> If the network infra-structure allows for POS to connect to the Internet at large
If it can't reach "the Internet at large", then it has to use modems and modem based access for credit card and debit card transactions. This is relatively slow, fragile, and expensive per transaction. Such devices are almost completely gone. Sadly, Windows XP is still commonly used on point-of-sale terminals. A typical vendor, like the one below, has _no_ Windows * based systems and supports only Windows XP and Windows 7.
> This is what happens when you have employees who think they have a god given right to surf the internet
Or when you have an employer mandate to check employee email about store policies, schedules, delivery dates, and inventory, verifying store hours for other branches, verifying alternative vendor prices for price matching, checking the weather for a customer buying exterior paint, looking up a product review or product specifications with a customer, or any of a dozen other uses. It is _embarrassing_ for a modern vendor to be unable to work with a customer checking the same information that the customer can obtain at home on their home computer, or to be unable to print out the specifications for a product that the vendor sells.
Such terminals have become quite common and are much more necessary now that customers expect one store to be able to verify inventory or reserve an item before proceeding to another physical store. If they cannot do this, they will lose the sale to an online vendor.
This especially includes video monitoring. The UK has a television tax, called the "television license fee". It's still a tax, and it's used to help fund the BBC and other government sponsored media. This tax is being skipped more and more with modern computers downloading video directly, and the DRM on British television is being evaded more and more and the broadcasts being retransmitted live, around the world. The problems of collecting the tax are compunded by home entertainment systems no longer being CRT based and easily detected by the scanning vans.
> I agree on this point. But since the proposal is for a generic design to deal with any incoming impactor, be it comet, asteroid, or even generation ship, then a design that can handle any impactor without modification is needed. There won't be time to design a modification if it is actually needed.
And this is where I would say _what!!???_ at lest if we were in person. "Any incoming impactor" includes objects of such potentially high kinetic energy, and of such unlikeliness, that we cannot even include it in any practical discussion. That includes, for example, intrastellar planetary bodies, "rogue planets". And that is where such a discussion would need need to assess, right from the start, trade-offs of likelihood of combinations of mass, velocity, and lead time to deal with it.
This was played out in the Rosetta Comet mission, which did _not_ succeed in embedding anchors in the cometary surface. Expecting a single design to handle both intra-solar-system objects, such as those from the Astroid Belt and of much smaller relative velocity to the Earth, and a cometary body that could be expected to be far, far colder and of a much larger relative velocity.
So right there, in the necessary requirements, are two profoundly distinct missions that might require two very distinct designs. Let's not limit such a discussion from the start in a single idea or technology that _must_ handle both.
It's hard work, and the pay tends to be far below the amount of work expected. Pre-school is exhausting, and grade school and high school often demand as many hours of support work, meetings, after-hours activities, and lesson preparation as hours of actual classroom teaching Many of those teachers also hung on through several deep recessions, and have reached retirement age or worked well past retirement age. And many "district" educational boards are encouraging senior teachers to retire early, so that younger, teachers with no seniority and lower hourly wages can fill those roles. Older teachers often disagree with the latest fads, and have the experience and knowledge to resist fads: middle management often finds those older teachers to be a dangerous "note of discord", and work politically to eliminate them quietly.
Please note that most of those issues occur in senior engineering roles. In IT, the sudden egress of senior tends to be much faster, and more concentrated to single companies.
Please actually look at the older generation, and revisit your own. Many younger people have _no idea_ how the technology works, much like their older peers. They have considerable hands-on familiarity with newer tools and no older habits to unlearn, but wait that same 10 years and they will be in a similar situation. I'm old enough to remember when 'C' and 'BASIC' were new and exciting. And it's a delight with my older colleagues and peers to learn new tools, and a personal delight to walk the young programmers through the same problems we had decades ago, problems they didn't realize the new tools would also have or which they ignored in testing.
I spent a very, very long week with developers and network architects arguing about the subtle disrepencies of their layouts and software and how their software works. And eventually, I took actual measurements and showed that for far less money, using the simplest tools provided the faster solution at a tiny fraction of the complexity and cost when you _actually measured things_.
