From what I can tell, even the alarmist global climate change warming shit isn't a huge problem. The problem is our infrastructure is big and slow: We won't be able to quickly adjust. It's not that we can't, physically, just pick up and change shit around; it's that even a gradual change will cause commercial issues--business risks nobody wants to take, changes in available food that people will pass over looking for good old white wheat and chicken, and so on--and so we'll have difficulty making what are physically easy changes.
B12 comes from intestinal fermentation of cobalt. Animals tend to consume dietary sources that more readily supply that. Humans tend not to. Even when humans do, the issue of bioavailability is different. Omnivores tend to extract it more from animals than from plants, because it takes less energy to break down the structure and get at it--you have straight B12, rather than some other compound holding down a cobalt atom that you need to strip down somehow and then get at and ferment into B12 (intestinal bacteria in humans will ferment cobalt into B12). If the cobalt is stored a way that the bacteria can't get at, and you don't digest the food in a way that frees it to their access, it passes through.
Yes but the other way. Something like 95% (I've seen 98% quoted, but numbers around 95% are more accepted as not being alarmist bullshit) of people who try vegetarianism find it makes them terribly ill. They then become omnivores or pesciparians or something--they eat fish or chicken, or they go back to a normal diet.
They're not loud. The loud ones are people who think vegetarians are retarded, versus vegetarians who have had success. The public anecdote doesn't include the mass of people who don't care, tried vegetarianism, and found it was horrible. It does include huge religious movements and cultural behavior whereby a certain race or large swath of a race defined by a religion simply don't eat meat--usually this ends with proponents trying to propagate back that thousands of years of devout veganism doesn't provide any argument that modern man might be largely different than modern vegan-descendent man.
Wolves and humans have the same communications skills in cooperative context. Planning not so much: humans can develop language--grunts and hand motions, all the way up to complete linguistics. Wolves were domesticated (into dogs) because we share the same social structures and the same implicit communications: we're nearly the same species, minus genetics and physical shape, in that respect. Other social animals communicate entirely differently and are impossible to interact with; but we interact very naturally with wolves.
Dogs are useless on their own. Dogs cooperate with humans extremely well. Really, wolves hunt prey; they do not hunt other packs, and they will not try to get in a scuffle with a group of a dozen or so humans because they're well aware of what will happen. Cats just don't want to hunt that many things at once--they stay out of groups of zebra, ffs. Wolves look at humans hunting and have an absolute understanding of what they're looking at and why they want to stay away, because it's 'familiaris'.
Yeah, he sucks. The deer in the woods could get out of sight and run-rest-run-rest, while man chase-track-chase-track. A deer in a field is going to have to run its ass off non-stop. Deer in the woods has much better chances.
It's not hugely at odds with individual liberty. I know people with 16 or 18 children. They love to breed, they're proud of their huge families, and they want more. It's not a welfare grab; it's an over-active biological clock that keeps ringing the "MAKE BABIES!!" alarm. Never mind the pressure on the healthcare system to sustain them, if they're not rich. Never mind the additional unemployment, the cost to the school system (you don't pay a tax on every child; opposite, you get more tax credit up to 3), and so on.
Every extra baby you have encroaches on my personal liberty. Stop having more than everyone else!
Eugenics is a good way to improve the population, but it needs to be handled well. It solves so many things though, especially overpopulation. The problem with classical eugenics is the focus went straight to "Racial Purification".
The first thing to establish is that everyone gets the right to maintain their bloodline. Everyone gets 2 kids (the way this is factored out is complex, but it's basically max(a,b) for a coupling(a,b), which does create a hole...). Then you get additional licenses to breed by passing physical, emotional, and mental fitness standards--you're stronger, smarter, able to remain motivated and focused, and so on.
The whole proposal is ridiculously complex--it started too simple, became over-complicated, then went through optimization to establish identical function in far fewer rules--but the main ideal scenario is that most people can have a family of 2-3 kids, all people can have a family of 2 kids at least, and so population and genetic diversity is maintained. Breeding is biased toward those who are better fit, and in small part biased toward those who are motivated--if you're going to actually put in some effort, you should be able to tag at least one additional license.
