And, as unpopular as this statement might be... I think their largely totalitarian government - so long as they don't infringe enough on their people so as to reduce their work ethic, their national pride, and the ability for businesses to compete with each other - will actually help them in competition with the US, due to the greater degree of strategic control they can have over their markets. The US would have a lot more trouble trying to do things like force foreign companies to disclose their tech secrets, apart from outright spying.
I don't know if everyone on/. is old enough to remember, but that's the same argument that was made for the Japanese economy in the '80s. By now we were all supposed to be speaking Japanese and eating bentos because Japan's MITI was intelligently directing research in Japan and the Japanese government was controlling local markets. Japanese companies were able to do research almost for free through government incentives and artificially low interest rates.
But it didn't happen, did it? The problem is economies overly influenced by governments start to become inefficient. Yes, in the short run you can "leapfrog" the competition, but you're sowing the seeds of a ten year recession.
In China's case, corruption and outright stupid policies have kept the country thirty years behind the developed world until very recently, and the economy is white hot now as it catches up. But unless the government relinquishes much of its control it won't last.
Incidentally, the patent system was designed to force inventors to disclose tech secrets, and it works relatively well for that. Unfortunately, however, the patent process has become so abused it's antithetical to the common good. But this is slashdot, and we all known that.
I have considered making a "DO NOT DISTURB" sign and putting it on the top edge of the cube wall
When I'm in this situation I just wear headphones. It's a "do not disturb" sign that says "I'm doing something" without saying "you're not important enough to disturb me."
Serious issues with threading prevent it from serving for any serious server workhorse. No doubt, talented engineers are still trying to crack this nut, but threaded Java applications pushing large chunks of data about are very susceptable to insidious behavoir, depending on the machine architecture and other system software instances mix.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. I've been writing multi-mulithreaded Java server-side apps for five years now and the threads have always behaved the way I expect.
Well, if they just stuck to suing institutions instead of individuals, that would work. But they'd probably decide it's easier to sue Susie student for $500,000 and settle for half her college money since she can't afford to pay a lawyer $200/hr to defend her for six months. And make no mistake: the old joke about the guy who defends himself having a fool for a client is true. If she tries to defend herself she could lose by missing a filing deadline.
So she'll pay because it'll be cheaper than paying that lawyer for a week. Even if she's a false positive.
Hmmm. Unfortunately they seem to have changed the original article to premium content. But the quote sums it up nicely - successive administrations and, indeed, society in general has been repeatedly given overly optimistic timeframes for the fruits of this research.
In point of fact, I agree with you when you say fusion is pretty important, but you missed my point entirely. Physicists are going to have to be really careful about what they promise in an effort to regain lost credibility. Why do you think the funding for fusion research has actually fallen as the need for the technology has increased by any measure? You can't separate the political aspects from funding that has to take place over many decades, and taxpayers don't appreciate being lied to. You might get a little bump in funding for a year or two, but lose your credibility and the reasearch will suffer in the long run.
The first realistic (as far as I can tell) assertions I've seen regarding commercial fusion power are contained in ITER documentation. Im much more willing to support someone who says "look, it's going to be a hard slog, maybe fifty years or more, but it will be worth the immense cost" than the "just thirty more years" crowd. I suspect the real basis for that number is "not for a long time, but still in your lifetime so you should fund my research".
The physics for a working reactor hasn't been nailed down to any great extent, and after that will come the real engineering. Barring some unforseen breakthrough, fusion power will really be a gift to our grandchildren. I'm OK with that, but let's call it what it is.
By the way, your doomsday predictions about oil don't really stand up to scrutiny. We haven't really begun to tap the vast reserves of coal, and oil doesn't have to go up in price too much to make coal-based synthetic gas a reasonable alternative. The real problem will be the continued environmental damage wrought by the widespread combustion of hydrocarbons. That is why we need fusion.
You'll have to pardon us for some skepticism. As the Economist noted, all those billions of dollars for fusion research over 50 years have produced the fundemental constant of 30. That is the number of years from the present before we'll have commercial fusion power.
