Once it becomes FDA approved and a patent is awarded, one of the big pharma companies will come in with a blank check to the patent owner and will immediately proceed to bury this knowledge and it'll never be used again, all in favor of high-priced chemotherapy.
TFA says that the bill for this one-time treatment weighs in at $475,000. That's probably even more high-priced than almost any chemotherapy.
I know that this is moving the goalposts a bit, but a very common treatment for leukemia is a stem cell transplant after intensive chemo. That can go well over $1,000,000 all told, more like $2,000,000. Again, that is the listed price, the insurance companies will pay less.
Interestingly, I read the link you gave for the costs of crime, and I found this:
"Using predominantly NCVS data, victim losses due to crimes against individuals and households were estimated at $450 billion ($1,800 per resident) per year from 1987–1990."
That would appear to contradict, somewhat, your premise, especially since it doesn't include the costs for police, courts, etc. If we toss that in (at least $179 billion) it starts to add up. And, the "war on poverty" isn't solely about reducing crime. I would argue that it includes other social good, intended to help some of the less fortunate among us.
... A largish household solar panel system might be 5 kW peak capacity (enough to provide order of 24 kW-hr in 24 hours with average-ish insolation). This system might cost $25K to $35K installed.
Please don't use out-dated information for installation costs. I googled installation costs, and found an article from 2008 (or earlier) that used those numbers: https://www.solarpowerauthorit.... I found a more recent article that had significantly better numbers: http://solar-power-now.com/cos.... This is roughly half the cost specified in your article.
I know the story, actually a very good one. But don't have the title in my mind or the book at hand, will check later at home.
There where two types of immortality. One was the teleportation thing the other one was a "gene therapy" done to kids who where then stuck in 12 - 14 year old bodies.
I'm pretty sure you're talking about the Ringworld series, especially the later books.
I agree there unfortunately. I did the math a few years ago, during which time the electric price hasn't really risen substantially in the midwest. I basically figured that the cost of installing the PV panels would be recouped at about the same time that the panels reached about 30% of their original capacity... in other words by that point you'd be so close to replacement time that it was almost a wash. It just didn't make sense to me because when I also included costs of routine maintenance (you have to clean PV shingles or panels frequently to ensure maximum efficiency) it really was a net negative.
Now, if electricity prices were higher like in Australia then I could definitely see it making a lot more sense.
Where did you get these data? I can't even find any timetable for solar panels degrading to 30% rated capacity. The typical warranty is no worse than 80% of rated capacity after 25 years.
Doing a little math: Normal degradation is around.7% per year, so getting to 30% would take ln(.3)/ln(.993) or 171 years. Even at 2% per year it's roughly 60 years. All I can say is electricity must be pretty cheap where you live, if it takes 170 years for panels to pay off.
The biggest appeal was getting into the chat system. There, we could chat with what I assume were Darthmouth college students. "JOIN XYZ" I think was the command from the main menu.
There was this cool VT display of who was in the chat, so you could tell how many people were there. I used to chat with these people all the time. It was great for a precocious 13 year old who couldn't talk with his peers because his vocabulary and worldview was greatly expanded from theirs. How unfortunate that my social skills were so backward at the same time.
The details are a bit foggy, but I'm sure with some conversation with some of the same folks who used to chat there, I could dredge up those memories. Anyone remember chatting on that system?
Oh yes. I was a freshman in '80, and I spent a lot (too much?) time in Kiewit, playing the adventure game, writing programs in BASIC (and later BASIC7, which had a multi-threaded version if you can believe that) chatting on XYZ. Probably talked to you at one point.
BTW, it's 'Dartmouth'. I'm not fussy, but I'm sure there are alums who are.
The average kwh cost in the US is about twelve cents, or $0.90 to $1.20 to go 25 miles.
PG&E has standard rate plans that vary from 11c/kWh (which is so little that you can't afford a refrigerator) to 30c/kWh. There are also special plans (time- and season-driven); one of them is specifically intended for charging EVs. In that plan, IIRC, the rate is about 5 c/kWh - but that is at night only. I do not recall what is the rate during the day. Utilities hide the actual rate tables. PG&E has a convenient calculator. I tried it with Tesla S60 and 60 miles per day. I got about $150/mo on plan EV-A.
