions of the proteins involved.
Ideally it would contain approximately none, as the proteins would mess with the taste, odor, and color. HFCS is a very highly refined product... I would vaguely guess that there is about as much protein from random contaminants like rodent hair as protein from the corn.
Generally speaking HFCS syrups are sold with nutritional information for 100g of the stuff, and the nutritional info always lists 0g of protein. Now that doesn't mean 0, it means rounded to 0. So, if scientists write the nutritional data, that means less than 500 mg protein per 100 grams, or if marketing wrote it, it means 999.99999999 mg or less per 100 grams. However marketing doesn't care about protein content of HFCS at this time, so I'd feel confident that its well under 0.5% by weight.
I'd worry more about, say, frozen creamed corn, corn chips, or corn tortillas.
I mean, sure, it's nice to know that they are able to detect such an object, but the key here is probability. Was this pure chance/luck that they found it or are they 99.999% sure that they will detect any such object within the given timeframe?
Another interesting related question, how often do they "look" for objects with that trajectory? Constantly? Every hour? One time?
Imagine you had robots who could do all the work we need humans for now
The Marxian view that the only source of wealth is labor just doesn't work "outside of the lab". Resource limitations, energy limitations, social fads (paying adults millions to play a childs playground game), private property issues...
Also the Marxian view that only the means of production matters, is a bit out of date. You'll still have problems with distribution, fads, marketing, intentional market distortion, etc.
The baby boomers retire at an ever increasing rate for the next 15 years now. In 10 years, 2 million extra people will retire a year (4 million total).
They used to be dumping money into the stock market via 401Ks, now they'll be pulling money out of the market via cashing in 401Ks. Also they used to buy stuff, which they won't be doing after retirement/death.
Folks whom understand supply and demand, you know what to do with your investments in the "medium term". Panic is OK, as long as you're the FIRST one to panic, so to speak. Folks whom don't understand supply and demand, well you keep on dollar cost averaging, OK?
You're not thinking very far ahead. Who's to say that the people who can afford to buy the information will choose to disclose it? Perhaps they will only disclose it to other wealthy elite?
Perhaps if you watermark each individually processed document sold, with the valid credit card info used to make the donation, no one will share?
The other option is, sell for an interesting mathematical function by delay. 48 hours to one week its $1, after a week its free for research purposes. For less than 48 hours, it costs (2^(48-(hours old))) dollars. Perhaps powers of two is a bit expensive, and a mere 1.2 would be sufficient. 1.2^48 is only about six grand, if your 24 hour TV network wants the scoop right now. On the other hand a newspaper on a reasonable deadline would only have to drop maybe 1.2^40 which is a mere one grand. Individual concerned citizens would be willing to drop 1.2^24 which is a mere $80, these are the people that drop $40 for a hardcover book on the same topic and presumably this would be more interesting. And people that wait around 2 days pay something like itunes type charges, $1.20.
It depends what "sooner" means. If sooner is 1-2 days, perhaps it wouldn't be too bad, but a week or more would have bad effects because of outdated information
No need for an outdated "time intervals" here. Set a bounty. We figure it costs us $X to run this article, and we freely release it to the public when donations total $X, of course if you want to see a neatly watermarked copy right now, simply send a monetary donation of more than $1, up to whatever you think it might be worth, and we'll send you a nice watermarked copy, note we create and deliver your individualized copy in strict order of dollars donated, of course. Oh and by the way here is a snapshot of our current queue with dollar amounts and estimated processing time so you can intelligently balance your desire with your donation. That creates a nice long tail effect where a major TV network journalist will gladly donate the cost of a used car to scoop their competitors, yet a volunteer group or a poverty stricken individual (i.e. a student) in no hurry can get a copy for about the cost of an old fashioned paper newspaper.
Well if you were in the middle of the ocean, you probably wouldn't get a LORAN-C signal at all so your backup really isn't a backup. Check the LORAN-C coverage maps, anywhere outside the Caribbean, North Atlantic and North Pacific simply can't get any fix from LORAN-C signals (so if you're south of the equator you're probably SOL). Anywhere out of sight of coasts doesn't really get a great signal and has a fairly poor resolution.
Thats what the Omega system was for. Operated from 1971 to 1997. For reasons unknown the USAR put me thru a correspondence course on the Omega system in like 1996 (1995?). Omega had worldwide coverage. Its interesting that Omega could be heard with those "ELF" receivers as the carrier frequencies were in the audio range, made it quite annoying to listen for "whistlers". Its interesting that LORAN relies on chains where a master TX sends a pulse, then the remotes send another as they hear the master, so each chain has a single point of failure. Omega on the other hand had each station send a different pattern of tones, so you'd sync to each pattern/station, then measure the relative time (and/or phase) difference between them to get the ratio of distances to each station, so no single point of failure. GPS is basically Omega with the following differences, about a zillion times higher frequency, a much fancier spread spectrum modulation than the four tone Omega, and of course the GPS satellites move...