I don't think the hostility is directed at science in general, just the plasma physicists who exagerate the importance of their research in order to ensure the continuing supply of funds.
I think it would be amusing to see them accuse someone of doing it that actually wasn't.
Amusing and expensive. That's the reason for the outrage: You pay a pretty steep penalty for getting sued even if you win.
The problem here is two-fold: Getting caught up in the court system is too expensive for normal individuals, and the penalty for this crime is too severe. If I were an enterprising young lawyer defending one of these people I would try to attack it from that angle. This business of considering each separate download a separate crime is what allows them to sue for such eye-popping sums people will settle with any reasonable risk/benefit analysis.
The French and Germans have loads of holidays compared to North Americans, and yet their productivity per capita is actually higher than in the USA.
This is a classic example of policy-making based on a misuse of statistics.
The reason French and German workers are so productive is companies will do anything to avoid hiring one. A good example of this is the Hilton hotel chain. In New York, the kitchen employs 6 people to wash dishes whereas the in Paris they employ only two. So the French dish-washers are three times as productive as the Americans, right?
Wrong. French workers are so expensive to employ and so hard to fire it made sense to buy a super-expensive automated dish-washing machine in Paris.
Be careful of productivity statistics. Economists make the statistics show what they want to see just like everyone else.
Awhile back the Economist said 50 years and billions of dollars of fusion research has produced the fundemental constant 30. This is the number of years before we'll have commercial fusion power.
I've implemented complex database logic in stored procedures and also using application code. I've found it to be easier in all cases, both from a development and a maintennence standpoint. My experience applies to Sybase and Oracle, though.
What I've found in most shops is people use stored procedures because they don't understand anything but the most basic aspects of SQL and it's the only way they can have nested loops without sacrificing too much performance. They don't understand how to use subqueries, outer joins, complex select logic, etc. So they break the problem down into multiple small peices or nested cursor loops. I simply don't buy the argument I've seen by other posters which goes "use stored procedures so you only return what you need". SQL will do that if you use it correctly.
Also, stored procedures tend to have limitations dynamic SQL doesn't have. For example, suppose you have a partitioned Oracle table that's using a data-based partition key. You can't create a partition from a compiled stored procedure without jumping through a lot of hoops (with associated ugly code).
As far as the speed goes - I don't know about other vendors, but Oracle caches the execution plan for dynamic statents, so if you send the same statement twice it'll run about as fast as a stored procedure. In any event in most business applications the query plan generation takes much less time than the actual query execution, so it doesn't matter that much unless you have a statement that gets executed thousands of times.
And you can get bit using stored procedures, too. If your statistics have changed drastically since you compiled your procedure you might not be using the correct query plan. Not a big deal for in-house applications, but do you expect your customers to recompile stored procedures?
Remember that one? When everyone would use e-mail exclusively (since it was FREE!) and the post office, fedex, and ups would be out of business in 5 years. I don't have stats to back it up, but I suspect the Internet has actually helped the postal industry a ton. Okay, maybe people write and send fewer snail letters, but mail-order shopping and e-bay resulting shipments (more shipping $$$) have gone through the roof!
In the US there really isn't any "postal industry". The post office is a government-regulated monopoly, and it's (technically) illegal to compete with it. UPS and Fedex get around this by providing guarenteed delivery times. The post office can and does sue companies for using UPS or Fedex when they don't have a legitimate delivery time requirement.
The USPS gets a very large portion of its revenue ($37B) from first class and metered mail, which is mostly bill payment. If everyone started paying bills online, revenue would collapse. I suspect the reason this hasn't happened has more to do with ineptitude on the part of banks than any permanent advantage to postal mail. When consumers expect free internet bill payment, and merchants are tied into some sort of national clearinghouse first class mail will virtually cease to exist. Grandma only writes so many letters.
The other large portion of revenue ($17.2B) is from all that garbage they stuff into your mailbox. That will eventually become such a large portion (percentage-wise) of revenue it will become USPS's only reason to exist (aside from the dreaded registered letter and jury summons).
