I guess I'm not understanding the setup you describe. Do you mean to say this very long tube is on the ground, and the scramjet moves through it until it reaches mach 5 or so, then exits the tube? That would have to be a really long tube, and very large in diameter to accomodate anything usefull. Also, I would think the thicker air would cause heat problems close to the ground once it left the tube.
Or are you saying the other jet is attached to the front of the scramjet. That doesn't make sense to me, as all the oxygen would be gone from the air as it entered the scramjet.
Hmmm... never even heard of this one. I stand corrected. I guess I should have said "all scramjets need some external propulsion to get the engine into its operating envelope".
However scramjets do not begin to work until they reach five times the speed of sound.
All scramjets, including this one, use rockets to get the engine up to speed - scramjets don't work at subsonic speeds.
They're trying to test an engine design here. Would you rather have them spend 200M building a whole craft to test an engine that's likely to be used only once? They're a long way from an anything that could actually be used for something practical, so cheapest is best as long as it moves the ball forward.
Fist of all, Musk isn't a co-founder of Paypal. Second, Carmack has spent much, much, less money than Musk. And Third, if Carmack is successful, his rocket will be much cheaper to operate.
I haven't seen anyone point out the most dire threat to newspapers - Craig's List. Newspapers used to provide news, comics, sports, etc as a means of getting revenue from advertisers, yes, but more imortantly the classified ads. The 25 cents (or whatever) you pay for the paper just barely covers the printing costs.
It's not clear to me you can have a viable paper without that classified ad revenue. Murdoch is right - unless the papers get a piece of that revenue they're doomed. It really doesn't matter if Aunt Clara refuses to get a computer or not; if they can't get the classified ads back they won't be able to produce a newspaper at a price she's willing to pay.
Vonage is using telco infrastructure to undercut a major telco profit center, without paying a them a dime for the privelege.
No. The customer is using telco infrastructure, which he pays for monthly in the form of a service fee to his ISP, to undercut the absurdly high rates telcos charge for POTS.
Vonage is just an application. If Vonage has to pay the "using my pipes" fee, and Google has to pay the "using my pipes" fee, what the hell am I paying every month to my ISP?
I weep for the future of my country (USA). If anything, the woman who called the police should have been fined for wasting the officer's time.
If it had been me she wouldn't be wasting the officer's time, but she would have found it pretty difficult to call the cops while I was wringing her neck. I've had my fill of people who don't know when not to take a phone call.
Even if the plasma somehow ruptured its container and shot out around the lab, you'd never notice a change in temperature--especially since the plasma would only be around for something on the order of nanoseconds (going from memory here, might be less than that).
Oh, I'm sure you'd notice it if you were in the way.
Am I the only one here who realizes this is really all about the "war on undeclared income"? The "war on drugs" is, itself, an excuse to give Congress an "in" to your bank account to see if that cash business should be getting milked a little more.
This is a consequence of the size of the government. As it grows larger it will acquire more influence on our day-to-day activities. It's the nature of large bureaucracies.
Our forbears would be horrified at the extent of today's government, but somebody has to feed the beast.
Of course not. But it IS unreasonable for companies to characterize profit less than 30% to be "not worthwhile" - especially when advertising budgets are typically 5 times that or R&D (a lifesaving drug should need an advertising budget of approximately $0.)
But lifesaving drugs do have an advertising budget of $0. When is the last time you saw a commercial for Vancomycin? What they're advertising is drugs like Viagra, Allegra, and Lipitor.
The pharmaceutical industry is far from "unprofitable".
I don't recall saying it was. But saying an industry is profitable isn't the same as saying one product line is profitable. Normally when a new class of antibiotics comes out it gets reserved for cases that don't respond to conventional drugs. For you and me that's great, since it means there's one more thing to try when everything else fails. For a drug company it's a guarentee of unprofitability.
There is not as dire a relationship between high profitability and innovation. There IS a relationship between company profitability, and the square footage of the CEO's vacation home in Aspen.
Eh, so what? There's never a direct relationship between high profitability and innovation. Profitability comes from providing a product product people are willing to pay for at a price higher than you can make it. Next had the most innovative stuff on the market, but they never made any money. Oh, and there's only one measure of CEO performance - profitability. It's not a charity, it's a corporation.
Actually, you just cited two ways to deal with this. And actually, it's a false dichotomy. And actually - when you even accept the notion of a Patent, the Government already IS involved.
Of course the government is involved. But that's not the same thing as saying the government is developing the drugs.