The russian transit sat equivalents are still up there and transmitting as of a few years ago. All the systems generally transmitted two data carriers very close to 200 and 400 MHz. Receivers measured the ratio of frequencies, thus figuring out the doppler shift directly without needing an accurate oscillator on the ground. Doppler hits zero when the satellite is overhead, and its no great task to calculate and distribute plots of where a satellite is directly overhead at any moment. That gives you only one fix, but you can also measure the rate of change of the doppler effect, giving you quite accurately how high the satellite was above the horizon, that gives you a 2-D position.
Slashdot Mirror
How could I scrap one of these shuttles
I don't know about this specific deal, but I do know about several artifact deals like this, and generally you never own it. You just have a semi-perpetual lease. The lease voids and you must return the artifact unless certain conditions are met, like the artifact must be generally accessible to the public, must be indoors in a climate controlled environment, must be maintained by professional conservators (not the janitor or handyman), must submit an annual report meeting the satisfaction of some military historical/conservation office, etc. Often there are restrictions on control by for-profit companies, and restrictions on commercial advertising, especially if the focus of the advertising is the artifact or there is any insinuation of government approval of the advertiser. And then there are the insurance requirements.
You're not going to be allowed to part the thing out on ebay for fundraising, without really weird special permission. Maybe, if one of the tires goes flat, you could get permission from congress to chop it up, attach sq cm pieces to wood plaques, and sell the plaques, maybe, and it would help if you gave relevant congressmen some free samples.
I've seen strange word drift with other "ownership" words, the word "owning" means nothing anymore. The majority of the people whom claim they "own" a house are actually renting from the bank via a mortgage. For a good laugh, if you think you "own" your land, try not paying rent (aka property tax) to your local govt for a couple years, and see who really owns "your" land. Then there are the people that say "I built my home" merely meaning they purchased it from the builder as opposed to purchasing from a real estate agent. In some parts of the country, "an apartment" is a rental and in other parts "an apartment" is what most people call a condo, "buying an apartment" is an oxymoron because by definition an apartment is a place you rent. Some places call a condo a "home", in other areas only a free standing single family shack is called a "home".
Same deal with the shuttles. You're not "buying a shuttle" you're getting a "free" lease with a thousand special conditions, and only paying for delivery. The govt will repossess, at your expense, if you try to do something unapproved with the artifact, or something they'll repossess just because they feel like it.
If I was that rich, I'll *ride* the chops and I'll certainly never miss the opportunity of having my own space shuttle on my back yard. Don't you too?
filthy rich guy implies a trophy wife.
trophy wife is probably incompatible with our preferred decor.
Even a typical standard issue wife is borderline incompatible with my typical guy collection of ham radio gear, metalworking tools, electronics stuff, and computer parts. More, or higher class, versions of the same stuff would be even less wife approved. I may feel a full size professional grade SMD hot air rework station with a shelf full of accessories would be a vast improvement over my old traditional soldering station, but most female "interior decorator wannabes" would disagree. This coming from a guy whom thought interior decorating meant using an empty spray painted cable-reel for a bedside table and didn't own a non-folding dining room set until mid 2000.
Couldn't you just form an symbiotic relationship with algae or photoplankton, allowing them to live inside you for protection in return for using them for energy? Aren't there already animals that do this?
Thats very roughly the deal we have with the bacteria in our guts.
If we were transparent, we could make the same deal with algae.
Maybe if we swallowed a lot of flashlights?
Shortcut the whole process and just stand in the toilet.
Water? Like out of a toilet? No man, you need Brawndo. Its got electrolytes.
Well, the problem would be that you then would also be very hot.
Not so bad for someone dying of hypothermia. Titanic sinks, skinny people instantly croak, fat ones could swim around at least until they dehydrate in a couple days?
I wonder how much fat I'd burn per hour to keep warm if I literally went swimming with the penguins?
I'm guessing it would be comparable to continuously heating up a large water heater using heating oil... maybe a couple pounds per hour?
One would hope that you could control the photosynthesis to keep from getting too fat, though.
Wear variable amount of clothes.
Strange side effect -> women in tiny bikinis would be fat, women in the cover it all up wetsuit like one pieces would be skinny.
But I assume they use analogue radio transmissions for that, not data
Nope all digital. TDRSS.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracking_and_Data_Relay_Satellite_System
ren antique???.jpg desk???.jpg
mmv "antique*.jpg" "desk#1.jpg"
Owning an in dash car mp3 player since roughly the millenium, which only really understands 8.3 filenames, I've gotten pretty handy at renaming downloaded audiobook mp3 files ...
