What complete rubbish. a non-compete does not stop someone from working, it stops someone from working in a competing area! Small difference? that depends.
Which for many professions and companies means they can't get a decent job period. Congratulation you can work as Starbucks with a PhD, hooray.
If (and I say if..) a company has spent years and a lot of its money training someone up to be highly valuable in a specific area, what happens to the investment that company has made when the employee jumps straight to their competitor?
So your solution is to have all that training go to waste or to force someone to work in a company that may be very much non-competitive? God, you gotta hate capitalism. If you're worried about wasted investment than you could simply have a clause that requires an employee to repay training costs if they leave. Of course than the company can't hold a death grip on the employee and has to actually play fair. You know, not require the employee and society to sacrifice significantly more than the training cost.
A lot of staff seem to forget that it is a give and take situation, and a balance is required. Especially in a small company the investment and trust placed in an employee, especially a senior one, can be substantial..
California seems to do perfectly well without non-competes. But you know that whole dot-com boom, silicon valley, mecca of startups is all just a lie. Impossible without non-competes, right?
Stop trying to paint companies as always bad, and employees as always good - I have twice seen employees near the critical point in large contracts suddenly present offers from other companies, and in effect try and blackmail massive payments from their current company, because they hold information entrusted to them by the company...
And now you magically change your argument as this has nothing at all to do with training costs. The above is essentially to do with NDA agreements and the difficulty in enforcing them. Of course your solution is to cripple a large segment of the economy for rather minuscule gains. God, I hope you never get to run a company or go into politics.
See, that's the difference between a free market and being a slave. A slave can't quit. If you voluntarily make yourself a slave with your own inaction than why do you expect sympathy from anyone?
Of course in reality, not that insane fantasy you seem to live in, training costs are minor and much less than your salary. You're not working for nothing but rather you're simply working for less as your hours have increased without an increase in salary. If you cannot understand that simple fact, that your salary covers all the time you're on the job than that's your loss.
The ALA can go fuck itself. E-cigs are from what I've noticed the single best way to quit smoking and apparently the ALA doesn't want people to actually quit smoking. Patches and all that jazz don't work so I wonder how much ALA funding is coming from the makers of those.
It's quite clear there's more to a cigarette addiction than just a nicotine addiction. Patches and all that crap barely work for that very reason.
I know a lot of people who have tried to quit for years or decades without much success. Then they tried e-cigs and after a while they don't smoke at all anymore or at most once a week. Quite a few have even stopped smoking e-cigs as well. If I remember studies show the success rate to be absurdly better than any other approach.
And if the rootkit remover bricks some systems you'd be yelling at Microsoft for not making it a separate update so users could prepare for it, right? I doubt it matters what MS does, you'd find a reason to think they're wrong no matter what.
Security updates are security update, malware removal is malware removal. Mixing the two is a horrid idea.
A space elevator is not a building. Current designs would be a ribbon 10cm wide and thinner than a piece of paper.
In how it works it'd be more like a rope hanging down from space essentially tied down at a geosynchronous orbit (by another large mass/force beyond geosynchronous orbit). You cut it near that point and the whole thing must fall down like any other untied rope. There is no section that can stand up under compression because it'd be pointless to do that.
If you cut it low down than the only section to fall down would be that below the cutting point. The rest would in fact float up if measures aren't taken to counter that.
Earth has an atmosphere much ticker than Mars. A space elevator falling would create a marvelous strip of fire across the sky but not much would be left of it to hit the ground.
Also, a space elevator would probably have the density and thickness of cardboard. A lot stronger to tear apart mind you but the parts not high enough to burn up would not fall straight down like a rock. So they'd gently float down onto the uninhabited ocean that surrounds the space elevator. Same for any other pieces that survive reentry.
So in the end it'd do no real damage from actually falling down. Some of the crawlers attached to it might leave unpleasant carters but probably not much damage either.
Except for slashdot users most people don't spend that much time at their computer and a single platform is more intuitive for them. SMS messages are automatically split and re-assembled so size is irrelevant. Teens will have unlimited plans so cost is not a concern.
SMS also doesn't have to deal with inability to receive offline messages, server reconnects/disconnects, multiple formats for sending non-text data and so on.
