I expected people who worked for me to make important decisions with something more than a sniff and a single data point.
An example of an important decision would be something like deciding who would be pleasant or unpleasant to work under. You know almost nothing about me, or about my former employees who are my rich current friends.
Yes that's right. My employees are now rich because of me, and they're still friends with me. If they didn't like any of my policies, they were completely free to slave away from someone TRULY awful, and are free to not eat dinner on my yacht, or to invite me to theirs.
If you're currently working, then your boss is a worse guy than me, and you're putting up with it. If he was any good, you'd be retired by now. I'm glad I could put some PERSPECTIVE on that for you.
Wouldn't work, because we're dealing with quantum effects, not analog effects.
Either the plates are close enough, or they're not. Angling is a gradual change, but at each point along the angling it's either close enough, or not close enough. The effect is that at the quantum level your plate isn't a line, it's a step function (if your plates were lines on a graph).
I think that when liberals sling around the term "fascism" to describe just about anything they don't like, they ultimately enable fascism. Someday when a real 2nd Hitler comes along, he's just going to say "Cry Wolf" and waltz into power.
The true meaning of the word "fascism" today is more like "the dirty, smelly, hippie idiot who doesn't like the President is using a word he doesn't understand." You can get the meaning from context, usually.
If the husband and wife both worked for me, I'd fire both of them right before Christmas, because that's how you teach people it's stupid to put both eggs into one basket.
And as an employer, I never hired a husband and wife. Never would do it either, for the reasons you mention. I need them to work, not game the system, or beg for special rights.
Anyway, all your hypothetical arguments aren't really pertinent. The examples just never came up. My job was to run a company, not to cover my ass with every possible answer to every HR question out there. If it came up, I'd deal with it then, because I was the boss and owner.
It was one a month, for someone who wasn't the employee (their kids). I gave unlimited sick days for their own illnesses, and if they were gone 3 days in a row, they needed a doctor's note to return. I had someone come back after 4 days with the flu, and it cost me thousands of dollars from others being sick too. So, if they were sick enough to be gone for 3 days, they were sick enough to go to the doctor. I'd rather them be gone for 2 weeks than to be selfish assholes and infect the whole office.
It doesn't matter if I am right or wrong. I'm rich. And my illustration of the principle is more useful than yours.
The fact that YOU don't know where they are or how fast they're going has NO EFFECT on them.
Did I say that it did?
The particles exist, or don't.
Hawking is wrong then, the AC said so. Hawking radiation is just bogus. Well, it could be bogus, but I'm going to refrain from saying so until after Hawking says so. I'm arrogant, but not stupidly so.
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by some of your comments, but let me run my experience by you and tell me if this is what you mean.
I'm 38. I was raised to treat everybody equally. I don't trash talk others, and I paid the women who worked for me equally to the men. I gave nobody special favors, and I was nice to everybody.
But I've noticed that women just a few years older than me seemed incapable of believing that my statements in the last paragraph were true. They were mean, never smiled, treated me like a child, expected special treatment when their kids were sick, and so on. My policy was that if your kid was sick, you could take a sick day once a month. Any more than that, you had to make it up or lose the pay. I thought it was pretty generous, and it was the same for the guys too.
But what I got was a bunch of angry women treating me like I was Hitler, because they had to take care of their sick kids for more than a day a month. Excuse me, but I am not Hitler because you can't work it out with your husband that you *share* responsibility for the brat. If your husband makes you clean house, cook dinner, earn a paycheck, stay home with the kids, and suck his dick, it's not MY fault.
I'm not oppressing you, and it won't kill you to smile, tell jokes, and just quit scowling at every man in the office.
The energy isn't created really, is kept from moving into the area between the plates.
Let me explain further:
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle says you can't know where a particle is, or it's momentum, at the same time. That applies to space too. For any point in space, you can't know if there's a particle there or not.
Therefore, the reality is that the vacuum is boiling all the time with particles popping into and out of existence all the time. Particle soup. For another interesting effect of this, check out Hawking radiation.
Anyway, if the plates are close enough together, no particles can be popping into existence in that space, because it's too small. It's literally small enough that if there were a particle there, you'd know it's position and momentum, and that is NOT allowed.
So, the situation you've set up is that you have two plates very close together, with particles appearing and disappearing on one side of the plates (the outside surfaces) but not on the inside surfaces. That means that there's a pressure created which forces the plates together.
No energy is created because what you're doing is preventing particles (energy) from appearing inside the plates. The energy of a vacuum is not zero because of those particles. The energy inside the plates is zero (zero point energy).
The problem is that once the plates have moved together which is work, you don't get any more work out of the system unless you move the plates back apart.