No. A couple watts is what you use to burn things. A couple of milliwatts would suffice for this application.
I don't know about that... A couple mW focused on a tiny little spot looks pretty bright. Smeared across a couple square feet, not so good. To see what I'm saying, look at a nice bright laserpointer on a screen, then shine the laser thru a lens to smear a big splotch across the screen.
If it magically the big area was as bright as the small spot, then you could shine upon a couple solar panels, use one panel to power the laser, and sell the power from the other panels. Perpetual motion/power, sort of.
I would imagine a mW laser would light up an entire room about as well as any other mW class light source...
I personally cant wait for Dish & Direct TV to start battling it out by shooting down each others satellites.
And the only way the public wins, is if they BOTH are successful.
I didn't see any mention in the article - will it have this horrible weakness that CRTs had?
Well, the HV supply for my old CRTs is a couple watts, my LCD backlight displays are a couple watts, I'm guessing this thing will require a couple watt laser for equal brightness. So if the scanning mirror jams in one spot, a couple dozen focused watts will burn a hole clean thru the screen, not just discolor the phosphor. That'll be exciting.
I am just not sure I can think of a market where durability is less important than energy efficiency.
Greenwashing market.
They have no copyright on the information so what good does the watermark do?
Hey Shaitand buddy old pal, I bought a copy of todays top sekret govt conspiracy du jour, its really interesting, I think you'd like it, and you being my buddy, let me print you a copy for when we meet down at the pub this evening for beers, OK? ... later, at the pub ...
Sorry Shaitand buddy old pal, I tried printing a copy for you this afternoon, and my darn credit card info shows up in light gray across each page, isn't that weird? I'd love to give ya a copy buddy old pal, but, thats my credit card, man ...
Now that slows down a serious .PDF script kiddie for about two minutes, but the average journalist type would be totally mystified and stopped.
Somehow the Bt toxin makes its way through the bug's digestive system to kill it. Why is it so unbelievable that some of the toxin makes it through a human's digestive system?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_thuringiensis
"When insects ingest toxin crystals the alkaline pH of their digestive tract causes the toxin to become activated."
Most (all?) higher animals use a strongly ACIDIC digestive tract. Not a serious concern.
No idea why it would directly affect rodents. Maybe it doesn't directly affect them at all.
If you make a crop that produces cyanide, it's going to be poisonous.
I wonder how many people caught the sarcasm of your post, revolving around apple seeds containing cyanide.
How ever it is used to produce E-85 alcohol fuel, will it damage my fuel injectors?
INSECTICIDE laced fuel damage your injectors? Only if you drive a volkswagon BUG !
broad-spectrum herbicide tolerant species should be allowed ever: this is giving the farmer instructions to completely soak the countryside with lethal chemicals (and who is to say the rats were sick because of the GMO or the herbicide?)
Oh, theres a much worse outcome. Some folks have the strange idea that genes can only change in a lab... Imagine a crossbred weed that is literally unkillable. Or the nations entire corn crop, instead of being unable to process one specific herbicide which is sort of good, is now unable to adsorb phosphate or nitrogen fertilizers which is sort of bad.
How would the unencumbered "free market" handle a problem like this? Especially since none of us who eat corn are actually direct customers of Monsanto's GM corn?
In a free market, you wouldn't have patents, trademarks, copyrights, so I highly doubt the genitive case of "Monsanto's GM corn".
Also without the federal govt collecting our income taxes, skimming off quite a percentage for salaries and corruption, and then distributing money to politically connected corn farmers, I really don't think we'd be growing much corn.
Finally, if we had a free market, that would imply informed consumers making intelligent choices, so I think we'd simply not buy the bad stuff.
If the above is "not possible", which I believe, then I guess a free market is not possible, so we need to have the govt control it and regulate the hell out of it, in my opinion, just like health care.
I think the majority of "high prevalence of corn in processed foods" is HFCS - does this contain significant fractions of the proteins involved.
Ideally it would contain approximately none, as the proteins would mess with the taste, odor, and color. HFCS is a very highly refined product... I would vaguely guess that there is about as much protein from random contaminants like rodent hair as protein from the corn.
Generally speaking HFCS syrups are sold with nutritional information for 100g of the stuff, and the nutritional info always lists 0g of protein. Now that doesn't mean 0, it means rounded to 0. So, if scientists write the nutritional data, that means less than 500 mg protein per 100 grams, or if marketing wrote it, it means 999.99999999 mg or less per 100 grams. However marketing doesn't care about protein content of HFCS at this time, so I'd feel confident that its well under 0.5% by weight.
I'd worry more about, say, frozen creamed corn, corn chips, or corn tortillas.