If there's a semi waiting to turn left than you shouldn't enter the intersection since you will be blocking traffic. If the semi arrives after you're already in the intersection than it can bloody wait. Of course this doesn't happen very often and if it does than the road should be redesigned due to the large amount of trucks on it. Sacrificing efficiency 99 times out of a hundred to gain it that 1 time out of a 100 is called stupidity.
If you do not have a clear line of sight behind the semi then you should not move forward. Legally you need to verify there is no oncoming traffic like any other unprotected left turn. However since cross traffic has to wait for the intersection to clear you can wait the extra 0.5 seconds till they have a green light which guarantees you are in the clear and then go.
Killed how? Please do explain. It's perfectly legal in most places and even encouraged by traffic handbooks. You're not more of an obstacle to traffic than all those cars who were stopped at a red light.
If you always stop at the beginning of a yellow light than YOU are the bad driver. That is pretty much how you guarantee running a red light (oh laws of braking physics how intolerant you are) so please stay as far away from north California as possible. I value my life.
Yes medicare...The program that outsource everything except the very top functions to private companies. Private hospitals, private billing, private fraud investigation, private doctors, private pharmaceutical companies and basically private everything of any real consequence. You know, exactly what NASA is doing? So what was your point again?
Fragmentation comes from who owns the app store in question and how they'll act. Do you honestly think carriers won't block other app stores from their phones that aren't making them money? Apple has shown them the forbidden fruit and now they're all lining up to take a bite out of it.
Solar sails are based on light and not the solar wind. Light does not stop and the heliopause does not matter. It does however start weak and gets horribly weak horribly quickly.
That is why any decent velocity system requires and uses giant ass lasers in the solar system for light instead of the sun.
Ooops, when I said one way trip I instead meant a flyby mission. So to stop you make sure you don't miss the star itself.
If you do want to survive the experience there's I think a few options:
* Magnetic sail to brake against the target star's magnetosphere
* An outer sail that detaches near the destination and reflects backs light onto an inner sail. See wikipedia.
Orion/nuclear pulse propulsion would I think give around 0.04c at best using existing technology. If you got some sort of fussion working Project Daedalus was expected to give 0.12c.
A solar sail with some sort of laser/lens system in the solar system is also possible. Horribly inefficient and expensive given existing technology but I don't think it's theoretically impossible. This might give you something like 0.2c or more.
Nuclear salt-water rocket is another option but it only gives you 0.036c at best. Also, if you thought shoving nukes out the back with Orion was insane than this one is Cuthulu. It's basically a continuous nuclear explosion kept just outside the ship by continuously pumping fuel at it. Fun times.
All of these velocities are for a one way trip I should add.
There is a big difference between the basic technology existing and a practical device using that technology existing. The Apollo project didn't cost $80 billion because the technology was revolutionary. It cost $80 billion because getting something that big to work properly is in itself a massive pain in the ass even if you have all the technology. Hell, just recreating the Apollo project would probably cost close to $80billion without blueprints and we already did it once before. Essentially it's an engineering problem rather than a scientific one.
He said he could see the point in a manned mission to Mars. Rather difficult to get to Mars without getting into LEO or higher.
Since he said nothing about not going to LEO I once again fail to see your point. Stop making things up to support your own viewpoint.
As for the rest of your point. Assuming any base on the moon will be long term or large is absurd. Look at the ISS, we can't even get that running properly. Any mission to the moon will involve stepping there, walking around a bit and then not coming back for 50 years.
But then again, my crystal ball IS broken, plus I'm an Aries - we don't believe in that kind of stuff.
Sure you do, as long as it supports your viewpoint. Your whole post is a magical "if we threw infinite money at the moon with no return for decades" rant which any sane person would realize is insane. No one will do that. We need better technology first. Without inexpensive ways of getting supplies into orbit or magical robots that will build an industrial base from scratch on the moon there is no way a permanent base will get built. You seem to for some reason be incapable of grasping that simple concept.
How about figuring out how to set up production centers from scratch? If we can produce our own raw materials, fabricated materials etc. all the way to custom made production utilities, we can save a ton of money in supplies. We'd still need food, water and fuel, but if we can kick start industrial production planet/lunar side, we're pretty much golden. Hell, if we can manage to build a nuclear reactor, we don't even need that much fuel.