I thought entropy was particularly high at the big bang. Or maybe that's just informational entropy, which is different than the normal entropy that physicists think of. Anyway, infinite informational entropy would mean that we can't have any information from whatever happened before the big bang (if that even made any sense), or from the big bang itself. It's one reason why we can only know about events that happened right after the big bang. Infinite entropy doesn't preserve any information at all from any time before it.*
A fake character? Are you saying that I am NOT the Defense Minister for all of Mars? Well, try to land your spacecraft on my planet, and I'll shoot it down.
Go ahead, check your record. You'll see that I have been very successful so far, shooting down your pathetic spacecraft.
Well of course Billionaires aren't going to laugh at you right in your face. But they're thinking "what a loser."
And as far as the community that created and fostered me, YA RIGHT. I started my business with the inheritance from my father, and combined with my Ivy League (that's how you spell it) education, turned it into a fortune. I'm a self-made man.
If it makes you feel better to give everything away, go right ahead. As far as I can see, you're a dirt farmer helping dirt farmers.
The statement about me being in my death bed watching my children fight is a good one. How can my only son fight with himself?
Anyway, if you really were a good person, you'd be rich too. The world is dangerous, but it's perfectly just. People really do get what they deserve, and you can see it time and time again. People are poor for a simple reason: they are undisciplined and can't take care of themselves, and are therefore bad people. Why do you think the world gives rich people a break? It's because we're better people, and the money is the evidence.
On the other hand, you claim that if you give away all your money, impoverish yourself on purpose, and then depend on others to help you live that's good? Nonsense. You're just plain lazy, looking for a handout. You promote that kind of attitude in others as well, by giving handouts. You're taking something inherently evil and calling it good. Typically liberal of you.
Well at the end of the day, all I have is opinions and and a dump truck full of money. Actually, that's pretty good. Good luck with your pocket lint and your indignation! And stay out of the road, I don't brake for liberals.
If it was your money, you would have the right to do that. And it would be my right to laugh at you. This is a dangerous world, and if you give your money away you're immoral for failing to protect your own family. Money is the ultimate protection and sign of success. Therefore, money is the main reason why I'm a good person and you are, well, I'll be nice and just say "poor." If you would give all your money away, that's just stupid, and I'll point that out right now.
But, the criminal part is when you and your types want to not only give your money away, but mine as well. You're interfering with my ability to protect and provide for my family. That's immoral.
No, you're not. I don't think you are. And if you are, you haven't got a clue.
Now as for me, I didn't work for NASA, I contracted with NASA (and other people too, obviously). I am retired at age 38 after selling off my successful company. When I say retired, I mean that my family is retired for the next 5 generations or so. How long does it take to spend a hundred million dollars? I can get back to you on that.
That's my excuse. Now what's YOUR excuse for spending your days arguing on Slashdot? Get back to work.
My point is this: We haven't lost any "know how" for building Saturn V class rockets. The problem is that the parts and materials have in some cases been superceded and would need a redesign with available parts.
I am not saying parts that are modern, just parts that are available. I am not saying that we need to space rate a Intel Core Duo processor, just that the vacuum tube sequencers in the Saturn V would need to be redesigned with available parts. Vacuum tubes are not available because there are no vacuum tube factories remaining in the world.
I am saying that you are wrong that there's anything special about making large F1 class rocket engines. We could do it now, with a minimum of work. The current rocket designs we normally work with are far more sophisticated and challenging than the F1 engines. The F1 engines weren't that efficient, and weren't even throttleable! No big deal.
Now, finish your college degree and when you graduate, I might hire you.
The reason it's taking you so long is because you're working for NASA. Land of the government contract, a welfare program for engineers like yourself.
It's easy to make stuff work when you have the attitude that it takes 10 years to space rate things, and the money is unlimited right from the taxpayer.
Now, do it for a hundred million and I'll be impressed. Until then, *yawn*.
The Saturn V uses tubes. You cannot build a new rocket using tubes. WHY? Because there are no tube factories in the world! You'd have to make vacuum tube factories to make tubes to make your Saturn V.
I'm a space program expert. Some of the millions I have sitting in my bank account are because of my work with space program contractors. Sure, it software expertise, but I am also a space nut who has been around the block likely before you were born.
The Saturn F1 engines are pretty simple scale-ups of normal unsophisticated kerosine engines. The engines including the nozzles are not difficult to make. Any competent manufacturer could build one, in either Russia, China, or yes, the USA. It takes money to do the design, and it's expensive to test, but all the engineering exists, is accessible, and to put it bluntly, not difficult.