The meta-game is important though: it's easy to come up with a fair, non-abusive, socially-acceptable eugenics strategy (if you can operate in objective reality, and not get a call-back to Hitler along with people swearing it's their "god-given right" to have 18 children); the problem is that those in power will seize control of it and try to breed a population of loyalists, operating patently unfairly to political opponents. Even child protective services is often used simply to destroy the lives and families of political opponents--not just politicians, but "I don't like you and I work for the school board so YOU ARE FUCKED HAHAHAHAHAHA THEY'RE COMING FOR YOUR CHILDREN!!!"
Yes but land predators do not want to deal with 30 or 40 mud-covered primates with pointy sticks, so they stay the hell away. Nothing chases us. We can, however, chase the shit out of anything.
Sugar has 4kcal/g, protein has 4kcal/g, fat has 9kcal/g. Lean meat--discarding the bone and weighing meat--should be 60% water and 40% caloric material. You should be able to get like 200kcal out of 100g.
Second, a chihuaha has roughly 1kg meat on it; a deer, roughly 30kg. There's a good 60,000kcal on that thing at least, maybe more. Unless you're spending hours chasing a squirrel or two, I can't imagine not eating quite well if you ever catch anything--even sharing it with 30 people.
I bought a house. Yes, seriously. I opened the walls. There was buzzing, instability, etc. The wiring was fucking wrong, twisted the wrong way (it came loose when the screws on the fixtures were tightened, so was buzzing under load), 14ga on 20A circuits (12ga is required or it catches fire), etc. My 20A appliance loop in the kitchen has 15A receptacles because, heyyyyyyy, you're not really going to draw 20A out of these right? Those 2000 watt appliances don't go on a 20A loop that can pass 2200 watts... I use a Breville 1800W toaster oven drawing over 16A through one receptacle. One 15A receptacle on 20A wiring.
Maybe nothing was really wrong. Maybe the wiring sucks, the charger draws too much RMS power due to a dirty wave (Fattened with harmonics), the excess current causes overheating, etc. So rather than putting in a current detector or whatever else to detect faults, he just... stuck in a thermal fuse. If it gets too hot, it shuts off.
Most hardware doesn't constantly draw that much power. It's really hard to screw up a transformer--the wall charger would just be a transformer and maybe a MOSFET-based rectifier or something else that can pass that much power. Thermal fuse--even a current fuse--is really a "this will never happen, but if anything does happen that creates any kind of bad situation, this will stop it. Whatever it is."
PWM requires a triac. It requires a PWM circuit fed into an inductor coil and capacitor (clamp circuit) to get a smooth, reduced-voltage line for cheap; otherwise you need a transformer (expensive). Transformers are for high power and for high fidelity, not for low-power feeds.
First major retailer to reach for freedom from the big banks was Khaddafi. We shot him in the head for it, and claimed he was being a terrorist dictator tyrant.
Lessons learned: Don't buy your oil with gold. The world bank will have America assassinate you.
Except "groundbreaking authors" come out of nowhere, and literature experiences sudden extreme changes in what's stylistically popular all the time. They're trying to use this week's popularity contest to predict the next eternity's type of fluff to write; what they're going to do is produce pulp that doesn't sell for very long.
I got an associate's degree in computer networking because I learned to configure CISCO routers. The way to handle this is to define your algorithm as a set of discrete logic and arithmetic actions (arithmetic actions can be represented as half-adders and such), and then count the number of decisions and do some on-paper optimizations. Then you know how many gates you need, roughly.
Then again, I have the inherent ability to simulate the entire universe in my head on the cosmic or subatomic level so...
I already understand nuclear meltdown. Metal gets hot, it melts. Hot metal does exactly what you'd think; and this metal stays hot because it's its own heat source.
Taleb's point was that you can see patterns in past behavior that don't necessarily indicate future performance. He even used literary work as one of his first examples.