Industrial production is bloody complicated. Getting any sort of useful industrial base on the moon would take a lot of time, equipment and thus money. Also a very large population that you have to initially support by constantly sending materials there.
But let's not forget the obvious one. The money maker. Tourism. Just imagine the fun you could have on your (somewhat nerdy) honey moon. Sex in a 1/6th gravity field. You could litterally have sex while hanging from the ceiling. Imagine the rather odd sports you could play. The bragging rights. The scenery! Now, this one doesn't have that many scientific applications, but it's still a good money machine.
And at probably $100000/kg to get there it'll be the most expensive sex ever even by the standards of certain politicians.
First of all, all he said was that MANNED space flight to the moon is a waste of money. Your post magically manages to utterly avoid explaining why that is the case. Please explain why manned mission to the moon are so important. Well? He said nothing, I might note, about manned flights into LEO or testing new propulsion systems in space or unmanned missions. So what do those manned mission to the moon gain, please do explain.
Second of all, 30.5 Mjoule/kg is nothing. It looks like a big scary number but so does a mole of carbon if you write it out as the number of molecules. One kilowatt-hour of electricity is 3.6Mjoules and costs around $0.10.
In other words 30.5 megajoules of energy costs under $1 for me and less than that if you've got a dedicated generator. So no the amount of energy needed is not a barrier and the laws of physics are perfectly happy with sending things into orbit at $1 however our technology is not capable of that.
In fact, let's look at the cost of actual fuel shall we?
1kg of H2/LOX propellant costs roughly $1 from what I gather. The space shuttle has a 70:1 propellant:cargo ratio but it uses solid boosters so let's say 100:1 using h2/lox. That's still $100/kg compared to roughly $20000/kg for the space shuttle and $3000/kg (or around there) for a commercial satellite launch. So quite evidently the energy and fuel costs are not the direct problem even in practice.
Your argument about weight as a result is bullshit since even with all the extra weight we already send up the energy cost is not the main cost (of course certain propellants aren't as inexpensive as h2/lox). The costs in the end come down mainly to things like design costs, construction costs, testing, infrastructure, maintenance and so on. Unavoidable with current designs but not fundamentally impossible to surmount.
A low-maintenance often used reusable craft will give you something like $200/kg to leo costs given existing constraints. More exotic methods (space elevator, nuclear propulsion, ground based lasers, etc) would probably bring that down to something like $10/kg. So yes, there is plenty of room for improvement.
Uhhhh...you DO realize you just described exactly why there are multiple versions of Windows, which most geeks here at Slashdot have a royal shitfit about, right? While I don't have a problem with different SKUs charging per core and per RAM amount is getting a little anal about it. Hell even MSFT as far as I know doesn't charge per core but per socket.
And if you asked any of those geeks why microsoft had different reasons, how many do you think could answer? Of course, if some congressman dares to not know the exact details of some technological issue they all suddenly rise in outrage at his ignorance and stupidity.
I dislike ignorance. Claiming the practice is absurd shows an utter lack of understanding of the issue which was my only point. I'm pretty sure most people even on slashdot would very much dislike having pay more for basic windows since they'd never use enterprise features (which is what'd happen if there was but one version). As a note, just because I happen to agree with someone's overall views doesn't mean I won't call them an utter moron if they start spouting stupidities.
It's not absurd at all, perfectly valid economics. That you're incapable of understanding the economics involved is your failure not Oracles.
Essentially different people are willing and able to pay different amounts for the same product. As a result if you could charge people individual amounts you could not only meet the needs of more consumers (ie: sell more software) but also make more money in the process. That is, if you couldn't price differentiate than you'd need to (ie: while maximizing profit) charge everyone an amount that certain customers just couldn't afford. If you could somehow charge just those customers less than everyone would be better of. Since you don't know what this amount is you have to use a proxy. Oracle uses features, the number of cores and ram as their proxy.
No, the mission is planned to last two years the same way the current rover's missions were planned to last 90 days.
The RTG has a minimum life span of 14 years but most likely the rest of the rover will die before the RTG stops producing usable power. The fuel never runs out, btw, but simply produces less and less power over time.
Slashdot Mirror
What complete rubbish. a non-compete does not stop someone from working, it stops someone from working in a competing area! Small difference? that depends.