Then when you consider the reality that much of the cutting edge research is actually done at universities, many of them state-funded, while the IP that's generated is then funnelled to the drug company that markets the drug, you're illusion of the Proud Brave Libertairan Ideal Free Enterprise Innovating Heroic Drug Company kind of breaks down.
Not hard to beat up a strawman, is it? I don't assign any moral value to an economic system. The only way to get corporations to work for the public good is to set up the situation such that they make money doing what you want them to do. That's not happening now, so that's why they're not investing in antibiotics. Why is that so hard to understand?
As far as universities are concerned, they aren't doing the risky and expensive part. The drug companies typically pay for the trials. "Promising" substances are a dime a dozen. But going from a test tube to something a doctor can prescribe is a long and risky road. If you think universities are just giving IP away, you've never been associated with one.
It's kind of tired and old, and most people with an IQ over 100 aren't fooled by it anymore.
What a stupid thing to say. Your entire point is drug companies make money off drugs like Viagra, so they can afford to lose money developing new antibiotics. That may make sense from your perspective; less from a drug company's.
I don't understand what the big deal is. She wrote a letter urging "forcefull" removal of the governemnt. That's textbook sedition. It's against the law. You see, there are a couple exceptions to you right to speak freely, and that's one of them.
Note too she hasn't actually been charged with anything or even, to her knowledge, investigated by the FBI. Some schmoe HR director is just covering his ass in case she goes postal.
Now, if writing a stupid sentence in a rant letter is all she did and she gets a criminal charge and she gets convicted, then I'll be worried. Until the, no.
By the way, if she composed that letter from work she really should be fired, just like anybody would be at my work for playing politics on company time and on company equipment.
. . . and by "legislation". . . I assume they mean "more government handouts, tax breaks, bogus tort-reform to free them from responsibility for adequate testing, and patent extensions"
I don't think it's unreasonable for companies to expect a profit from their research. New antibiotics are usually reserved for patients that have exhausted the more common ones, so the company won't sell many units. But the cost to prove safety and efficacy is the same as a new hypertension drug that millions of people could take on a daily basis.
So you tell me what you'd do if you ran a drug company? I know what I'd do - I'd stay out of antibiotic (and antifungal) research altogether until I could see some way to make a profit. I'd happily turn out new, marginally better drugs for hypertension, high cholesterol, and diabetes until the cows come home. Or until the business environment changes.
There's really only two ways to deal with this. Either you find some way of getting more money to the drug companies so more lines of research become profitabe, or you have the government do it. But why anybody would think the government could do better I have no idea. We've been waiting for fusion power for more than 50 years. And how's that AIDS vaccine coming?
There used to be a law called the "Orphan Drug Act" that allowed companies to retain patents for long periods of time if they were researching drugs for diseases that don't affect very many people. I know it was somewhat abused, but I think much good came of it, too. I don't know if it's still law or not.
Eh... given how successful the "war on drugs", the "war on poverty", the "war on AIDS", and all those other wars on social/medical problems are turning out, let's not and say we did.
I don't mind funding research, but there are only so many people out there smart and educated enough to make good use of the money. Putting extra in doesn't get you better results, it just creates large self-sustaining bureaucracies.
There's one really, really important fact missing from this article: Did he have access to the documents in question during the course of his duties, or did he go snooping around the law firms computers for unsecured documents?
If it's the later, then he absolutely deserves to be prosecuted (and convicted). The idea behind the whisleblower laws was to give people with knowlege of criminal activity some protection from reprisal. But the key point is you had to have obtained that info in the course of your regular (legal) duties. These laws do not give you carte blanche to break into your boss's computer to see if the company you work for is doing anything you don't like.
If he just copied documents in his possession he could certainly get sued by his boss for breach of contract, but I don't think the charges will survive the grand jury. Based on the specific charges, I suspect there's more to it than that (or at least the DA thinks so).
These are experience related issues. You can't expect someone with a little college training to know about memory allocation issues. They don't even teach those languages anymore. At my school they start with Java. How are you supposed to know about the stack when you start in Java? I wrote something about this exact issue.
As I noted in another response, if a guy who claims ten years of experience on his resume can't pass this test he's either really stupid or excessively padding his resume. Either way I don't want him.
I'm not going to put a junior programmer who gonna need a lot of TLC into a senior position.
That's catch-22. You're gleefully claiming to laugh at these people who come and interview and don't know some things you want them to know, but I bet some of those people you are laughing at have never been given the opportunity to learn. You can talk all you want about "oh but they should have spent every spare moment writing code for OSS projects during university" or whatever, but that's not realistic to expect. People have to have a way in to GET the experience you laugh at people for not having.