I mean, sure, it's nice to know that they are able to detect such an object, but the key here is probability. Was this pure chance/luck that they found it or are they 99.999% sure that they will detect any such object within the given timeframe?
Another interesting related question, how often do they "look" for objects with that trajectory? Constantly? Every hour? One time?
No, what you need is more wealth.
Imagine you had robots who could do all the work we need humans for now
The Marxian view that the only source of wealth is labor just doesn't work "outside of the lab". Resource limitations, energy limitations, social fads (paying adults millions to play a childs playground game), private property issues...
Also the Marxian view that only the means of production matters, is a bit out of date. You'll still have problems with distribution, fads, marketing, intentional market distortion, etc.
The baby boomers retire at an ever increasing rate for the next 15 years now. In 10 years, 2 million extra people will retire a year (4 million total).
They used to be dumping money into the stock market via 401Ks, now they'll be pulling money out of the market via cashing in 401Ks. Also they used to buy stuff, which they won't be doing after retirement/death.
Folks whom understand supply and demand, you know what to do with your investments in the "medium term". Panic is OK, as long as you're the FIRST one to panic, so to speak. Folks whom don't understand supply and demand, well you keep on dollar cost averaging, OK?
You're not thinking very far ahead. Who's to say that the people who can afford to buy the information will choose to disclose it? Perhaps they will only disclose it to other wealthy elite?
Perhaps if you watermark each individually processed document sold, with the valid credit card info used to make the donation, no one will share?
The other option is, sell for an interesting mathematical function by delay. 48 hours to one week its $1, after a week its free for research purposes. For less than 48 hours, it costs (2^(48-(hours old))) dollars. Perhaps powers of two is a bit expensive, and a mere 1.2 would be sufficient. 1.2^48 is only about six grand, if your 24 hour TV network wants the scoop right now. On the other hand a newspaper on a reasonable deadline would only have to drop maybe 1.2^40 which is a mere one grand. Individual concerned citizens would be willing to drop 1.2^24 which is a mere $80, these are the people that drop $40 for a hardcover book on the same topic and presumably this would be more interesting. And people that wait around 2 days pay something like itunes type charges, $1.20.
It depends what "sooner" means. If sooner is 1-2 days, perhaps it wouldn't be too bad, but a week or more would have bad effects because of outdated information
No need for an outdated "time intervals" here. Set a bounty. We figure it costs us $X to run this article, and we freely release it to the public when donations total $X, of course if you want to see a neatly watermarked copy right now, simply send a monetary donation of more than $1, up to whatever you think it might be worth, and we'll send you a nice watermarked copy, note we create and deliver your individualized copy in strict order of dollars donated, of course. Oh and by the way here is a snapshot of our current queue with dollar amounts and estimated processing time so you can intelligently balance your desire with your donation. That creates a nice long tail effect where a major TV network journalist will gladly donate the cost of a used car to scoop their competitors, yet a volunteer group or a poverty stricken individual (i.e. a student) in no hurry can get a copy for about the cost of an old fashioned paper newspaper.
Well if you were in the middle of the ocean, you probably wouldn't get a LORAN-C signal at all so your backup really isn't a backup. Check the LORAN-C coverage maps, anywhere outside the Caribbean, North Atlantic and North Pacific simply can't get any fix from LORAN-C signals (so if you're south of the equator you're probably SOL). Anywhere out of sight of coasts doesn't really get a great signal and has a fairly poor resolution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OMEGA_Navigation_System
Thats what the Omega system was for. Operated from 1971 to 1997. For reasons unknown the USAR put me thru a correspondence course on the Omega system in like 1996 (1995?). Omega had worldwide coverage. Its interesting that Omega could be heard with those "ELF" receivers as the carrier frequencies were in the audio range, made it quite annoying to listen for "whistlers". Its interesting that LORAN relies on chains where a master TX sends a pulse, then the remotes send another as they hear the master, so each chain has a single point of failure. Omega on the other hand had each station send a different pattern of tones, so you'd sync to each pattern/station, then measure the relative time (and/or phase) difference between them to get the ratio of distances to each station, so no single point of failure. GPS is basically Omega with the following differences, about a zillion times higher frequency, a much fancier spread spectrum modulation than the four tone Omega, and of course the GPS satellites move...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_(satellite)
The russian transit sat equivalents are still up there and transmitting as of a few years ago. All the systems generally transmitted two data carriers very close to 200 and 400 MHz. Receivers measured the ratio of frequencies, thus figuring out the doppler shift directly without needing an accurate oscillator on the ground. Doppler hits zero when the satellite is overhead, and its no great task to calculate and distribute plots of where a satellite is directly overhead at any moment. That gives you only one fix, but you can also measure the rate of change of the doppler effect, giving you quite accurately how high the satellite was above the horizon, that gives you a 2-D position.