Won't happen. For all intents and purposes you can't win a lawsuit against a judge for what he does on the bench. It has to work that way, otherwise the legal system would grind to a halt.
True, but it's worth pointing out that one of the great inventions of 1880-1960 was science fiction.(*) There were a lot more people getting paid to anticipate the future in 1969 than in 1880.
The fact a technology is "anticipated" is meaningless from the standpoint of progress. You can dream all you want, but the technology won't actually exist until someone goes out and develops it, and that's when it counts.
The article also mentions 'cancer' as something which still hasn't got a cure; an obvious information problem. Both because 'cancer' isn't one disease, and also because there are various kinds that can be pretty much 'cured' or even prevented depending on their cause (for example, cancer caused by HPV, which can be vaccinated against). The fact that various vectors can screw with DNA isn't something that's going to have a revolutionary 'cure', but many incremental steps will reduce the mortality of many of them over time.
It also overlooks progress in certain types of cancers. Childhood Leukemia, for example, used to be a death sentence. The survival rate is up over 90% now. There's been solid progress against other forms of cancer (like certain types of breast cancer) as well, albeit not as dramatic. We make baby steps against various cancers every year, and when you add them all up over a decade or two it's nontrivial.
Yes, we all need electricity, and if this was the only way to generate electricity I would say it's a good financial bet. But they're trying to replace a technology that already exists and is cheaper than they can ever hope to be, even if everything goes perfectly (which it won't). They won't be able to compete with ground-based solar in $/KWh. Ever. So what's the end game?
I think the problem is they know he's not going to be convicted of anything in the end. So the judge is trying to send a message to people who might be inclined to do the same thing.
"We can get you. We don't need to actually convict you, either. We can get you anyway."
Why is it that people on/. who live and breath new technology always have such a hard time with new technology economics?
No, the problem is I do understand technology economics. For a product to actually be successful, you have to eventually reach a point where you're providing a product or service that people actually want for a price they're willing to pay. The problem with power generating satellites is there's no reasonable math which gets you there from here. Launching things into orbit is expensive. Look what happened to Motorola in its Iridium project - $50 billion loss. And that involved launch costs that will be dwarfed by this proposal.
Unless there's some dramatic change in the economics of getting to LEO this project will never be able to compete with terrestrial power generation.
I can already tell you what the technology rights will be worth if they get it right: nothing. Zero, zilch, nada. The reason is the same reason nobody's actually bothered to put up solar satellites in the past, even though the concept is more than fifty years old - it can never compete with terrestrial power generation unless there's some breakthrough that dramatically reduces launch costs.
They couldn't make it work financially using today's rockets even if the satellites themselves were free. That's the problem, not anything regarding the microwave link or the efficiency of solar cells.
Over $71k per household? I sure hope they have a plan that ends up with better economics. This thing smells suspiciously like one of those projects that doesn't make sense to anyone except the companies that are using taxpayer cash to do the work.
But the math is adapted to explain what we observe. I don't see math as a limitation to our understanding. Rather, our understanding of the universe is a limitation to expanding mathematics.
With smart processes and the proper incentives, US companies can keep jobs here in America, and do so in a way that is actually better for the company and its employees.
Okay. But what if they took those same "smart processes and proper incentives" and transplanted them to India? Wouldn't they end up with the same quality at a fraction of the price?
The US doesn't have its "head in the sand". The US government and corporations are simply in the position of having large blocks of IPv4 addresses, so there's far less urgency. Of course China is using IPv6 - they came along too late to get many v4 addresses, and v6 already existed when they started building out infrastructure. The US market is relatively mature, as well, so you're not going to see the kind of demand growth you have in other places. We could last for decades on NATs.
The fact is some of America's greatest prosperity was during the 50's and 60's. Tax rates for the rich ran in the 70-90% range. That was when America was as redistributionist as it could get and America did great.
You're proceeding from a false assumption. Tax rates had nothing to do with American prosperity in the '50s and '60s. We were prosperous because most of the first world's industrial base had been destroyed during WW II, and people all over the world had to rely on American products as they rebuilt their own industries. High marginal tax rates had nothing to do with that prosperity, and in fact probably hindered it to some degree.