So you can argue that we could built the Saturn V out of materials qualified for the Shuttle program. But those may not be good enough beyond low earth orbit. And it is a whole different story to cross the van Allen belts... Even then the materials used in the Shuttle program are 20 years old technology. The newest stuff will take 10 years to trickle down/up to space.
I have no idea WTF you're thinking here. Did I say that we need to use new stuff? I am just saying that we need to use available stuff. The Saturn V used sequencers. Bet you didn't know that, since you're talking about computers. You have to make your sequencers from stuff you have. I am not talking advanced stuff here.
Are you really saying that it's going to take 10 years to make guidance system hardware? I call complete bullshit, because we have rockets today.
Finally, I'm rich, and if I had just a little more money, I WOULD pay some Chinese engineers to make a rocket to fly Americans, just to prove to you that Chinese people can make rockets for flying Americans.
Nonsense. The problem is not that we've lost the know-how.
The problem is that the Saturn V uses components like vacuum tubes and so forth, and some other materials are not being made any longer. This isn't that we've forgotten how to make the materials, but that new stuff is better stuff, and old crappy stuff doesn't get made any more.
We'd have to redesign the Saturn V to use integrated circuits and modern materials. Anything made of bakelite would probably have to be redesigned to use a modern plastic. And so on.
No big deal. We could hire 50 Russian or Chinese rocket engineers to do it in their sleep.
This information is actually not going to the people who need it. We're not the ones who need to understand the permit rules. Send it to the liberals at the NYPD who will undoubtedly start roughing up grandmothers who are just trying to take a picture of the Empire State Building.
I see this as yet another big government intrusion into our lives, to regulate every last thing we can do, in the name of Socialism. I seem to recall horror stories when I was growing up about how you could get arrested in the USSR if you took a picture of a forbidden bridge. Communists among us? I think we're turning into them, and this is just one small example of that.
No, I wasn't serious. I was just really bored on a Sunday afternoon. I just find all these OS wars silly, and I was just taking this article as seriously as it deserved to be taken.
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I wouldn't have hired you either.
I expected people who worked for me to make important decisions with something more than a sniff and a single data point.
An example of an important decision would be something like deciding who would be pleasant or unpleasant to work under. You know almost nothing about me, or about my former employees who are my rich current friends.
Yes that's right. My employees are now rich because of me, and they're still friends with me. If they didn't like any of my policies, they were completely free to slave away from someone TRULY awful, and are free to not eat dinner on my yacht, or to invite me to theirs.
If you're currently working, then your boss is a worse guy than me, and you're putting up with it. If he was any good, you'd be retired by now. I'm glad I could put some PERSPECTIVE on that for you.
Wouldn't work, because we're dealing with quantum effects, not analog effects.
Either the plates are close enough, or they're not. Angling is a gradual change, but at each point along the angling it's either close enough, or not close enough. The effect is that at the quantum level your plate isn't a line, it's a step function (if your plates were lines on a graph).
I think that when liberals sling around the term "fascism" to describe just about anything they don't like, they ultimately enable fascism. Someday when a real 2nd Hitler comes along, he's just going to say "Cry Wolf" and waltz into power.
The true meaning of the word "fascism" today is more like "the dirty, smelly, hippie idiot who doesn't like the President is using a word he doesn't understand." You can get the meaning from context, usually.
The particles are virtual particles, not really there. Virtual Particle is a pretty good article in Wikipedia, check it out.
If the husband and wife both worked for me, I'd fire both of them right before Christmas, because that's how you teach people it's stupid to put both eggs into one basket.
And as an employer, I never hired a husband and wife. Never would do it either, for the reasons you mention. I need them to work, not game the system, or beg for special rights.
Anyway, all your hypothetical arguments aren't really pertinent. The examples just never came up. My job was to run a company, not to cover my ass with every possible answer to every HR question out there. If it came up, I'd deal with it then, because I was the boss and owner.
It was one a month, for someone who wasn't the employee (their kids). I gave unlimited sick days for their own illnesses, and if they were gone 3 days in a row, they needed a doctor's note to return. I had someone come back after 4 days with the flu, and it cost me thousands of dollars from others being sick too. So, if they were sick enough to be gone for 3 days, they were sick enough to go to the doctor. I'd rather them be gone for 2 weeks than to be selfish assholes and infect the whole office.
It doesn't matter if I am right or wrong. I'm rich. And my illustration of the principle is more useful than yours.
The fact that YOU don't know where they are or how fast they're going has NO EFFECT on them.
Did I say that it did?
The particles exist, or don't.