This has been a consistent lesson throughout my career. People theorize and postulate endlessly with complex analysys and essentially fraudulent testcases, and don't examine it in the real world.
Philae did not have to apply significant force to the comet itself, especially applying consistent force as the comet itself melts, and to consistently apply force to the same side of the comet. Even if a solar sail is applied purely as a solar powered brake, the tumbling of a comet or asteroid will require that the attachment points be able to _spin_, and not to tangle the shrouds of the solar sail on the tumbling object itself. If the spin of the object has an axis on the side away from the Sun, it should be possible to attach there.
There are profound issues of how to attach robustly and avoid fracturing a comet, leaving a potentially deadly remainder still on target for Earth, if it is a porous, frozen object. I'd anticipate significatnt sublimation and thawing on even the backside if the solar sail does not reflect _away_ from the object. But the idea provides far more available thrust and control than draping coverings directly on a tumbling asteroid or comet.
I'm afraid "log jam" typically means getting a penis stuck during anal sex. Feces do not "compact" from anal sex: unless you've already got other problems. they're not that solid, and intestinal walls are somewhat elastic. They _squish_.
Until they know what the problem was, they're all at risk. If it's a maintenance mistake or bad series of parts, it could wind up applied to other aircraft and the failure only waiting to happen there, as well.
According tot he CDC at http://www.cdc.gov/reproductiv..., the unintended pregnancy rate male condoms is 18%. Whether "failures can be fixed", they're not being "fixed".
> I know people with HIV can be kept alive for a long time, but they are obviously infecting other people,
HIV can be "clinically latent" for 10 years. That is a _long_ time to be infectious but without symptoms. For someone sexually active, that is also a long time to have a single sexual partner and rely on both themselves and that partner to be sexually monogamous. And given the sexual activity of some people and of their cultures, I'm afraid the continuing though much reduced spread is not surprising.
Doctor A died of AIDS? I'd not even realized, his family apparently kept it quiet for along time. Given Isaac Asimov's reported and repeated history of sexual harassment of female fans, especially in letters such as this one (https://www.facebook.com/IndianAtheists/posts/197188677080469), it does raise some interesting questions about other possible vectors by which he may have gotten AIDS. If you dig into old letters about him, he was what we would then call "an old rogue with a twinkle in his eye" and now we'd call "a sexual harasser" and eject form a science convention, even if here were a guest-of-honor.
Also: condoms sometimes break, sometimes they slip off, and sometimes they are used incorrectly. It is much safer not to point that gun at a person, even if you're sure the safety is on and the gun unloaded.
Check injury rates, not just fatalities. According to http://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/o..., the only work with higher national injury rates is nursing care.
A few seconds searching Google for "fired police rehired" turns up hundreds of examples, and rehiring as a matter of policy or as a result of arbitration.
Domestic disputes, one of the most dangerous duties for police, will get slower responses. People, especially bettered women and children as the most frequent victims, will die. Those are often cases where tempers are already flaring, and blaming, harassing, or trying to sue the officer who escorts a victim to shelter or helps the victim file charges is commonplace. Those are the kinds of cases where _limited_ immunity for the officers on the scene makes good sense.
I would not bet that way. There are pnumerous private security companies, and even mercenary companies listed as "security contractors", who pay very nice hiring bonuses for trained policemen. And for tough districts short of capable policemen, such as Ferguson, Missouri this year, they're going to be taking whatever they can get.
> There is no such thing as "excess supply of labor": if labor is cheap enough
I'm sorry to contradict you, but _where_ are you getting this nonsense? "Labor costs" that drop below a sustenance level kill workers, and even prevent the workers from participating in the local economy. Between those two limitations, and all the others, one can certainly have an "excess supply of labor". It's especially apparent in seasonal farm labor when drought or blight ruins the crops, and it was certainly a problem for winter food supplies in harsh climates.
Please, actually work as a farm worker, a fast food attendant, a cab driver, or try to feed a family on a minimum wage before you make such absurd claims,
> The reason those store fronts are empty is because your town/city is keeping the cost of doing business high
This is, once again, complete nonsense. "The town/city" is not keeping the expenses high as a matter of tax or licensing policy. There simply isn't enough street traffic to support so many vendors, especially when modern consumers so easily order goods online from around the world. And for the service industries, such as hair and nail salons, they need parking, foot traffic, and customers who can attend their salons when the businesses are open.