Which for many professions and companies means they can't get a decent job period. Congratulation you can work as Starbucks with a PhD, hooray.
If (and I say if..) a company has spent years and a lot of its money training someone up to be
highly valuable in a specific area, what happens to the investment that company has made when the employee jumps straight to their competitor?
So your solution is to have all that training go to waste or to force someone to work in a company that may be very much non-competitive? God, you gotta hate capitalism. If you're worried about wasted investment than you could simply have a clause that requires an employee to repay training costs if they leave. Of course than the company can't hold a death grip on the employee and has to actually play fair. You know, not require the employee and society to sacrifice significantly more than the training cost.
A lot of staff seem to forget that it is a give and take situation, and a balance is required. Especially in a small company the investment and trust placed in an employee, especially a senior one, can be substantial..
California seems to do perfectly well without non-competes. But you know that whole dot-com boom, silicon valley, mecca of startups is all just a lie. Impossible without non-competes, right?
Stop trying to paint companies as always bad, and employees as always good - I have twice seen employees near the critical point in large contracts suddenly present offers from other companies, and in effect try and blackmail massive payments from their current company, because they hold information entrusted to them by the company...
And now you magically change your argument as this has nothing at all to do with training costs. The above is essentially to do with NDA agreements and the difficulty in enforcing them. Of course your solution is to cripple a large segment of the economy for rather minuscule gains. God, I hope you never get to run a company or go into politics.
And you're not quitting why?
See, that's the difference between a free market and being a slave. A slave can't quit. If you voluntarily make yourself a slave with your own inaction than why do you expect sympathy from anyone?
Of course in reality, not that insane fantasy you seem to live in, training costs are minor and much less than your salary. You're not working for nothing but rather you're simply working for less as your hours have increased without an increase in salary. If you cannot understand that simple fact, that your salary covers all the time you're on the job than that's your loss.
The ALA can go fuck itself. E-cigs are from what I've noticed the single best way to quit smoking and apparently the ALA doesn't want people to actually quit smoking. Patches and all that jazz don't work so I wonder how much ALA funding is coming from the makers of those.
It's quite clear there's more to a cigarette addiction than just a nicotine addiction. Patches and all that crap barely work for that very reason.
I know a lot of people who have tried to quit for years or decades without much success. Then they tried e-cigs and after a while they don't smoke at all anymore or at most once a week. Quite a few have even stopped smoking e-cigs as well. If I remember studies show the success rate to be absurdly better than any other approach.
And if the rootkit remover bricks some systems you'd be yelling at Microsoft for not making it a separate update so users could prepare for it, right? I doubt it matters what MS does, you'd find a reason to think they're wrong no matter what.
Security updates are security update, malware removal is malware removal. Mixing the two is a horrid idea.
A space elevator is not a building. Current designs would be a ribbon 10cm wide and thinner than a piece of paper.
In how it works it'd be more like a rope hanging down from space essentially tied down at a geosynchronous orbit (by another large mass/force beyond geosynchronous orbit). You cut it near that point and the whole thing must fall down like any other untied rope. There is no section that can stand up under compression because it'd be pointless to do that.
If you cut it low down than the only section to fall down would be that below the cutting point. The rest would in fact float up if measures aren't taken to counter that.
Earth has an atmosphere much ticker than Mars. A space elevator falling would create a marvelous strip of fire across the sky but not much would be left of it to hit the ground.
Also, a space elevator would probably have the density and thickness of cardboard. A lot stronger to tear apart mind you but the parts not high enough to burn up would not fall straight down like a rock. So they'd gently float down onto the uninhabited ocean that surrounds the space elevator. Same for any other pieces that survive reentry.
So in the end it'd do no real damage from actually falling down. Some of the crawlers attached to it might leave unpleasant carters but probably not much damage either.
Except for slashdot users most people don't spend that much time at their computer and a single platform is more intuitive for them. SMS messages are automatically split and re-assembled so size is irrelevant. Teens will have unlimited plans so cost is not a concern.
SMS also doesn't have to deal with inability to receive offline messages, server reconnects/disconnects, multiple formats for sending non-text data and so on.