Hawking is wrong then, the AC said so. Hawking radiation is just bogus. Well, it could be bogus, but I'm going to refrain from saying so until after Hawking says so. I'm arrogant, but not stupidly so.
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by some of your comments, but let me run my experience by you and tell me if this is what you mean.
I'm 38. I was raised to treat everybody equally. I don't trash talk others, and I paid the women who worked for me equally to the men. I gave nobody special favors, and I was nice to everybody.
But I've noticed that women just a few years older than me seemed incapable of believing that my statements in the last paragraph were true. They were mean, never smiled, treated me like a child, expected special treatment when their kids were sick, and so on. My policy was that if your kid was sick, you could take a sick day once a month. Any more than that, you had to make it up or lose the pay. I thought it was pretty generous, and it was the same for the guys too.
But what I got was a bunch of angry women treating me like I was Hitler, because they had to take care of their sick kids for more than a day a month. Excuse me, but I am not Hitler because you can't work it out with your husband that you *share* responsibility for the brat. If your husband makes you clean house, cook dinner, earn a paycheck, stay home with the kids, and suck his dick, it's not MY fault.
I'm not oppressing you, and it won't kill you to smile, tell jokes, and just quit scowling at every man in the office.
Is that what you meant?
The energy isn't created really, is kept from moving into the area between the plates.
Let me explain further:
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle says you can't know where a particle is, or it's momentum, at the same time. That applies to space too. For any point in space, you can't know if there's a particle there or not.
Therefore, the reality is that the vacuum is boiling all the time with particles popping into and out of existence all the time. Particle soup. For another interesting effect of this, check out Hawking radiation.
Anyway, if the plates are close enough together, no particles can be popping into existence in that space, because it's too small. It's literally small enough that if there were a particle there, you'd know it's position and momentum, and that is NOT allowed.
So, the situation you've set up is that you have two plates very close together, with particles appearing and disappearing on one side of the plates (the outside surfaces) but not on the inside surfaces. That means that there's a pressure created which forces the plates together.
No energy is created because what you're doing is preventing particles (energy) from appearing inside the plates. The energy of a vacuum is not zero because of those particles. The energy inside the plates is zero (zero point energy).
The problem is that once the plates have moved together which is work, you don't get any more work out of the system unless you move the plates back apart.
I thought entropy was particularly high at the big bang. Or maybe that's just informational entropy, which is different than the normal entropy that physicists think of. Anyway, infinite informational entropy would mean that we can't have any information from whatever happened before the big bang (if that even made any sense), or from the big bang itself. It's one reason why we can only know about events that happened right after the big bang. Infinite entropy doesn't preserve any information at all from any time before it.*
* - except for information of God, of course.
You could turn this into a good joke. A black guy and a Mexican are taping a movie. Which one do you eject first?
A. The black guy
or if your audience is mostly black, the answer is The Mexican.
I know there has to be a joke regarding the bit about "snatching up supercomputers" and it would belong in this thread.
A fake character? Are you saying that I am NOT the Defense Minister for all of Mars? Well, try to land your spacecraft on my planet, and I'll shoot it down.
Go ahead, check your record. You'll see that I have been very successful so far, shooting down your pathetic spacecraft.
Well of course Billionaires aren't going to laugh at you right in your face. But they're thinking "what a loser."
And as far as the community that created and fostered me, YA RIGHT. I started my business with the inheritance from my father, and combined with my Ivy League (that's how you spell it) education, turned it into a fortune. I'm a self-made man.
If it makes you feel better to give everything away, go right ahead. As far as I can see, you're a dirt farmer helping dirt farmers.
The statement about me being in my death bed watching my children fight is a good one. How can my only son fight with himself?
Anyway, if you really were a good person, you'd be rich too. The world is dangerous, but it's perfectly just. People really do get what they deserve, and you can see it time and time again. People are poor for a simple reason: they are undisciplined and can't take care of themselves, and are therefore bad people. Why do you think the world gives rich people a break? It's because we're better people, and the money is the evidence.
On the other hand, you claim that if you give away all your money, impoverish yourself on purpose, and then depend on others to help you live that's good? Nonsense. You're just plain lazy, looking for a handout. You promote that kind of attitude in others as well, by giving handouts. You're taking something inherently evil and calling it good. Typically liberal of you.
Well at the end of the day, all I have is opinions and and a dump truck full of money. Actually, that's pretty good. Good luck with your pocket lint and your indignation! And stay out of the road, I don't brake for liberals.
If it was your money, you would have the right to do that. And it would be my right to laugh at you. This is a dangerous world, and if you give your money away you're immoral for failing to protect your own family. Money is the ultimate protection and sign of success. Therefore, money is the main reason why I'm a good person and you are, well, I'll be nice and just say "poor." If you would give all your money away, that's just stupid, and I'll point that out right now.