According to your stated theory "That is, increasing supply lowers prices but it also increases volume, also for labor.". It ignores the _caps_ on volume of business, caps due to capital supply limitations, due to available numbers of customers and frequency of service, and due to the minimum costs of keeping the workers alive.
Again, I don't know where you're getting these ideas. They're refuted by the most casual reviews of economic disasters, such as the Great Depression in the USA, or famines such as the Irish Potato Famine or the mass starvations of North Korea of the 1990's. There was no "labor shortage", people would work for less than a survival wage or survival diet and starve to _death_ as they struggled to outlast the famines and poverty.
> That is, increasing supply lowers prices but it also increases volume, also for labor.
Except when it doesn't. "Supply increases volume" only when then suppliers _believe_ that there is a profit available, and excess supply often saturates the market. Otherwise, all the empty storefronts I see on one block on my way to work would be filled with active hair salons, unlike the three competing salons on that block that are all going out of business.
You can get a much, much larger effect by attaching a much larger, more easily manufactured and testable actual solar sail. Either approach has interesting difficulties if the object is tumbling, since the attachment points for a solar sail or an actual elevated shield would need to be at the axes of rotation with joints that can handle spinning. And any mishandling of the forces could change the tumbling and cause the object to precess. But that seems far, far simpler than stopping the tumbling completely: that would require far more fuel and complex ongoing course corrections. And the resources to control tumbling might be easily overwhelmed by uneven melting and outgassing from any comet like body.
In fact,please permit me to revise my earlier suggestion of tilting the light sale to steer. Caught early enough, I think that a large solar sail providing even a small amount of solar braking would work just as well, with less complexity, to avoid an Earth impact. Delta vee is delta vee, and unless it were applied miraculously precisely to re-aim the dangerous body at Earth, even a random thrust should be enough.
ICBM's have guidance systems. Asteroids and comets do not, and space is _large_. Even a very, very slight "delta vee" early in the trajectory will make it miss a planet quite easily.
Solar sails are light payload, the forces involved are modest and cumulative rather than requiring a single controlled thrust under extreme circumstances, and need only modest anchorage or very modest netting to attach to the asteroid. They can provide continuous thrust for the lifespan of the sail, rather than a single high energy event, so they're much safer to build and to handle and much, much safer to test. Attached early enough, they should easily shift an asteroid or comet enough to avoid a crash. And properly constructed, they could be used to guide the object to almost any orbit desired, including guiding it to L4 or L5 to be a resource.
I suspect that you're over specifying. The last "Sparcstations" were manufactured 15 years ago, and the market has changed profoundly. As soon as you nail down the spec as "a modern Sparcstation" and try to pass that to a purchasing agent or a vendor, it will confuse them and you as they try to fulfill your needs.
I suggest that you move at least a decade in architecture. Look at a modern CAD or graphics workstation as examples, or even high end gaming systems. Use top notch network components, flash drives for high speed local work, top notch video cards for a high resolution and high refresh rate display, with enough RAM to handle bulky software or even VM's for relevant work unavailable in the host operating system, and you have a very powerful Linux or even UNIX workstation that pays for the hardware costs in responsiveness and day to day efficiency.
And like the old UNIX workstations surrounded by serial ports in the days of Sparcstations and IRIX hosts, most people don't need one on their desk. Most personnel can work with a modest laptop or netbook for email and web accdess and an office suite, with only occasional access to the high powered hardware.
Discard the specialized CPU's if you'd like to get work done and your architecture supported for the next five years. Itanium is, effectively, a dead end: none of the major Linux or UNIX systems consider it their primary architecture. Sparc64, the key Fujitsu supported architecture, never even exceeded 1 GHz: there is no _point_ to spending more time and money on those uncommon architectures unless they offered ground breaking performance. That hasn't been the case for over a decade.