Besides which, people paid taxes at those rates in the same way corporations pay high corporate taxes today, which is to say they didn't. Tax receipts are the important figure, not tax rates. The Economist had an article years ago (which I can't find on the web, unfortunately) which said rich people pay no more than about 25% taxes in aggregate. And that's not just Americans, either, it's pretty constant worldwide. It's true in Europe, and even in Japan where the top bracket is on the order of 90% (at least it was at the time the article was written). Wealthy people don't make money at jobs the way you and I do - they invest what they have in order to generate profits. But investments involve a risk/reward calculation. As you raise taxes more investments fall into the "not worth the risk" category because the reward is reduced. Those are the same investments which will generate the most profit (and thus, the most tax revenue) if they work out.
So you don't actually get more money by having sky-high marginal tax rates, because people are making changes in the way they invest their money. In the case of the US, as you raise taxes the capital eventually moves into double-tax-free munis. The rich people pay fewer taxes, and the economy falters because nobody is investing in enterprises which will create jobs. When tax rates were lowered in the early '80s tax receipts actually went up as people moved their money out of double-tax-free munis and into riskier investments. At the same time growth, which is what actually lifts people out of poverty, started to pick up.
High marginal tax rates were lowered because people had come to realize they are a bad idea for everyone. I have to believe the idea is back in vogue because we have a lot of people who are too young to remember the last time around. Oh well, that's life, I guess. If you don't talk to your parents you do the same stupid shit they did.
There is no 'unlimited demand' for healthcare. People do not visit hospitals because they like it, they do it because they're ill. The correct approach is to define upfront which treatments should be covered by insurance and which not.
When you make health care free people do indeed use it at a much greater rate than they would otherwise. One of the fallacies in this debate is the idea if we give poor people primary care so they can get their hypertension or diabetes taken care of it will save lots of money by reducing emergency room visits. This turns out to be wrong, because when people have free primary care they go to see the doctor for every little ache and pain, which ends up costing more than the ER visit for untreated whatever. Now, from a humanitarian standpoint I think that's a worthy place to put your tax dollars. But it doesn't save money.
This is why insurance companies insist on a copay. When HMOs first started doing business there was no copay - what's the point, when you can just roll it into the monthly bill? But what they found is people will go to the doctor at the drop of a hat if it doesn't cost anything. People started going for the sniffles because the plan paid for prescription medicine, so if they could get a prescription decongestant they didn't have to buy over-the-counter cold medicine. They had people going to the doctor every day out of sheer loneliness, because they had nothing else to do. You say people only go to the doctor when they're sick, but experience show it just isn't true.
It's funny you should mention that. The reality is incendiary bullets, by themselves, were ineffective against German airships. The bullet would exit the airship before the oxygen and hydrogen had enough time to mix to flammable concentrations. It was only when they started mixing explosive and incendiary bullets together (see here) that they began to have some success:
In the summer of 1916, three new types of British machine gun ammunition which had been under development for years became available for general use. Two types, named "Pomeroy" and "Brock," after their inventors, were explosive bullets. The third, called "Buckingham", was a phosphorus incendiary bullet. Any one of these bullets was only marginally effective when fired at a zeppelin, but when mixed, they formed a lethal combination. The explosive rounds blew holes in the zeppelin's gas cells, allowing the hydrogen to escape and mix with the oxygen outside, forming an explosive mixture. The incendiary bullets then ignited the mixed gases! This new "mixed ammo" sequence was to become Britain's wonder weapon against airships.
Airships were a lot hardier than you'd think. There was one case where a British artillery shell went off inside the airship and the crew managed to land safely before destroying it with flares.
I didn't say it was impossible, I said impractical. The sorts of small aircraft you launch from carriers don't have room for a hydrogen tank. Of course you could make them larger, but then they'd have bigger radar signatures and lower performance.
You say sourcing of hydrogen was the problem with the Tu-155 (presumably why they switched to LNG). But hydrogen production through natural gas reformation is old, cheap technology. Hydrogen was already cheap in 1930s when they used it for passenger airships. The reason "sourcing" is a problem is it's dangerous and expensive to store and handle the stuff, like I said.