But, the criminal part is when you and your types want to not only give your money away, but mine as well. You're interfering with my ability to protect and provide for my family. That's immoral.
No, you're not. I don't think you are. And if you are, you haven't got a clue.
Now as for me, I didn't work for NASA, I contracted with NASA (and other people too, obviously). I am retired at age 38 after selling off my successful company. When I say retired, I mean that my family is retired for the next 5 generations or so. How long does it take to spend a hundred million dollars? I can get back to you on that.
That's my excuse. Now what's YOUR excuse for spending your days arguing on Slashdot? Get back to work.
My point is this: We haven't lost any "know how" for building Saturn V class rockets. The problem is that the parts and materials have in some cases been superceded and would need a redesign with available parts.
I am not saying parts that are modern, just parts that are available. I am not saying that we need to space rate a Intel Core Duo processor, just that the vacuum tube sequencers in the Saturn V would need to be redesigned with available parts. Vacuum tubes are not available because there are no vacuum tube factories remaining in the world.
I am saying that you are wrong that there's anything special about making large F1 class rocket engines. We could do it now, with a minimum of work. The current rocket designs we normally work with are far more sophisticated and challenging than the F1 engines. The F1 engines weren't that efficient, and weren't even throttleable! No big deal.
Now, finish your college degree and when you graduate, I might hire you.
The reason it's taking you so long is because you're working for NASA. Land of the government contract, a welfare program for engineers like yourself.
It's easy to make stuff work when you have the attitude that it takes 10 years to space rate things, and the money is unlimited right from the taxpayer.
Now, do it for a hundred million and I'll be impressed. Until then, *yawn*.
You're just not understanding what I am saying.
The Saturn V uses tubes. You cannot build a new rocket using tubes. WHY? Because there are no tube factories in the world! You'd have to make vacuum tube factories to make tubes to make your Saturn V.
I'm a space program expert. Some of the millions I have sitting in my bank account are because of my work with space program contractors. Sure, it software expertise, but I am also a space nut who has been around the block likely before you were born.
The Saturn F1 engines are pretty simple scale-ups of normal unsophisticated kerosine engines. The engines including the nozzles are not difficult to make. Any competent manufacturer could build one, in either Russia, China, or yes, the USA. It takes money to do the design, and it's expensive to test, but all the engineering exists, is accessible, and to put it bluntly, not difficult.
So you can argue that we could built the Saturn V out of materials qualified for the Shuttle program. But those may not be good enough beyond low earth orbit. And it is a whole different story to cross the van Allen belts... Even then the materials used in the Shuttle program are 20 years old technology. The newest stuff will take 10 years to trickle down/up to space.
I have no idea WTF you're thinking here. Did I say that we need to use new stuff? I am just saying that we need to use available stuff. The Saturn V used sequencers. Bet you didn't know that, since you're talking about computers. You have to make your sequencers from stuff you have. I am not talking advanced stuff here.
Are you really saying that it's going to take 10 years to make guidance system hardware? I call complete bullshit, because we have rockets today.
Finally, I'm rich, and if I had just a little more money, I WOULD pay some Chinese engineers to make a rocket to fly Americans, just to prove to you that Chinese people can make rockets for flying Americans.
The benefit of health clubs is that I have fewer undisciplined lardasses to look at.
Nonsense. The problem is not that we've lost the know-how.
The problem is that the Saturn V uses components like vacuum tubes and so forth, and some other materials are not being made any longer. This isn't that we've forgotten how to make the materials, but that new stuff is better stuff, and old crappy stuff doesn't get made any more.
We'd have to redesign the Saturn V to use integrated circuits and modern materials. Anything made of bakelite would probably have to be redesigned to use a modern plastic. And so on.
No big deal. We could hire 50 Russian or Chinese rocket engineers to do it in their sleep.
This information is actually not going to the people who need it. We're not the ones who need to understand the permit rules. Send it to the liberals at the NYPD who will undoubtedly start roughing up grandmothers who are just trying to take a picture of the Empire State Building.
I see this as yet another big government intrusion into our lives, to regulate every last thing we can do, in the name of Socialism. I seem to recall horror stories when I was growing up about how you could get arrested in the USSR if you took a picture of a forbidden bridge. Communists among us? I think we're turning into them, and this is just one small example of that.
No, I wasn't serious. I was just really bored on a Sunday afternoon. I just find all these OS wars silly, and I was just taking this article as seriously as it deserved to be taken.
All excellent suggestions, I agree completely. Sun, are you listening?