Slashdot Mirror
> If the network infra-structure allows for POS to connect to the Internet at large
If it can't reach "the Internet at large", then it has to use modems and modem based access for credit card and debit card transactions. This is relatively slow, fragile, and expensive per transaction. Such devices are almost completely gone. Sadly, Windows XP is still commonly used on point-of-sale terminals. A typical vendor, like the one below, has _no_ Windows * based systems and supports only Windows XP and Windows 7.
http://www.barcodesinc.com/p/
> This is what happens when you have employees who think they have a god given right to surf the internet
Or when you have an employer mandate to check employee email about store policies, schedules, delivery dates, and inventory, verifying store hours for other branches, verifying alternative vendor prices for price matching, checking the weather for a customer buying exterior paint, looking up a product review or product specifications with a customer, or any of a dozen other uses. It is _embarrassing_ for a modern vendor to be unable to work with a customer checking the same information that the customer can obtain at home on their home computer, or to be unable to print out the specifications for a product that the vendor sells.
Such terminals have become quite common and are much more necessary now that customers expect one store to be able to verify inventory or reserve an item before proceeding to another physical store. If they cannot do this, they will lose the sale to an online vendor.
This especially includes video monitoring. The UK has a television tax, called the "television license fee". It's still a tax, and it's used to help fund the BBC and other government sponsored media. This tax is being skipped more and more with modern computers downloading video directly, and the DRM on British television is being evaded more and more and the broadcasts being retransmitted live, around the world. The problems of collecting the tax are compunded by home entertainment systems no longer being CRT based and easily detected by the scanning vans.
http://www.theguardian.com/not...
> I agree on this point. But since the proposal is for a generic design to deal with any incoming impactor, be it comet, asteroid, or even generation ship, then a design that can handle any impactor without modification is needed. There won't be time to design a modification if it is actually needed.
And this is where I would say _what!!???_ at lest if we were in person. "Any incoming impactor" includes objects of such potentially high kinetic energy, and of such unlikeliness, that we cannot even include it in any practical discussion. That includes, for example, intrastellar planetary bodies, "rogue planets". And that is where such a discussion would need need to assess, right from the start, trade-offs of likelihood of combinations of mass, velocity, and lead time to deal with it.
This was played out in the Rosetta Comet mission, which did _not_ succeed in embedding anchors in the cometary surface. Expecting a single design to handle both intra-solar-system objects, such as those from the Astroid Belt and of much smaller relative velocity to the Earth, and a cometary body that could be expected to be far, far colder and of a much larger relative velocity.
So right there, in the necessary requirements, are two profoundly distinct missions that might require two very distinct designs. Let's not limit such a discussion from the start in a single idea or technology that _must_ handle both.
It's hard work, and the pay tends to be far below the amount of work expected. Pre-school is exhausting, and grade school and high school often demand as many hours of support work, meetings, after-hours activities, and lesson preparation as hours of actual classroom teaching Many of those teachers also hung on through several deep recessions, and have reached retirement age or worked well past retirement age. And many "district" educational boards are encouraging senior teachers to retire early, so that younger, teachers with no seniority and lower hourly wages can fill those roles. Older teachers often disagree with the latest fads, and have the experience and knowledge to resist fads: middle management often finds those older teachers to be a dangerous "note of discord", and work politically to eliminate them quietly.
Please note that most of those issues occur in senior engineering roles. In IT, the sudden egress of senior tends to be much faster, and more concentrated to single companies.
Please actually look at the older generation, and revisit your own. Many younger people have _no idea_ how the technology works, much like their older peers. They have considerable hands-on familiarity with newer tools and no older habits to unlearn, but wait that same 10 years and they will be in a similar situation. I'm old enough to remember when 'C' and 'BASIC' were new and exciting. And it's a delight with my older colleagues and peers to learn new tools, and a personal delight to walk the young programmers through the same problems we had decades ago, problems they didn't realize the new tools would also have or which they ignored in testing.
Measure. It.
I spent a very, very long week with developers and network architects arguing about the subtle disrepencies of their layouts and software and how their software works. And eventually, I took actual measurements and showed that for far less money, using the simplest tools provided the faster solution at a tiny fraction of the complexity and cost when you _actually measured things_.