I will go so far as to say we will probably never see hydrogen (in gas form) as a fuel in general use for anything beyond rockets. Even if we have virtually free energy from, say, some kind of fusion power breakthrough, it will make more sense to create hydrocarbon fuels from CO2 or use metal hydrides than to use hydrogen gas directly.
The reality is there's an unlimited demand for free (or almost free) goods, so somehow the government will have to decide when to stop spending money on grandma. Whether you actually have a "panel" (whatever you call it) that meets to decide, or some QALY-style formula to make that determination, it will have to be made.
Under the current US system, it's possible your insurance company will deny you coverage for some technical reason, but they risk being sued for millions if they deny anything considered "customary".
Slashdot Mirror
I was thinking anime until you said the narrator survives.
Won't happen. For all intents and purposes you can't win a lawsuit against a judge for what he does on the bench. It has to work that way, otherwise the legal system would grind to a halt.
The fact a technology is "anticipated" is meaningless from the standpoint of progress. You can dream all you want, but the technology won't actually exist until someone goes out and develops it, and that's when it counts.
It also overlooks progress in certain types of cancers. Childhood Leukemia, for example, used to be a death sentence. The survival rate is up over 90% now. There's been solid progress against other forms of cancer (like certain types of breast cancer) as well, albeit not as dramatic. We make baby steps against various cancers every year, and when you add them all up over a decade or two it's nontrivial.
Yeah, it's a good thing we didn't have any of those problems in the '30s, or we never would have seen jet engines.
Yes, we all need electricity, and if this was the only way to generate electricity I would say it's a good financial bet. But they're trying to replace a technology that already exists and is cheaper than they can ever hope to be, even if everything goes perfectly (which it won't). They won't be able to compete with ground-based solar in $/KWh. Ever. So what's the end game?
Not only that, if everyone else is using gmail you won't be able to contact your customers anyway.
I think the problem is they know he's not going to be convicted of anything in the end. So the judge is trying to send a message to people who might be inclined to do the same thing.
"We can get you. We don't need to actually convict you, either. We can get you anyway."
Yeah, except that it has been extremely reliable. "Reliable" not being the same thing as "perfect".
Someone's gonna get fired over this.
Because it isn't actually practical. Barring some big advance in launch technology, this will never make sense.
No, the problem is I do understand technology economics. For a product to actually be successful, you have to eventually reach a point where you're providing a product or service that people actually want for a price they're willing to pay. The problem with power generating satellites is there's no reasonable math which gets you there from here. Launching things into orbit is expensive. Look what happened to Motorola in its Iridium project - $50 billion loss. And that involved launch costs that will be dwarfed by this proposal.
Unless there's some dramatic change in the economics of getting to LEO this project will never be able to compete with terrestrial power generation.
I can already tell you what the technology rights will be worth if they get it right: nothing. Zero, zilch, nada. The reason is the same reason nobody's actually bothered to put up solar satellites in the past, even though the concept is more than fifty years old - it can never compete with terrestrial power generation unless there's some breakthrough that dramatically reduces launch costs.
They couldn't make it work financially using today's rockets even if the satellites themselves were free. That's the problem, not anything regarding the microwave link or the efficiency of solar cells.
Over $71k per household? I sure hope they have a plan that ends up with better economics. This thing smells suspiciously like one of those projects that doesn't make sense to anyone except the companies that are using taxpayer cash to do the work.
But the math is adapted to explain what we observe. I don't see math as a limitation to our understanding. Rather, our understanding of the universe is a limitation to expanding mathematics.
Yes, in fact, that's exactly the question I'm posing. What can we do with this that couldn't be done with the backscatter techniques in the past?
The picture is all very impressive, but is there some practical application for this technique?
Okay. But what if they took those same "smart processes and proper incentives" and transplanted them to India? Wouldn't they end up with the same quality at a fraction of the price?
The US doesn't have its "head in the sand". The US government and corporations are simply in the position of having large blocks of IPv4 addresses, so there's far less urgency. Of course China is using IPv6 - they came along too late to get many v4 addresses, and v6 already existed when they started building out infrastructure. The US market is relatively mature, as well, so you're not going to see the kind of demand growth you have in other places. We could last for decades on NATs.
Was that before or after they spun off Lenovo?