If there's a semi waiting to turn left than you shouldn't enter the intersection since you will be blocking traffic. If the semi arrives after you're already in the intersection than it can bloody wait. Of course this doesn't happen very often and if it does than the road should be redesigned due to the large amount of trucks on it. Sacrificing efficiency 99 times out of a hundred to gain it that 1 time out of a 100 is called stupidity.
If you do not have a clear line of sight behind the semi then you should not move forward. Legally you need to verify there is no oncoming traffic like any other unprotected left turn. However since cross traffic has to wait for the intersection to clear you can wait the extra 0.5 seconds till they have a green light which guarantees you are in the clear and then go.
Killed how? Please do explain. It's perfectly legal in most places and even encouraged by traffic handbooks. You're not more of an obstacle to traffic than all those cars who were stopped at a red light.
If you always stop at the beginning of a yellow light than YOU are the bad driver. That is pretty much how you guarantee running a red light (oh laws of braking physics how intolerant you are) so please stay as far away from north California as possible. I value my life.
Yes medicare...The program that outsource everything except the very top functions to private companies. Private hospitals, private billing, private fraud investigation, private doctors, private pharmaceutical companies and basically private everything of any real consequence. You know, exactly what NASA is doing? So what was your point again?
Fragmentation comes from who owns the app store in question and how they'll act. Do you honestly think carriers won't block other app stores from their phones that aren't making them money? Apple has shown them the forbidden fruit and now they're all lining up to take a bite out of it.
The question was about what existing technologies could achieve that velocity.
Solar sails are based on light and not the solar wind. Light does not stop and the heliopause does not matter. It does however start weak and gets horribly weak horribly quickly.
That is why any decent velocity system requires and uses giant ass lasers in the solar system for light instead of the sun.
Ooops, when I said one way trip I instead meant a flyby mission. So to stop you make sure you don't miss the star itself.
If you do want to survive the experience there's I think a few options:
* Magnetic sail to brake against the target star's magnetosphere
* An outer sail that detaches near the destination and reflects backs light onto an inner sail. See wikipedia.
Orion/nuclear pulse propulsion would I think give around 0.04c at best using existing technology. If you got some sort of fussion working Project Daedalus was expected to give 0.12c.
A solar sail with some sort of laser/lens system in the solar system is also possible. Horribly inefficient and expensive given existing technology but I don't think it's theoretically impossible. This might give you something like 0.2c or more.
Nuclear salt-water rocket is another option but it only gives you 0.036c at best. Also, if you thought shoving nukes out the back with Orion was insane than this one is Cuthulu. It's basically a continuous nuclear explosion kept just outside the ship by continuously pumping fuel at it. Fun times.
All of these velocities are for a one way trip I should add.
There is a big difference between the basic technology existing and a practical device using that technology existing. The Apollo project didn't cost $80 billion because the technology was revolutionary. It cost $80 billion because getting something that big to work properly is in itself a massive pain in the ass even if you have all the technology. Hell, just recreating the Apollo project would probably cost close to $80billion without blueprints and we already did it once before. Essentially it's an engineering problem rather than a scientific one.
It runs on molten sodium. Cool is the one thing you don't ever want the battery to get.
Sunk cost, go read up on it.
He said he could see the point in a manned mission to Mars. Rather difficult to get to Mars without getting into LEO or higher.
Since he said nothing about not going to LEO I once again fail to see your point. Stop making things up to support your own viewpoint.
As for the rest of your point. Assuming any base on the moon will be long term or large is absurd. Look at the ISS, we can't even get that running properly. Any mission to the moon will involve stepping there, walking around a bit and then not coming back for 50 years.
But then again, my crystal ball IS broken, plus I'm an Aries - we don't believe in that kind of stuff.
Sure you do, as long as it supports your viewpoint. Your whole post is a magical "if we threw infinite money at the moon with no return for decades" rant which any sane person would realize is insane. No one will do that. We need better technology first. Without inexpensive ways of getting supplies into orbit or magical robots that will build an industrial base from scratch on the moon there is no way a permanent base will get built. You seem to for some reason be incapable of grasping that simple concept.
How about figuring out how to set up production centers from scratch? If we can produce our own raw materials, fabricated materials etc. all the way to custom made production utilities, we can save a ton of money in supplies. We'd still need food, water and fuel, but if we can kick start industrial production planet/lunar side, we're pretty much golden. Hell, if we can manage to build a nuclear reactor, we don't even need that much fuel.