Here's the completely predictable: One day, a small movie studio will start pushing its own movies where they explicitly try to make "golden-age" movies that aren't formulaic. They'll become wicked-popular. How do we know this? All of the push-back against formulaic crap!
Here's the unpredictable: Someone made a formula for movies based on the kind of analysis we're seeing, and all movies became this garbage. That it's spreading to books and music is predictable since it happened once and is being repeated--it's an idea that's in marketers' heads, we know how that works. We couldn't have predicted that the idea would come up until someone came up with it.
There are only three basic literary devices, but so many plots. Look at Stephen R. Donaldson's "The Gap Cycle" or Fredrick Pohl's "Gateway".
The Gap Cycle: Negotiations with a passively hostile alien race, a huge driving factor in a government-manipulating megacorporation run by a monomaniac, and a spy thriller woven into it if you're really paying attention. The story IS a spy thriller. But read it and tell me it's another James Bond. Try it.
Gateway... nothing like it. A generic space opera with interesting economics and a prospector backstory, but it carries a real plot; and that's woven into a bigger plot about benign and hostile aliens, and an entire unique sequence of events that you can categorize in a box but you can't say is anyone's story relabeled.
Office space is flexible, but the expense is inflexible: it comes in blocks. The more employees you hire in the office, the less expensive they are per capita in office space. In tight offices, two-per-cubicle with 30% larger cubicles is more space-efficient than open plan and has about 1/10 of the drawbacks (look, we all want private offices, but we'll settle for private cubes; open-plan is just stupid, but double cubes are a legitimate trade-off). So it's better to take office space as a separate expense. Same with business bandwidth: you're doing business on your bandwidth, and often your employees are going to be using the extra padding that saves you in peak times.
The same can be said of furniture: if it lasts relatively long, it's a minimal expense. Someone should buy us all $2000 standing desks, because the $100 motor is replaceable when it burns out 15-20 years down the line (the SSA uses these and has about 200,000 of them--they last forever). Phone services for each employee (mobile) are a legitimate per-annum per-capita expense; PBX lines are not, since you buy one bloc outgoing (maybe 20 lines for 6000 people; many more if your business operations are largely handled by phone conversations, in which case it's a business expense and not a human expense) and a PBX internal that doesn't have a subscription cost.
The overhead of business is large. The overhead of employment doesn't equate to one unit slice of business per employee.
The value of information is going to be, at most, the value of the materials contained on the asteroid minus the cost of mining them. That means if there's a 5% ROI mining asteroids and you can get $100 million return out of the asteroid, then the value of information is going to be at most $100 million to mine a $2 billion asteroid.
Then subtract the risk. Let's say that, accounting for mission failures, failure to properly assess the asteroid's value (both finding more than expected and finding much less), and cost overruns for probable events, an extra $80 million goes into each mission. The value of the information is then going to be at most $20 million, otherwise it costs more than the risk and you're just gambling. The difference between gambling and investing is gambling has a probability of loss if carried out perfectly; investing has an outcome controllable with net-positive or break-even gain and an extremely low (unpredictable because it happens almost never) loss. The stock market is called "investing" because skilled traders can read the market well enough to consistently make a profit, enough to offset occasional black swans (the market is essentially skilled traders preying on unskilled idiots who don't know how to keep their shirts).
Then you have adjustments over time: scarcity of materials increasing commodity value, causing a great rise in price; this couples with risk, both in increased scarcity (makes you a profit, makes society poorer) and in someone finding themselves a bitchload asteroid and bringing back gigatonnes of platinum (makes your current mining efforts suddenly worth a lot less, causing a loss; makes society more wealthy). Improvements in technology--particularly in energy production and storage--make mining cheaper, so profit margins increase and risk decreases. These adjustments increase the value of prospecting contracts.
Then you have emerging markets. For example, a titan supply line would be highly valuable as a way to replenish CO2 in the earth's atmosphere. To facilitate space travel, an orbital collector could store microwave energy in power cells or flywheels, then sync transmit and tight-beam power down to a ground station. The ground station would then absorb CO2 from the air--carbon and oxygen--and H2O--hydrogen and oxygen--and produce gasoline or diesel fuel in a rather lossy process. With enough access to a huge store (i.e. the sun, which will burn out in 5-10 billion years) of high-flow (i.e. enough radiation from the sun to provide for space travel) energy, you could use this fuel--gasoline, hydrogen/oxygen, diesel--as propellant.