Most internet retailers use Fedex and UPS (USPS does only $2.2B in packages). I've always wondered why.
Instead of a 2 year timeout while the Shuttle is being revamped, I think we need to take a 10 year timeout until new launch systems are invented.
Agreed, except for the timeline. Let's research the technology we need, then go. Five years, ten years, whatever - there's no point in going to space if you can't do anything. In any event, the shuttle should never fly again, and it wouldn't if it didn't employ so many people.
Any of several forms of launch assist, most likely Magnetic Rail. Any other technology would benefit from having this as a virtual first stage. Find the ideal location and buy the land -- DO NOT LEASE. We could probably build it in America, but why be trapped long term with less than ideal initial launch orbits. To be really radical, make it accessible to all nations, maybe build it as a coalition of the gravity well escaping.
This would cost you more than you'd ever save. Fuel isn't the cost driver for space flight. Big, dumb, pressure fed rockets are the way to go if you actually want to get to space cheaply.
Scram Jet and VASMIR, lets throw bucket loads of money in those directions.
The scramjet is worthless. It adds a whole bunch of extra weight and complexity, yet only works within a very narrow altitude range. Everything you save by not toting around LOX you lose by pushing your craft through the atmosphere.
I agree on VASMIR, but I wouldn't stop there. The only way even intra-system travel will ever be practical is some sort of nuclear-powered rocket (either nuclear powered ion/plasma thrusters or atual nuclear rockets). Gas cycle nuclear rockets make a lot of sense to me, and they are doable on the theoretical level. Fusion rockets would be best. All these technologies should be heavily funded, since we really don't know which is a dead end. But lets do the research before we try to build a vehicle. There isn't any reason to plan out a vehicle if you aren't sure whether or not the propulsion system will work.
Ditch the Space Elevator (at least for now), concentrate on something that could really be built, and that would be a "rotovator"
I'm not really sure why you think the space elevator couldn't really be built. I think the technical challenges for the space elevator are less than the rotovators.
For items like oxygen, water, propellant, food -- fire them into orbit with a cannon. Massive G-Forces will not hurt them (though it might over tenderize steaks if that's the kind of food your sending up). This is really-really cost effective. Iraq was constructing a cannon capable of hitting Israel, it's just a matter of scale
The problem here is you can't get things to go exactly where you want them to go with a gun. So you need some way of collecting all your supplies once they get to orbit. That might end up being more trouble (meaning more expensive) than just launching them with a rocket to the place you want them.
That's very naive. Do you remember Leona Helmsly?. What about the current crop of "hate crimes" laws? What you say can definitely get years added to your sentence, or get you prosecuted when other people were not (a la Rush Limbaugh).
There are millions of federal statutes now, and you couldn't possibly do anything in life without breaking some of them. If the Feds decide they want to "get" you, they will. If they can't find something specific, they'll use RICO (which can be stretched to cover anything).
Re:Not for commercial flight
on
X43-A on to Mach 10
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· Score: 2, Informative
I doubt it. It will take less fuel to simply use a rocket to get out of the atmosphere as soon as possible and coast for a larger portion of the flight. In any case fuel isn't the cost driver with sub-orbital flight.
When Sun came out with Java applets, I remember thinking "What is this sandbox stuff? I don't need so much security. I'm not the military or anything."
It amazes me how many people on this site don't understand why Linus is so important to open source software. It doesn't have anything to do with his coding ability. I agree many people could have written Linux 1.0. But there never would have been a version 2.
The reason he's so important is his ability to lead. You don't find that very often in technical people. To be sure, he's not the only leader. But this kind of distributed project will whither on the vine if you don't have somebody with a little charisma to keep people on the same page.
If European programmers aren't bound by these stupid patents while we (I'm in the US) are, the US software industry will just evaporate. Since Congress will see the writing on the wall, the US patent system will then be changed to something more reasonable.
If everybody in the world lines up with the US system, in the end only Microsoft and IBM will be legally able to write code.