Sure, if we're looking for someone junior, we don't expect them to realize how important that kind of stuff is. But if I'm hiring for a senior position, and I interview a guy who says he has ten years of "C/C++" under his belt, if he doesn't understand those kinds of fundemental issues he's either a) exceedingly stupid or b) lying about his experience. If you're applying for a job with me and I catch you lying the interview is over.
Here's the real kicker! A HS dropout with absolutely horrid social skills and language skills, can get a job driving a forklift around for 60 bucks an hour. I've seen it happen MANY times. Hell, a lot of them don't even know English. The good ones (read: social) get paid even more, that's why they like to hire the cheapy dropouts.
That's hard for me to believe. Somebody driving a forklift making 60 bucks an hour is pulling down $120,000 a year. Since the median houshold income (where both parents are usually working) is somewhere around $50,000, I have to be a little skeptical about your number. Do you mean $60,000 a year? A little more believable, although probably still higher than average.
Every time slashdot runs an article like this there's always a bunch of people that post something to the effect of "Oh yeah? Why can't I find a job for the mad money I was making in 2001?"
Every time we have an open position, finding someone reasonably competent is like pulling teeth. We routinely have applicants lie about their experience. We had one guy say he's been doing NT support five years longer than NT has existed.
When we hire C programmers, we give a programming test. Most applicants don't realize it's not good to lose a reference to allocated memory, have no problem passing stack variables back to the calling function, and can't spot a variable that's used before initialization.
Whenever I see someone complaining about not having a job, I wonder if it's one of the ones we laughed about at lunch after interviewing all morning.
Why go far, look right here on Slashdot. These are geeks, supposedly the folks who're "smarter" than the average population.
That's very conceited, isn't it? I see no evidence slashdot geeks are any more intelligent than the average college graduate. In the great scheme of things computers aren't that complicated, and spending some time to learn your way around them doesn't make you intelligent.
I submit the comment section of any random article on this site as proof of my point.
Well, country boy, you ever been to San Fancisco, the bluest of blue cities? Let me tell you, it's easy to decry racism if you're never actually in physical proximity to other people. Oh sure, there's no racists here, just ask anyone - their best friends are black. But it sure is funny how the races never seem to be in the same place at the same time. Why is that, I wonder?
Black kids in the local public school? "Well, I'd put Johnny in the public school, but, you know, it's so important to get a good start in life, and the private school twenty miles from here is so much better. But it's not racism, you understand, that's only for rednecks in Republican states."
Look, you lefties can tell yourselves whatever you want, but I know hypocrisy when I see it.
The majority of the right wing isn't racist? That's a good one! Have you even ventured into the countryside before, maybe, spoken with the majority of the republicans in the US? Either you're sheltered or flat out lying your ass off.
I wonder if you actually have any idea what you're talking about, or you've formed this opinion by reading the Times in your NYC apartment. My personal experience is far different.
The most pervasive American racism I've encountered is in blue state America, where the so-called liberals can be against racism while at the same time totally isolating themselves from anybody who doesn't look like they do, except for the nanny.
You want to know the dirty little secret of gun control? Liberals are fearful of the minorities they've excluded (economically) from the gated enclaves, but they can't very well say "I'd feel safer if minorities didn't have guns". So they support gun control for everyone. Well, everyone except for the cops who are far more numerous in their well-patrolled neighborhoods. And the private security in the gated communities.
I'd like to refute your other points, but it's clear you haven't taken your medicine, so why bother?
We need some kind of shorthand to describe different sets of beliefs. Yes, it's true people have misconceptions based on labels, but what's the alternative? If somebody asks about your politics do you subject them to a half-hour laundry list of your positions on the issues, or do you say "I'm left of center"? Personally I describe myself as a conservative, but if you'd be wrong if you thought that means I have anything in common with Pat Robertson.
I have read Howard Zinn's book and wasn't impressed. I thought he didn't provide enough detail to back up many of his assertions. It may be he felt it was more important to cover a little bit of everything instead of going into detail. I don't know.
Slashdot Mirror
Or are you saying the other jet is attached to the front of the scramjet. That doesn't make sense to me, as all the oxygen would be gone from the air as it entered the scramjet.
The picture is awesome, by the way.
However scramjets do not begin to work until they reach five times the speed of sound.
All scramjets, including this one, use rockets to get the engine up to speed - scramjets don't work at subsonic speeds.
They're trying to test an engine design here. Would you rather have them spend 200M building a whole craft to test an engine that's likely to be used only once? They're a long way from an anything that could actually be used for something practical, so cheapest is best as long as it moves the ball forward.