60 miles per day * 30 = 1800 miles per month. If we convert this to a gas car, $150 pays for about 42 gallons of gas. This results in efficiency of 42.85 mpg. This not something to write home about. My own Prius does 52 mpg on flat land, and 45 mpg if you add climbing of the surrounding hills. If these calculations are correct, it is not efficient to use an EV even if you got it for free. At best it equals the hybrid that costs a third of the price of the EV.
I'm not sure I understand their math. A Tesla 60 gets at least 3 miles per kWh (http://www.teslamotors.com/goelectric#range), so your 60 mile day would take about 20 kWh. At 5 cents per kWh, that is $1/day, so about $30/month. To get a cost of $150/month would take electricity at $.25/kWh.
At $.05/kWh, you end up getting more than 200 miles/gallon equivalent, and that's if gas is $3.57/gal. Around here (Bay area) it's closer to $3.80.
Like I said, the math is squirrelly.
So if I set up a print shop that prints and sells copies of recent bestsellers and sells them dirt cheap to bookstores that sell them at deep discounts to consumer's that's a misdemeanor? How about if I download copies of the latest movie releases, burn them to DVDs and ship them all over Europe?
Then you would no longer be a private citizen but would be engaging in business. I think that almost everyone agrees that anyone who does that for commercial gain should have the book thrown at them.
Indeed. You can't stress that enough. The part of labwork I hated most was working with Tritium-labels. Sure, that plastic shield holds back all the alphas, but stuff gets aerosolized and that is not particular fun.
All the harry dresden books, for example, decided to be in a bold fond in the version I downloaded. Makes purchasing them a LOT more worthwhile (which I ended up doing for the first few, until I decided to give up on the series, but that's another story).
Ah, the memories! Here are some of the stories I've heard and or witnessed over the years.
Buttons: Every couple years, IBM would hold an open house where anyone in the community
could come in and get a tour of the facility (Kingston, NY). This was back in 1984, IIRC. PCs were just starting to make an impact at this time... big iron was king. We're talking about a huge raised-floor area
with multiple mainframes, storage, tape drives... MANY millions of dollars per system. A few hundred users on a system was quite an accomplishment back then and these boxes could handle a thousand users. We were
also in the midst of a huge test effort of the next release of VM/SP. I had come in that Sunday afternoon to get several tests done (death marches are no fun). All of a sudden the mainframe I was on crashed. Hard. I'd grown accustomed to this as we were at a point where we were "eating our own dog food"; the production system was running the latest build of the OS. But, an hour later and it was STILL down. Apparently, a tour guide had led a group to one of the operator consoles and a child could not resist pressing buttons. Back in those days, booting a mainframe meant "re-IPL" Initial Program Load. Unless the computer was REALLY messed up and wouldn't boot. Only then would someone re-IML the system. Initial Microcode Load. Guess which button the kid pressed? It left the system in such a wonky state that it had to be reloaded from tape. All the
development work of that weekend was lost and had to be recreated and rebuilt. (It was a weekend and backups
were only done on weekday nights.) It took us a week to get things back to normal.
Hey, I have a similar story from when I was working at Dartmouth College in the mid-80's. I was on third shift with two other guys, one who knew what he was doing, and one who was, uh, not fully technology-enabled.
For some reason, one night the latter person thought it would be a good idea to clean out the cabinet of our Honeywell mainframe. With a broom. A long-handled push broom.
This was on a weekend, when we normally do a full backup (onto good old 9-track tapes), reboot the system into protected mode, verify the system integrity, and go into multi-user mode. Well, we finished the backups, and tried to reboot. Nothing was working, and the diagnostics were wonky and pretty uninformative, and we (the useful co-worker and I) spent an hour or so trying to debug what was going on. It wasn't until we asked the third guy about the machine that he mentioned his cleaning. The boot switches for the IPL were on the door, and when he was in there cleaning, the broom handle toggled several of them, leaving the machine in its unusual state.
Needless to say, we asked him to avoid cleaning mainframes with brooms in the future.
Of course it was... it was a setup for another poster to come along and elevate the irony level via a similarly-constructed officious-seeming announcement in order to enhance the joke and provide, hopefully, additional chuckles among the fine readers of slashdot.
Instead, by observing my typo, and failing to take the opportunity to craft a joke out of it in the same vein... why that's a complete waste of a setup.