Maybe the solution is for all the open source programmers to form some sort of guild and patent every damn stray thought like the big boys are doing. That way we'll have leverage if they threaten us. We can even set up do-nothing companies to sue Microsoft for patent infringement every time they fund an SCO or AdTI, you know, like whacking your dog with a rolled-up newspaper. Baaaaad Microsoft. Whack!
In the UK and Australia among many others, there is no party willing to say, "vote for us and we'll tell the US where to stick it"
Sorry to break this to you, pal, but that's how democracies work. If the majority doesn't agree with you, you're out of luck. That isn't "disenfranchised", it's just life. You can rest assured there would be a party espousing just that position if they thought it would help at the polls (even if they don't do anything differently at a practical level - look at France).
In any event, I'm not sure what you mean by "fuck (or not) the rest of us over". Are we bombing your country? What, exactly are you talking about? There is enough room for reasonable people to disagree on virtually all the issues of our day. If you're talking about the Iraq occupation specifically, I'd like to hear how you, individually, or your country as a whole is "fucked over".
I don't consider 25 tons to be heavy lift. It would be heavy compared to current vehicles, but compared to Saturn 5 or Energia it's not so much.
My point was the 20 ton launchers could use some competition, whereas this rocket is competing with very low-cost programs from Russia, China, and India.
As far as the satellite size is concerned, I don't see any reason why they wouldn't grow larger - most of the current problems are manufacturing glitches and surmountable technical problems. Size has considerable benefits in the GEO comsat market - larger satellites can transmit at higher power and use more focused antennae.
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I don't know if everyone on /. is old enough to remember, but that's the same argument that was made for the Japanese economy in the '80s. By now we were all supposed to be speaking Japanese and eating bentos because Japan's MITI was intelligently directing research in Japan and the Japanese government was controlling local markets. Japanese companies were able to do research almost for free through government incentives and artificially low interest rates.
But it didn't happen, did it? The problem is economies overly influenced by governments start to become inefficient. Yes, in the short run you can "leapfrog" the competition, but you're sowing the seeds of a ten year recession.
In China's case, corruption and outright stupid policies have kept the country thirty years behind the developed world until very recently, and the economy is white hot now as it catches up. But unless the government relinquishes much of its control it won't last.
Incidentally, the patent system was designed to force inventors to disclose tech secrets, and it works relatively well for that. Unfortunately, however, the patent process has become so abused it's antithetical to the common good. But this is slashdot, and we all known that.
When I'm in this situation I just wear headphones. It's a "do not disturb" sign that says "I'm doing something" without saying "you're not important enough to disturb me."
I don't know about that. Everybody I know has a cell phone now, and a cell phone is cheaper than a cell phone and a land line.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. I've been writing multi-mulithreaded Java server-side apps for five years now and the threads have always behaved the way I expect.
So she'll pay because it'll be cheaper than paying that lawyer for a week. Even if she's a false positive.
In point of fact, I agree with you when you say fusion is pretty important, but you missed my point entirely. Physicists are going to have to be really careful about what they promise in an effort to regain lost credibility. Why do you think the funding for fusion research has actually fallen as the need for the technology has increased by any measure? You can't separate the political aspects from funding that has to take place over many decades, and taxpayers don't appreciate being lied to. You might get a little bump in funding for a year or two, but lose your credibility and the reasearch will suffer in the long run.
The first realistic (as far as I can tell) assertions I've seen regarding commercial fusion power are contained in ITER documentation. Im much more willing to support someone who says "look, it's going to be a hard slog, maybe fifty years or more, but it will be worth the immense cost" than the "just thirty more years" crowd. I suspect the real basis for that number is "not for a long time, but still in your lifetime so you should fund my research".
The physics for a working reactor hasn't been nailed down to any great extent, and after that will come the real engineering. Barring some unforseen breakthrough, fusion power will really be a gift to our grandchildren. I'm OK with that, but let's call it what it is.
By the way, your doomsday predictions about oil don't really stand up to scrutiny. We haven't really begun to tap the vast reserves of coal, and oil doesn't have to go up in price too much to make coal-based synthetic gas a reasonable alternative. The real problem will be the continued environmental damage wrought by the widespread combustion of hydrocarbons. That is why we need fusion.