Industrial production is bloody complicated. Getting any sort of useful industrial base on the moon would take a lot of time, equipment and thus money. Also a very large population that you have to initially support by constantly sending materials there.
But let's not forget the obvious one. The money maker. Tourism. Just imagine the fun you could have on your (somewhat nerdy) honey moon. Sex in a 1/6th gravity field. You could litterally have sex while hanging from the ceiling. Imagine the rather odd sports you could play. The bragging rights. The scenery! Now, this one doesn't have that many scientific applications, but it's still a good money machine.
And at probably $100000/kg to get there it'll be the most expensive sex ever even by the standards of certain politicians.
First of all, all he said was that MANNED space flight to the moon is a waste of money. Your post magically manages to utterly avoid explaining why that is the case. Please explain why manned mission to the moon are so important. Well? He said nothing, I might note, about manned flights into LEO or testing new propulsion systems in space or unmanned missions. So what do those manned mission to the moon gain, please do explain.
Second of all, 30.5 Mjoule/kg is nothing. It looks like a big scary number but so does a mole of carbon if you write it out as the number of molecules. One kilowatt-hour of electricity is 3.6Mjoules and costs around $0.10.
In other words 30.5 megajoules of energy costs under $1 for me and less than that if you've got a dedicated generator. So no the amount of energy needed is not a barrier and the laws of physics are perfectly happy with sending things into orbit at $1 however our technology is not capable of that.
In fact, let's look at the cost of actual fuel shall we?
1kg of H2/LOX propellant costs roughly $1 from what I gather. The space shuttle has a 70:1 propellant:cargo ratio but it uses solid boosters so let's say 100:1 using h2/lox. That's still $100/kg compared to roughly $20000/kg for the space shuttle and $3000/kg (or around there) for a commercial satellite launch. So quite evidently the energy and fuel costs are not the direct problem even in practice.
Your argument about weight as a result is bullshit since even with all the extra weight we already send up the energy cost is not the main cost (of course certain propellants aren't as inexpensive as h2/lox). The costs in the end come down mainly to things like design costs, construction costs, testing, infrastructure, maintenance and so on. Unavoidable with current designs but not fundamentally impossible to surmount.
A low-maintenance often used reusable craft will give you something like $200/kg to leo costs given existing constraints. More exotic methods (space elevator, nuclear propulsion, ground based lasers, etc) would probably bring that down to something like $10/kg. So yes, there is plenty of room for improvement.
Uhhhh...you DO realize you just described exactly why there are multiple versions of Windows, which most geeks here at Slashdot have a royal shitfit about, right? While I don't have a problem with different SKUs charging per core and per RAM amount is getting a little anal about it. Hell even MSFT as far as I know doesn't charge per core but per socket.
And if you asked any of those geeks why microsoft had different reasons, how many do you think could answer? Of course, if some congressman dares to not know the exact details of some technological issue they all suddenly rise in outrage at his ignorance and stupidity.
I dislike ignorance. Claiming the practice is absurd shows an utter lack of understanding of the issue which was my only point. I'm pretty sure most people even on slashdot would very much dislike having pay more for basic windows since they'd never use enterprise features (which is what'd happen if there was but one version). As a note, just because I happen to agree with someone's overall views doesn't mean I won't call them an utter moron if they start spouting stupidities.
It's not absurd at all, perfectly valid economics. That you're incapable of understanding the economics involved is your failure not Oracles.
Essentially different people are willing and able to pay different amounts for the same product. As a result if you could charge people individual amounts you could not only meet the needs of more consumers (ie: sell more software) but also make more money in the process. That is, if you couldn't price differentiate than you'd need to (ie: while maximizing profit) charge everyone an amount that certain customers just couldn't afford. If you could somehow charge just those customers less than everyone would be better of. Since you don't know what this amount is you have to use a proxy. Oracle uses features, the number of cores and ram as their proxy.
So having a little number on the screen go from 100 to 85 DOESN'T trivialize gunshot wounds but adding some vibration does?
No, the mission is planned to last two years the same way the current rover's missions were planned to last 90 days.
The RTG has a minimum life span of 14 years but most likely the rest of the rover will die before the RTG stops producing usable power. The fuel never runs out, btw, but simply produces less and less power over time.