Can you help a brother out and at least continue the joke when the effort of a setup has been made?
This thread, however, is a fine example of depth-first self-flamage. For those of you who were in one of the schools that failed to properly teach computer science, observe and be edified.
Yeah time-shifting is nothing new. It has existed ever since the Sony Umatic VCR released circa 1969. That VCR was too expensive, so Sony went back and created the Betamax (anc JVC copied it to create VHS) in 1975. DVR is not even the first digital recording method - that was miniDV and Digital VHS in the early 1990s. ----- People have been time-shifting for decades. All the DVR did was replace the magnetic tape storage with magnetic disk storage. Nothing revolutionary... it was an evolutionary change.
On the contrary! Using a disk to store data is completely revolutionary!
I'm not an engineer so I can't comment on the operating ceiling of the the thing but speaking as a former private pilot, 9,150 meters (FL 28, roughly) is already well above the point where the pilot-in-command would be allowed to operate without supplemental oxygen.In fact, up that high you'd be messing with the three-holer transport jets and would probably need a pretty high-quality heated flight suit.
The actual history of "going to the mattresses" comes from the Joey Gallo and the war between him and the Profaci family. The term appeared in the headlines in the early 60's in the headlines in New York newspapers.
Also, this term appeared in the book "The Valachi Papers". From what I recall, it is supposed to mean getting serious about a mob war, where the various mob soldiers would live in rented houses/apartments, sleeping on mattresses, for the duration of the war.
That justifies baseless claims about the benefits of substances that have yet to be discovered? Or claims that organic farming somehow performs better at providing these hypothesized nutrients?
No. No, it doesn't. Those claims are still just as unfounded and hypothetical as they ever were.
I rarely rise to the bait presented by knee-jerk naysayers and pessimists. *sigh* Sometimes my self-restraint is overcome.
I read TFA, and didn't see a definitive list of "nutrients" they were studying. There were a few, but if the ones mentioned were the only ones studied, then yes they missed a *lot* of compounds commonly regarded as being of nutritive value.
The history of the quantitative and chemical analysis of food has been one of misunderstanding and misapplication of principles. Start by looking at Kellogg and his odd ideas of a healthful diet.
Slashdot Mirror
Once it becomes FDA approved and a patent is awarded, one of the big pharma companies will come in with a blank check to the patent owner and will immediately proceed to bury this knowledge and it'll never be used again, all in favor of high-priced chemotherapy.
TFA says that the bill for this one-time treatment weighs in at $475,000. That's probably even more high-priced than almost any chemotherapy.
I know that this is moving the goalposts a bit, but a very common treatment for leukemia is a stem cell transplant after intensive chemo. That can go well over $1,000,000 all told, more like $2,000,000. Again, that is the listed price, the insurance companies will pay less.
(Don't ask me how I know this... :-( )
Interestingly, I read the link you gave for the costs of crime, and I found this: "Using predominantly NCVS data, victim losses due to crimes against individuals and households were estimated at $450 billion ($1,800 per resident) per year from 1987–1990." That would appear to contradict, somewhat, your premise, especially since it doesn't include the costs for police, courts, etc. If we toss that in (at least $179 billion) it starts to add up. And, the "war on poverty" isn't solely about reducing crime. I would argue that it includes other social good, intended to help some of the less fortunate among us.
Wahoo! *waves cowboy hat*
Please don't use out-dated information for installation costs. I googled installation costs, and found an article from 2008 (or earlier) that used those numbers: https://www.solarpowerauthorit.... I found a more recent article that had significantly better numbers: http://solar-power-now.com/cos.... This is roughly half the cost specified in your article.
Today I'm contributing to Bernie's campaign.
I know the story, actually a very good one. But don't have the title in my mind or the book at hand, will check later at home.
There where two types of immortality. One was the teleportation thing the other one was a "gene therapy" done to kids who where then stuck in 12 - 14 year old bodies.
I'm pretty sure you're talking about the Ringworld series, especially the later books.
Proofed it quickly and missed "prey instead of pray." WHACK!!! Another slap on the wrist.
I thought that that was intentional. Way cool if it had been.