Accounting for this, your in-atmosphere propellant would be clean: it would release hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon originally collected from atmosphere, and not contain mercury or sulfur. Your out-of-atmosphere propellant would remove these things from the atmosphere--water, carbon, oxygen. Thus, eventually, new sources of hydrocarbon fuel would be required to replace the depleted oxygen and carbon in the earth's atmosphere. All high-altitude fuel would come from the methane hydrocarbon reserves of Titan, either as methane-propelled gas fuel rockets or processed into a more effective fuel source. Most of that hydrocarbon combustion products--and any allowable impurities (sulfur, mercury, etc.)--would spew into space instead of into earth's atmosphere. Clean fuel would be preferred in-atmosphere, but mined fuel would be brought in and burned--possibly in launches--when the atmospheric levels of CO2 and H2O and O2 were considered low.
Huge economic considerations.
I want to be a sci-fi writer; I can world-build fantasy and sci-fi, but I can't come up with plot. They've all been done; I'd feel like I'm copying someone else--anyone else--everyone else!
Program flow is controlled by instrumentation data on what is called the "stack". The stack grows up or down; up-growing stack attacks are somewhat more esoteric, but very doable. Down-growing stacks are readily-understood, which has lead to many people blaming the direction of stack growth on x86 for its vulnerability to these attacks (they're wrong). We'll use down-growing stacks for our explanation here.
Each function sets up, from right to left (high address to low), return address, stack frame pointer, stored registers, and then local function variables. Local variables, as an implementation detail, are stored on the stack. Array variables are stored as a range, so if you allocate an integer of 4 bytes and a character array of 5 bytes may look like [CCCCC][IIII][SFP.][RETP]. Remember, the integer is allocated first; the character array allocated second. In reality, %esp just has the total aligned or unaligned (it doesn't matter from a compatibility standpoint, but it's specified in the binary standard) size of the stack variables subtracted from it. alloca() does the same thing, because malloc() is expensive (takes too much CPU time) and requires later free()ing the RAM while alloca(n) just subtracts n from %esp.
If a program loads data into a pre-allocated buffer of, say, 75 bytes, or if it calls alloca() to allocate a stack-local temporary buffer of 75 bytes, you can overwrite other stuff by writing more than 75 bytes. Above, if you wrote 17 bytes into the 5 byte character array, you would overwrite SFP and RETP. So if a program assumes an input field is under 75 bytes, or if it reads a numeric value from input and allocates that much, and then reads more than that, it can overwrite control data. This may happen if, for example, the program allocates a 75 byte buffer and then accepts that a data file says "FIELD X IS 255 BYTES LONG" and copies 255 bytes into it, or if it accepts "FIELD X IS 10 BYTES LONG" and allocates 10 bytes, then copies an ASCIIZ string (a bunch of bytes terminated by a 0 byte--the length is everything up to the 0).
In any such case, the overflow can spill into RETP. If you specially craft it to align a repeating set of values containing an address on the stack somewhat above the RETP, then dump in a bunch of AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA characters (inc %eax on x86, essentially nothing), then dump in a piece of program code, the function will return to the program code you just wrote into the stack. More directly, it will probably land sloppily into your NOP slide, increment an unimportant counter repeatedly, and then begin running your code.
So there you have it. A program copies a big piece of data into a little place next to instrumentation data, overwrites instrumentation data, and the program does unexpected things when the CPU tries to use that instrumentation data to direct program flow. If you're very careful about it, you can write specific instrumentation data in and add code to the program, and the program will execute your code because it's directed to return to it instead of to the previous call point.
