Rented or, more likely, purchased with borrowed money. Every few months I read about some has-been who just crashed and burned in bankruptcy court. Sometimes it's because they just spent too much of the money coming in. But usually it's because they borrowed too much thinking the gravy train would go on forever.
They may not have known it was a software problem, though. Somebody comes in with a phone that doesn't work, you give them another and everything's fine. Sounds like a hardware problem.
From Microsoft's perspective it's much worse than that. One thing Gates always worried about was being bound up by the government like IBM was, and that's exactly what happened in the end. Microsoft would love to provide for free all those services that siphon away customer money. But they can't, because the moment they did it would be off to court in twenty different countries as the providers of Antivirus and developer tools and whatever sued to keep Microsoft from removing their niche.
At least with developer tools I think the behemoth should have done it anyway and fought that legal battle. They could have made a pretty good case that with all sorts of free tools on the market releasing a set of free tools wouldn't cause distortions.
For most development groups it's not even a question of cost. I could certainly get Microsoft tools (or pretty much any other commercial software) at my job - if I were willing to fill out a business justification and wait for three weeks while the paper pushers made sure all the boxes were filled in properly. I don't care very much one way or the other if my company has to shell out $500/seat for a set of developer tools - that kind of money is lost in the noise. Hell, they probably spent more than that on whatever that art-thing is supposed to be that they hung up in the lobby a few weeks ago. But I can't afford to wait for the paperwork wheels to grind.
No thats Helium 3. The best sources of Helium are in the four gas giants but I think the price locally would have to rise by a factor in the billions to make extraction economical.
That's true today. Will it be true in 100 years when helium gets truly difficult to get ahold of? I'm skeptical. Assuming, of course, we haven't found some way to synthesize it.
And I wonder exactly how dangerous it would be to use hydrogen for party balloons? The density in the balloon will be low, but the bottle of hydrogen might be dangerous, but possibly no worse than propane.
The individual balloons wouldn't be very dangerous, but the filling station would be, and if you stored enough of them in an enclosed space you might have trouble. Probably one of those things most people could do responsibly, but there are enough idiots to make it impractical on a society-wide basis.
It's a mistake to depend too heavily on international ventures. Countries have different political and economic cycles - you tend to find yourself halfway through something ambitious when your partners decide they don't want to fund it any more. The ISS was a classic case of this kind of thing - we ended up bailing out the Russians as they went through problems after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Europeans were slow with their supply ships. The US stayed in the project when it would have made sense to cancel it, then we kept the shuttle fleet flying longer than we should have to service the ISS.
You may save money up front by penciling in partners, but you pay a big price in flexibility.
Women going getting more education and better jobs doesn't imply they're going into IT. There are a lot of nice jobs in government and medicine, two fields which are becoming dominated by women.
You could weld a valve onto the top, but if you try to close it, the pressure will seek relief elsewhere. If you get really, really lucky, it just blows out the weld and rejects the valve.
This doesn't make sense to me. The key failed element of the blow out preventer was was the "blind ram" that was supposed to pinch the pipe and seal it. They spent the first couple days trying to activate the failed half of the pincher, first by activating it manually and finally by attaching a high-pressure hydraulic pump with an ROV.
If what you're saying is true, that would have simply split the pipe instead of closing off the leak. I seriously doubt they would have even installed the BOP if the most likely outcome of its use was disaster.
When I was in college one of my physics professors told us he doubted programs would ever get bigger than a few hundred kilobytes because cosmic rays would cause the larger programs to fail too frequently.
They can't afford to assign an officer to every crackpot. Also, the test was whether or not he'd be flagged as someone to investigate. It's not something they could reasonably benefit from continuing with the same individual.
Just recently Adobe announced they would drop support for 64 bit Linux. What is wrong with these people? Is it really so difficult to put out a 64 bit version of software you already have running? Oh, but they promise they'll get it working someday. Thanks a lot, guys. It's a shame 64 bit computers are so damn new I have to use a wrapper to use your buggy, bloated, insecure, crap software.
This is the part of the conversation where I wonder if you get out much. I'm not basing that on any "theory" at all, but rather an unambiguous reading of history leading to current events. If you don't realize the free market is the most efficient way to deliver goods then I don't think I can help you.
Second, though the "free market" is often more efficient, there may be cases where "efficiency" is not the chief concern. It can be "more efficient" to ignore safety standards in manufacturing. It can be "more efficient" for the police to simply arrest and jail whoever they think is guilty, without need of evidence or a trial.