This has been a consistent lesson throughout my career. People theorize and postulate endlessly with complex analysys and essentially fraudulent testcases, and don't examine it in the real world.
Just. Measure. It.
Philae did not have to apply significant force to the comet itself, especially applying consistent force as the comet itself melts, and to consistently apply force to the same side of the comet. Even if a solar sail is applied purely as a solar powered brake, the tumbling of a comet or asteroid will require that the attachment points be able to _spin_, and not to tangle the shrouds of the solar sail on the tumbling object itself. If the spin of the object has an axis on the side away from the Sun, it should be possible to attach there.
There are profound issues of how to attach robustly and avoid fracturing a comet, leaving a potentially deadly remainder still on target for Earth, if it is a porous, frozen object. I'd anticipate significatnt sublimation and thawing on even the backside if the solar sail does not reflect _away_ from the object. But the idea provides far more available thrust and control than draping coverings directly on a tumbling asteroid or comet.
I'm afraid "log jam" typically means getting a penis stuck during anal sex. Feces do not "compact" from anal sex: unless you've already got other problems. they're not that solid, and intestinal walls are somewhat elastic. They _squish_.
Until they know what the problem was, they're all at risk. If it's a maintenance mistake or bad series of parts, it could wind up applied to other aircraft and the failure only waiting to happen there, as well.
According tot he CDC at http://www.cdc.gov/reproductiv..., the unintended pregnancy rate male condoms is 18%. Whether "failures can be fixed", they're not being "fixed".
> I know people with HIV can be kept alive for a long time, but they are obviously infecting other people,
HIV can be "clinically latent" for 10 years. That is a _long_ time to be infectious but without symptoms. For someone sexually active, that is also a long time to have a single sexual partner and rely on both themselves and that partner to be sexually monogamous. And given the sexual activity of some people and of their cultures, I'm afraid the continuing though much reduced spread is not surprising.
Doctor A died of AIDS? I'd not even realized, his family apparently kept it quiet for along time. Given Isaac Asimov's reported and repeated history of sexual harassment of female fans, especially in letters such as this one (https://www.facebook.com/IndianAtheists/posts/197188677080469), it does raise some interesting questions about other possible vectors by which he may have gotten AIDS. If you dig into old letters about him, he was what we would then call "an old rogue with a twinkle in his eye" and now we'd call "a sexual harasser" and eject form a science convention, even if here were a guest-of-honor.
Also: condoms sometimes break, sometimes they slip off, and sometimes they are used incorrectly. It is much safer not to point that gun at a person, even if you're sure the safety is on and the gun unloaded.
It's their core strategy.
Check injury rates, not just fatalities. According to http://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/o..., the only work with higher national injury rates is nursing care.
A few seconds searching Google for "fired police rehired" turns up hundreds of examples, and rehiring as a matter of policy or as a result of arbitration.
Domestic disputes, one of the most dangerous duties for police, will get slower responses. People, especially bettered women and children as the most frequent victims, will die. Those are often cases where tempers are already flaring, and blaming, harassing, or trying to sue the officer who escorts a victim to shelter or helps the victim file charges is commonplace. Those are the kinds of cases where _limited_ immunity for the officers on the scene makes good sense.
There is a useful description of such immunity at http://www.criminaldefenselawy....
"Burma Shave"
I would not bet that way. There are pnumerous private security companies, and even mercenary companies listed as "security contractors", who pay very nice hiring bonuses for trained policemen. And for tough districts short of capable policemen, such as Ferguson, Missouri this year, they're going to be taking whatever they can get.
> There is no such thing as "excess supply of labor": if labor is cheap enough
I'm sorry to contradict you, but _where_ are you getting this nonsense? "Labor costs" that drop below a sustenance level kill workers, and even prevent the workers from participating in the local economy. Between those two limitations, and all the others, one can certainly have an "excess supply of labor". It's especially apparent in seasonal farm labor when drought or blight ruins the crops, and it was certainly a problem for winter food supplies in harsh climates.