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From what I can tell, even the alarmist global climate change warming shit isn't a huge problem. The problem is our infrastructure is big and slow: We won't be able to quickly adjust. It's not that we can't, physically, just pick up and change shit around; it's that even a gradual change will cause commercial issues--business risks nobody wants to take, changes in available food that people will pass over looking for good old white wheat and chicken, and so on--and so we'll have difficulty making what are physically easy changes.
B12 comes from intestinal fermentation of cobalt. Animals tend to consume dietary sources that more readily supply that. Humans tend not to. Even when humans do, the issue of bioavailability is different. Omnivores tend to extract it more from animals than from plants, because it takes less energy to break down the structure and get at it--you have straight B12, rather than some other compound holding down a cobalt atom that you need to strip down somehow and then get at and ferment into B12 (intestinal bacteria in humans will ferment cobalt into B12). If the cobalt is stored a way that the bacteria can't get at, and you don't digest the food in a way that frees it to their access, it passes through.
Yes but the other way. Something like 95% (I've seen 98% quoted, but numbers around 95% are more accepted as not being alarmist bullshit) of people who try vegetarianism find it makes them terribly ill. They then become omnivores or pesciparians or something--they eat fish or chicken, or they go back to a normal diet.
They're not loud. The loud ones are people who think vegetarians are retarded, versus vegetarians who have had success. The public anecdote doesn't include the mass of people who don't care, tried vegetarianism, and found it was horrible. It does include huge religious movements and cultural behavior whereby a certain race or large swath of a race defined by a religion simply don't eat meat--usually this ends with proponents trying to propagate back that thousands of years of devout veganism doesn't provide any argument that modern man might be largely different than modern vegan-descendent man.
Wolves and humans have the same communications skills in cooperative context. Planning not so much: humans can develop language--grunts and hand motions, all the way up to complete linguistics. Wolves were domesticated (into dogs) because we share the same social structures and the same implicit communications: we're nearly the same species, minus genetics and physical shape, in that respect. Other social animals communicate entirely differently and are impossible to interact with; but we interact very naturally with wolves.
Dogs are useless on their own. Dogs cooperate with humans extremely well. Really, wolves hunt prey; they do not hunt other packs, and they will not try to get in a scuffle with a group of a dozen or so humans because they're well aware of what will happen. Cats just don't want to hunt that many things at once--they stay out of groups of zebra, ffs. Wolves look at humans hunting and have an absolute understanding of what they're looking at and why they want to stay away, because it's 'familiaris'.
Yeah, he sucks. The deer in the woods could get out of sight and run-rest-run-rest, while man chase-track-chase-track. A deer in a field is going to have to run its ass off non-stop. Deer in the woods has much better chances.
It's not hugely at odds with individual liberty. I know people with 16 or 18 children. They love to breed, they're proud of their huge families, and they want more. It's not a welfare grab; it's an over-active biological clock that keeps ringing the "MAKE BABIES!!" alarm. Never mind the pressure on the healthcare system to sustain them, if they're not rich. Never mind the additional unemployment, the cost to the school system (you don't pay a tax on every child; opposite, you get more tax credit up to 3), and so on.
Every extra baby you have encroaches on my personal liberty. Stop having more than everyone else!
Eugenics is a good way to improve the population, but it needs to be handled well. It solves so many things though, especially overpopulation. The problem with classical eugenics is the focus went straight to "Racial Purification".
The first thing to establish is that everyone gets the right to maintain their bloodline. Everyone gets 2 kids (the way this is factored out is complex, but it's basically max(a,b) for a coupling(a,b), which does create a hole...). Then you get additional licenses to breed by passing physical, emotional, and mental fitness standards--you're stronger, smarter, able to remain motivated and focused, and so on.
The whole proposal is ridiculously complex--it started too simple, became over-complicated, then went through optimization to establish identical function in far fewer rules--but the main ideal scenario is that most people can have a family of 2-3 kids, all people can have a family of 2 kids at least, and so population and genetic diversity is maintained. Breeding is biased toward those who are better fit, and in small part biased toward those who are motivated--if you're going to actually put in some effort, you should be able to tag at least one additional license.