I agree there unfortunately. I did the math a few years ago, during which time the electric price hasn't really risen substantially in the midwest. I basically figured that the cost of installing the PV panels would be recouped at about the same time that the panels reached about 30% of their original capacity... in other words by that point you'd be so close to replacement time that it was almost a wash. It just didn't make sense to me because when I also included costs of routine maintenance (you have to clean PV shingles or panels frequently to ensure maximum efficiency) it really was a net negative.
Now, if electricity prices were higher like in Australia then I could definitely see it making a lot more sense.
Where did you get these data? I can't even find any timetable for solar panels degrading to 30% rated capacity. The typical warranty is no worse than 80% of rated capacity after 25 years.
.7% per year, so getting to 30% would take ln(.3)/ln(.993) or 171 years. Even at 2% per year it's roughly 60 years. All I can say is electricity must be pretty cheap where you live, if it takes 170 years for panels to pay off.
Doing a little math: Normal degradation is around
The biggest appeal was getting into the chat system. There, we could chat with what I assume were Darthmouth college students. "JOIN XYZ" I think was the command from the main menu.
There was this cool VT display of who was in the chat, so you could tell how many people were there. I used to chat with these people all the time. It was great for a precocious 13 year old who couldn't talk with his peers because his vocabulary and worldview was greatly expanded from theirs. How unfortunate that my social skills were so backward at the same time.
The details are a bit foggy, but I'm sure with some conversation with some of the same folks who used to chat there, I could dredge up those memories. Anyone remember chatting on that system?
Oh yes. I was a freshman in '80, and I spent a lot (too much?) time in Kiewit, playing the adventure game, writing programs in BASIC (and later BASIC7, which had a multi-threaded version if you can believe that) chatting on XYZ. Probably talked to you at one point.
BTW, it's 'Dartmouth'. I'm not fussy, but I'm sure there are alums who are.
The average kwh cost in the US is about twelve cents, or $0.90 to $1.20 to go 25 miles.
PG&E has standard rate plans that vary from 11c/kWh (which is so little that you can't afford a refrigerator) to 30c/kWh. There are also special plans (time- and season-driven); one of them is specifically intended for charging EVs. In that plan, IIRC, the rate is about 5 c/kWh - but that is at night only. I do not recall what is the rate during the day. Utilities hide the actual rate tables. PG&E has a convenient calculator. I tried it with Tesla S60 and 60 miles per day. I got about $150/mo on plan EV-A.
60 miles per day * 30 = 1800 miles per month. If we convert this to a gas car, $150 pays for about 42 gallons of gas. This results in efficiency of 42.85 mpg. This not something to write home about. My own Prius does 52 mpg on flat land, and 45 mpg if you add climbing of the surrounding hills. If these calculations are correct, it is not efficient to use an EV even if you got it for free. At best it equals the hybrid that costs a third of the price of the EV.
I'm not sure I understand their math. A Tesla 60 gets at least 3 miles per kWh (http://www.teslamotors.com/goelectric#range), so your 60 mile day would take about 20 kWh. At 5 cents per kWh, that is $1/day, so about $30/month. To get a cost of $150/month would take electricity at $.25/kWh. At $.05/kWh, you end up getting more than 200 miles/gallon equivalent, and that's if gas is $3.57/gal. Around here (Bay area) it's closer to $3.80. Like I said, the math is squirrelly.
Do you know what de facto means?
Well, I know what everybody says it means, but not necessarily what the rules say it's supposed to mean.
Man, I wish I had mod points... that's beautiful.
So if I set up a print shop that prints and sells copies of recent bestsellers and sells them dirt cheap to bookstores that sell them at deep discounts to consumer's that's a misdemeanor? How about if I download copies of the latest movie releases, burn them to DVDs and ship them all over Europe?
Then you would no longer be a private citizen but would be engaging in business. I think that almost everyone agrees that anyone who does that for commercial gain should have the book thrown at them.
Better not copy "Lord of the Rings" then...
"We're about ready to load our new destination into our GPS and head out onto the open road."
It seems Mars has GPS aswell. Time to start Geocaching on Mars...
I know it's obvious, but wouldn't that be "areo-caching"?
But I'd bet the Chinese are considering mining operations off planet
I find the above quote a little bit too ironic
Speaking of mining and ores, I find yours a bit... (how to put it?)... pun-ic?
And 'ores' rhymes with 'wars'. Nice.
"The Demolished Man", "The Stars My Destination"...