Please, actually work as a farm worker, a fast food attendant, a cab driver, or try to feed a family on a minimum wage before you make such absurd claims,
> The reason those store fronts are empty is because your town/city is keeping the cost of doing business high
This is, once again, complete nonsense. "The town/city" is not keeping the expenses high as a matter of tax or licensing policy. There simply isn't enough street traffic to support so many vendors, especially when modern consumers so easily order goods online from around the world. And for the service industries, such as hair and nail salons, they need parking, foot traffic, and customers who can attend their salons when the businesses are open.
According to your stated theory "That is, increasing supply lowers prices but it also increases volume, also for labor.". It ignores the _caps_ on volume of business, caps due to capital supply limitations, due to available numbers of customers and frequency of service, and due to the minimum costs of keeping the workers alive.
Again, I don't know where you're getting these ideas. They're refuted by the most casual reviews of economic disasters, such as the Great Depression in the USA, or famines such as the Irish Potato Famine or the mass starvations of North Korea of the 1990's. There was no "labor shortage", people would work for less than a survival wage or survival diet and starve to _death_ as they struggled to outlast the famines and poverty.
> That is, increasing supply lowers prices but it also increases volume, also for labor.
Except when it doesn't. "Supply increases volume" only when then suppliers _believe_ that there is a profit available, and excess supply often saturates the market. Otherwise, all the empty storefronts I see on one block on my way to work would be filled with active hair salons, unlike the three competing salons on that block that are all going out of business.
You can get a much, much larger effect by attaching a much larger, more easily manufactured and testable actual solar sail. Either approach has interesting difficulties if the object is tumbling, since the attachment points for a solar sail or an actual elevated shield would need to be at the axes of rotation with joints that can handle spinning. And any mishandling of the forces could change the tumbling and cause the object to precess. But that seems far, far simpler than stopping the tumbling completely: that would require far more fuel and complex ongoing course corrections. And the resources to control tumbling might be easily overwhelmed by uneven melting and outgassing from any comet like body.
In fact,please permit me to revise my earlier suggestion of tilting the light sale to steer. Caught early enough, I think that a large solar sail providing even a small amount of solar braking would work just as well, with less complexity, to avoid an Earth impact. Delta vee is delta vee, and unless it were applied miraculously precisely to re-aim the dangerous body at Earth, even a random thrust should be enough.
ICBM's have guidance systems. Asteroids and comets do not, and space is _large_. Even a very, very slight "delta vee" early in the trajectory will make it miss a planet quite easily.
Solar sails are light payload, the forces involved are modest and cumulative rather than requiring a single controlled thrust under extreme circumstances, and need only modest anchorage or very modest netting to attach to the asteroid. They can provide continuous thrust for the lifespan of the sail, rather than a single high energy event, so they're much safer to build and to handle and much, much safer to test. Attached early enough, they should easily shift an asteroid or comet enough to avoid a crash. And properly constructed, they could be used to guide the object to almost any orbit desired, including guiding it to L4 or L5 to be a resource.
I suspect that you're over specifying. The last "Sparcstations" were manufactured 15 years ago, and the market has changed profoundly. As soon as you nail down the spec as "a modern Sparcstation" and try to pass that to a purchasing agent or a vendor, it will confuse them and you as they try to fulfill your needs.
I suggest that you move at least a decade in architecture. Look at a modern CAD or graphics workstation as examples, or even high end gaming systems. Use top notch network components, flash drives for high speed local work, top notch video cards for a high resolution and high refresh rate display, with enough RAM to handle bulky software or even VM's for relevant work unavailable in the host operating system, and you have a very powerful Linux or even UNIX workstation that pays for the hardware costs in responsiveness and day to day efficiency.
And like the old UNIX workstations surrounded by serial ports in the days of Sparcstations and IRIX hosts, most people don't need one on their desk. Most personnel can work with a modest laptop or netbook for email and web accdess and an office suite, with only occasional access to the high powered hardware.
Discard the specialized CPU's if you'd like to get work done and your architecture supported for the next five years. Itanium is, effectively, a dead end: none of the major Linux or UNIX systems consider it their primary architecture. Sparc64, the key Fujitsu supported architecture, never even exceeded 1 GHz: there is no _point_ to spending more time and money on those uncommon architectures unless they offered ground breaking performance. That hasn't been the case for over a decade.