The meta-game is important though: it's easy to come up with a fair, non-abusive, socially-acceptable eugenics strategy (if you can operate in objective reality, and not get a call-back to Hitler along with people swearing it's their "god-given right" to have 18 children); the problem is that those in power will seize control of it and try to breed a population of loyalists, operating patently unfairly to political opponents. Even child protective services is often used simply to destroy the lives and families of political opponents--not just politicians, but "I don't like you and I work for the school board so YOU ARE FUCKED HAHAHAHAHAHA THEY'RE COMING FOR YOUR CHILDREN!!!"
Yes but land predators do not want to deal with 30 or 40 mud-covered primates with pointy sticks, so they stay the hell away. Nothing chases us. We can, however, chase the shit out of anything.
Sugar has 4kcal/g, protein has 4kcal/g, fat has 9kcal/g. Lean meat--discarding the bone and weighing meat--should be 60% water and 40% caloric material. You should be able to get like 200kcal out of 100g.
Second, a chihuaha has roughly 1kg meat on it; a deer, roughly 30kg. There's a good 60,000kcal on that thing at least, maybe more. Unless you're spending hours chasing a squirrel or two, I can't imagine not eating quite well if you ever catch anything--even sharing it with 30 people.
Early ancestor of humans was bacteriophagic.
I bought a house. Yes, seriously. I opened the walls. There was buzzing, instability, etc. The wiring was fucking wrong, twisted the wrong way (it came loose when the screws on the fixtures were tightened, so was buzzing under load), 14ga on 20A circuits (12ga is required or it catches fire), etc. My 20A appliance loop in the kitchen has 15A receptacles because, heyyyyyyy, you're not really going to draw 20A out of these right? Those 2000 watt appliances don't go on a 20A loop that can pass 2200 watts... I use a Breville 1800W toaster oven drawing over 16A through one receptacle. One 15A receptacle on 20A wiring.
Maybe nothing was really wrong. Maybe the wiring sucks, the charger draws too much RMS power due to a dirty wave (Fattened with harmonics), the excess current causes overheating, etc. So rather than putting in a current detector or whatever else to detect faults, he just ... stuck in a thermal fuse. If it gets too hot, it shuts off.
Most hardware doesn't constantly draw that much power. It's really hard to screw up a transformer--the wall charger would just be a transformer and maybe a MOSFET-based rectifier or something else that can pass that much power. Thermal fuse--even a current fuse--is really a "this will never happen, but if anything does happen that creates any kind of bad situation, this will stop it. Whatever it is."
TV will not damage your eyes. What, are you afraid to watch TV in the dark too?
PWM requires a triac. It requires a PWM circuit fed into an inductor coil and capacitor (clamp circuit) to get a smooth, reduced-voltage line for cheap; otherwise you need a transformer (expensive). Transformers are for high power and for high fidelity, not for low-power feeds.
First major retailer to reach for freedom from the big banks was Khaddafi. We shot him in the head for it, and claimed he was being a terrorist dictator tyrant.
Lessons learned: Don't buy your oil with gold. The world bank will have America assassinate you.
Except "groundbreaking authors" come out of nowhere, and literature experiences sudden extreme changes in what's stylistically popular all the time. They're trying to use this week's popularity contest to predict the next eternity's type of fluff to write; what they're going to do is produce pulp that doesn't sell for very long.
I got an associate's degree in computer networking because I learned to configure CISCO routers. The way to handle this is to define your algorithm as a set of discrete logic and arithmetic actions (arithmetic actions can be represented as half-adders and such), and then count the number of decisions and do some on-paper optimizations. Then you know how many gates you need, roughly.
Then again, I have the inherent ability to simulate the entire universe in my head on the cosmic or subatomic level so...
I already understand nuclear meltdown. Metal gets hot, it melts. Hot metal does exactly what you'd think; and this metal stays hot because it's its own heat source.
Taleb's point was that you can see patterns in past behavior that don't necessarily indicate future performance. He even used literary work as one of his first examples.
Here's the completely predictable: One day, a small movie studio will start pushing its own movies where they explicitly try to make "golden-age" movies that aren't formulaic. They'll become wicked-popular. How do we know this? All of the push-back against formulaic crap!