Do you have an air conditioner, and if so do you pay the bill?
http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/missile/row/shk val.htm
I don't think the hostility is directed at science in general, just the plasma physicists who exagerate the importance of their research in order to ensure the continuing supply of funds.
Amusing and expensive. That's the reason for the outrage: You pay a pretty steep penalty for getting sued even if you win.
The problem here is two-fold: Getting caught up in the court system is too expensive for normal individuals, and the penalty for this crime is too severe. If I were an enterprising young lawyer defending one of these people I would try to attack it from that angle. This business of considering each separate download a separate crime is what allows them to sue for such eye-popping sums people will settle with any reasonable risk/benefit analysis.
This is a classic example of policy-making based on a misuse of statistics.
The reason French and German workers are so productive is companies will do anything to avoid hiring one. A good example of this is the Hilton hotel chain. In New York, the kitchen employs 6 people to wash dishes whereas the in Paris they employ only two. So the French dish-washers are three times as productive as the Americans, right?
Wrong. French workers are so expensive to employ and so hard to fire it made sense to buy a super-expensive automated dish-washing machine in Paris.
Be careful of productivity statistics. Economists make the statistics show what they want to see just like everyone else.
Awhile back the Economist said 50 years and billions of dollars of fusion research has produced the fundemental constant 30. This is the number of years before we'll have commercial fusion power.
What I've found in most shops is people use stored procedures because they don't understand anything but the most basic aspects of SQL and it's the only way they can have nested loops without sacrificing too much performance. They don't understand how to use subqueries, outer joins, complex select logic, etc. So they break the problem down into multiple small peices or nested cursor loops. I simply don't buy the argument I've seen by other posters which goes "use stored procedures so you only return what you need". SQL will do that if you use it correctly.
Also, stored procedures tend to have limitations dynamic SQL doesn't have. For example, suppose you have a partitioned Oracle table that's using a data-based partition key. You can't create a partition from a compiled stored procedure without jumping through a lot of hoops (with associated ugly code).
As far as the speed goes - I don't know about other vendors, but Oracle caches the execution plan for dynamic statents, so if you send the same statement twice it'll run about as fast as a stored procedure. In any event in most business applications the query plan generation takes much less time than the actual query execution, so it doesn't matter that much unless you have a statement that gets executed thousands of times.
And you can get bit using stored procedures, too. If your statistics have changed drastically since you compiled your procedure you might not be using the correct query plan. Not a big deal for in-house applications, but do you expect your customers to recompile stored procedures?
In the US there really isn't any "postal industry". The post office is a government-regulated monopoly, and it's (technically) illegal to compete with it. UPS and Fedex get around this by providing guarenteed delivery times. The post office can and does sue companies for using UPS or Fedex when they don't have a legitimate delivery time requirement.
The USPS gets a very large portion of its revenue ($37B) from first class and metered mail, which is mostly bill payment. If everyone started paying bills online, revenue would collapse. I suspect the reason this hasn't happened has more to do with ineptitude on the part of banks than any permanent advantage to postal mail. When consumers expect free internet bill payment, and merchants are tied into some sort of national clearinghouse first class mail will virtually cease to exist. Grandma only writes so many letters.
The other large portion of revenue ($17.2B) is from all that garbage they stuff into your mailbox. That will eventually become such a large portion (percentage-wise) of revenue it will become USPS's only reason to exist (aside from the dreaded registered letter and jury summons).
Most internet retailers use Fedex and UPS (USPS does only $2.2B in packages). I've always wondered why.
Agreed, except for the timeline. Let's research the technology we need, then go. Five years, ten years, whatever - there's no point in going to space if you can't do anything. In any event, the shuttle should never fly again, and it wouldn't if it didn't employ so many people.
Any of several forms of launch assist, most likely Magnetic Rail. Any other technology would benefit from having this as a virtual first stage. Find the ideal location and buy the land -- DO NOT LEASE. We could probably build it in America, but why be trapped long term with less than ideal initial launch orbits. To be really radical, make it accessible to all nations, maybe build it as a coalition of the gravity well escaping.