All markets exist inside some kind of regulatory framework, even if it's only laws against fraud. The free market is the most efficient way to deliver goods and services inside that regulatory framework, so there's no conflict between the benefits of voluntary economic association and health and safety standards. That's kind of a straw man.
I like free markets, but I'm also in favor of good government. The "free market" is a method we use to organize ourselves in order to produce cheap stuff, but "government" is a method we use to organize ourselves to ensure our lives have safety and justice.
Even the most ardent free market advocates see a role for government in minimizing Adam Smith's "conspiracy against the public". Being pro free market is no the same thing as being pro business. The problem is if the government has too much of a presence in the market companies find it easier to influence the government than to focus on delivering products people want. A good example is car seats - statistically useless after age 2 but mandated to age 8 in my state at the behest of industry lobbyists.
Now that's a good idea. That way if you ever run across an armored pheasant you'll still knock that sucker down. And since DU is pyrophoric by the time you get there he'll be cooked, too.
The Ares and the Falcon were designed with different goals in mind. The Falcon was designed to safely lift a (potentially living) cargo out of the atmosphere at minimum cost.
The Ares was designed to employ all the people that currently work on the shuttle program, so it never had any hope of being inexpensive. It was designed to be expensive.
The liability cap was part of a deal that added a new tax on every barrel of oil to establish a pool of money to fund spill cleanups. So it's not like BP isn't paying the cleanup costs - essentially they've been paying insurance for this purpose since the cap was introduced.
Well, okay. I'm very, very skeptical about the price savings. If you don't put maneuvering capability into the projectile you can launch things cheaply, but recovering the cargo in orbit becomes very expensive. If you put maneuvering capability into the projectile all your cost and reliability advantages go out the window.
Within the last few years the army fielded a GPS guided artillery shell called Excalibur. The program ran two years past its deadline and each projectile costs $200k because getting the electronics to work reliably under those conditions was very difficult.
A guided space cannon projectile would be orders of magnitude more difficult.
As others have pointed out, this is not how things work in the real world. As far as the US government is concerned, all rocket development is "munition" development. Not only must you get permission to export any rocket or rocket technology developed in the US, as a US national you can't go to another country to work on a rocket project without running afoul of the law. Having foreign nationals working on your rocket falls under the "exporting rocket technology" part.
This came up a few years back when Armadillo was suffering because they government refused to get its act together. The suggestion made was "well, why don't you start a company in another country and build your rocket there." The answer was eventually determined to be "because everyone would end up in jail".
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Rented or, more likely, purchased with borrowed money. Every few months I read about some has-been who just crashed and burned in bankruptcy court. Sometimes it's because they just spent too much of the money coming in. But usually it's because they borrowed too much thinking the gravy train would go on forever.
Yep. This one is set to join NASP and VentureStar before the legislation is even finalized. This is graft, pure and simple.
They may not have known it was a software problem, though. Somebody comes in with a phone that doesn't work, you give them another and everything's fine. Sounds like a hardware problem.
From Microsoft's perspective it's much worse than that. One thing Gates always worried about was being bound up by the government like IBM was, and that's exactly what happened in the end. Microsoft would love to provide for free all those services that siphon away customer money. But they can't, because the moment they did it would be off to court in twenty different countries as the providers of Antivirus and developer tools and whatever sued to keep Microsoft from removing their niche.
At least with developer tools I think the behemoth should have done it anyway and fought that legal battle. They could have made a pretty good case that with all sorts of free tools on the market releasing a set of free tools wouldn't cause distortions.
For most development groups it's not even a question of cost. I could certainly get Microsoft tools (or pretty much any other commercial software) at my job - if I were willing to fill out a business justification and wait for three weeks while the paper pushers made sure all the boxes were filled in properly. I don't care very much one way or the other if my company has to shell out $500/seat for a set of developer tools - that kind of money is lost in the noise. Hell, they probably spent more than that on whatever that art-thing is supposed to be that they hung up in the lobby a few weeks ago. But I can't afford to wait for the paperwork wheels to grind.
That's true today. Will it be true in 100 years when helium gets truly difficult to get ahold of? I'm skeptical. Assuming, of course, we haven't found some way to synthesize it.
The individual balloons wouldn't be very dangerous, but the filling station would be, and if you stored enough of them in an enclosed space you might have trouble. Probably one of those things most people could do responsibly, but there are enough idiots to make it impractical on a society-wide basis.
Sure, it's Progress. And progress, too, since the last one to go wrong slammed into Mir.