Fist of all, Musk isn't a co-founder of Paypal. Second, Carmack has spent much, much, less money than Musk. And Third, if Carmack is successful, his rocket will be much cheaper to operate.
What does it matter, as long as you get to space (alone if necessary).
Yeah, that was my take too. They didn't gain much by winning, but it was certainly a "must win".
I'm pretty sure no sane national politician wants to be associated with this clunker. Maybe if it brings jobs to his district.
I'm sure Bush'll give a nice speech if everything goes well and an even nicer one if it doesn't.
It's not clear to me you can have a viable paper without that classified ad revenue. Murdoch is right - unless the papers get a piece of that revenue they're doomed. It really doesn't matter if Aunt Clara refuses to get a computer or not; if they can't get the classified ads back they won't be able to produce a newspaper at a price she's willing to pay.
No. The customer is using telco infrastructure, which he pays for monthly in the form of a service fee to his ISP, to undercut the absurdly high rates telcos charge for POTS.
Vonage is just an application. If Vonage has to pay the "using my pipes" fee, and Google has to pay the "using my pipes" fee, what the hell am I paying every month to my ISP?
If it had been me she wouldn't be wasting the officer's time, but she would have found it pretty difficult to call the cops while I was wringing her neck. I've had my fill of people who don't know when not to take a phone call.
Oh, I'm sure you'd notice it if you were in the way.
This is a consequence of the size of the government. As it grows larger it will acquire more influence on our day-to-day activities. It's the nature of large bureaucracies.
Our forbears would be horrified at the extent of today's government, but somebody has to feed the beast.
But lifesaving drugs do have an advertising budget of $0. When is the last time you saw a commercial for Vancomycin? What they're advertising is drugs like Viagra, Allegra, and Lipitor.
The pharmaceutical industry is far from "unprofitable".
I don't recall saying it was. But saying an industry is profitable isn't the same as saying one product line is profitable. Normally when a new class of antibiotics comes out it gets reserved for cases that don't respond to conventional drugs. For you and me that's great, since it means there's one more thing to try when everything else fails. For a drug company it's a guarentee of unprofitability.
There is not as dire a relationship between high profitability and innovation. There IS a relationship between company profitability, and the square footage of the CEO's vacation home in Aspen.
Eh, so what? There's never a direct relationship between high profitability and innovation. Profitability comes from providing a product product people are willing to pay for at a price higher than you can make it. Next had the most innovative stuff on the market, but they never made any money. Oh, and there's only one measure of CEO performance - profitability. It's not a charity, it's a corporation.
Actually, you just cited two ways to deal with this. And actually, it's a false dichotomy. And actually - when you even accept the notion of a Patent, the Government already IS involved.
Of course the government is involved. But that's not the same thing as saying the government is developing the drugs.
Then when you consider the reality that much of the cutting edge research is actually done at universities, many of them state-funded, while the IP that's generated is then funnelled to the drug company that markets the drug, you're illusion of the Proud Brave Libertairan Ideal Free Enterprise Innovating Heroic Drug Company kind of breaks down.
Not hard to beat up a strawman, is it? I don't assign any moral value to an economic system. The only way to get corporations to work for the public good is to set up the situation such that they make money doing what you want them to do. That's not happening now, so that's why they're not investing in antibiotics. Why is that so hard to understand?
As far as universities are concerned, they aren't doing the risky and expensive part. The drug companies typically pay for the trials. "Promising" substances are a dime a dozen. But going from a test tube to something a doctor can prescribe is a long and risky road. If you think universities are just giving IP away, you've never been associated with one.
It's kind of tired and old, and most people with an IQ over 100 aren't fooled by it anymore.
What a stupid thing to say. Your entire point is drug companies make money off drugs like Viagra, so they can afford to lose money developing new antibiotics. That may make sense from your perspective; less from a drug company's.
Note too she hasn't actually been charged with anything or even, to her knowledge, investigated by the FBI. Some schmoe HR director is just covering his ass in case she goes postal.
Now, if writing a stupid sentence in a rant letter is all she did and she gets a criminal charge and she gets convicted, then I'll be worried. Until the, no.
By the way, if she composed that letter from work she really should be fired, just like anybody would be at my work for playing politics on company time and on company equipment.
I don't think it's unreasonable for companies to expect a profit from their research. New antibiotics are usually reserved for patients that have exhausted the more common ones, so the company won't sell many units. But the cost to prove safety and efficacy is the same as a new hypertension drug that millions of people could take on a daily basis.