You're proceeding from a false assumption. Tax rates had nothing to do with American prosperity in the '50s and '60s. We were prosperous because most of the first world's industrial base had been destroyed during WW II, and people all over the world had to rely on American products as they rebuilt their own industries. High marginal tax rates had nothing to do with that prosperity, and in fact probably hindered it to some degree.
Besides which, people paid taxes at those rates in the same way corporations pay high corporate taxes today, which is to say they didn't. Tax receipts are the important figure, not tax rates. The Economist had an article years ago (which I can't find on the web, unfortunately) which said rich people pay no more than about 25% taxes in aggregate. And that's not just Americans, either, it's pretty constant worldwide. It's true in Europe, and even in Japan where the top bracket is on the order of 90% (at least it was at the time the article was written). Wealthy people don't make money at jobs the way you and I do - they invest what they have in order to generate profits. But investments involve a risk/reward calculation. As you raise taxes more investments fall into the "not worth the risk" category because the reward is reduced. Those are the same investments which will generate the most profit (and thus, the most tax revenue) if they work out.
So you don't actually get more money by having sky-high marginal tax rates, because people are making changes in the way they invest their money. In the case of the US, as you raise taxes the capital eventually moves into double-tax-free munis. The rich people pay fewer taxes, and the economy falters because nobody is investing in enterprises which will create jobs. When tax rates were lowered in the early '80s tax receipts actually went up as people moved their money out of double-tax-free munis and into riskier investments. At the same time growth, which is what actually lifts people out of poverty, started to pick up.
High marginal tax rates were lowered because people had come to realize they are a bad idea for everyone. I have to believe the idea is back in vogue because we have a lot of people who are too young to remember the last time around. Oh well, that's life, I guess. If you don't talk to your parents you do the same stupid shit they did.
When you make health care free people do indeed use it at a much greater rate than they would otherwise. One of the fallacies in this debate is the idea if we give poor people primary care so they can get their hypertension or diabetes taken care of it will save lots of money by reducing emergency room visits. This turns out to be wrong, because when people have free primary care they go to see the doctor for every little ache and pain, which ends up costing more than the ER visit for untreated whatever. Now, from a humanitarian standpoint I think that's a worthy place to put your tax dollars. But it doesn't save money.
This is why insurance companies insist on a copay. When HMOs first started doing business there was no copay - what's the point, when you can just roll it into the monthly bill? But what they found is people will go to the doctor at the drop of a hat if it doesn't cost anything. People started going for the sniffles because the plan paid for prescription medicine, so if they could get a prescription decongestant they didn't have to buy over-the-counter cold medicine. They had people going to the doctor every day out of sheer loneliness, because they had nothing else to do. You say people only go to the doctor when they're sick, but experience show it just isn't true.
It's funny you should mention that. The reality is incendiary bullets, by themselves, were ineffective against German airships. The bullet would exit the airship before the oxygen and hydrogen had enough time to mix to flammable concentrations. It was only when they started mixing explosive and incendiary bullets together (see here) that they began to have some success:
Airships were a lot hardier than you'd think. There was one case where a British artillery shell went off inside the airship and the crew managed to land safely before destroying it with flares.
I didn't say it was impossible, I said impractical. The sorts of small aircraft you launch from carriers don't have room for a hydrogen tank. Of course you could make them larger, but then they'd have bigger radar signatures and lower performance.
You say sourcing of hydrogen was the problem with the Tu-155 (presumably why they switched to LNG). But hydrogen production through natural gas reformation is old, cheap technology. Hydrogen was already cheap in 1930s when they used it for passenger airships. The reason "sourcing" is a problem is it's dangerous and expensive to store and handle the stuff, like I said.
I will go so far as to say we will probably never see hydrogen (in gas form) as a fuel in general use for anything beyond rockets. Even if we have virtually free energy from, say, some kind of fusion power breakthrough, it will make more sense to create hydrocarbon fuels from CO2 or use metal hydrides than to use hydrogen gas directly.
The reality is there's an unlimited demand for free (or almost free) goods, so somehow the government will have to decide when to stop spending money on grandma. Whether you actually have a "panel" (whatever you call it) that meets to decide, or some QALY-style formula to make that determination, it will have to be made.
Under the current US system, it's possible your insurance company will deny you coverage for some technical reason, but they risk being sued for millions if they deny anything considered "customary".