Here's the unpredictable: Someone made a formula for movies based on the kind of analysis we're seeing, and all movies became this garbage. That it's spreading to books and music is predictable since it happened once and is being repeated--it's an idea that's in marketers' heads, we know how that works. We couldn't have predicted that the idea would come up until someone came up with it.
The Black Swan will explain why this research is so ludicrously stupid.
There are only three basic literary devices, but so many plots. Look at Stephen R. Donaldson's "The Gap Cycle" or Fredrick Pohl's "Gateway".
The Gap Cycle: Negotiations with a passively hostile alien race, a huge driving factor in a government-manipulating megacorporation run by a monomaniac, and a spy thriller woven into it if you're really paying attention. The story IS a spy thriller. But read it and tell me it's another James Bond. Try it.
Gateway... nothing like it. A generic space opera with interesting economics and a prospector backstory, but it carries a real plot; and that's woven into a bigger plot about benign and hostile aliens, and an entire unique sequence of events that you can categorize in a box but you can't say is anyone's story relabeled.
I don't want to retell someone else's story.
Office space is flexible, but the expense is inflexible: it comes in blocks. The more employees you hire in the office, the less expensive they are per capita in office space. In tight offices, two-per-cubicle with 30% larger cubicles is more space-efficient than open plan and has about 1/10 of the drawbacks (look, we all want private offices, but we'll settle for private cubes; open-plan is just stupid, but double cubes are a legitimate trade-off). So it's better to take office space as a separate expense. Same with business bandwidth: you're doing business on your bandwidth, and often your employees are going to be using the extra padding that saves you in peak times.
The same can be said of furniture: if it lasts relatively long, it's a minimal expense. Someone should buy us all $2000 standing desks, because the $100 motor is replaceable when it burns out 15-20 years down the line (the SSA uses these and has about 200,000 of them--they last forever). Phone services for each employee (mobile) are a legitimate per-annum per-capita expense; PBX lines are not, since you buy one bloc outgoing (maybe 20 lines for 6000 people; many more if your business operations are largely handled by phone conversations, in which case it's a business expense and not a human expense) and a PBX internal that doesn't have a subscription cost.
The overhead of business is large. The overhead of employment doesn't equate to one unit slice of business per employee.
Try reading The Way of Kings. I guess they're all the same plot again and again, but it sure doesn't feel that way.
The value of information is going to be, at most, the value of the materials contained on the asteroid minus the cost of mining them. That means if there's a 5% ROI mining asteroids and you can get $100 million return out of the asteroid, then the value of information is going to be at most $100 million to mine a $2 billion asteroid.
Then subtract the risk. Let's say that, accounting for mission failures, failure to properly assess the asteroid's value (both finding more than expected and finding much less), and cost overruns for probable events, an extra $80 million goes into each mission. The value of the information is then going to be at most $20 million, otherwise it costs more than the risk and you're just gambling. The difference between gambling and investing is gambling has a probability of loss if carried out perfectly; investing has an outcome controllable with net-positive or break-even gain and an extremely low (unpredictable because it happens almost never) loss. The stock market is called "investing" because skilled traders can read the market well enough to consistently make a profit, enough to offset occasional black swans (the market is essentially skilled traders preying on unskilled idiots who don't know how to keep their shirts).
Then you have adjustments over time: scarcity of materials increasing commodity value, causing a great rise in price; this couples with risk, both in increased scarcity (makes you a profit, makes society poorer) and in someone finding themselves a bitchload asteroid and bringing back gigatonnes of platinum (makes your current mining efforts suddenly worth a lot less, causing a loss; makes society more wealthy). Improvements in technology--particularly in energy production and storage--make mining cheaper, so profit margins increase and risk decreases. These adjustments increase the value of prospecting contracts.