So you tell me what you'd do if you ran a drug company? I know what I'd do - I'd stay out of antibiotic (and antifungal) research altogether until I could see some way to make a profit. I'd happily turn out new, marginally better drugs for hypertension, high cholesterol, and diabetes until the cows come home. Or until the business environment changes.
There's really only two ways to deal with this. Either you find some way of getting more money to the drug companies so more lines of research become profitabe, or you have the government do it. But why anybody would think the government could do better I have no idea. We've been waiting for fusion power for more than 50 years. And how's that AIDS vaccine coming?
There used to be a law called the "Orphan Drug Act" that allowed companies to retain patents for long periods of time if they were researching drugs for diseases that don't affect very many people. I know it was somewhat abused, but I think much good came of it, too. I don't know if it's still law or not.
Oh, that's easy. The more dangerous one is the one I get.
I don't mind funding research, but there are only so many people out there smart and educated enough to make good use of the money. Putting extra in doesn't get you better results, it just creates large self-sustaining bureaucracies.
If it's the later, then he absolutely deserves to be prosecuted (and convicted). The idea behind the whisleblower laws was to give people with knowlege of criminal activity some protection from reprisal. But the key point is you had to have obtained that info in the course of your regular (legal) duties. These laws do not give you carte blanche to break into your boss's computer to see if the company you work for is doing anything you don't like.
If he just copied documents in his possession he could certainly get sued by his boss for breach of contract, but I don't think the charges will survive the grand jury. Based on the specific charges, I suspect there's more to it than that (or at least the DA thinks so).
As I noted in another response, if a guy who claims ten years of experience on his resume can't pass this test he's either really stupid or excessively padding his resume. Either way I don't want him.
I'm not going to put a junior programmer who gonna need a lot of TLC into a senior position.
Sure, if we're looking for someone junior, we don't expect them to realize how important that kind of stuff is. But if I'm hiring for a senior position, and I interview a guy who says he has ten years of "C/C++" under his belt, if he doesn't understand those kinds of fundemental issues he's either a) exceedingly stupid or b) lying about his experience. If you're applying for a job with me and I catch you lying the interview is over.
Here's the real kicker! A HS dropout with absolutely horrid social skills and language skills, can get a job driving a forklift around for 60 bucks an hour. I've seen it happen MANY times. Hell, a lot of them don't even know English. The good ones (read: social) get paid even more, that's why they like to hire the cheapy dropouts.
That's hard for me to believe. Somebody driving a forklift making 60 bucks an hour is pulling down $120,000 a year. Since the median houshold income (where both parents are usually working) is somewhere around $50,000, I have to be a little skeptical about your number. Do you mean $60,000 a year? A little more believable, although probably still higher than average.
Every time we have an open position, finding someone reasonably competent is like pulling teeth. We routinely have applicants lie about their experience. We had one guy say he's been doing NT support five years longer than NT has existed.
When we hire C programmers, we give a programming test. Most applicants don't realize it's not good to lose a reference to allocated memory, have no problem passing stack variables back to the calling function, and can't spot a variable that's used before initialization.
Whenever I see someone complaining about not having a job, I wonder if it's one of the ones we laughed about at lunch after interviewing all morning.
That's very conceited, isn't it? I see no evidence slashdot geeks are any more intelligent than the average college graduate. In the great scheme of things computers aren't that complicated, and spending some time to learn your way around them doesn't make you intelligent.
I submit the comment section of any random article on this site as proof of my point.
Black kids in the local public school? "Well, I'd put Johnny in the public school, but, you know, it's so important to get a good start in life, and the private school twenty miles from here is so much better. But it's not racism, you understand, that's only for rednecks in Republican states."
Look, you lefties can tell yourselves whatever you want, but I know hypocrisy when I see it.
I wonder if you actually have any idea what you're talking about, or you've formed this opinion by reading the Times in your NYC apartment. My personal experience is far different.
The most pervasive American racism I've encountered is in blue state America, where the so-called liberals can be against racism while at the same time totally isolating themselves from anybody who doesn't look like they do, except for the nanny.
You want to know the dirty little secret of gun control? Liberals are fearful of the minorities they've excluded (economically) from the gated enclaves, but they can't very well say "I'd feel safer if minorities didn't have guns". So they support gun control for everyone. Well, everyone except for the cops who are far more numerous in their well-patrolled neighborhoods. And the private security in the gated communities.
I'd like to refute your other points, but it's clear you haven't taken your medicine, so why bother?
I have read Howard Zinn's book and wasn't impressed. I thought he didn't provide enough detail to back up many of his assertions. It may be he felt it was more important to cover a little bit of everything instead of going into detail. I don't know.