Turgid, I'm curious... where were working for Xerox? I was at the Wilsonville location...
Indeed. You can't stress that enough. The part of labwork I hated most was working with Tritium-labels. Sure, that plastic shield holds back all the alphas, but stuff gets aerosolized and that is not particular fun.
I saw what you did there...
All the harry dresden books, for example, decided to be in a bold fond in the version I downloaded. Makes purchasing them a LOT more worthwhile (which I ended up doing for the first few, until I decided to give up on the series, but that's another story).
I saw what you did there...
Ah, the memories! Here are some of the stories I've heard and or witnessed over the years.
Hey, I have a similar story from when I was working at Dartmouth College in the mid-80's. I was on third shift with two other guys, one who knew what he was doing, and one who was, uh, not fully technology-enabled.
For some reason, one night the latter person thought it would be a good idea to clean out the cabinet of our Honeywell mainframe. With a broom. A long-handled push broom.
This was on a weekend, when we normally do a full backup (onto good old 9-track tapes), reboot the system into protected mode, verify the system integrity, and go into multi-user mode. Well, we finished the backups, and tried to reboot. Nothing was working, and the diagnostics were wonky and pretty uninformative, and we (the useful co-worker and I) spent an hour or so trying to debug what was going on. It wasn't until we asked the third guy about the machine that he mentioned his cleaning. The boot switches for the IPL were on the door, and when he was in there cleaning, the broom handle toggled several of them, leaving the machine in its unusual state.
Needless to say, we asked him to avoid cleaning mainframes with brooms in the future.
Of course it was... it was a setup for another poster to come along and elevate the irony level via a similarly-constructed officious-seeming announcement in order to enhance the joke and provide, hopefully, additional chuckles among the fine readers of slashdot. Instead, by observing my typo, and failing to take the opportunity to craft a joke out of it in the same vein... why that's a complete waste of a setup. Can you help a brother out and at least continue the joke when the effort of a setup has been made?
This thread, however, is a fine example of depth-first self-flamage. For those of you who were in one of the schools that failed to properly teach computer science, observe and be edified.
Yeah time-shifting is nothing new. It has existed ever since the Sony Umatic VCR released circa 1969. That VCR was too expensive, so Sony went back and created the Betamax (anc JVC copied it to create VHS) in 1975. DVR is not even the first digital recording method - that was miniDV and Digital VHS in the early 1990s. ----- People have been time-shifting for decades. All the DVR did was replace the magnetic tape storage with magnetic disk storage. Nothing revolutionary... it was an evolutionary change.
On the contrary! Using a disk to store data is completely revolutionary!
Sorry about that... couldn't help myself.
I'm not an engineer so I can't comment on the operating ceiling of the the thing but speaking as a former private pilot, 9,150 meters (FL 28, roughly) is already well above the point where the pilot-in-command would be allowed to operate without supplemental oxygen.In fact, up that high you'd be messing with the three-holer transport jets and would probably need a pretty high-quality heated flight suit.
Erm, FL 280, right?
The actual history of "going to the mattresses" comes from the Joey Gallo and the war between him and the Profaci family. The term appeared in the headlines in the early 60's in the headlines in New York newspapers.
Info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Gallo#Gallo-Profaci_war http://tomfolsom.com/blog/
Also, this term appeared in the book "The Valachi Papers". From what I recall, it is supposed to mean getting serious about a mob war, where the various mob soldiers would live in rented houses/apartments, sleeping on mattresses, for the duration of the war.
Their Cingular bill is going to suck.
You mean it's going to be astronomical?
(sorry; I had to)
That justifies baseless claims about the benefits of substances that have yet to be discovered? Or claims that organic farming somehow performs better at providing these hypothesized nutrients?
No. No, it doesn't. Those claims are still just as unfounded and hypothetical as they ever were.
I rarely rise to the bait presented by knee-jerk naysayers and pessimists. *sigh* Sometimes my self-restraint is overcome.
I read TFA, and didn't see a definitive list of "nutrients" they were studying. There were a few, but if the ones mentioned were the only ones studied, then yes they missed a *lot* of compounds commonly regarded as being of nutritive value.
The history of the quantitative and chemical analysis of food has been one of misunderstanding and misapplication of principles. Start by looking at Kellogg and his odd ideas of a healthful diet.