This would cost you more than you'd ever save. Fuel isn't the cost driver for space flight. Big, dumb, pressure fed rockets are the way to go if you actually want to get to space cheaply.
Scram Jet and VASMIR, lets throw bucket loads of money in those directions.
The scramjet is worthless. It adds a whole bunch of extra weight and complexity, yet only works within a very narrow altitude range. Everything you save by not toting around LOX you lose by pushing your craft through the atmosphere.
I agree on VASMIR, but I wouldn't stop there. The only way even intra-system travel will ever be practical is some sort of nuclear-powered rocket (either nuclear powered ion/plasma thrusters or atual nuclear rockets). Gas cycle nuclear rockets make a lot of sense to me, and they are doable on the theoretical level. Fusion rockets would be best. All these technologies should be heavily funded, since we really don't know which is a dead end. But lets do the research before we try to build a vehicle. There isn't any reason to plan out a vehicle if you aren't sure whether or not the propulsion system will work.
Ditch the Space Elevator (at least for now), concentrate on something that could really be built, and that would be a "rotovator"
I'm not really sure why you think the space elevator couldn't really be built. I think the technical challenges for the space elevator are less than the rotovators.
For items like oxygen, water, propellant, food -- fire them into orbit with a cannon. Massive G-Forces will not hurt them (though it might over tenderize steaks if that's the kind of food your sending up). This is really-really cost effective. Iraq was constructing a cannon capable of hitting Israel, it's just a matter of scale
The problem here is you can't get things to go exactly where you want them to go with a gun. So you need some way of collecting all your supplies once they get to orbit. That might end up being more trouble (meaning more expensive) than just launching them with a rocket to the place you want them.
There are millions of federal statutes now, and you couldn't possibly do anything in life without breaking some of them. If the Feds decide they want to "get" you, they will. If they can't find something specific, they'll use RICO (which can be stretched to cover anything).
I doubt it. It will take less fuel to simply use a rocket to get out of the atmosphere as soon as possible and coast for a larger portion of the flight. In any case fuel isn't the cost driver with sub-orbital flight.
"Previous job", eh?
Boy, do I feel stupid.
The reason he's so important is his ability to lead. You don't find that very often in technical people. To be sure, he's not the only leader. But this kind of distributed project will whither on the vine if you don't have somebody with a little charisma to keep people on the same page.
If everybody in the world lines up with the US system, in the end only Microsoft and IBM will be legally able to write code.
Maybe the solution is for all the open source programmers to form some sort of guild and patent every damn stray thought like the big boys are doing. That way we'll have leverage if they threaten us. We can even set up do-nothing companies to sue Microsoft for patent infringement every time they fund an SCO or AdTI, you know, like whacking your dog with a rolled-up newspaper. Baaaaad Microsoft. Whack!
Yes, the way they prepared for this was to say "the mission only lasts until winter"
Sorry to break this to you, pal, but that's how democracies work. If the majority doesn't agree with you, you're out of luck. That isn't "disenfranchised", it's just life. You can rest assured there would be a party espousing just that position if they thought it would help at the polls (even if they don't do anything differently at a practical level - look at France).
In any event, I'm not sure what you mean by "fuck (or not) the rest of us over". Are we bombing your country? What, exactly are you talking about? There is enough room for reasonable people to disagree on virtually all the issues of our day. If you're talking about the Iraq occupation specifically, I'd like to hear how you, individually, or your country as a whole is "fucked over".
OK, mod me as offtopic, but can somebody tell me where this comes from, originally?
My point was the 20 ton launchers could use some competition, whereas this rocket is competing with very low-cost programs from Russia, China, and India.
As far as the satellite size is concerned, I don't see any reason why they wouldn't grow larger - most of the current problems are manufacturing glitches and surmountable technical problems. Size has considerable benefits in the GEO comsat market - larger satellites can transmit at higher power and use more focused antennae.