Then you have emerging markets. For example, a titan supply line would be highly valuable as a way to replenish CO2 in the earth's atmosphere. To facilitate space travel, an orbital collector could store microwave energy in power cells or flywheels, then sync transmit and tight-beam power down to a ground station. The ground station would then absorb CO2 from the air--carbon and oxygen--and H2O--hydrogen and oxygen--and produce gasoline or diesel fuel in a rather lossy process. With enough access to a huge store (i.e. the sun, which will burn out in 5-10 billion years) of high-flow (i.e. enough radiation from the sun to provide for space travel) energy, you could use this fuel--gasoline, hydrogen/oxygen, diesel--as propellant.
Accounting for this, your in-atmosphere propellant would be clean: it would release hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon originally collected from atmosphere, and not contain mercury or sulfur. Your out-of-atmosphere propellant would remove these things from the atmosphere--water, carbon, oxygen. Thus, eventually, new sources of hydrocarbon fuel would be required to replace the depleted oxygen and carbon in the earth's atmosphere. All high-altitude fuel would come from the methane hydrocarbon reserves of Titan, either as methane-propelled gas fuel rockets or processed into a more effective fuel source. Most of that hydrocarbon combustion products--and any allowable impurities (sulfur, mercury, etc.)--would spew into space instead of into earth's atmosphere. Clean fuel would be preferred in-atmosphere, but mined fuel would be brought in and burned--possibly in launches--when the atmospheric levels of CO2 and H2O and O2 were considered low.
Huge economic considerations.
I want to be a sci-fi writer; I can world-build fantasy and sci-fi, but I can't come up with plot. They've all been done; I'd feel like I'm copying someone else--anyone else--everyone else!
In generic technical terms...
Program flow is controlled by instrumentation data on what is called the "stack". The stack grows up or down; up-growing stack attacks are somewhat more esoteric, but very doable. Down-growing stacks are readily-understood, which has lead to many people blaming the direction of stack growth on x86 for its vulnerability to these attacks (they're wrong). We'll use down-growing stacks for our explanation here.
Each function sets up, from right to left (high address to low), return address, stack frame pointer, stored registers, and then local function variables. Local variables, as an implementation detail, are stored on the stack. Array variables are stored as a range, so if you allocate an integer of 4 bytes and a character array of 5 bytes may look like [CCCCC][IIII][SFP.][RETP]. Remember, the integer is allocated first; the character array allocated second. In reality, %esp just has the total aligned or unaligned (it doesn't matter from a compatibility standpoint, but it's specified in the binary standard) size of the stack variables subtracted from it. alloca() does the same thing, because malloc() is expensive (takes too much CPU time) and requires later free()ing the RAM while alloca(n) just subtracts n from %esp.
If a program loads data into a pre-allocated buffer of, say, 75 bytes, or if it calls alloca() to allocate a stack-local temporary buffer of 75 bytes, you can overwrite other stuff by writing more than 75 bytes. Above, if you wrote 17 bytes into the 5 byte character array, you would overwrite SFP and RETP. So if a program assumes an input field is under 75 bytes, or if it reads a numeric value from input and allocates that much, and then reads more than that, it can overwrite control data. This may happen if, for example, the program allocates a 75 byte buffer and then accepts that a data file says "FIELD X IS 255 BYTES LONG" and copies 255 bytes into it, or if it accepts "FIELD X IS 10 BYTES LONG" and allocates 10 bytes, then copies an ASCIIZ string (a bunch of bytes terminated by a 0 byte--the length is everything up to the 0).
In any such case, the overflow can spill into RETP. If you specially craft it to align a repeating set of values containing an address on the stack somewhat above the RETP, then dump in a bunch of AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA characters (inc %eax on x86, essentially nothing), then dump in a piece of program code, the function will return to the program code you just wrote into the stack. More directly, it will probably land sloppily into your NOP slide, increment an unimportant counter repeatedly, and then begin running your code.
So there you have it. A program copies a big piece of data into a little place next to instrumentation data, overwrites instrumentation data, and the program does unexpected things when the CPU tries to use that instrumentation data to direct program flow. If you're very careful about it, you can write specific instrumentation data in and add code to the program, and the program will execute your code because it's directed to return to it instead of to the previous call point.