It's a mistake to depend too heavily on international ventures. Countries have different political and economic cycles - you tend to find yourself halfway through something ambitious when your partners decide they don't want to fund it any more. The ISS was a classic case of this kind of thing - we ended up bailing out the Russians as they went through problems after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Europeans were slow with their supply ships. The US stayed in the project when it would have made sense to cancel it, then we kept the shuttle fleet flying longer than we should have to service the ISS.
You may save money up front by penciling in partners, but you pay a big price in flexibility.
Women going getting more education and better jobs doesn't imply they're going into IT. There are a lot of nice jobs in government and medicine, two fields which are becoming dominated by women.
This doesn't make sense to me. The key failed element of the blow out preventer was was the "blind ram" that was supposed to pinch the pipe and seal it. They spent the first couple days trying to activate the failed half of the pincher, first by activating it manually and finally by attaching a high-pressure hydraulic pump with an ROV.
If what you're saying is true, that would have simply split the pipe instead of closing off the leak. I seriously doubt they would have even installed the BOP if the most likely outcome of its use was disaster.
When I was in college one of my physics professors told us he doubted programs would ever get bigger than a few hundred kilobytes because cosmic rays would cause the larger programs to fail too frequently.
They can't afford to assign an officer to every crackpot. Also, the test was whether or not he'd be flagged as someone to investigate. It's not something they could reasonably benefit from continuing with the same individual.
Like I said, they promise they'll get it working someday.
You realize they've been saying that since 2008, right?
Just recently Adobe announced they would drop support for 64 bit Linux. What is wrong with these people? Is it really so difficult to put out a 64 bit version of software you already have running? Oh, but they promise they'll get it working someday. Thanks a lot, guys. It's a shame 64 bit computers are so damn new I have to use a wrapper to use your buggy, bloated, insecure, crap software.
This is the part of the conversation where I wonder if you get out much. I'm not basing that on any "theory" at all, but rather an unambiguous reading of history leading to current events. If you don't realize the free market is the most efficient way to deliver goods then I don't think I can help you.
All markets exist inside some kind of regulatory framework, even if it's only laws against fraud. The free market is the most efficient way to deliver goods and services inside that regulatory framework, so there's no conflict between the benefits of voluntary economic association and health and safety standards. That's kind of a straw man.
Even the most ardent free market advocates see a role for government in minimizing Adam Smith's "conspiracy against the public". Being pro free market is no the same thing as being pro business. The problem is if the government has too much of a presence in the market companies find it easier to influence the government than to focus on delivering products people want. A good example is car seats - statistically useless after age 2 but mandated to age 8 in my state at the behest of industry lobbyists.
Now that's a good idea. That way if you ever run across an armored pheasant you'll still knock that sucker down. And since DU is pyrophoric by the time you get there he'll be cooked, too.
The Ares and the Falcon were designed with different goals in mind. The Falcon was designed to safely lift a (potentially living) cargo out of the atmosphere at minimum cost.
The Ares was designed to employ all the people that currently work on the shuttle program, so it never had any hope of being inexpensive. It was designed to be expensive.
had to write to or (in b2c) the website is expected to handle any browser the user might reasonably have, starting with IE6.
Aaaaaaand the strawman goes down for the count!
Who cares? Top line revenue is irrelevant. What is that as a percentage of profit?
The liability cap was part of a deal that added a new tax on every barrel of oil to establish a pool of money to fund spill cleanups. So it's not like BP isn't paying the cleanup costs - essentially they've been paying insurance for this purpose since the cap was introduced.
Well, okay. I'm very, very skeptical about the price savings. If you don't put maneuvering capability into the projectile you can launch things cheaply, but recovering the cargo in orbit becomes very expensive. If you put maneuvering capability into the projectile all your cost and reliability advantages go out the window.
Within the last few years the army fielded a GPS guided artillery shell called Excalibur. The program ran two years past its deadline and each projectile costs $200k because getting the electronics to work reliably under those conditions was very difficult.
A guided space cannon projectile would be orders of magnitude more difficult.
Why build something like that when you still need a rocket program to launch everything that won't crush under acceleration?
As others have pointed out, this is not how things work in the real world. As far as the US government is concerned, all rocket development is "munition" development. Not only must you get permission to export any rocket or rocket technology developed in the US, as a US national you can't go to another country to work on a rocket project without running afoul of the law. Having foreign nationals working on your rocket falls under the "exporting rocket technology" part.
This came up a few years back when Armadillo was suffering because they government refused to get its act together. The suggestion made was "well, why don't you start a company in another country and build your rocket there." The answer was eventually determined to be "because everyone would end up in jail".
Well, I suppose you'll end up with a sore ass either way.